With the future of human civilization hanging in the balance, both democracy and capitalism are badly failing to serve the deepest interests of humankind. Both are unwieldy and both are in a state of disrepair. But if the flaws in our current version of democracy and capitalism are addressed, if the barnacles of corruption, corporate control, and domination by elites can be sc.r.a.ped away, both of these systems will be invaluable in turning world civilization in the right direction before it is too late. Yet this difficult policy transition will require leadership and political courage that is presently in short supply, particularly in the United States.
In order to understand why so many political leaders are failing to address this existential crisis, it is important to explore the way public perceptions of global warming have been manipulated by global warming deniers, and how the psychology of the issue has made that manipulation easier than it should be. Powerful corporations with an interest in delaying action have lavished money on a cynical and dishonest public campaign to manipulate public opinion by sowing false doubts about the reality of the climate crisis. They are taking advantage of the natural desire that all of us have to seize upon any indication that global warming isn"t real after all and the scientists have somehow made a big mistake.
Many have described the climate crisis as "the issue from h.e.l.l," partly because its complexity, scale, and timeframe all make public discussion of the crisis, its causes, and its solutions more difficult. Because its consequences are distributed globally, it masquerades as an abstraction. Because the solutions involve taking a new path into the future, improving long-familiar technologies, and modifying long-standing patterns, it triggers our natural reluctance to change. And because the worst damages stretch into the future, while our attention spans are naturally short, it makes us vulnerable to the illusion that we have plenty of time before we have to start solving it.
"Denial" is a psychological tendency to which all of us are vulnerable. One of the first to explore how this phenomenon works was Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who taught, according to the organization she founded, that "Denial can be conscious or unconscious refusal to accept facts, information, or the reality of the situation. Denial is a defense mechanism and some people can become locked in this stage." The modern psychiatric definition of this condition is: "An unconscious defense mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings."
Certainly the prospect of a catastrophic threat to the future of all global civilization qualifies as "an unpleasant thought." And the natural tendency for all of us is to hope that the scientific consensus on global warming is not an accurate depiction of the real danger that we face. Those who become locked into this psychological strategy typically respond to the stronger and stronger evidence of global warming with stronger and stronger denunciations of the entire concept, and stronger attacks on those who insist that we must take action.
We have learned a lot about human nature over the last century. We now know, for example, that the "rational person" a.s.sumed by Enlightenment thinkers-and the definition of human behavior implicit in the work of Adam Smith and other cla.s.sical economists, which some now refer to as "h.o.m.o economicus"-is really not who we are. Quite to the contrary, we are heirs to the behavioral legacy shaped during our long period of development as a species. Along with our capacity for reason, we are also hardwired to be more attentive and responsive to short-term and visceral factors than longer-term threats that require the use of our capacity for reason.
Two social scientists-Jane Risen at the University of Chicago, and Clayton Critcher at the University of California, Berkeley-asked two groups of people the same series of questions about global warming, with the only difference being the temperature in each room. Those who responded in a room that was ten degrees warmer gave answers indicating significantly larger support for doing something to counter global warming than the group in the cooler room. The differences showed up among both liberals and conservatives. In a second study, two groups were asked for their opinions about drought, and those given salty pretzels to eat had a markedly different outlook than the group that wasn"t as thirsty.
At a time when the world is undergoing the dramatic changes driven by the factors covered in this book-globalization and the emergence of Earth Inc., the Digital, Internet, and computing revolutions, the Life Sciences and biotechnology revolutions, the historic transformation of the balance of political and economic power in the world, and the commitment to a form of "growth" that ignores human values and threatens to deplete key resources vital to our future-the climate crisis easily gets pushed down the list of political priorities in most nations.
The flawed definition of growth described in Chapter 4 is at the center of the catastrophic miscalculation of the costs and benefits of continuing to rely on carbon-based fuels. The stocks of publicly traded carbon fuel companies, for example, are valued on the basis of many factors, especially the value of the reserves they control. In arriving at the worth of these underground deposits, the companies a.s.sume that they will be produced and sold at market rates for burning. Yet any reasonable person familiar with the global scientific consensus on the climate crisis knows that these reserves cannot all be burned. The very idea is insane. Yet none of the environmental consequences of burning them is reflected in their market valuation.
In addition to denial and our misplaced blind reliance on a deeply flawed economic compa.s.s, there is another ingrained tendency to which all of us are p.r.o.ne: we want to believe that ultimately all is right with the world, or at least that part of the world in which each of us lives. Social psychologists call this the system justification theory, which holds that everyone wants to think well of themselves, the groups they identify with, and the social order in which they live their lives. Because of the scale of the changes necessary to confront global warming, any proposal to embark on this necessary journey can easily be portrayed as a challenge to the status quo and trigger our tendency to defend it by automatically rejecting any potential alternative to the status quo.
When there is an existential threat that requires quick ma.s.s mobilization-the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, for example-the natural reluctance to break out of our comfortable patterns is overridden by a sense of emergency. But most such examples are rooted in the same group conflict scenarios that characterized the long period in which we as human beings developed. There is no precedent (except the ozone hole) for a fast global response to an urgent global threat-especially when the response called for poses a big challenge to business as usual.
