Over the weekend, the Democratic National Committee voted in favor of refusing all future donations from fossil-fuel companies. They’re so proud of the decision that it was only publicized on Tuesday, and then only by reporters who had to do some digging to learn the news.

The resolution will bar the national committee from taking any donation tied to corporate political-action committees linked to coal, oil, or gas companies. Marveling over the news, ThinkProgress quoted a variety of progressive activists who are thrilled that the DNC has finally lived up to the spirit of the Democratic Party’s platform. That platform, if you’ve never read it, calls for the elimination of tax incentives and subsidies for fossil-fuel producers, demands a “phase down” of the development and extraction of new sources of carbon fuel, and calls on the Justice Department to investigate them for misleading the public on “scientific reality of climate change.” Absent from ThinkProgress’s account of this wondrous turn of events, however, is any comment from the DNC.

The Democrats’ reluctance to trumpet their righteous decision to decline donations from the fossil-fuel industry—a sector of the economy that employed 7 million people and made up 5 percent of U.S. GDP in 2017—is, perhaps, understandable. According to ThinkProgress, the Democratic Party’s hostility toward fossil-fuel producers is so intense that 90 percent of the industry’s political donations go to the Republican Party as it is. In that sense, every time a Democrat fills up her car or takes a flight, she’s contributing to Republican candidates or causes. Hypocrisy is, after all, the tribute vice pays to virtue. Today, that tribute amounts to $2.91-per-gallon.

Maybe the most bizarre aspect of this fanatic fealty to the tenets of green absolutism is that the Democrats could make a salient point about clean energy and market economics without branding the entire fossil-fuel enterprise a bête noire. The coal industry is in decline, and it has been for years. In the last 15 years, coal has declined as a share of the energy market by one-third. Oil, too, has declined slightly after a marginal resurgence. In the same period, renewable energy sources have increased from 5 to 10 percent of the market as the costs of production have declined, but every source of energy pales in comparison to natural gas. Revolutionary new technologies like hydraulic fracturing have made gas cheap and ubiquitous, to the point now that, for the first time since 1953, the United States is projected to become a net-energy exporter by 2022.

Not only does that mean that the U.S. will benefit from a kind of energy security that seemed like a fantasy just a decade ago, it means that America can relieve the energy burden on its allies, which are dependent upon exports from states like Russia and China. Even if national and economic security arguments don’t move climate fanatics, the environmental benefits of America’s transition to reliance on natural gas should. Burning natural gas emits about 50 percent less carbon into the atmosphere than coal, and the shift to natural gas has contributed to the precipitous decline of carbon emissions released into the atmosphere over the last decade in the West.

Of course, the left’s environmentalist wing doesn’t want to hear any of this. They’d prefer to hear how fossil fuels could be relegated to history’s dustbin by force of will alone. They want Democrats to treat this vital sector of the economy like apartheid South Africa. With the DNC’s vote, it would seem like the Democratic Party agrees with its left wing on the immorality of supporting in any form fossil fuel production and exploration. It makes you wonder, then, why Democrats don’t seem to want to talk about it.