This is another article
beating the dogma that CO2 is driving climatic fluctuation. It you
look at the chart above, you will observe that for the past decade
the climate has been warmer by about .4C degrees. This fits very
well with what has been observed. Even better, this chart is
calculated by a satellite that is immune form changing local
conditions.
Unfortunately this decade
has a natural comparable to the decade of the thirties when we had
similar conditions and temperatures.
It also looks like the
1997 El Nino event dumped a lot of heat into the atmosphere that then
has taken forever to dissipate.
The problem is that we do
not have two centuries of date to compare with.
I also suspect something
significant happened in the Atlantic ocean that we do not yet
understand.
All this looks very much
like part of a natural climatic cycle that is steadily warming since
the Little Ice Age. That was possibly triggered by a sharp
adjustment in ocean currents which I suspect is the only force able
to make the magnitude of changes observed.
Otherwise, the economic
and scientific reality is that we will need to use fossil fuels for a
short while. The good news is that the transition to thermal fusion
energy has begun and can itself completely displace fossil fuels. In
the meantime gas plants are thrashing the coal industry now and will
completely end its role.
It thermal fusion is a
problem, then we already have superconducting power transmission and
this allows western geothermal power to replace all fossil fuels as
needed.
So before, real fusion
energy is available we can do it all using geothermal. It is just
that we will not need to do it this way.
My point though is that
fossil fuels are on their last hurrah. They face a flood of superior
replacement.
Global Warming's
Terrifying New Math
Three simple numbers
that add up to global catastrophe - and that make clear who the real
enemy is
Illustration by Edel
Rodriguez
July 19, 2012 9:35 AM
ET
If the pictures of
those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the
size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about
climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records
across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for
the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the
temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average,
the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a
number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
Meteorologists
reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our
nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it
represented the "largest temperature departure from average of
any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported
that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the
hottest downpour in the planet's history.
Not that our leaders
seemed to notice. Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for
the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit,
accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the
first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was "a ghost
of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British
journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention,
footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by
multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first books for a general
audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent
the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I
can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and
quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about
the peril that human civilization is in.
When we think about
global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological,
theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our
predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an
easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by
financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of
environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken
through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the
conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows
us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally
hopeless – position with three simple numbers.
The First Number:
2° Celsius
If the movie had ended
in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would
have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing
climate. The world's nations had gathered in the December gloom of
the Danish capital for what a leading climate economist, Sir Nicholas
Stern of Britain, called the "most important gathering since the
Second World War, given what is at stake." As Danish energy
minister Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the conference, declared
at the time: "This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take
years before we get a new and better one. If ever."
In the event, of
course, we missed it. Copenhagen failed spectacularly. Neither China
nor the United States, which between them are responsible for 40
percent of global carbon emissions, was prepared to offer dramatic
concessions, and so the conference drifted aimlessly for two weeks
until world leaders jetted in for the final day. Amid considerable
chaos, President Obama took the lead in drafting a face-saving
"Copenhagen Accord" that fooled very few. Its purely
voluntary agreements committed no one to anything, and even if
countries signaled their intentions to cut carbon emissions, there
was no enforcement mechanism. "Copenhagen is a crime scene
tonight," an angry Greenpeace official declared, "with the
guilty men and women fleeing to the airport." Headline writers
were equally brutal: COPENHAGEN: THE MUNICH OF OUR TIMES? asked one.
The accord did contain
one important number, however. In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized
"the scientific view that the increase in global temperature
should be below two degrees Celsius." And in the very next
paragraph, it declared that "we agree that deep cuts in global
emissions are required... so as to hold the increase in global
temperature below two degrees Celsius." By insisting on two
degrees – about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit – the accord ratified
positions taken earlier in 2009 by the G8, and the so-called Major
Economies Forum. It was as conventional as conventional wisdom gets.
