Much has been made of the Biden Administration asking members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to increase oil and gas production to help lower prices rather than turning to domestic producers.
“While he’s saying no to the Permian Basin, to the Gulf of Mexico, he’s saying yes to Iran, to Iraq, to other areas – to Libya instead of Lubbock, to Algeria instead of Abilene,” said Scott Angelle, formerly the longest-serving director of the US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.
There was pain at the gas pump before Russia’s “stupidity and ignorance” in invading Ukraine, he said, but the invasion will cause additional pain before things are sorted out.
“It’s unfortunate it took an invasion and a war to highlight how important domestic energy is,” he commented.
Angelle, who is also a former Louisiana Lieutenant Governor, has launched USA Energy Workers and a website, www.usaenergyworkers.com, that lets the nation’s 3.1 million energy workers tell their stories and offers an online gathering for them, their families and friends.
“I would say it’s not a solution and it is an insult. It is an insult to US energy workers that ‘We don’t want you to do this, we’ll get others to do it.’ You wouldn’t say that to US car manufacturers, you wouldn’t say you don’t want US corn or wheat, but that’s what they did with oil,” he told the Reporter-Telegram in a telephone interview.
He said the increasingly negative rhetoric around the oil and gas industry has also served to vilify its workers, and he sees the website as a way for them to tell their stories.
“For generations we’ve had people who put on their steel-toed boots and their hard hats, kiss their families good-bye and go do the hard work of energizing the country,” he said. “There’s a saying that, ‘if you can read this, thank a teacher. Well, if you can read this, at night, and you’re warm, thank a teacher AND an energy worker.”
The website also has a “My Story” portal that lets energy workers share how they participate in and glorify nature. Red states love the environment as much as blue states, and clean air and clean water are as important, Angelle noted.
He stressed that he does not limit USA energy workers to only those who work to produce oil and gas but those in alternative energy like wind and solar, who are equally important. Not only could it serve to glorify and not vilify energy workers but the website could serve as a tool to recruit the next generation, he said.
“My mission is to elevate and celebrate the energy worker,” Angelle said.
As an American, he concluded, “I am grateful for the men and women of the Permian Basin – Texas and New Mexico – for the work they’re doing. I’m confident America will be bolder, stronger and more secure because of the men and women and what they do; it’s phenomenal.”
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Originally Appeared Here