Dan starts by retelling the story about the North Face hypocrisy that earned the company the Colorado Oil and Gas Association’s first ever Customer Appreciation Award for being an extraordinary oil and gas customer. This award rivals the Not My Job Award as a means of recognizing extraordinary individual and organizational chutzpah. North Face refused to sell jackets to an oil industry service company because doing so would be counter to its “goals and commitments surrounding sustainability and environmental protection.” As the Colorado Oil and Gas Assoc. pointed out:
At least 90 percent of the materials in North Face jackets are made from petrochemicals derived from oil and natural gas. Moreover, many of its jackets and the materials that go into them are made in countries such as China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, and then shipped to the United States in vessels that are powered by oil. To muddy matters further, not long before North Face rejected the request, its corporate owner had built a new hangar at a Denver airport for its corporate jets, all of which run on jet fuel.
Yergin in The Atlantic
Yergin goes on to point out the extraordinary complexities of energy transitions particularly for developing nations:
Aissatou Sophie Gladima, the energy minister of Senegal, put it more pithily: Restricting lending for oil and gas development, she said, “is like removing the ladder and asking us to jump or fly.”
Yergin in The Atlantic
He talks about other energy transitions:
The 19th century is known as the “century of coal,” but, as the technology scholar Vaclav Smil has noted, not until the beginning of the 20th century did coal actually overtake wood as the world’s No. 1 energy source. Moreover, past energy transitions have also been “energy additions”—one source atop another. Oil, discovered in 1859, did not surpass coal as the world’s primary energy source until the 1960s, yet today the world uses almost three times as much coal as it did in the ’60s.
Yergin in The Atlantic
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Bud's Offshore Energy (BOE) 