The number first gained prominence, in fact, at a 1995 climate
conference chaired by Angela Merkel, then the German minister of the
environment and now the center-right chancellor of the nation.
Some context: So
far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under
0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most
scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is
gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds
more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a
shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating
floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to
think that two degrees is far too lenient a target. "Any number
much above one degree involves a gamble," writes Kerry Emanuel
of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, "and the odds become
less and less favorable as the temperature goes up." Thomas
Lovejoy, once the World Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, puts it
like this: "If we're seeing what we're seeing today at 0.8
degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much." NASA scientist
James Hansen, the planet's most prominent climatologist, is even
blunter: "The target that has been talked about in international
negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a prescription
for long-term disaster." At the Copenhagen summit, a spokesman
for small island nations warned that many would not survive a
two-degree rise: "Some countries will flat-out disappear."
When delegates from developing nations were warned that two degrees
would represent a "suicide pact" for drought-stricken
Africa, many of them started chanting, "One degree, one Africa."
Despite such
well-founded misgivings, political realism bested scientific data,
and the world settled on the two-degree target – indeed, it's fair
to say that it's the only thing about climate change the world has
settled on. All told, 167 countries responsible for more than 87
percent of the world's carbon emissions have signed on to the
Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two-degree target. Only a few
dozen countries have rejected it, including Kuwait, Nicaragua and
Venezuela. Even the United Arab Emirates, which makes most of its
money exporting oil and gas, signed on. The official position of
planet Earth at the moment is that we can't raise the temperature
more than two degrees Celsius – it's become the bottomest of bottom
lines. Two degrees.
The Second Number: 565 Gigatons
Scientists estimate
that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into
the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of
staying below two degrees. ("Reasonable," in this case,
means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing
Russian roulette with a six-shooter.)
This idea of a global
"carbon budget" emerged about a decade ago, as scientists
began to calculate how much oil, coal and gas could still safely be
burned. Since we've increased the Earth's temperature by 0.8 degrees
so far, we're currently less than halfway to the target. But, in
fact, computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing
CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8
degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the
atmosphere. That means we're already three-quarters of the way to the
two-degree target.
How good are these
numbers? No one is insisting that they're exact, but few dispute that
they're generally right. The 565-gigaton figure was derived from one
of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been
built by climate scientists around the world over the past few
decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the latest
climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of the
next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"Looking at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all,"
says Tom Wigley, an Australian climatologist at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research. "There's maybe 40 models in the data
set now, compared with 20 before. But so far the numbers are pretty
much the same. We're just fine-tuning things. I don't think much has
changed over the last decade." William Collins, a senior climate
scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agrees. "I
think the results of this round of simulations will be quite
similar," he says. "We're not getting any free lunch from
additional understanding of the climate system."
We're not getting any
free lunch from the world's economies, either. With only a single
year's lull in 2009 at the height of the financial crisis, we've
continued to pour record amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, year
after year. In late May, the International Energy Agency published
its latest figures – CO2 emissions last year rose to 31.6
gigatons, up 3.2 percent from the year before. America had a warm
winter and converted more coal-fired power plants to natural gas, so
its emissions fell slightly; China kept booming, so its carbon output
(which recently surpassed the U.S.) rose 9.3 percent; the Japanese
shut down their fleet of nukes post-Fukushima, so their emissions
edged up 2.4 percent. "There have been efforts to use more
renewable energy and improve energy efficiency," said Corinne Le
Quéré, who runs England's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change
Research. "But what this shows is that so far the effects have
been marginal." In fact, study after study predicts that carbon
emissions will keep growing by roughly three percent a year – and
at that rate, we'll blow through our 565-gigaton allowance in 16
years, around the time today's preschoolers will be graduating from
high school. "The new data provide further evidence that the
door to a two-degree trajectory is about to close," said Fatih
Birol, the IEA's chief economist. In fact, he continued, "When I
look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature
increase of about six degrees."
That's almost 11
degrees Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of
science fiction.
