Commentary
One of the best ways to improve the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people around the world is to broaden, rather than restrict, access to the oil and gas sector.
It won’t just make people more prosperous, it will also empower women and improve air quality.
This is not a position you hear argued often these days. You’re far more likely to hear the exact opposite, that the sector needs to be phased out.
But Chris Wright, the CEO of Liberty Energy, is so passionate about the positive change he plans to bring to poor communities across the globe via expanding gas usage that he won’t be deterred.
That includes at a recent speaking event he had at an American university, where environmental activists were so incensed that they performed a mock funeral for Mother Earth upon his arrival.
“I’ve got a mostly hostile room and I just walk them through how the world has evolved,” Wright, the Denver-based executive, said during an interview conducted recently in Banff. “We used to have a 30-year life expectancy. And I say two things changed the world: the rise of human liberty and this explosion in available energy.”
But while access to affordable energy has fuelled the growth behind the way of life enjoyed by people in the West, regions like Sub-Saharan Africa have been left behind. Women are particularly affected, as so much time and effort is spent daily by women and their children to source forms of cooking fuel that are bad for their health.
This is one of the reasons why Wright formed the newly launched Bettering Human Lives Foundation, which aims to bring affordable cooking fuels to women in developing countries.
Anne Hyre, a career nurse-midwife who is now executive director of the new foundation, wrote on her observations of the issue in the field.
“Despite significant cultural and geographical differences among countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the scenes outside the window, as I drive from town to town, are remarkably similar, and all include women and girls standing in lines at water pumps, walking in groups in search of firewood and cow dung, and carrying heavy loads of firewood and water-filled buckets,” she said. “Whether in Malawi, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, or Kenya, I pass clusters of homes and see women cooking amidst harmful smoke from open fires fuelled by wood or cow dung. How is this acceptable in the year 2024?”
A booklet produced by the Bettering Human Lives Foundation cites an estimate from the Kenyan Ministry of Health that 21,500 premature deaths occur yearly because of indoor air pollution caused by cooking. And that’s just one country.
It’s an alarming issue and one that’s hardly ever spoken of in this way. If more people in the West thought about the lack of access to gas used for cooking as a social blight, perspectives would rapidly evolve.
The social innovation and benefits afforded by expanded access to gas was one of the major themes of the conference that saw Wright visit Banff for the International Gas Research Conference, which was hosted this year by the Canadian Gas Association.
Wright and others in attendance, like keynote speaker Bjorn Lomborg, encouraged participants to stop apologizing for their industry and instead be proud of the good that their products can provide.
“I think we’ve made a mistake in just not speaking honestly and candidly in public,” Wright says of how his sector has let climate activists frame the debate. “I talk about climate change a lot, but honestly, and in context, it’s a real thing—it’s just not even remotely close to the world’s biggest problem.”
Wright likes to inspire young people by keeping positive, arguing that access to affordable fuel “is the biggest step on the road from abject poverty to middle class.”
“When you’re no longer spending hours a day gathering wood, women and children are not waking up hours early to stoke fires and to cook and do everything slow and in smoky rooms, if you’ve got a propane stove and can turn it on and light a flame, heat your house, cook the meals, and then turn it off without smoke and time—that’s just liberation,“ he says. ”That’s empowerment; that’s longer, healthier lives.”
Wright’s foundation will focus on providing no-interest loans to entrepreneurs in Africa—where interest rates for business loans run as prohibitively high as 30-40 percent—to help them develop their own gas distribution hubs for communities.
Whether it’s taking this story to college kids or to industry conferences, it’s one that needs to be heard. This is especially true as climate activists in North America are now bizarrely pushing to restrict natural gas here. This would only move us backwards.
It’s long overdue that we shift the narrative away from doom and gloom and towards these sorts of inspiring messages.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
