TURNING OIL GREEN

An oil market pundit offers a provocative yet straightforward energy solution in this environmental work.

With 35 years of experience as a commodities trade adviser and energy markets analyst and the author of two books—Shale Boom, Shale Bust (2014) and Oil’s Endless Bid (2011)—Dicker is someone to be taken seriously. His latest work is a plea for a blunt way to bring about a green revolution: Make oil “really expensive to buy, literally forever.” While he claims to be an environmental advocate who leans left, the author still assails activists whose goal is to punish fossil fuel companies. Rather, he writes, it is energy companies that have the critical infrastructure to “accelerate the rise of renewables” if it is worth their while to do so. Dicker does an admirable job of explaining the energy market with regard to oil, shale, natural gas, and renewables. His observations of the oil industry’s machinations are nothing if not colorful and frank. About the smaller American oil companies that engage in shale-fracking, the author asks: “How did they take a new and enormous resource that is the envy of every other country, and in ever greater demand and—unbelievably—manage to bankrupt themselves totally in less than a decade?” He is a proponent of natural gas as a bridge to renewables because “it is cheaper, it’s cleaner, it’s more abundant, and it can replicate virtually any use that crude oil and its refined products can, while requiring minimal processing from wellhead to burner.” In the end, Dicker views the problem of fossil fuel usage and global warming through a less conventional lens, putting forth a deceptively simple premise: “Make oil prices so high that renewable sources are more than competitive, they’re financially superior to fossil fuels. Then, keep oil prices high.” The author does admit that the Covid-19 pandemic likely impedes the timing of his pricing strategy, but he stands by it. Dicker convincingly supports his theory by using charts and graphs to demonstrate costs of oil versus renewables, oil demand and prices, energy consumption, a “projected evolution of energy,” and more.

A refined, contrarian argument about oil, both well researched and engaging.