So, new data in hand,
everyone at the Rio conference renewed their ritual calls for serious
international action to move us back to a two-degree trajectory. The
charade will continue in November, when the next Conference of the
Parties (COP) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change
convenes in Qatar. This will be COP 18 – COP 1 was held in Berlin
in 1995, and since then the process has accomplished essentially
nothing. Even scientists, who are notoriously reluctant to speak out,
are slowly overcoming their natural preference to simply provide
data. "The message has been consistent for close to 30 years
now," Collins says with a wry laugh, "and we have the
instrumentation and the computer power required to present the
evidence in detail. If we choose to continue on our present course of
action, it should be done with a full evaluation of the evidence the
scientific community has presented." He pauses, suddenly
conscious of being on the record. "I should say, a fuller
evaluation of the evidence."
So far, though, such
calls have had little effect. We're in the same position we've been
in for a quarter-century: scientific warning followed by political
inaction. Among scientists speaking off the record, disgusted candor
is the rule. One senior scientist told me, "You know those new
cigarette packs, where governments make them put a picture of someone
with a hole in their throats? Gas pumps should have something like
that."
The Third Number:
2,795 Gigatons
This number is the
scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes the
political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was
highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of
London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a
report in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks
that climate change poses to their stock portfolios. The number
describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal
and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the
countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel
companies. In short, it's the fossil fuel we're currently planning to
burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is
higher than 565. Five times higher.
The Carbon Tracker
Initiative – led by James Leaton, an environmentalist who served as
an adviser at the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers – combed
through proprietary databases to figure out how much oil, gas and
coal the world's major energy companies hold in reserve. The numbers
aren't perfect – they don't fully reflect the recent surge in
unconventional energy sources like shale gas, and they don't
accurately reflect coal reserves, which are subject to less stringent
reporting requirements than oil and gas. But for the biggest
companies, the figures are quite exact: If you burned everything in
the inventories of Russia's Lukoil and America's ExxonMobil, for
instance, which lead the list of oil and gas companies, each would
release more than 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Which is exactly why
this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two
degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the
0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving
home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still
stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an
evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the
fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to
pour.
We have five times as
much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is
safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked
away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers,
our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it
seems certain.
Yes, this coal and gas
and oil is still technically in the soil. But it's already
economically aboveground – it's figured into share prices,
companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their
budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why
the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the
regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary
asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It's why
they've worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock
the oil in Canada's tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea,
or how to frack the Appalachians.
If you told Exxon or
Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't
pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet.
John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs
the Capital Institute, calculates that at today's market value, those
2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion.
Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80
percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in
assets. The numbers aren't exact, of course, but that carbon bubble
makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won't
necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which
case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater.
You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively
healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like
you can't have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That's how
the story ends.
So far, as I said at
the start, environmental efforts to tackle global warming have
failed. The planet's emissions of carbon dioxide continue to soar,
especially as developing countries emulate (and supplant) the
industries of the West. Even in rich countries, small reductions in
emissions offer no sign of the real break with the status quo we'd
need to upend the iron logic of these three numbers. Germany is one
of the only big countries that has actually tried hard to change its
energy mix; on one sunny Saturday in late May, that
northern-latitude nation generated nearly half its power from solar
panels within its borders. That's a small miracle – and it
demonstrates that we have the technology to solve our problems. But
we lack the will. So far, Germany's the exception; the rule is ever
more carbon.
This record of failure
means we know a lot about what strategies don't work. Green
groups, for instance, have spent a lot of time trying to change
individual lifestyles: the iconic twisty light bulb has been
installed by the millions, but so have a new generation of
energy-sucking flatscreen TVs. Most of us are fundamentally
ambivalent about going green: We like cheap flights to warm places,
and we're certainly not going to give them up if everyone else is
still taking them. Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries
of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to
build a movement against yourself – it's as if the gay-rights
movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers,
or the abolition movement from slaveholders.
