Time for energy suppliers to prove they are not the bad guys

Oil spills and global warming fears have cast the energy industry in a poor light. But now suppliers must respond to the criticism in a positive manner

Steam billows from the cooling towers of a coal power station behind wind turbines near Cottbus, Germany. Pawel Kopczynski / Reuters

The energy industry has been ineffective in framing the public debate on the role of energy and the environment. It is time we collectively took the bull by the horns and turned this narrative around in our favour.

The dominant media narrative plaguing the industry since the age of environmental enlightenment dawned with the Exxon Valdez disaster 22 years ago has been that energy suppliers are bad and energy consumers, ie everybody on the planet, are good.

This dislocated storyline has been bolstered by a second somewhat darker, more derogatory media narrative that goes something like Arabs/Opec, who hold a majority of the world's energy reserves, are wrong and populations in the West, the world's largest consumers of hydrocarbons, are conversely right.

The surprising thing about these naive distorted Hollywood plots is that the international energy companies and our partners, the resource-holding countries, have remained essentially silent for two decades on countering a growing chorus of criticism. This lays all the blame of global warming at the door of energy suppliers and next to none on all of us who consume and demand these products every minute of every hour of every day.

For the most part, the energy industry gave up the debate early on and abandoned the stage of public opinion to our harshest critics. We have been content to trawl through the halls of power to ensure our interests are protected in quiet political handshakes. Well, guess what? Politicians often have even lower popularity ratings than energy suppliers.

It is time for the industry to come out of the closet and engage in redrafting these out-of-date narratives that keep people apart in opposite camps of distrust. Their lingering presence is not good for the planet, presents unwelcome challenges to economic growth and threatens geopolitical stability.

The story needs a new definition that acknowledges we are all stakeholders in this one-Earth boat of environmental protection and sustainable economic growth. The narrative needs to shift from an emphasis on supply, where the least environmental impact takes place, to a focus on demand and consumption, where the majority of the negative impact from hydrocarbons takes place.

It is in all our interests to work together to secure the solutions to the big challenges for everyone's benefit. The reality is that those scientists who are most likely to have the biggest impact in combating carbon dioxide emissions probably work for energy companies, or are financed by its research budgets.

As an industry, we need to put our head above the parapet and tell our story. Begin with trying to change the dynamic of the conversation as Chevron has recently tried to do, demonstrating what the industry continues to achieve and contribute to the advancement of society.

All in all, it requires getting out from inside the energy bubble and initiating consistent and proactive engagements with all stakeholders, and not just when a disaster occurs.

Chevron launched a global advertising campaign six months ago titled We Agree. The campaign highlights the common ground it shares with people around the world on key energy issues. It also describes the actions the company takes in producing energy responsibly and in supporting the communities in which it operates.

"We hear what people say about oil companies - that they should develop renewables, support communities, create jobs and protect the environment - and the fact is, we agree," says Rhonda Zygocki, the vice president of policy, government and public affairs at Chevron.

Chevron has received a lot of criticism from the long line of cynics that scream double standards and hypocrisy any time an energy company tries to use the collective phrase "we". For our critics it is key to maintain a "them and us" wedge firmly entrenched between the industry and society as a whole. The energy business must get its house in order to remove any soft underbelly of inconsistencies that provides others with the stick to beat us, as clearly we suffer from being seen as promoting self-interest.

There are two ways to be famous - famous for your good deeds or infamous for your bad deeds.

Two ideas would be to partner independent stakeholders - invite recognised environmental activists to be non-executive directors on the board of energy companies - and establish industry standards on transparency and solicit ratings from Transparency International in the same way as a corporation would request a credit rating from Moody's or Standard & Poor's.

Our industry needs to come together to rebrand as one. Perhaps Opec, the International Energy Agency and the International Energy Forum could include a category of membership or affiliation for companies in the same way as they have for countries.

Thought leadership is what is needed, and maybe for all of us this begins at home. The irony is that for an industry that touches almost every human life on the planet, we have stood by and allowed our contribution to be dismissed and have been portrayed as the Planet Bad Guy.

A James McCallum is the chief executive of Senergy, a global energy service company