President Reagan, when confronting the need for nuclear arms control, expressed the same thought on many occasions, including once in a speech to the United Nations General a.s.sembly: "In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." Some members of my political party ridiculed Reagan"s formulation during his presidency, but I always thought that it embodied an important insight.
THE POLITICS OF DIVISION.
We do, of course, face a common threat to all humanity where the climate crisis is concerned. But it is not from aliens; it is from us. So our capacity to respond by uniting to overcome the threat can be undermined by "antagonisms of the moment." America"s founders recognized the importance of this ingrained trait in human nature. More than two centuries later scientists tell us that the tendency to form opposing factions is deeply rooted in the history of our species.
As E. O. Wilson recently wrote, "Everyone, no exception, must have a tribe, an alliance with which to jockey for power and territory, to demonize the enemy, to organize rallies and raise flags. And so it has ever been.... Human nature has not changed. Modern groups are psychologically equivalent to the tribes of ancient history. As such, these groups are directly descended from the bands of primitive humans and prehumans."
That is one of the underlying reasons that the denial of global warming has somehow become a "cultural" issue, in the sense that many who reject the scientific evidence feel a group kinship-almost a "tribal ident.i.ty"-with others who are also locked into denial. In the U.S., the extreme conservative ideology that has come to dominate the Republican Party is based in part on a mutual commitment to pa.s.sionately fight against a variety of different reform proposals opposed by members of a disparate coalition.
It could be called the Three Musketeers Principle: all for one and one for all. Those primarily interested in opposing any form of gun regulation agree to support the position of oil and coal companies opposed to any efforts to reduce global warming pollution. Antiabortion activists agree to support large banks in their opposition to new financial regulations. As Kurt Vonnegut said, "So it goes."
Over the last four decades, the largest carbon polluters have become charter members of the antireform counterrevolution described in Chapter 3 that was organized in the 1970s under the auspices of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce-out of fear that the tumultuous protest movements of the 1960s (against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, women"s rights, gay rights, disability rights, the consumer movement, the pa.s.sage of Medicare and programs to a.s.sist the poor, and so on) were threatening to spin out of control in ways that would disadvantage powerful corporations and elites. In their view, these movements threatened to undermine capitalism itself.
One of the enduring consequences of this counterreform movement was the establishment of a large network of think tanks, foundations, inst.i.tutes, law schools, and activist organizations that turn out an endless stream of mostly contrived "reports," "studies," lawsuits, testimony before congressional and regulatory panels, op-eds, and books that all promote the philosophy and agenda of the new corporate Musketeers: * Government is bad, cannot be trusted, should instead be feared, and must be starved of resources so that it is capable of interfering as little as possible with the plans of corporations and the interests of elites; * Hardship is good for poor people because it"s the only thing that will give them an incentive to become more productive; hardship also makes them more willing to accept lower wages and fewer benefits; * Rich people, on the other hand, should be taxed as little as possible in order to encourage them to make even more money-which is the only tried-and-true way to produce more growth in the economy, even if there is too little demand because consumers don"t have enough money to buy more goods and services; * More inequality is a good thing, because it simultaneously inspires poor people to more ambition and rich people to more investing, even if the evidence shows that the highest-income groups are primarily interested in wealth preservation when the economy is weak; and * The environment can take care of itself nicely, no matter how much pollution we dump into it. Anyone who believes otherwise is motivated by a barely concealed love for socialism and an abiding determination to thwart business.
To one degree or another, of course, there is a natural incentive to build broad coalitions among differing interests in most political parties. I certainly experienced such pressures as a member of the Democratic Party when I served in Congress. Yet there is something different about the lockstep discipline in the new U.S. right-wing coalition-a discipline that is enforced by extremely wealthy contributors who are primarily interested in policies that increase their already unhealthy share of America"s aggregate income.
In today"s world, the challenge of global warming has, unfortunately, led to an almost tribal division between those who accept the overwhelming scientific consensus-and the evidence of their own senses-and those who are bound and determined to reject it. The ferocity of their opposition is treated as a kind of badge signifying their membership in the second group and antagonism toward the first.
The organized deniers know that in order to maintain their control of the coalition opposed to policies reducing greenhouse gas emissions, they do not have to prove that man-made global warming is not real-though many of them do a.s.sert as much over and over again. All they really need to do is create enough doubt to convince the public that "the jury is still out." This strategic goal was explicitly spelled out in an internal doc.u.ment from a business coalition dominated by large carbon polluters.
Leaked to the press in 1991, the doc.u.ment stated that the group"s strategic goal was to "reposition global warming as theory not fact." A charitable interpretation would be that these companies had long felt besieged by what they perceived as hyperbolic claims on the part of environmental activists seeking more regulation of various forms of pollution, and that they developed a habit of reflexively countering any claim of impending harm by going all-out to undermine the credibility of the claims and of those making them.
However, in light of the decades of extensive doc.u.mentation making this deadly threat crystal clear, and in light of the national academies of science around the world proclaiming that the evidence is now indisputable, it is no longer easy to be charitable in a.s.sessing what these wealthy, powerful, and self-interested deniers are doing. They reject the spirit of reasonable dialogue. They reject and vilify the integrity of the scientific process. Nothing has worked to hold them to their obligation to the greater good. Some, it is true, have examined both the evidence and their conscience and have changed. But those who have done so are still in the tiny minority. The deniers" a.s.sault on the future of our world continues.