People perceive –
correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive
difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2; by 2010, a poll
found that "while recycling is widespread in America and 73
percent of those polled are paying bills online in order to save
paper," only four percent had reduced their utility use and only
three percent had purchased hybrid cars. Given a hundred years, you
could conceivably change lifestyles enough to matter – but time is
precisely what we lack.
A more efficient
method, of course, would be to work through the political system, and
environmentalists have tried that, too, with the same limited
success. They've patiently lobbied leaders, trying to convince them
of our peril and assuming that politicians would heed the warnings.
Sometimes it has seemed to work. Barack Obama, for instance,
campaigned more aggressively about climate change than any president
before him – the night he won the nomination, he told supporters
that his election would mark the moment "the rise of the oceans
began to slow and the planet began to heal." And he has achieved
one significant change: a steady increase in the fuel efficiency
mandated for automobiles. It's the kind of measure, adopted a
quarter-century ago, that would have helped enormously. But in light
of the numbers I've just described, it's obviously a very small start
indeed.
At this point,
effective action would require actually keeping most of the carbon
the fossil-fuel industry wants to burn safely in the soil, not just
changing slightly the speed at which it's burned. And there the
president, apparently haunted by the still-echoing cry of "Drill,
baby, drill," has gone out of his way to frack and mine. His
secretary of interior, for instance, opened up a huge swath of the
Powder River Basin in Wyoming for coal extraction: The total basin
contains some 67.5 gigatons worth of carbon (or more than 10 percent
of the available atmospheric space). He's doing the same thing with
Arctic and offshore drilling; in fact, as he explained on the stump
in March, "You have my word that we will keep drilling
everywhere we can... That's a commitment that I make." The next
day, in a yard full of oil pipe in Cushing, Oklahoma, the president
promised to work on wind and solar energy but, at the same time, to
speed up fossil-fuel development: "Producing more oil and gas
here at home has been, and will continue to be, a critical part of an
all-of-the-above energy strategy." That is, he's committed to
finding even more stock to add to the 2,795-gigaton inventory of
unburned carbon.
Sometimes the irony is
almost Borat-scale obvious: In early June, Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton traveled on a Norwegian research trawler to see firsthand the
growing damage from climate change. "Many of the predictions
about warming in the Arctic are being surpassed by the actual data,"
she said, describing the sight as "sobering." But the
discussions she traveled to Scandinavia to have with other foreign
ministers were mostly about how to make sure Western nations get
their share of the estimated $9 trillion in oil (that's more than 90
billion barrels, or 37 gigatons of carbon) that will become
accessible as the Arctic ice melts. Last month, the Obama
administration indicated that it would give Shell permission to start
drilling in sections of the Arctic.
Almost every
government with deposits of hydrocarbons straddles the same divide.
Canada, for instance, is a liberal democracy renowned for its
internationalism – no wonder, then, that it signed on to the Kyoto
treaty, promising to cut its carbon emissions substantially by 2012.
But the rising price of oil suddenly made the tar sands of Alberta
economically attractive – and since, as NASA climatologist James
Hansen pointed out in May, they contain as much as 240 gigatons of
carbon (or almost half of the available space if we take the 565
limit seriously), that meant Canada's commitment to Kyoto was
nonsense. In December, the Canadian government withdrew from the
treaty before it faced fines for failing to meet its commitments.
The same kind of
hypocrisy applies across the ideological board: In his speech to the
Copenhagen conference, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez quoted Rosa Luxemburg,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and "Christ the Redeemer," insisting
that "climate change is undoubtedly the most devastating
environmental problem of this century." But the next spring, in
the Simon Bolivar Hall of the state-run oil company, he signed an
agreement with a consortium of international players to develop the
vast Orinoco tar sands as "the most significant engine for a
comprehensive development of the entire territory and Venezuelan
population." The Orinoco deposits are larger than Alberta's –
taken together, they'd fill up the whole available atmospheric space.
