Credible scientists say there’s no such thing as spontaneous human combustion. But they have yet to inform “environmentalists” of the Institute for Energy Research’s new report on the prospect of “oil and natural gas production moving from countries with the highest environmental standards to countries with lower, or even functionally zero, environmental standards.” At least one greenie zealot brave enough to read the analysis might burst into flames.
Authors David W. Kreutzer, Ph.D. and Paige Lambermont make use of the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy’s Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which tracks “40 … indicators across 11 issue categories,” ranking “180 countries on climate change … environmental health, and ecosystem vitality.” The assessment was employed as “as a proxy under the assumption that the internal demand for a country’s environmental quality is broad based.” Kreutzer and Lambermont then took countries’ EPI scores and “multiplied by national production volumes to create a production weighted environmental quality score.”
Here are the results for liquid fuels:
For the 20 largest producers outside the U.S., the average EPI score … is 39. At the same time, the U.S. EPI score is 51.1. That is, the average barrel of non-U.S. petroleum is produced in a country with an EPI score that is 23.6% lower than the EPI score for the U.S.
Excluding “other developed democracies like Canada and Norway” intensifies the disparity — “the weighted environmental score of the remaining oil production falls to just 36.5, 28.6% lower than the U.S. EPI score.” For the record, China (28.4), Nigeria (28.3), Indonesia (28.2), Iraq (27.8), and India (18.9) land at the cohort’s rock bottom.
And for natural gas:
Similar to that of the non-U.S. oil producers, the production-weighted EPI score for the 20 largest non-U.S. … producers is only 38.6 compared to the 51.1 EPI score of the U.S. Thus, the average [billion cubic feet] of non-U.S. natural gas is produced in a country with an EPI score 24.5% lower than that of the U.S. The U.S. score is 32.4% higher than the average production-weighted EPI score.
Among the major natural-gas nations, China (28.4), Nigeria (28.3), Indonesia (28.2), Pakistan (24.6) and Oman (24) have the stinkiest EPI results.
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