There is, after all, no longer any reasonable doubt whatsoever that man-made emissions of CO2 and the other global warming pollutants are seriously damaging the planetary ecological system that is crucial to the future survival of human civilization. Many of the extreme weather disasters that have already claimed so many lives and caused so much suffering are now being directly linked to global warming. The damage that is being done to hundreds of millions in the present generation makes it impossible, in my view, to ignore the moral consequences of what is being done.
Most legal systems in the world make it a criminal offense, as well as a civil offense, for anyone to knowingly misrepresent material facts for the purpose of self-enrichment at the expense of others who rely on the false representations and suffer harm or damage as a result. If the misrepresentation is merely negligent, it can still be a legal offense. If the false statements are reckless and if the harm suffered by those induced to rely on the false statements is grave, the offense is more serious still. The most common legal standard for determining whether or not the person (or corporation) misrepresenting the material facts did so "knowingly" is not "beyond a reasonable doubt," but rather the "preponderance of the evidence."
The large public multinational fossil fuel companies have an estimated $7 trillion in a.s.sets that are at risk if the global scientific consensus is accepted by publics and governments around the world. That is the reason that several of them have been misrepresenting to the public-and to investors-the material facts about the grave harm to the future of human civilization that results from the continued burning of their princ.i.p.al a.s.sets in such a reckless manner. The value of similar and larger reserves owned by sovereign states, when combined with the a.s.sets owned by private and public companies, adds up to a total of $27 trillion. That is why Saudi Arabia, until recently at least, has been so vehement in its efforts to block any international agreement to limit global warming pollution. In 2012, a member of the royal family, Prince Turki al-Faisal, called for Saudi Arabia to convert its domestic energy use to 100 percent renewables in order to preserve its oil reserves for sale to the rest of the world.
"SUBPRIME CARBON a.s.sETS"
The oil, coal, and gas a.s.sets carried on the books of fossil fuel companies is valued at market rates based on the a.s.sumption that they will eventually be sold to customers who will burn them and dump the gaseous global warming pollution that results into the Earth"s atmosphere. In the past, I have referred to these reserves as "subprime carbon a.s.sets," in order to draw an a.n.a.logy to subprime mortgages, which the market and most banking experts also believed had extremely high value. Actually, however, these subprime mortgages had an illusory value that was based on the absurd a.s.sumption that people who obviously couldn"t pay them back somehow would. They were often referred to in the industry as "low doc.u.mentation loans," or more simply as "liar loans."
I remember vividly when I signed my first home mortgage as a young man. I sat across the desk from Walter Glenn Birdwell Jr., the man in charge of Citizens Bank in Carthage, Tennessee. Before giving me the mortgage, Mr. Birdwell required me to provide written answers to a long series of questions about my income and net worth. Even though neither was very high, he gained enough confidence that I would be able to make the monthly payments. He then required me to make what was for me at the time a considerable down payment.
By contrast, the subprime mortgages were given to people who had no earthly way of paying them back-a fact that would have been immediately clear if any of them had been required to answer questions from Mr. Birdwell. Nor were these homebuyers asked to make any down payment. So, if a reasonable person could easily determine that the mortgages were unlikely to be paid back, and that it was only a matter of time before the homebuyers defaulted, why would the banks nevertheless enter into such transactions?
The answer is that in the age of Earth Inc. and the Global Mind, the banks originating these flawed mortgages were able to use powerful computers to combine many thousands of such mortgages-in the aggregate, 7.5 million of them in the U.S. alone-slice them and dice them into financially engineered derivatives products too complex for most of us to comprehend, and then sell them into the global marketplace. In other words, the ridiculous a.s.sumption was that the risk inherent in providing a mortgage to someone who couldn"t pay it back could be magically eliminated if a great many such mortgages were all packaged together and sold into the global marketplace.
When this a.s.sumption was tested during the slowdown of the global economy in 200708, it suddenly collapsed and the bankers had an unpleasant encounter with reality. The unpleasantness didn"t linger for them, however, because they were able to use the overwhelming political power they had purchased with campaign contributions and lobbying activities-with a little help from officials that had gone through the revolving door connecting governments and banks-to be bailed out by the taxpayers, who had to borrow the money for the purpose. The net result was a credit crisis and a global Great Recession, which economists may yet relabel a depression.
Subprime carbon a.s.sets have a similarly inflated value in the marketplace, undergirded by an a.s.sumption even more absurd than the ridiculous idea that it was perfectly okay to give mortgages to millions of people who couldn"t ever pay them back. In this case, the a.s.sumption is that it is perfectly all right to burn every last drop of oil in the oil companies" reserves and destroy the future of civilization. It"s not all right.
Yet the market value to the oil, coal, and natural gas companies of this particular absurd a.s.sumption is extremely high. Ultimately, that is the reason they have been willing to devote billions of dollars to defend it-by organizing a ma.s.sive and highly sophisticated campaign of deception designed to convince people-and policymakers-that it may very well be fine to burn as much carbon fuel as we can.