So: the paths we have
tried to tackle global warming have so far produced only gradual,
halting shifts. A rapid, transformative change would require building
a movement, and movements require enemies. As John F. Kennedy put it,
"The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor.
He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln." And enemies are what
climate change has lacked.
But what all these
climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet
does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than
governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the
fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry,
reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One
to the survival of our planetary civilization. "Lots of
companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay
terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure
them to change those practices," says veteran anti-corporate
leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate
crisis. "But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel
industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It's what they
do."
According to the
Carbon Tracker report, if Exxon burns its current reserves, it would
use up more than seven percent of the available atmospheric space
between us and the risk of two degrees. BP is just behind, followed
by the Russian firm Gazprom, then Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell,
each of which would fill between three and four percent. Taken
together, just these six firms, of the 200 listed in the Carbon
Tracker report, would use up more than a quarter of the remaining
two-degree budget. Severstal, the Russian mining giant, leads the
list of coal companies, followed by firms like BHP Billiton and
Peabody. The numbers are simply staggering – this industry, and
this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and
chemistry of our planet, and they're planning to use it.
They're clearly
cognizant of global warming – they employ some of the world's best
scientists, after all, and they're bidding on all those oil leases
made possible by the staggering melt of Arctic ice. And yet they
relentlessly search for more hydrocarbons – in early March, Exxon
CEO Rex Tillerson told Wall Street analysts that the company plans to
spend $37 billion a year through 2016 (about $100 million a day)
searching for yet more oil and gas.
If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today's market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren't exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won't necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can't have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That's how the story ends.
So far, as I said at
the start, environmental efforts to tackle global warming have
failed. The planet's emissions of carbon dioxide continue to soar,
especially as developing countries emulate (and supplant) the
industries of the West. Even in rich countries, small reductions in
emissions offer no sign of the real break with the status quo we'd
need to upend the iron logic of these three numbers. Germany is one
of the only big countries that has actually tried hard to change its
energy mix; on one sunny Saturday in late May, that northern-latitude
nation generated nearly half its power from solar panels within its
borders. That's a small miracle – and it demonstrates that we have
the technology to solve our problems. But we lack the will. So far,
Germany's the exception; the rule is ever more carbon.
This record of failure
means we know a lot about what strategies don't work. Green
groups, for instance, have spent a lot of time trying to change
individual lifestyles: the iconic twisty light bulb has been
installed by the millions, but so have a new generation of
energy-sucking flatscreen TVs. Most of us are fundamentally
ambivalent about going green: We like cheap flights to warm places,
and we're certainly not going to give them up if everyone else is
still taking them. Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries
of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to
build a movement against yourself – it's as if the gay-rights
movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers,
or the abolition movement from slaveholders.
People perceive –
correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive
difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2; by 2010, a poll
found that "while recycling is widespread in America and 73
percent of those polled are paying bills online in order to save
paper," only four percent had reduced their utility use and only
three percent had purchased hybrid cars. Given a hundred years, you
could conceivably change lifestyles enough to matter – but time is
precisely what we lack.
A more efficient
method, of course, would be to work through the political system, and
environmentalists have tried that, too, with the same limited
success. They've patiently lobbied leaders, trying to convince them
of our peril and assuming that politicians would heed the warnings.
Sometimes it has seemed to work. Barack Obama, for instance,
campaigned more aggressively about climate change than any president
before him – the night he won the nomination, he told supporters
that his election would mark the moment "the rise of the oceans
began to slow and the planet began to heal." And he has achieved
one significant change: a steady increase in the fuel efficiency
mandated for automobiles. It's the kind of measure, adopted a
quarter-century ago, that would have helped enormously. But in light
of the numbers I've just described, it's obviously a very small start
indeed.
