Lessons from UK

What can Houston’s energy economy learn from Great Britain’s election results?

While Americans were glued to James Comey’s congressional testimony on Thursday, British voters went to the polls in a snap election that, like so many recent votes, proved wrong the pundits and prognosticators.

So what happened? To quote Beyoncé: To the left, to the left.

Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, running on an unabashedly socialist platform, forced Conservative Party Prime Minister Theresa May to lose her majority in a race that she was originally predicted to dominate.

Houstonians can be forgiven if they missed an Election Day from 5,000 miles away — but now is the time to start paying attention. The results of the British election should serve as a warning for the longterm economic success of the Energy Capital of the World.

No, we’re not too worried about Corbyn’s calls for hiking taxes on the rich or raising the quality of life or investing in education. His energy policy, on the other hand, presents a vision of Houston enduring a Rust Belt-style collapse in a few decades.

“Labour will ban fracking,” Corbyn’s platform states, “because it would lock us into an energy infrastructure based on fossil fuels, long after the point in 2030 when the Committee on Climate Change says gas in the UK must sharply decline.”

Britain has licenced shale fracking for nearly a decade, and an across-theboard ban would be misguided. However, there’s a nugget of truth in Labor’s extreme position. Fracking — and the cheap and plentiful natural gas that it produces — does lock the world into an infrastructure that’s based on fossil fuels.

Those fossil fuels undeniably serve as the economic lifeblood of our city.

Corbyn isn’t alone in his push for a world without oil and gas, and major energy companies are predicting a peak demand for petroleum within the next several decades.

If the world hits peak petroleum in 2030, then Houston as we know it hits a peak in 2030.

So what’s the answer for our city? If the globe is going green, then oil and gas has to follow. This means capping methane leaks, investing in carboncapture technology and emphasizing how natural gas can reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Unfortunately, the energy industry isn’t getting the support it needs from Washington. Donald Trump has proposed a budget that would cut fossil fuel research and development, such as carbon capture technology, from more than $600 million to $280 million. That’s why Houston’s own Michael Skelly, president of Clean Line Energy, joined the head of the American Gas Association and 13 other energy industry leaders in writing a letter to Congress that urged lawmakers to fully fund the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Projects like the Petra Nova carbon-capture power plant in Fort Bend County simply wouldn’t be possible without government help. The oil and gas industry isn’t going away anytime soon. The long-promised global market for natural gas has arrived. Liquified natural gas terminals are laying the foundation for international energy infrastructure that relies on Gulf Coast-based exports. In fact, the conflict in Qatar forced Royal Dutch Shell to ship LNG from the U.S. to Dubai. The idea of the United States sending natural gas to the Middle East, instead of the other way around, was once unimaginable. Frackers have turned the world upside-down.

Things are looking great for the fourth-largest city in the United States — but we can’t forget that Detroit once held that mantle, too. Energy markets can rise, and they can also fall, often very quickly and with disastrous consequences. Just ask anyone in the coal industry.

Wind and solar are growing more affordable with each passing year. Consumers are starting to demand green energy. Voters across the planet are supporting government regulations in response to climate change.

Houston has to make sure that we can sell the energy products that the world wants to buy, now and in the decades to come. Or else we may find ourselves, like Prime Minister May, facing a future where we’re distinctly less in demand than we once imagined.

Energy markets can rise, and they can also fall, often very quickly and with disastrous consequences. Just ask anyone in the coal industry.