These carbon polluters have also deceived coal miners and other employees in the fossil energy industry into ignoring the reality of the change that is inevitable. In a courageous and eloquent speech on the Senate floor in 2012, Senator Jay Rockefeller, from the most coaldependent state in the U.S., West Virginia, said, "My fear is that concerns are also being fueled by the narrow view of others with divergent motivations-one that denies the inevitability of change in the energy industry, and unfairly leaves coal miners in the dust. The reality is that many who run the coal industry today would rather attack false enemies and deny real problems than find solutions."
The dominance of wealth and corporate influence in decision making has so cowed most politicians that they are scared to even discuss this existential threat in any meaningful way. There are more than a few honorable exceptions, but on issues that engage the interests of Earth Inc., Earth Inc. is fully in control of global policy. The carbon fuel companies hired four anti-climate lobbyists for every single member of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives in their fight to defeat climate legislation. They have become one of the largest sources of campaign contributions to candidates in both parties-though significantly more goes to Republicans.
Many of these companies have provided large amounts of money over the last two decades to "liars for hire" who turn out a seemingly endless stream of misleading, peripheral, irrelevant, false, and unscientific claims: * Global warming is a hoax perpetrated by scientists who are scheming to receive more government research funding and by activists who want to impose socialism or worse.
* Global warming isn"t occurring; it stopped several years ago.
* If it is occurring, it is not caused by global warming pollution, but is instead the result of a natural cycle.
* The Earth"s climate system is so resilient that it can, in any event, absorb unlimited quant.i.ties of global warming pollution with no harmful consequences.
* If global warming does occur, it will actually be good for us.
* Even if it"s not good for some people, we certainly have the ability to adapt to it with little hardship.
* The ice caps on Jupiter are also melting, therefore it is logical to a.s.sume that some poorly understood phenomenon endemic to our solar system is the true cause (never mind that Jupiter doesn"t have ice caps).
* Global warming is being caused by sunspots (never mind that temperatures have continued to go upward during the long "cool phase" of the sunspot cycle now coming to an end).
* Global warming is caused by volcanoes (never mind that human-caused CO2 emissions are 135 to 200 times greater than volcanic emissions, which are in any case part of a natural process that is, in the long term, carbon neutral).
* Computer models are unreliable (never mind that more than a dozen separate and independent temperature records from the real world completely confirm what the computer models have long predicted).
* Clouds will cancel out global warming (never mind the growing evidence that the net feedback from clouds is likely to make global warming even worse, not better).
There are more than 100 other bogus arguments, or red herrings, that are pushed relentlessly in the media, by lobbyists, and by captive politicians beholden to the carbon polluters. The only thing the deniers are absolutely certain about is that 90 million tons per day of global warming pollution are certainly not causing global warming-even if the entire global scientific community says the opposite. There are, to be sure, some opponents of the scientific consensus who genuinely believe that the science is wrong. Some of them have backgrounds and personal stories that predispose them to fight on for a variety of reasons. But they are the exceptions, and their complete lack of any credible supporting evidence would quickly marginalize them except for the fact that climate science denial has become a cottage industry generously supported by carbon polluters.
To undermine the public"s confidence in the integrity of science, the carbon companies and their agents and allies constantly insinuate that climate scientists are lying about the facts they have uncovered, and/or are secretly part of a political effort to expand the role of government. The political a.s.sault against climate scientists has been designed not only to demonize them, but also to intimidate them-which has added to the naturally cautious approach that scientists habitually adopt.
One right-wing state attorney general in the United States took legal action against a climate scientist simply because his findings were inconvenient for coal companies. Right-wing legal foundations and think tanks have repeatedly sued climate scientists and vilified them in public statements. Right-wing members of Congress have repeatedly sought to slash climate research funding. To mention only one of the many consequences, the ability of the U.S. to even monitor climate change adequately is being severely damaged with multiple launches of essential monitoring satellites being delayed or canceled-just at the time when the data is most needed.
On the eve of the global negotiating session on climate in December of 2009 in Copenhagen, the entire climate science community was a.s.saulted by what appears to have been a well-planned hacking of their private, internal emails among one another. The cherry-picking of misleading phrases taken out of context led to the trumpeting by the right-wing media of charges that the climate science community was lying to the public and to their governments. An extensive investigation determined that the hacking came from outside the targeted research center but did not identify the perpetrator. Meanwhile, four separate independent investigations all completely cleared the climate scientists of any wrongdoing.
THE DENIAL MACHINE.
The ability of the public to see through the lies and deceptions of the carbon polluters and their allies has been hampered because the traditional role of the news media has changed significantly in the past few decades-especially in the United States. Many newspapers are going bankrupt and most others are under severe economic stress that reduces their ability to fulfill their historic role of ensuring that the foundation of a democracy is a "well-informed citizenry."
As noted in Chapter 3, the rising prominence of the Internet is a source of hope, but for the time being television is still far and away the dominant medium of information. And yet the news divisions of television networks are now required to focus on ways to contribute more profit to the corporate bottom line. As a result, they have been forced to blur the distinction between news and entertainment. Since ratings are the key to profitability, the kinds of news stories that are given priority have changed.
Virtually every news and political commentary program on television is sponsored in part by oil, coal, and gas companies-not just during campaign seasons, but all the time, year in and year out-with messages designed to soothe and rea.s.sure the audience that everything is fine, the global environment is not threatened, and the carbon companies are working diligently to further develop renewable energy sources.
