What are the flame producing poles that stick out of the ground doing?
They're flares. They are burning off what's called "stranded natural gas". The natural gas comes with the oil but to deliver it to market, they would have to build a liquefaction compression plant and a separate set of cryogenic pipes to carry the natural gas to market so it would take a very long time to make their money back. Most natural gas is just burned as a waste product of oil production. This is also why CNG isn't really a viable alternative fuel for cars because any significant increase in demand would result in a huge capital expense in laying down additional pipes and compressors. They are working on portable gasifers and fischer tropsch reactors so that the natural gas can be converted to a synthetic crude that can be mixed with the crude oil being piped to market. The flares have nothing to do with safety, pressure relief or generating energy other than the fact that the gas has to go somewheres or it will be a safety/pressure issue.
Why do people think it’s an option to believe in climate change?
Because the evidence is far from conclusive, and there are a lot of scientistis who disagree with one or other aspect of the current cimactic dogma, being silenced and denied access to the media. Also, it is evident that a lot of climate scientists are not objective but biased and that there is a lot of political pressure from the governments controlled by the Neo-Marxist left to support the dogma even if it means rigging the results, which has been discivered and proved a few times. Also, the left media coverage is totally hysterial, which is, in itself, a reason to doubt ulterior motives, especially after all the alarmist projections of the bodies such as IPCC fell far short, and any warming proved to be very modest. I’m not an anti-scientific person, on the contrary, but I have very good reasons not to trust Neo-Communist governments, government-financed scientists and crony media, and I will need much more hard evidence and much less obvious financial and career pressures on the scientists and media manipulation and propaganda to credit any kind of drastic climate change caused by human activities.