Rick Perry’s tortured relationship with the English language reached new heights (or lows) last week when he somehow connected two very distinct subjects: fossil fuels and sexual assault. “Let me tell you where people are dying, is in Africa, because of the lack of energy they have there,” the energy secretary said during a speech in Washington, D.C. He asked his audience to consider it “from the standpoint of sexual assault. When the lights are on, when you have light that shines the righteousness, if you will, on those types of acts. So from the standpoint of how you really affect people’s lives, fossil fuels is going to play a role in that.”

Perry’s view of fossil fuels, as an unmitigated good for mankind, is a common one in the Trump administration. Kathleen Hartnett-White, the new head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, has defended coal and oil as the “lifeblood of the modern world” and lamented that policy discussions rarely include the “inestimable human benefits of fossil fuels.” Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, frequently does the same. “God has blessed us with natural resources,” he told Politico in July. “Let’s use them to feed the world. Let’s use them to power the world. Let’s use them to protect the world.”

Next week, the Trump administration reportedly will make this very case on the world stage. At the United Nation climate talks in Bonn, Germany, where countries will discuss next steps for implementing the Paris agreement, U.S. officials plan to argue that fossil fuels are key to fighting climate change, according to The New York Times. Representatives of the coal, natural gas, and nuclear industries reportedly will speak on “The Role of Cleaner and More Efficient Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power in Climate Mitigation,” a presentation about “how American energy resources, particularly fossil fuels, can help poor countries meet electricity needs and drive down greenhouse gas emissions.”

Some of these defenses of fossil fuels may sound reasonable enough. Oil and coal have indeed been the “lifeblood of the modern world” for over a hundred years, improving lives and promoting prosperity around the world. And there’s no doubt that access to electricity must be expanded in poor countries. But the Trump administration’s argument conveniently ignores two important realities: the rise of affordable and viable renewable energy, and the scientific consensus that our reliance on fossil fuels will increase human suffering. That’s why the ascendant moral case for fossil fuels is even more pernicious than the climate-change denial on which it rests.

The moral case for fossil fuels, as promulgated on the right, states that fossil fuels have improved humans’ lives for more than a century—mainly through economic growth—and thus will continue to do so. The benefits of oil, gas, and coal consumption, the argument goes, far outweigh the environmental and public health costs, which have been wildly overstated by scientists anyway.