At this point,
effective action would require actually keeping most of the carbon
the fossil-fuel industry wants to burn safely in the soil, not just
changing slightly the speed at which it's burned. And there the
president, apparently haunted by the still-echoing cry of "Drill,
baby, drill," has gone out of his way to frack and mine. His
secretary of interior, for instance, opened up a huge swath of the
Powder River Basin in Wyoming for coal extraction: The total basin
contains some 67.5 gigatons worth of carbon (or more than 10 percent
of the available atmospheric space). He's doing the same thing with
Arctic and offshore drilling; in fact, as he explained on the stump
in March, "You have my word that we will keep drilling
everywhere we can... That's a commitment that I make." The next
day, in a yard full of oil pipe in Cushing, Oklahoma, the president
promised to work on wind and solar energy but, at the same time, to
speed up fossil-fuel development: "Producing more oil and gas
here at home has been, and will continue to be, a critical part of an
all-of-the-above energy strategy." That is, he's committed to
finding even more stock to add to the 2,795-gigaton inventory of
unburned carbon.
Sometimes the irony is
almost Borat-scale obvious: In early June, Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton traveled on a Norwegian research trawler to see firsthand the
growing damage from climate change. "Many of the predictions
about warming in the Arctic are being surpassed by the actual data,"
she said, describing the sight as "sobering." But the
discussions she traveled to Scandinavia to have with other foreign
ministers were mostly about how to make sure Western nations get
their share of the estimated $9 trillion in oil (that's more than 90
billion barrels, or 37 gigatons of carbon) that will become
accessible as the Arctic ice melts. Last month, the Obama
administration indicated that it would give Shell permission to start
drilling in sections of the Arctic.
Almost every
government with deposits of hydrocarbons straddles the same divide.
Canada, for instance, is a liberal democracy renowned for its
internationalism – no wonder, then, that it signed on to the Kyoto
treaty, promising to cut its carbon emissions substantially by 2012.
But the rising price of oil suddenly made the tar sands of Alberta
economically attractive – and since, as NASA climatologist James
Hansen pointed out in May, they contain as much as 240 gigatons of
carbon (or almost half of the available space if we take the 565
limit seriously), that meant Canada's commitment to Kyoto was
nonsense. In December, the Canadian government withdrew from the
treaty before it faced fines for failing to meet its commitments.
The same kind of
hypocrisy applies across the ideological board: In his speech to the
Copenhagen conference, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez quoted Rosa Luxemburg,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and "Christ the Redeemer," insisting
that "climate change is undoubtedly the most devastating
environmental problem of this century." But the next spring, in
the Simon Bolivar Hall of the state-run oil company, he signed an
agreement with a consortium of international players to develop the
vast Orinoco tar sands as "the most significant engine for a
comprehensive development of the entire territory and Venezuelan
population." The Orinoco deposits are larger than Alberta's –
taken together, they'd fill up the whole available atmospheric space.
So: the paths we have
tried to tackle global warming have so far produced only gradual,
halting shifts. A rapid, transformative change would require building
a movement, and movements require enemies. As John F. Kennedy put it,
"The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor.
He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln." And enemies are what
climate change has lacked.
But what all these
climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet
does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than
governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the
fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry,
reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One
to the survival of our planetary civilization. "Lots of
companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay
terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure
them to change those practices," says veteran anti-corporate
leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate
crisis. "But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel
industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It's what they
do."
According to the
Carbon Tracker report, if Exxon burns its current reserves, it would
use up more than seven percent of the available atmospheric space
between us and the risk of two degrees. BP is just behind, followed
by the Russian firm Gazprom, then Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell,
each of which would fill between three and four percent. Taken
together, just these six firms, of the 200 listed in the Carbon
Tracker report, would use up more than a quarter of the remaining
two-degree budget. Severstal, the Russian mining giant, leads the
list of coal companies, followed by firms like BHP Billiton and
Peabody. The numbers are simply staggering – this industry, and
this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and
chemistry of our planet, and they're planning to use it.
