American Oil and Gas Reporter - September 2017 - 112

ConventionCoverage: Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico
limits chloride to 10,000 parts per million,
he said some regulators advocated a 600
ppm threshold. "Once you get above 600
ppm, it is hard to grow something in top-

soil," Mullins explained. "But it typically
is only the top one foot of soil at that
level and not necessarily 15 feet below
the surface, so we are having additional

discussions with the state and regulators,
trying to reach an agreement that protects
groundwater resources and the environment."
r

Sustainability Ignores Hard Questions

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.-As an ecologist, he strongly supports real sustainability: thoughtful, caring, responsible,
economical stewardship and conservation
of land, water, energy, forests, wildlife
and other natural resources, author and
Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow
Senior Policy Adviser Paul Driessen told
the Independent Petroleum Association
of New Mexico. "What I despise and oppose . . . is politicized sustainability and
its realities, absurdities and duplicities,"
he added. "Real sustainability tells poor
nations: 'Don't do what rich countries
are doing now that they are rich. Do
what rich countries did to become rich-
and do it as responsible stewards of God's
creation.'"
As the keynote speaker at IPANM's
2017 annual convention, Aug. 3-4 at Albuquerque's Sandia Casino and Resort,
Driessen delved into a number of positions
espoused by fossil fuel critics, including
catastrophic anthropogenic climate change,
so-called "green" energy sources, and
flaws in the precautionary principle.
Driessen also focused a significant
portion of his remarks on the concept of
sustainability as sought by anti-development activists and their allies. Like
climate change alarmism, he described,
"politicized sustainability relies on ideological assertions and theoretical models
as an alternative to actual, outside-ourwindows reality and evidence. Its purpose
is to gain greater control by agitators
and governments over people's energy
use, lives, livelihoods, living standards,
lifespans and liberties. It reflects abysmal
understanding of basic energy, economic
resource extraction, manufacturing and
human rights realities. In fact, it rejects
reality."

generations.
"At first blush, it sounds logical and
ethical," he acknowledged.
However, he countered, people alive
today cannot know the resource needs of
people in the future. "We are supposed to
predict future technologies and ensure today's resource use will not compromise
the completely unpredictable energy and
raw material requirements that completely
unpredictable future technologies may introduce," Driessen noted. "We are supposed to safeguard the assumed needs of
future generations, even if it means ignoring
or compromising the undeniable needs
of current generations, including the needs,
aspirations, health and welfare of the
world's poorest people, who desperately
want to improve and extend their lives."
The same mindset generally deems
people to be destroyers rather than creators
capable of improving living standards,

Unknowable Needs
Political sustainability holds that current
generations may meet their needs only
to the extent that doing so will not compromise future generations' ability to do
so, Driessen explained. It assumes that
human beings are depleting finite resources
rapidly and therefore must reduce their
current use to save resources for future

112 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

Although the goal of "political sustainability"-governmental efforts to prevent
consumption of a share of resources
such as petroleum for future generations-may seem reasonable, such efforts
often come at the expense of the world's
poorest people, warns author and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow Senior
Policy Adviser Paul Driessen. Throughout
history, raw material and energy needs
evolved with technological innovation,
he observed.

he pointed out. "We are supposed to assume that people tear down more than
we build up; consume more than we produce and invariably leave the world worse
instead of better than we found it. And
we are supposed to do this generation
after generation."
Driessen rejected such a characterization of humanity, especially since the
ongoing industrial revolution. Since fossil
fuel use has proliferated, he observed,
the speed of humanity's technological
innovation has become almost exponential.
There is no reason to assume that is about
to end, he suggested.
"How can anyone today predict what
may be in store 10, 50 or 100 years from
now?" Driessen posed. "As we moved
from flint to copper to bronze, iron, steel
and beyond, we did not do it because
mankind had exhausted its supplies (of
those resources). We did it because we innovated. We invented something better,
more practical, more efficient, and each
advance required different raw materials."
Therefore, he reasoned, imposing artificial constraints on current resource
use is not only a fool's errand, it hurts
living standards for people today. Political
sustainability calls to mind the image of
a Stone Age bureaucrat obsessing about
the depletion of obsidian deposits.
"Why, then, would we think of empowering activists and governments to
regulate today's activities based on wholly
unpredictable technologies and lifestyles,
needs and resource demands of future
generations?" he asked. "Why would we
ignore or compromise the pressing needs
of current generations to meet those
totally unpredictable future needs?"
He offered examples of President Obama's reliance on political sustainability
as a justification for discouraging fossil
fuel use in Africa, where many continue
to live in dire poverty without electric
power:
* Under Obama's leadership, the
Overseas Private Investment Corporation
refused to support construction of a gasfired power plant in Ghana that would
have provided clean and affordable electricity to a power-deprived nation using

American Oil and Gas Reporter - September 2017

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