Quote:
The company’s snarky young lawyer is surprised when Tommy tells her they use wind farms—what she calls “clean energy”—to power pumps so remote that they’re off the grid. He claps back, “They use alternative energy. There’s nothing clean about this.” She throws him a Zillennial eye roll: “Please, Mr. Oilman, tell me how wind is bad for the environment.” So he does—with impassioned, profane eloquence—as they stand under a towering 400-foot wind turbine that stands on a concrete pad that covers a third of an acre and sits 12 feet deep.
“Do you have any idea how much diesel they have to burn to mix that much concrete?” Tommy schools her. “Or make that steel? And haul this s—t out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You wanna take a guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that f—n’ thing? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of makin’ it. And don’t get me started on solar panels or the lithium in your Tesla battery. And never mind the fact that if the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we don’t have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities. It’d take 30 years if we started tomorrow.”
He isn’t done: “And unfortunately for your grandkids, we have a 120-year-old petroleum-based infrastructure. Our whole lives depend on it. Hell, it’s in everything. That road we came in on. The wheels on every car ever made, including yours. It’s in tennis rackets and lipstick and refrigerators and antihistamines. Pretty much anything plastic. Your cellphone case, artificial heart valves, any kinda clothin’ that’s not made of animal or plant fibers. Soap, f—n’ hand lotion, garbage bags, fishin’ boats—you name it. Every f—n’ thang. And you know what the kicker is? We’re gonna run out of it before we find its replacement…. Getting oil outta the ground is the most dangerous job in the world. We don’t do it because we like it. We do it ’cuz we run outta options…. There ain’t nobody to blame but the demand that we keep pumpin’ it.”
Read it all here: