Success Quote by Lee R. Raymond

Raymond’s line is corporate realism dressed up as humility: “hardly an activity” makes the claim feel observational rather than ideological, as if he’s simply pointing at the obvious. But the rhetorical move is sharper than it looks. By framing energy as intrinsic to almost everything, he quietly collapses moral and political debates into a kind of thermodynamic inevitability. If fossil fuels are currently doing most of the work, then critique can be recast as naivete - a refusal to reckon with the material basis of modern life.

The subtext is defensive and strategic. This isn’t a celebration of oil so much as an argument against abrupt disruption: you can’t moralize your way out of the energy ledger. “Currently provided” is the key softener. It concedes contingency while still centering fossil fuels as the default infrastructure of civilization. That phrasing buys time - and positions the speaker as pragmatic, not obstructive - even as it sidesteps questions about who benefits from that arrangement and who pays the external costs.

Context matters because Raymond wasn’t a neutral energy educator; he was a titan of the fossil-fuel economy, closely associated with an era of aggressive industry messaging around climate policy. Read that way, the quote functions as agenda camouflage. It invites the listener to feel complicit (you, too, depend on this) and then implies a policy conclusion: slow down, be careful, don’t get radical. It’s a persuasive pivot from responsibility to dependency, from “should we change?” to “can we even change?”