Success Quote by Lee R. Raymond

There is a practiced innocence in Raymond's complaint: it stages him as the reluctant realist, baffled by the moralizing of comfortable Westerners. The phrasing does a lot of work. "Hugely prosperous country" isn’t just geography; it’s an accusation of hypocrisy. It frames climate-minded critics as people who climbed the ladder on cheap fossil energy and now want to kick it away. "Developing world" is invoked as a single, urgent constituency, a rhetorical shield that turns a corporate interest (continued oil and gas demand) into an ethical obligation (poverty alleviation). And "deprived" carries the sting of cruelty, as if the alternative to fossil fuels is not transition but punishment.

The intent is to re-center the energy debate around fairness rather than physics. Raymond isn’t arguing about emissions trajectories or externalities; he’s arguing about who gets to make demands. That’s shrewd, because it relocates responsibility from producers to consumers, from Exxon-era supply decisions to activists' supposed lifestyle politics. It also smuggles in a binary: either fossil fuels or deprivation, full stop. Renewables, grid modernization, storage, and policy design disappear, replaced by a moral melodrama.

Context matters: Raymond spent decades at Exxon, a company synonymous with maximizing hydrocarbon extraction and, historically, resisting regulation. In that light, the quote reads less like solidarity with the global poor and more like a preemptive rebuttal to climate constraints. It’s culture-war rhetoric in a suit: turn decarbonization into elitism, and you win time.