The fear of discussing global warming has influenced almost all mainstream television news networks in the U.S. The denier coalition unleashes vitriol at almost anyone who dares to bring up the subject of global warming and, as a result, many news companies have been intimidated into silence. Even the acclaimed BBC nature program The Frozen Planet was edited before the Discovery Network showed it in the United States to remove the discussion of global warming. Since one of the overarching themes of the series was the melting of ice all over the planet, it was absurd to remove the discussion of global warming, which is of course the princ.i.p.al cause of the ice melting. As activist Bill McKibben wrote, "It was like showing a doc.u.mentary on lung cancer and leaving out the part about the cigarettes."
During the hot summers of 2011 and 2012, the evening newscasts often resembled a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. But each time, the droughts and fires and windstorms and floods were covered as lead stories, the explanation was often something like, "a high pressure area" or "La Nina."
On the few occasions when global warming is discussed, the coverage is distorted by the tendency of the news media to insist on including a contrarian point of view to falsely "balance" every statement by a climate scientist about global warming-as if there was a legitimate difference of opinion. This problem has been worsened by the shrinking budgets for investigative reporting.
For someone who grew up believing in the integrity of the American democratic process-and who still believes that its integrity can be redeemed and restored-it is profoundly troubling that special interests have been able to capture control of decision making and policy formation in the nation that Abraham Lincoln eloquently described as "the last best hope of earth." But the fight is far from over. Its epicenter is in the United States, simply because the U.S. remains the only nation capable of rallying the world to save our future. As Edmund Burke said, "The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." That is what it now comes down to: will good men and women do nothing, or will they respond to the emergency that is now at hand?
In the last few years, the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events connected to the climate crisis have begun to have a significant impact on public att.i.tudes toward global warming. Even in the U.S., where the denier propaganda campaign is still in full force, public support for actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has gone up significantly. Proposals to do more have been supported by a majority for many years, although the intensity of the majority"s feeling has been too low to overcome the efforts of the carbon polluters to paralyze political action. More recently, however, support for action has been building steadily.
At the beginning of President Barack Obama"s administration in 2009, hopes were high that U.S. policy on global warming would change-and for a time, it did. His stimulus bill put a major emphasis on green provisions, including measures to accelerate the research and development, production, and use of renewable energy systems in the United States. His appointment of the extremely able Lisa Jackson as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency set the stage for a series of breakthrough rules and initiatives that have contributed to the reduction of CO2 emissions and the cleaning of pollutants from the environment.
The EPA rules requiring a reduction of CO2 emissions from new power plants and automobiles were courageous, and the EPA"s ruling that mercury emissions from coal plants must be sharply reduced has contributed to the decisions by many utilities to cancel planned construction of new coal-fired generating plants. The success by Jackson, her cabinet colleague, transportation secretary Ray LaHood, and White House adviser Carol Browner in reaching an agreement with U.S. carmakers to require significant improvements in auto mileage-eventually almost doubling the current average to 54.5 miles per gallon-was described by one environmentalist, Dan Becker, who runs the Safe Climate Campaign for the Center for Auto Safety, as "The biggest single step that any nation has taken to cut global warming pollution."
But several things happened over the last few years to make the political challenge more difficult than Obama expected. First, the economic crisis and Great Recession he inherited made the administration reluctant to confront a longer-term challenge when the economic distress of the present was so pressing. The effects of the recession lingered because of its unusual depth, the ma.s.sive deleveraging (repayment of debt) it triggered, the collapse of the housing market, and the inadequate size of the fiscal stimulus that injected some-but not enough-demand back into the economy.
Second, China surprised the world with its ma.s.sive commitment to dominate the production and export of windmills and solar panels, heavily subsidized with government-backed cheap credit and low-wage labor-which allowed them to flood the global market with equipment priced well below the cost of production in the United States and other developed countries.
Third, even though his climate legislation pa.s.sed the House of Representatives while it was still under his party"s control, the obsolete and dysfunctional rules of the U.S. Senate empowered a minority to kill it in that chamber. Senators in both parties said privately that pa.s.sage of the climate plan might have been within reach but that it seemed to them that President Obama was not prepared to make the all-out effort that would have been necessary to build a coalition in support of the plan. Earlier, he had chosen to make health care reform his number one priority, and the badly broken U.S. political system produced a legislative gridlock on his health plan that lasted until the midterm campaign season began, leaving no time for even Senate discussion of the climate change issue.
By then, Obama and his political team in the White House had apparently long since made a sober a.s.sessment of the political risks involved in states where the power of the fossil fuel industries would punish him for committing himself to the pa.s.sage of this plan. So instead, when his opponents in Congress took up the cry "drill, baby, drill," the president proposed the expansion of oil drilling-even in the Arctic Ocean-and opened up more public land to coal mining. For these and other reasons, the positive impacts of the energy and climate proposals with which he began his presidency were nearly overwhelmed by his sharp turn toward a policy that he described as an "all of the above" approach-one that has contributed to the increased reliance on carbon-rich fossil fuels.
Fourth, the discovery of enormous reserves of deep shale gas depressed electricity prices as more coal-fired generating plants switched to cheaper gas-thus pushing the price of kilowatt hours below the level needed for wind and solar to be compet.i.tive at their present early stage of development. Shale gas has flooded the market since the discovery and perfection of a new drilling technology that combines horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Although most of the debate about fracking has involved its use in the production of shale gas, it is used in the production of oil as well, opening previously inaccessible supplies and increasing the yield of oil from fields previously nearly depleted.
