Life's Pleasures Quote by Lee R. Raymond

Economic growth is framed here less as a policy choice than as a moral precondition: no growth, no clean water, no clinics, no development. Coming from Lee R. Raymond, longtime ExxonMobil chief and a defining voice of late-20th-century corporate energy culture, that linkage isn’t accidental. It’s a classic “growth as humanitarianism” move, designed to make objections to growth-oriented extraction feel like objections to human welfare itself.

The intent is to simplify a messy political argument into a single pipeline: growth -> services -> dignity. That pipeline rhetorically launders responsibility. “Potential for economic growth” sounds neutral and technocratic, but it quietly centers the conditions that enable growth: investment, deregulation, fossil energy, global trade. It’s an argument for permissive industrial policy without naming the costs. Water and healthcare are invoked as near-unassailable goods, functioning as emotional ballast for an economic premise that might otherwise read as self-interested.

The subtext, especially in the climate-era reading, is defensive: if environmental regulation constrains hydrocarbons, it constrains growth; if it constrains growth, it constrains the poor’s access to basics. That’s a powerful inversion, casting corporate expansion as anti-poverty work and framing critics as privileged moralists willing to deny others modernity.

Context matters: this is the worldview of an executive class that treated energy abundance as synonymous with progress, and treated skepticism as naivete. The line works because it harnesses genuine truth (development needs resources) while eliding the contested question of which growth, powered by what, and who bears the externalities.