Leadership Quote by Tim Holden

A politician doesn’t praise fossil fuels this plainly unless he’s trying to do two things at once: signal loyalty to an economic base and launder a controversial stance through the respectable language of innovation. “Research and development” is the key euphemism here. It frames fossil fuel expansion not as clinging to the past, but as a forward-looking, technocratic project - the kind of phrase that sounds like lab coats and patents rather than rigs and emissions.

Tim Holden, a longtime Pennsylvania Democrat from coal country, operated in a political ecosystem where energy policy was never abstract. It was payroll. In that context, “our fossil fuel program” isn’t a neutral descriptor; it’s a claim of ownership and protection. The pronoun “our” collapses industry interests, regional identity, and national policy into one tidy bundle, implying that questioning fossil fuels is questioning the community itself.

The subtext is defensive, even if the syntax is calm. At a moment when climate politics were sharpening into moral language (responsibility, sacrifice, transition), Holden’s phrasing drags the debate back into managerial terms: fund R&D, improve efficiency, develop “clean coal,” keep the jobs. It’s a rhetorical move that doesn’t deny environmental concerns so much as postpone their consequences, promising that the next round of technology will reconcile growth with guilt.

It also quietly redefines progress. Instead of progress meaning leaving fossil fuels behind, progress becomes making them smarter - an argument built to reassure swing voters and donors alike that change can happen without rupture.