THE IMPACT OF FRACKING.
Experts have cautioned that the world can expect a steady increase in the price of shale gas as liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports transfer the gas from low-priced markets like the United States to much higher-priced markets in Asia and Europe, with the average cost of shale gas going up significantly in the process. Nevertheless, the size of the new reserves opened up with fracking have at least temporarily overturned the pricing structure of energy markets. And the resulting enthusiasm for the exploitation of these reserves has obscured several crucial questions and controversies that should, and over time will, inspire caution about shale gas.
To begin with, the fracking process results in the leakage of enormous quant.i.ties of methane (the princ.i.p.al component of natural gas), which is more than seventy-two times as potent as CO2 in trapping heat in the atmosphere over a twenty-year time frame. After about a decade, methane breaks down into CO2 and water vapor, but its warming impact, molecule for molecule, is still much larger than that of CO2 over shorter time scales.
The global warming potency of methane has led to proposals for a global effort to focus on sharp reductions in methane emissions as an emergency short-term measure to buy time for the implementation of the more difficult strategies necessary to reduce CO2 emissions. Similarly, others have proposed a near-term focus on sharply reducing black carbon emissions, or soot, which trap incoming heat from the sun and which settle on the surface of ice and snow to increase heat absorption and magnify melting. Taken together, these two actions could significantly reduce warming potential by 2050. Given how long the world has waited to get started on controlling emissions, we need both and more.
There are huge leakages of methane in the fracking process before the equipment is put in place to capture the gas at the surface. After the underground formation is fracked by the injection of high-pressure liquids, there is a "flowback." That is, when the fracking water, chemicals, and sand used to do the fracking flow back to the surface and out of the well, this material contains large amounts of methane, which is either vented into the atmosphere or burned. Although many of the largest drilling operators take steps to prevent this leakage, the majority of smaller "wildcat" drillers do not. Additional methane is typically leaked into the atmosphere during the processing, storage, and distribution of gas. The total volume of methane leakage is so large that multiple studies-including a recent lifecycle a.n.a.lysis by Nathan Myhrvold, formerly of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, and Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Inst.i.tution"s Department of Global Ecology-have now found that virtually all of the benefit natural gas might have because of its lower carbon content compared to coal is negated.
In its ongoing operations, the fracking process also requires the continuing injection of huge amounts of water mixed with sand and toxic chemicals into the shale where the gas is confined. The requirement of an average of five million gallons of water for each well is already causing conflict in regions suffering from droughts and water shortages. In many communities, particularly in arid areas of the American West, the compet.i.tion for scarce water resources was acute even before the spread of the thirsty fracking process. In parts of Texas, fracking wells are being drilled in communities where water supply limitations are already constraining usage for drinking water and agriculture.
The fracking process sometimes also inadvertently contaminates precious underground aquifers. Although the gas-bearing rock is typically much deeper than the aquifers supplying drinking water, the upward migration of liquids underground is not well understood and is difficult to predict or control. Many of the deposits where fracking is taking place are found in oil and gas fields that are dotted with old abandoned shafts drilled decades ago in the search for reserves that could be produced through conventional means. These old wells can serve as chimneys for the upward migration of both methane and drilling fluids.
Some have speculated that abandoned drill holes and other poorly understood features of the underground geology may be responsible for the fact that numerous existing water wells located far above the ongoing horizontal drilling have already been poisoned by fracking fluids. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that the fluids used to drill for gas in Wyoming are the likely cause of pollution in the aquifer above an area that was fracked there. Reports of similar pollution from fracking in other areas have been made, but the EPA has been hampered in its investigations because of an unusual law pa.s.sed in 2005 at the behest of then vice president d.i.c.k Cheney, which provides a special exemption for fracking activities from U.S. government oversight under the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act.
The industry disputes most of these reports, and believes that in any case the pollution of some water wells is a small price to pay; the CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, for example, said recently, "The consequences of a misstep in a well, while large to the immediate people that live around that well, in the great scheme of things are pretty small." Nevertheless, political resistance from landowners has been growing in several regions.
Once the fracking fluid has been used, it must be disposed of as toxic wastewater. Often, it is reinjected deep underground in a manner that has caused multiple small (usually harmless) earthquakes and, on some occasions, is alleged to have infiltrated water aquifers. Indeed, the disposal of used fracking fluids is a more common source of complaints than the initial injections that begin the fracking process. In other locations, this used fracking fluid has been stored in large open-air holding ponds that sometimes overflow following heavy rainfalls. It has also at times been spread on roads, ostensibly for dust control.
Advocates of shale gas argue that there are safety measures that can mitigate many of these problems, although most claim disingenuously that the industry will adopt them voluntarily, in spite of the expense involved. By contrast, the oil and gas industry veteran who pioneered the fracking process, George P. Mitch.e.l.l of Houston, Texas, has publicly called for more government regulation. "They should have very strict controls. The Department of Energy should do it," Mitch.e.l.l told Forbes magazine. "If they don"t do it right, there could be trouble.... It"s tough to control these independents. If they do something wrong and dangerous, they should punish them," he added.
