Energy Secretary Rick Perry to Climate Activists: 'Fossil Fuels Save Lives'

“Pump oil, save lives,” seems like a slogan better fit for a gas station in New Jersey than a genuinely held idea propagated by the U.S. Energy Secretary, Rick Perry, but the National Petroleum Council (NPC) doesn’t appear to be in the business of making bumperstickers. While speaking at a NPC conference in DC on Monday, Perry’s ode to petroleum was interrupted by a small group of climate activists — but he was unfazed by their protest because fossil fuels “save lives,” goddamnit!

Per Bloomberg, Perry encouraged an audience of energy executives to represent their industry with pride before directly addressing the activists. “This industry is leading the world in affecting the climate and affecting the climate in a positive way,” said Perry. “I’m proud to be a part of this industry. You want to talk about saving lives that’s what we are doing.”

Laughter would ordinarily be an appropriate response to Perry’s sentiment if the planet’s future didn’t depend on these dipshits who seem to be addicted to extracting nonrenewable resources from the ground, burning them, and flooding the atmosphere with noxious gas. It’s all the more horrifying that Perry believes fossil fuels have affected the climate in a “positive way” — a nightmarish claim only topped in its absurdity by the suggestion that fossil fuels have somehow “saved lives” in north African countries.

“It upsets me when some guy stands up and says, ‘What are you going to do, you’re killing people,’” said Perry ostensibly addressing the climate activists who were being dragged from the conference. “No sir. You want to kill people, you take energy away from them and you see how those north African countries will be treated.”

It upsets me and, I imagine, several billion other people that an industry composed of fatally avaricious clowns have taken it upon themselves to be the twenty-first century bearers of the white man’s burden, saving the world through exploitation. As one activist shouted at Perry while she was being escorted out of the room by security, “People’s lives are on the line.”