The last thing most CEOs want is to court the wrath of politicians like Sen.
Elizabeth Warren.
That’s especially true of oil and gas executives, who try to appease their political opponents by talking up investments in renewable energy.
Toby Rice
is the rare CEO who seems to enjoy the political combat.
The 40-year-old leads
EQT Corp.
, America’s largest natural-gas producer. Last November Ms. Warren, in her fashion, fired off letters accusing him and 10 other energy executives of “corporate greed” for exporting liquefied natural gas.
Mr. Rice’s fierce nine-page response was chock full of data refuting Ms. Warren’s claim that gas exports increase U.S. energy prices. That assertion, he wrote, is “without merit” and fosters “a narrative that politicizes natural gas and associated infrastructure in a manner that runs counter to one of our key collective goals, one we know you share—addressing climate change.”
Ms. Warren and her ideological compatriots style themselves champions of the little guy and the environment. Nonsense, Mr. Rice says: Their policies mean higher prices for consumers and more carbon emissions. “If you’re blocking pipelines, you’re blocking the biggest green initiative on the planet,” he says in a Zoom interview from his office in Carnegie, Pa., a former karate studio in a walk-up above a liquor store. In the background are colorful portraits of
Andrew Carnegie,
Nikola Tesla,
Cornelius Vanderbilt,
John D. Rockefeller
and
J.P. Morgan.
Mr. Rice is a general on the frontlines of an energy war whose outcome matters more than ever after Russian’s invasion of Ukraine. The anti-fossil-fuel left is waging a multifront campaign to keep natural gas “in the ground,” as…