But even if new safety regulations worked as planned and even if the leakage of methane is tightly controlled, the burning of natural gas still results in an enormous volume of CO2 emissions. The fact that these emissions can in theory be brought down to a level that represents only half of the emissions from coal has been used by some advocates of shale gas as a new twist on the old question: is the gla.s.s half full or is it half empty? They make the seductive case that switching to gas means we can bring emissions halfway down in the sectors that now rely on coal. But here is the rub: the atmosphere itself is already full. The concentrations of global warming pollution are already at dangerous levels.
GETTING REAL.
As a result, solving the climate crisis requires reducing emissions not by a little, but by a lot. We have to begin reducing net additions of greenhouse gases by at least 80 to 90 percent-not 50 percent-in order to ensure that overall concentrations do not exceed a potential tipping point before starting to decline. Continuing to add additional amounts of greenhouse gases at a rate that far exceeds the slow rate at which CO2 is drawn out of the atmosphere by the oceans and the biosphere would push far into the future any possibility of reducing the overall concentration levels. Reliance on gas to "bridge" the time needed to convert to renewables can help, but a longer commitment would, in fact, be tantamount to surrendering in the struggle to ensure that civilization survives.
In some ways, this challenge is similar to what is happening with the depletion of groundwater and topsoil. The natural replenishment of those resources takes place on a timescale far slower than the rate at which they are being depleted by human activities. The natural rate of CO2 removal from the atmosphere takes place far more slowly than the rate at which we are adding to the overall concentrations. In all three cases, human activities are causing changes far faster than nature can adjust to them.
The underlying problem is that the new power and momentum of Earth Inc. is colliding violently with and overwhelming the environmental balance of the Earth. The overconsumption of limited resources and the production of unlimited pollution are both inconsistent with the continued functioning of the Earth"s ecological system in a manner that supports the survival of human civilization. As noted earlier, the CO2 contained in the "proven reserves" of oil, coal, and gas already on the books of carbon fuel companies and sovereign states exceeds by many times the amount we could safely add to the atmosphere-and the unconventional reserves now starting to be drawn on are potentially even larger.
The shale gas boom in the United States has led to a frenzy of exploration for shale gas in China, Europe, Africa, and elsewhere, raising the specter of a long-term global commitment to gas at the longer-term expense of renewables. Nevertheless, production of this resource outside the U.S. has thus far been limited. In China, where geologists believe that the supply may be two and a half times the size of U.S. shale gas reserves, the underground geology requires technologies that are different from those being used in the U.S., which complicates the option of simply transferring the U.S. horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies to China. Also, as in the Western United States, the profligate use of water in fracking may impose a limitation on use of the process-particularly in northern and northwestern China, where water shortages are endemic.
Even so, momentum is building in the global economy toward the full exploitation and production of shale gas. Some a.n.a.lysts make a persuasive case that if "fugitive emissions" are tightly controlled, the subst.i.tution of gas for coal might produce a temporary but still significant net reduction in the emissions of greenhouse ga.s.ses. In 2012, in what most a.n.a.lysts described as a surprising development, U.S. CO2 emissions dropped to their lowest level in twenty years-in part because of the economic slowdown, because of a mild fall and winter, because of more renewable energy use and increases in efficiency, but also because of the switch from coal to natural gas by electric utilities.
Years ago I was among those who recommended the greater use of conventional natural gas as a bridge fuel to phase out coal use more quickly while solar and wind technologies were produced at sufficient scales to bring their price down even more. However, it is increasingly clear that the net effect of shale gas on the environment may ultimately be inconsistent with its use as a bridge fuel. Global society as a whole would find it difficult to make the enormous investments necessary to switch from coal to gas, and then turn right around and make equally significant investments to subst.i.tute renewable technologies for gas. It strains credulity. In other words, it may be a bridge to nowhere.
Not only have the new supplies of shale gas temporarily depressed energy prices to the point where renewable energy technologies have more trouble competing, if the studies showing that there is no net greenhouse gas benefit to switching to shale gas are correct, this might lead to the worst of all possible worlds: huge investments in shale gas diverting money from renewable energy, and a worsening of the climate crisis in the meantime. The only virtue of shale gas is that it is leading to a faster phase-out of coal, at least in the United States.
Coal has the highest carbon content of any fuel and emits the most CO2 for each unit of energy it produces. It causes local and regional air pollution, including emissions of nitrous oxide (the leading cause of smog), sulfur dioxide (the continuing cause of acid rain), and toxic pollutants like a.r.s.enic and lead. The burning of coal also leaves huge quant.i.ties of toxic sludge-the second largest industrial waste stream in the United States-that is typically pumped to huge lagoons like the one that burst a holding wall and flooded portions of Harriman, Tennessee, in my home state four years ago.
Of particular importance, coal burning is the princ.i.p.al source of human-caused mercury in the environment, an extremely toxic pollutant that causes neurological damage, negatively impacting cognitive skills, the ability to focus, memory, and fine motor skills, among other effects. In the United States nearly all fish and sh.e.l.lfish include at least some amount of methyl-mercury that originated in coal-burning power plants. It is primarily for this reason that many fish and sh.e.l.lfish are considered dangerous in the diets of pregnant women, women who may become pregnant, nursing mothers, and young children. (Since the eating of fish is beneficial for brain development, pregnant women are advised to seek out fish that are low in mercury content and not avoid fish altogether.) But the worst harm from coal burning is its dominant role in causing global warming. Although public opposition in the U.S. has contributed to cancellation of 166 new coal plants that had been planned, coal use is still growing rapidly in the world as a whole. An estimated 1,200 new coal plants are now planned in 59 countries. Under current plans, the global use of coal is expected to increase by another 65 percent in the next two decades, replacing oil as the single largest source of energy worldwide.
