Thread by @bansisharma

1. Virtues of Low Cost Energy

Tired of misleading and hypocritical virtue signaling about “sustainable” business practices? Today let’s celebrate a CEO who decided to challenge trendy corporate wisdom about fossil fuels and school the CEO of North Face. Sit back and savor it!

2. Adam Anderson, CEO Innovex Downhole Solutions based in Texas, wrote a letter to Steve Rendle, CEO North Face, four months ago. Read this thread all the way to the end to know what caused him to do that. The rest of the thread is a serialization of this letter for the ages.

3. Adam Anderson began thus: "Mr. Rendle, we are an industry leader providing tools and technologies to service oil and natural gas products worldwide. Our work enables our customers, employees and communities to thrive." ...

4. Low-cost, reliable energy is critical to enable humans to flourish. Oil and natural gas are the two primary resources humanity relies on today for low-cost and reliable energy. The merits of low-cost and reliable energy are too numerous to cite in totality but here are a few.

5. Lifespans and quality of life have expanded dramatically over the last 150 years, enabled by access to abundant energy.

6. Low-cost and reliable energy enables lifesaving technologies. For example, the new Pfizer vaccine must be stored at -70 °C. This would be impossible to do without low-cost and reliable energy.

7. More than a billion people worldwide live today without access to electricity. As a result, these people live shorter, more difficult and dangerous lives than necessary. The solution to this problem is more low-cost and reliable energy, not less.

8. Oil and natural gas are the only viable sources for low-cost, reliable energy today. Wind, solar and many other alternatives suffer from an intermittency problem that has not yet been solved.

9. Any attempts to move our energy consumption to these unreliable, higher-cost sources of energy will have many negative impacts for humanity as it will dramatically decrease our access to low-cost and reliable energy.

10. For example, Germany has endeavored to transition their energy grid to alternatives such as wind and solar with disastrous consequences. Electricity costs in Germany have tripled over the last 20 years and are roughly twice the U.S. costs.

11. Oil and natural gas are used in many other important ways to create materials that go into thousands of critical products including clothes, smart phones, vehicles, and life-saving medical devices.

12. I acknowledge that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and modest increase in CO2 levels will have modest impacts on global temperatures.

13. However, I think the climate catastrophists who claim we will endure dramatic negative impacts from these changes are terribly wrong and misunderstand how low-cost energy can help us adapt to our ever changing climate.

14. The US Oil and Natural Gas Industry has enabled an ~14% reduction in US CO2 emissions over the last decade, largely as a result of significant growth in Natural Gas production.

15. Climate related deaths have declined ~90% since the beginning of the 20th century as a direct result of low-cost reliable energy and our society is more robust against floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures.

16. As there has been a modest increase in CO2, there has been an increase in carbon dioxide fertilization in plants across the globe. According to NASA there has been significant greening of Earth over the last 35 years.

17. This greening combined with incredible technological progress enabled by low-cost and reliable energy has led to a dramatic decrease in death by famine. The death rate due to famines has declined by more than 95% over the last century.

18. At this point, you may wonder why I am directing this letter to you, the CEO of one of the world's largest apparel companies. We recently contacted North Face about buying jackets with the Innovex logo for all of our employees as Christmas presents.

19. We viewed North Face as a high-quality brand that our employees will value and cherish for years to come. Unfortunately, we were informed that North Face will not sell us jackets because we were an oil and gas services company.

20. The irony in this statement is that your jackets are made from the oil and gas products the hardworking men and women of our industry produce. I think this stance by your company is counterproductive virtue signaling, and I would appreciate you reconsidering this stance.

21. We should be celebrating the benefits of what the oil and gas do to enable the outdoors lifestyle your brands embrace. Without Oil and Gas there would be no market for nor the ability to create the products your company sells.

22. I appreciate your consideration and look forward to hearing from you.

23. Slow clap for one CEO to call out another CEO's rank hypocrisy and ignorance. 👏👏👏

The End