They're clearly
cognizant of global warming – they employ some of the world's best
scientists, after all, and they're bidding on all those oil leases
made possible by the staggering melt of Arctic ice. And yet they
relentlessly search for more hydrocarbons – in early March, Exxon
CEO Rex Tillerson told Wall Street analysts that the company plans to
spend $37 billion a year through 2016 (about $100 million a day)
searching for yet more oil and gas.
The fossil-fuel industry is obviously a tougher opponent, and even if you could force the hand of particular companies, you'd still have to figure out a strategy for dealing with all the sovereign nations that, in effect, act as fossil-fuel companies. But the link for college students is even more obvious in this case. If their college's endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won't have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree. (The same logic applies to the world's largest investors, pension funds, which are also theoretically interested in the future – that's when their members will "enjoy their retirement.") "Given the severity of the climate crisis, a comparable demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the planet would not only be appropriate but effective," says Bob Massie, a former anti-apartheid activist who helped found the Investor Network on Climate Risk. "The message is simple: We have had enough. We must sever the ties with those who profit from climate change – now."
Movements rarely have
predictable outcomes. But any campaign that weakens the fossil-fuel
industry's political standing clearly increases the chances of
retiring its special breaks. Consider President Obama's signal
achievement in the climate fight, the large increase he won in
mileage requirements for cars. Scientists, environmentalists and
engineers had advocated such policies for decades, but until Detroit
came under severe financial pressure, it was politically powerful
enough to fend them off. If people come to understand the cold,
mathematical truth – that the fossil-fuel industry is
systematically undermining the planet's physical systems – it might
weaken it enough to matter politically. Exxon and their ilk might
drop their opposition to a fee-and-dividend solution; they might even
decide to become true energy companies, this time for real.
Even if such a
campaign is possible, however, we may have waited too long to start
it. To make a real difference – to keep us under a temperature
increase of two degrees – you'd need to change carbon pricing in
Washington, and then use that victory to leverage similar shifts
around the world. At this point, what happens in the U.S. is most
important for how it will influence China and India, where emissions
are growing fastest. (In early June, researchers concluded that China
has probably under-reported its emissions by up to 20 percent.) The
three numbers I've described are daunting – they may define an
essentially impossible future. But at least they provide intellectual
clarity about the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. We know
how much we can burn, and we know who's planning to burn more.
Climate change operates on a geological scale and time frame, but
it's not an impersonal force of nature; the more carefully you do the
math, the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a
moral issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell.
Meanwhile the tide of
numbers continues. The week after the Rio conference limped to its
conclusion, Arctic sea ice hit the lowest level ever recorded for
that date. Last month, on a single weekend, Tropical Storm Debby
dumped more than 20 inches of rain on Florida – the earliest the
season's fourth-named cyclone has ever arrived. At the same time, the
largest fire in New Mexico history burned on, and the most
destructive fire in Colorado's annals claimed 346 homes in Colorado
Springs – breaking a record set the week before in Fort Collins.
This month, scientists issued a new study concluding that global
warming has dramatically increased the likelihood of severe heat and
drought – days after a heat wave across the Plains and Midwest
broke records that had stood since the Dust Bowl, threatening this
year's harvest. You want a big number? In the course of this month, a
quadrillion kernels of corn need to pollinate across the grain belt,
something they can't do if temperatures remain off the charts. Just
like us, our crops are adapted to the Holocene, the 11,000-year
period of climatic stability we're now leaving... in the dust.
This story is from the
August 2nd, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.
1 comment:
Far too much to read on a subject that has had its scientific credibility destroyed..
I'm afraid Australia HASN'T seen global warming in action, even with the Lamestream media trying to blame every weather change on it.
So the Northern hemisphere is having a hot summer.. big deal! We have just come out of a 10year drought, so call us in nine years. It appears you have forgotten your freezing winters from only a couple of years ago. Ths is called natural variation you know.
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