Coal is considered cheap, primarily because the absurdly distorted accounting system we use for measuring its cost arbitrarily excludes any consideration of all of the harm caused by burning it. Some engineers are working on improvements to a long-known process for converting underground coal reserves into gas that could be brought to the surface as fuel. But even if this technology were to be perfected, the CO2 emissions would continue destroying the Earth"s ecosystem.
Oil, the second largest source of global warming pollution, contains 70 to 75 percent of the carbon in coal for each unit of energy produced. Moreover, most of the projected new supplies of oil-in the form of shale oil, deep ocean drilling, and tar sands (not only in Canada, but also in Venezuela, Russia, and elsewhere)-are considerably more expensive to produce and carry even harsher impacts for the environment.
Conventional oil is burdened with other problems that coal does not have. Most of the easily recoverable oil in the world is found in regions such as the Persian Gulf that are politically and socially unstable. Several wars have already been initiated in the Middle East for reasons that include compet.i.tion for access to oil supplies. And with Iran"s determined effort to develop nuclear weapons, and ongoing political unrest in multiple countries in the region, the strategic threat of losing access to these oil supplies makes the price of oil highly volatile.
Although most of the discussions about reductions of CO2 emissions have focused on industrial, utility, and vehicle emissions, it is also important to reduce CO2 emissions and enhance CO2 sequestration in the agriculture and forestry sectors, which together make up the second largest source of emissions. As the Keeling Curve demonstrates, the amount of CO2 contained in vegetation, particularly trees, is enormous. It is roughly equal to three quarters of the amount in the atmosphere.
The largest tropical forest, the Amazon, has been under a.s.sault from developers, loggers, cattle ranchers, and subsistence farmers for decades, and even though the government of former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took effective measures to slow down the destruction of the Amazon, his successor has made policy changes that are reversing some of the progress, though the rate of deforestation fell in 2012. In the last decade, the Amazon region was. .h.i.t hard in 2005 and again in 2010 by "once-in-a-century" droughts (or rather, by what used to be once-in-a-century droughts before human modification of the climate). This led some forest researchers to renew their concern about a controversial computer model projection that has predicted the possibility of a dramatic "dieback" of the Amazon by mid-century if temperatures continue rising.
An increasing amount of the world"s CO2 emissions are coming from the cutting, drying, and intentional burning of peat forests and peat lands-especially in Indonesia and Malaysia-in order to establish palm oil plantations. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, peatlands contain more than one third of all the global soil carbon. Although both governments have given lip service to efforts to rein in this destructive practice, endemic corruption has undermined their stated goals. Extremely poor governance practices are among the chief causes of deforestation almost everywhere it is occurring-partly because 80 percent of global forest cover is in publicly owned forests.
Tropical forests are also under a.s.sault in central and south-central Africa-particularly in Sudan and Zambia, and the Southeast Asian archipelago-including areas in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Borneo, and the Philippines. In many tropical countries, the increased demand for meat in the world"s diet has contributed greatly to the clearing of forests for ranching-especially cattle ranching. As noted in Chapter 4, the growing meat intensity of diets around the world has an especially large impact on land use because each pound of animal protein requires the consumption of more than seven pounds of plant protein.
The enormous northern boreal forests in Russia, Canada, Alaska, Norway, Sweden, and Finland (and parts of China, Korea, and j.a.pan) are also at great risk. Recent reestimates of the amount of carbon stored in these forests-not only in the trees, but also in the deep soils, which include many carbon-rich peatlands-calculate that as much as 22 percent of all carbon stored on and in the Earth"s surface is in these boreal forests.
In Russia"s boreal forest-by far the largest continuous expanse of trees on the planet-the larch trees that used to predominate are disappearing and are being replaced by spruce and fir. When the needles of the larch fall in the winter, unlike those of the spruce and fir, the sunlight pa.s.sing through the barren limbs is reflected by the snow cover back into s.p.a.ce, keeping the ground frozen. By contrast, when the conifer needles stay on the trees and absorb the heat energy from the sunlight, temperatures at ground level increase, thus accelerating the melting of the snow and the thawing of the tundra. The intricate symbiosis between the larch and the tundra is thereby disrupted, causing both to disappear. Millions of similar symbiotic relationships in nature are also being disrupted.
Although some Canadian provinces have impressive policies requiring sustainable forestry and limiting the damage from logging operations, Russia does not. And in both Russia and North America, the forests are being ravaged by the impact of global warming on droughts, fires, and insects. Beetles have expanded their range as average temperatures have increased, and have multiplied quickly as the number of cold snaps that used to hold them back has diminished. In many areas they are now reproducing three generations per summer rather than one. In the last decade, more than 27 million acres (110,000 square kilometers) of forests in the Western U.S. and Canada have been devastated by what the United Nations biodiversity experts described as "an unprecedented outbreak of the mountain pine beetle."