I read the Oil and Gas Journal so you don't have to.
The O&G Journal teems with details on fossil fuel production around the world. Large upcoming refinery expansions? There's a 3 page article; 2 of the world's 3 largest refineries are in South Korea. Proven oil reserves in Chad? Page 31 says its 1.5 billion barrels.
But when the gentle reader stumbles onto the editorial page, facts take a 2-page holiday. My eyes hurt to read it. You're plowing through carefully assembled data, and suddenly you feel like you've been handed a Tea Bagger leaflet.
I am alarmed because the O&G Journal, to some degree, speaks for the oil and gas industry. The industry employ many of the best and brightest scientists in all fields of study. Those folks certainly know that billions of tons of greenhouse gasses will have an impact.
Yet the recent "Journally Speaking" and "Editorial" sections stake out positions to the right of ExxonMobil or BP or even Senator Inhofe on these critical issues. Below the fluer de Kos, I'll provide gory details.
The January 7, 2013 issued featured a tome titled A Global Warming Wish. It asserted:
"Do humans ... contribute so much to (global) warming ... that by cutting ... emissions they can ... influence Global temperature? The answer might be no."
"...the (scientific) problem --- for activists --- ... average global temperature have quit rising."
"The political case (for global warming) began to fray when ... university researchers ... subordinated science to politics. The mischief included ... an IPCC report of unfounded predictions about the melting of glaciers."
And if you're still reading, let's turn to the editorial, "Approve Keystone XL." O&G Journal wants the pipeline. Well, I did too. But I never said, like O&G Journal does, that the most important reason to approve it is:
"Approval of the pipeline would rebuke the main and most extreme reason environmentalists want Keystone XL never to be built ... which they sneeringly ... call dirty oil (and) resort to fear mongering ... Approval ... would give US energy politics a healthy dose of realism."
In other words, Take That, 350.org!!!
In other portions of the O&G Journal I find fascinating articles about the massive captures of greenhouse gasses from industrial smokestacks, mainly carbon dioxide, which are injected into old oil fields to produce oil with much lower greenhouse emissions, beside removing hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 from the environment.
There's big plans to remove CO2 in this fashion, mainly from natural gas production, in Montana and Illinois, and even in Egypt, and utilize it to revitalize oil recovery.
I feel that CO2 removal and sequesteration is an important element of responding to climate change, since everything I read indicates we are going to burn oil and coal and gas for the next 100 years. I'm interested to learn about it and I'm glad the O&G Journal covers it.
If O&G Journal would just admit carbon dioxide contributed to climate change, then they could tout these developments as positive steps. But no.
The next time environmentalists lament the slow-to-none progress made on climate change, just remember that for every 350.org, there is a O&G Journal with their own bully pulpit, spouting their own hard line.