As the oil and gas industry works to save jobs and preserve our nation’s energy security during this catastrophic, ongoing pandemic, environmentalists are using the crisis as an opportunity to push their anti-oil and gas agenda.
Several Texas environmental groups, including Environment Texas, Public Citizen, Environmental Integrity Project, Big Bend Conservation Alliance, Save RGV From LNG, Livable Arlington, and Texas Campaign For The Environment are among a number of groups who claim the Railroad Commission of Texas should not only use proration to limit production in the short term, but as a mechanism to end oil and gas production in Texas:
“We…encourage you to curtail oil production…and to develop a plan to ratchet down production of oil throughout the next decade.”
– joint comments submitted by multiple environmental groups
“We encourage the RRC to develop a plan for an orderly exit from a dependence on oil and gas for state revenue and economic activity.”
– joint comments submitted by multiple environmental groups
“We agree with some of the other commenters who have come before us that this [crisis] is as an opportunity to begin a managed decline of the use of fossil fuels in Texas and transition to a clean energy economy of the future. We recommend specifically cuts to production in… hydraulic fracturing and CO2 injection for enhanced oil recovery…”
“We further urge the commission to take this opportunity to reevaluate Texas’s role as a global fossil fuel producer…”
With hundreds of thousands of Texans unemployed, environmentalists’ push for more expensive energy sources over affordable, reliable, Texas-made oil and natural gas will only exasperate economic hardships and prevent the revival of countless good-paying jobs in the Texas oil and natural gas industry.
