That’s kind of an interesting question. With the constant haranguing of threats impending doom, the shared responsibility for the epic boiling of the oceans even as they rise to drown us all…how bad are we?

How inefficient are our pursuits, how selfish about our creature comforts, the unreasonableness of the expectations we hold about utility deliveries – electricity, water, heat, natural gas, and the sheer gluttony in the amount of food stuffs and the variety therein we expect to be available when we enter a grocery or even a corner bodega. How ruinous have our very lives been and just how guilt-ridden should one be? Have we sinned merely horse hair shirt’s worth of penance or as much as a flagellated back, flogged around the fleet in shame for all to see and take warning to heed the bo’sun?

For years it’s been shaping up to be a general scourge of unbelievers, with a rampaging press crew of cultists doing their enforcement work for them while they worked to gather the authority to back-up the intimidation. The European Union is way ahead of us in that department – they’ve codified the insanity – but the cult adherents here are doing their level best to override the skeptic peasants while ignoring inherent freedoms, legally or surreptitiously.

Inflicting pain for pain’s sake, like a nerve-induction box in a climate cult Gom Jabbar.

God, don’t they get pissed when they can’t use the needle on you.

There seem to be less and less people with holes in their necks, lately, too. Even browbeaten corporations which had formerly kowtowed to the histrionics – threats of boycotts, protests, or cravenly simped for that ever coveted ESG score from a Blackstone or J.P Morgan – are suddenly simply ignoring the pain.

For example, Canadian energy company Suncor caused smelling salts and hankies to pop out of manpurses the other day when their new CEO said they were done with renewables as a focus. Wasn’t making them any money. From this point forward, he announced, they were going back to the oil business.

The man hired to turn around the flagging fortunes of Suncor Energy Inc. said Tuesday he believes the company has been too focused in recent years on the energy transition and must get back to an oil-centred business strategy.

CEO Rich Kruger, who took the reins at the Calgary-based energy giant this spring, told analysts on a conference call that the company’s board of directors agrees with him that a “revised direction and tone” at the company is necessary.

Sure, he said, clean energy is important, but so is a viable company. Guess what matters most?

…”Today, we win by creating value through our large integrated asset base underpinned by oilsands.”

The reaction was every bit as pissy as you would think. The Green types couldn’t drive the needle in, so environmentalists – to include the reporter – abused him anyway, decrying his culpability in the current catastrophic Gaia fricassee.

…His comments also come at the tail end of a summer in which global temperatures have soared to never-before-seen heights and wildfires exacerbated by climate change have wreaked devastation across the planet.

“It’s good to hear a fossil fuel CEO being honest about their intentions — squeezing every last drop of oil out of the ground, even if it means cooking our climate and harming communities in the process,” said Greenpeace Canada climate campaign head Laura Ullman.

But she added Kruger appears to be blindly doubling down on business as usual in the face of an increasingly urgent need to rapidly transition to renewable energy.

“It’s hard to understand how anyone who has seen the absolute devastation of this summer’s fires, floods and (oilsands) leaks could continue pushing for the expansion of fossil fuels,” Ullman said in an email.

Obviously, the man’s a menace. But surely the anger is directed more at the sentiment than the man, because he’s not the first. There’s been a veritable parade.

…Suncor is not alone in its strategy, said Duncan Kenyon, director of corporate engagement with shareholder advocacy group Investors for Paris Compliance. Ever since crude prices spiked in the aftermath of last year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine, he added, energy companies have been laser-focused on maximizing profits from oil.

European energy giant Shell, for example, angered climate activists earlier this year by effectively abandoning its plan to cut oil production by 1 to 2 per cent per year until the end of the decade.

British energy giant BP has also scaled back its greenhouse gas emission reduction targets in the wake of last year’s record profits from oil, while ExxonMobil’s CEO has boasted of “leaning in” to the petroleum products that are in demand today.

Darn if that doesn’t chap some hides. Additionally, after twenty years of being in the renewables business – announcing a $100M investment in renewables in 2000 – Suncor sold off all their wind and solar assets last year.

I’ve posted several times on different European countries backing out or shelving NetZero goals in light of either excessive costs or reality checks as far as power generation shortfalls. We’ve talked about the German deindustrialization cycle a couple of times as well – there’s never any good news coming out of that disintegrating Green haven, other than the Green Party is in serious election trouble. That’s pretty cheerful.

