Big Oil Has A Plan — Waste As Much Energy As Possible
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Recently, the failed US administration did something extraordinary. It’s not what you are thinking — rolling back restrictions on power plant emissions, revoking California’s ability to set its own exhaust emissions standards, or fast tracking approvals for new LNG terminals in the Gulf of Mexico. No, the extraordinary thing was eliminating the Energy Star program.
The New York Times reported on May 6, 2025, that Paul Gunning, the director of the Office of Atmospheric Protection at the EPA, told employees during a meeting, “The Energy Star program and all the other climate work, outside of what’s required by statute, is being de-prioritized and eliminated.” Shortly thereafter, Gunning’s job was eliminated.
Energy Star is a program begun by Republicans. In fact, former EPA administrator William K. Reilly pointed out in the Washington Post that if anyone is actually worried about about how much stuff humans waste, it would be the last program to cut. It cost about $32 million a year — a mere pittance in the federal budget — but has saved consumers $200 billion in utility bills since 1992. In 2024, the savings amounted to $14 billion. Then there is the issue of avoided emissions, which was the whole point of the program initially. In total, Energy Star has reduced emissions so much that they equal emissions from hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks.
In a post on Substack on May 16, 2025, Bill McKibben asked this probing question, “What if you wanted to burn more fossil fuel? What if you wanted to stretch out the transition to cheap, clean renewable energy? Well, then [getting rid of the Energy Star program] would make a lot of sense.”
McKibben added, “Occam’s Razor…would lead us to say that many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil. That’s not a particularly sophisticated rule for understanding their actions, but remember: Trump was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, and that industry has always wanted us to waste energy.”
Energy & Efficiency
A new global poll of business executives found that 97% were eager to make the switch to renewable energy for their companies, on the grounds that, “Electricity is the most efficient form of energy, and renewables-generated electricity a value-add to businesses and economies. In many countries, fossil fuels, with their exposure to imports and volatility to geopolitical shocks, are a liability. For business, this isn’t just inconvenient. It’s dangerous. Volatility drives up costs, turns strategic planning into guesswork and delays investment.”
“That’s how sensible people with sensible goals think,” McKibben wrote., “But it’s exactly the opposite of how our government now imagines its role.” To drive home his point, he highlights a filing in the Federal Register recently that announces the goal of the Department of Energy is “bolstering American energy dominance by increasing exports and subsequently the reliance of foreign nations on American energy.” Translated, that tells foreign governments they can either rely on the sun and wind or on the US, whose policies are erratic and unreliable. “China, meanwhile, is essentially exporting energy security in the form of clean energy tech,” McKibben said.
Lloyd Alter Has Thoughts About Energy
Lloyd Alter, the shining beacon of intellectual thought in Toronto, found McKibben’s post powerful enough to merit further consideration. So he discussed it in a Substack post entitled, Why we keep burning things: It drives the economy. His point is a thoughtful and thorough examination of how human civilizations function. The late economist and physicist Robert Ayres explained that wasting energy is what drives the economy. In fact, it is the economy. “Every politician wants to juice the economy, and nothing juices it faster and better than burning fossil fuels,”Alrer wrote. Here is more about Ayres from Alter’s book The Story Of Upfront Carbon.
Robert Ayres noted, “The economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services,” or, as I simplified it in my last book, the purpose of the economy is to turn energy into stuff. Ayres doesn’t have much time for traditional economics, but teaches that economics is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, which is very convenient when thinking of energy and carbon.
“The first law of thermodynamics — conservation of mass/energy — says that all industrial processes — extraction, reduction, synthesis, shaping and forming — generate waste residuals. The mass of residuals from industrial activity far exceeds the mass of materials.”
Those economic processes consume energy and turn it into goods and services, waste heat, upfront carbon emissions, and eventually landfill. So those of us who call for fixing things instead of buying new, of buying less, of using less stuff on our buildings and our lives, are not doing our main economic function, which is consuming energy in the form of goods and services.
Alter said, “Burning stuff creates wealth, and not just for the oil companies. We all play a role in this in our building, buying, or selling everything made with energy. The waste, the CO2, it is part of the deal. I would make an analogy that may seem a bit odd at first, but if you think it about it for a moment, I think it makes sense. It’s a line from the Rolling Stones song Sympathy For The Devil. “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’ When after all, it was you and me.”
From Buckminster Fuller To The Financial Times
Buckminster Fuller, creator of the geodesic dome and the Dymaxion automobile, was one of the first to express this idea clearly. According to graphic novelist Stuart McMillen, Fuller “saw that coal, oil, and gas were batteries for ancient sunshine that allowed civilization to, for the first time, live beyond its solar income.” I think that analogy explains much about why we are so fixated on destroying the environment that sustains us. Indigenous people have an inherent sense of how vital it is to treat the Earth with respect. The rest of us? Not so much.
This week, the Financial Times wrote about coal not in terms of energy but in terms of economics. “Coal is evil stuff, from an environmental point of view,” said Sir Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at Oxford University, pointing to its climate effect as well as the impact on human health. “But from an economic perspective, it is fantastically cheap, it is widely available, it can be stockpiled really easily, and it produces really intense heat.”
According to Helm, our energy needs are growing so quickly that the world simply needs more of everything — more renewables, more nuclear, and more oil, gas, and coal. “Very sadly, there isn’t a transition” away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy, Helm says. Instead, it is an increase in all directions.” And that’s where the thinking about an “all of the above” energy solution comes from.
The Takeaway
Bill McKibben concludes with this thought: “The goal for the rest of us, as we resist Trump and resist climate change, is pretty clear: do everything we can to speed up this transition to clean energy, here and everywhere. Solar works, solar is cheap, and solar is liberating.”
Lloyd Alter has a somewhat more nuanced take. “That’s not enough,” he writes. “Some politicians might promote greater efficiency and more renewables, as Joe Biden did, but he still oversaw the growth of US fossil fuel production to the highest levels ever, at 12.9 million barrels per day by the end of 2024. That’s why we have to grab on to that third leg of the stool — sufficiency. We have to make less stuff and use less stuff, and figure out what’s enough. That is always a hard sell.”
I wrote recently about the struggle between sufficiency and abundance. Based on the comments to that piece, abundance is the clear choice of CleanTechnica readers. Perhaps the take away is the wisdom of Pogo — “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
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