But all this wrack and ruin aside, have we made no progress at all, that these freaks think draconian measures – even given their fascist proclivities – are warranted?

The Wall Street Journal has a really interesting interview with a CEO named Peter Huntsman, who is, shall we say “unsparingly unfiltered” in his disdain for ESG and the climate cult.

I learned a ton (and I hope it’s not paywalled).

…Two questions seem pertinent. First, why do corporate managers and their spokesmen praise objectives they know to be impossible and, if followed in earnest, deadly to their industries? Second, will anyone in corporate America stand against this crowd?

Peter Huntsman will. He is president, CEO and chairman of Huntsman Corp., a multinational chemical manufacturing company. He has adopted a policy of brutal honesty about climate alarmism and its destructive potential. Mr. Huntsman, 60, has ample reason to worry about the acquiescence of corporate boardrooms to the mental pathologies of 21st-century American politics.

Huntsman Corp.—one of those Fortune 500 companies, with around $8 billion in annual revenue—turns hydrocarbons into usable products. It makes composite resins used in Boeing 787s, the seating and acoustic foam in U.S.-produced BMWs, and many other things…

His answer is innovation, which, oddly enough, we happen to be very good at. His examples were wonderful and, yeah – why aren’t we celebrating?

…“Think about the year 1970,” Mr. Huntsman says. “That’s the year we hit a trillion-dollar GDP, and the year Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wrote that great song ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ A great year, right? Well today we’re emitting roughly 6,500 million metric tons of CO2. Same thing we were emitting in 1970. And look how much more electricity we’re using, and look how many more transportation and miles we’re driving. We’ve expanded the economy 30 times over, nearly, and core CO2 has stayed flat. We should be celebrating this achievement, shouldn’t we?”

Before I can answer, he reifies the point. “There’s not a single product I’m aware of in [Huntsman Corp.’s] entire portfolio of products that today consumes more energy, more raw materials to make the same product we made five years ago. Not 50 years—five years ago. Because if there’s such a product, our competition would’ve replaced it by now. That iPhone,” he says, pointing to the device with which I’m recording our conversation, “it’s going to have to be lighter and stronger, it’s going to have to have better memory, in the next five years. We’ve got to come up with the materials, the insulation, the durability, lightness and design, the capabilities.” (Huntsman Corp.’s website has a section on sustainability, too, but its content has almost exclusively to do with innovation and doesn’t flirt with net-zero rhetoric.)

…Mr. Huntsman holds up a plastic water bottle: “We can make 10 of these for the amount of plastic we used in one of them a decade ago. . . . I don’t know why we don’t celebrate these accomplishments.”

Huntsman certainly isn’t a pollution advocate – he makes sure to emphasize that reducing emissions and always looking for cleaner, more efficient manufacturing processes are good business practices. Innovation, hello.

He’s not afraid to jab at the hypocrisies rampant among the Green crusaders, either.

…My hunch is that Mr. Huntsman’s lack of university degree enables him to say things his more-credentialed peers can’t. On the subject of renewable energy, America’s cultural VIPs speak in tones of hushed reverence. He doesn’t. “I keep hearing people say we’re in an energy ‘transition’ and our trucks, airplanes, ships, homes and factories will be powered by renewable energy,” he says. “Wind and solar provide 4% of the world’s energy. Nuclear and hydro another 10%. Fossil fuels the rest. Have you heard of anybody in the green movement clamoring to build more dams or nuclear plants?” He answers for me: “No. In fact, we’re looking at tearing down dams in most states out in the West. If people truly believed climate change was existential, we’d see nuclear power plants popping up everywhere. That’s not happening.”

Last year Michael Bloomberg announced an $85 million campaign, Beyond Petrochemicals, to stymie the chemical manufacturing industry. What does Mr. Huntsman think?

“Well,” he says with a wry smile, “he’s a great customer.” I can’t help laughing.

“I never like to speak ill of a customer,” Mr. Huntsman continues. “How many private jets does he have? How many homes? I assume he uses a lot of our materials.”

He raises an excellent point. The speciousness of attacks on the hydrocarbon economy goes beyond celebrities protesting the oil industry while jetting around the globe. Hydrocarbons produce more than fuel.

OMG, he had to be a hoot to interview.

I surely, surely hope we have a trend on our hands and a return to sanity before it’s gone so far, we get pricked by the needle.

It’s too late when that happens.