The United Nations says: “The difference between 1.5°C and 3°C global warming means vastly different scenarios for the future. Our survival on this planet hinges on these few degrees.”
This is the conclusion of a scientific research paper published in 2020. The scholarly language tends to soften the message somewhat, but if you look carefully at what they're saying — yikes! 😧
Our model shows that a catastrophic collapse in human population due to resource consumption is the most likely scenario of the dynamical evolution based on current parameters. Adopting a combined deterministic and stochastic model, we conclude from a statistical point of view that the probability that our civilization survives itself is less than 10% in the most optimistic scenario.
Calculations show that maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilization. Making the situation even worse, we stress once again that it is unrealistic to think that the decline of the population in a situation of strong environmental degradation would be a non-chaotic and well-ordered decline.
"Less than 10% in the most optimistic scenario" ... Holy hell.
@breadandcircuses I became a real dommer when I realized that "acting" would make things worse then they are actually
example : change all cars to electric ones ?
Okay and lithium and copper mines ? all already saturated and polluting everything... #JustStopOil
Okay but (and with the #climatecrisis ) this will lead humanity to a state of widespread famine, and therefore global war
planting trees to reduce CO2: absolutely not within the necessary orders of magnitude #AndSoOn
The nation of Azerbaijan gets two-thirds of its revenue from oil and gas, one of the highest percentages of any country in the world... which makes it a perfect place to hold the next UN climate summit! Am I right?
"Oil-reliant Azerbaijan Chosen to Host COP29 Climate Talks"
Currently, degrowth scholars are focusing on how policy decisions, if implemented soon enough and widely enough, might avoid a disastrous descent. As much as I respect and admire this impressive body of work, my argument is that this is unlikely to be successful, because resistance to change is still significantly greater than the pain the system is inflicting on its primary beneficiaries.
Until that equation changes (and it will change), I don’t believe the world is ready to accept the radical transformations that degrowth scholars have identified, even though these transformations are the only path by which we can realistically put our civilization on a more sustainable footing once we have lost the magical elixir of fossil fuels.
Given that degrowth is more likely to emerge within the climate crisis, rather than as a deliberate strategy to avoid the climate crisis, we can expect degrowth’s three primary goals to be achieved somewhat differently than much of the degrowth literature to date anticipates.
⒈ Abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal.
⒉ Scale back destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use.
⒊ Focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being.
If there is one unshakeable principle underlying our current devotion to capitalist growth, it is that size of financial return is the only valid criterion for making an investment decision. If that return comes at the cost of boiling the oceans or putting billions of people at risk of starvation, that is not the investor’s concern.
I believe the end of growth will finish off much of this opposition to degrowth policies, by virtue of deflating the political and economic power of those most responsible for the obstruction we see today. Only when climate change and resource depletion have rendered growth impossible will governments be ready to entertain new ways to protect the health and wellbeing of their citizens.
Today, the political stage in most western democracies is occupied by three main groups: (1) deregulation-obsessed billionaires, science deniers, and oil-industry boosters on the right, (2) a hodge-podge of “green growth” advocates in the middle who believe we can swap in renewables for fossil fuels and continue growing as in the past, and (3) a small coterie of progressives on the left who believe inequality also needs to be addressed as a contributing factor, but still embrace ongoing growth as an attainable goal.
Currently, there is no room on this stage for degrowth or post-growth advocates who see growth as the problem, not the cure, and identify over-consumption and carrying-capacity overshoot as equally important threats to human civilization. Accordingly, when degrowth ideas hit the mainstream in these countries, it’s much like a fly hitting an electric fly catcher. Pffft.
Over time, this will change. As the world gets hotter and more ecologically damaged, demand for better solutions will increase and radical change will become more acceptable to a struggling populace. When that day arrives, and previous occupants of the world’s political stage have scattered in disarray, the Ecosocialist Party must be ready to step up and provide the answers humanity needs.
My main concern with Steve's thesis is that by the time the climate crisis gets bad enough for the world to consider this proposed new direction, it might already be too late for any sort of complex society to survive. I hope I'm wrong about that. But in any case, I'm extremely grateful to Steve for providing us with all this valuable food for thought.
Our Mastodon friend Steve Genco (@sjgenco) offers some excellent ideas on how we might move forward into a better world. ...
Here are the assumptions to start from. If you don’t agree, there is no point in reading any further. You are not operating in the same universe of evidence and facts that I am.
⚠️ It’s going to get hotter, at least 2.0°C above preindustrial temps, possibly 3.0°C or more.
⚠️ The weather is going to get more unpredictable and extreme.
⚠️ Natural disasters are going to arrive at greater and greater frequency.
⚠️ Economic inequality (income and wealth) is going to get worse.
⚠️ We will continue depleting the natural world.
⚠️ The effects of climate change will be unevenly distributed around the planet.
⚠️ Fossil fuels will become financially and energetically unprofitable, ending our temporary Age of Oil sometime in the middle of this century.
What our leaders’ current vision of the future does not include — indeed, what it loudly denies — is the reality of over-consumption and overshoot in the wealthy Global North. In other words, the dominant mental model that rules our imaginations today denies that our rapacious capitalist appropriation of the planet’s natural resources is unsustainable. It denies that overshoot is real, and that it can only end in resource depletion, product and food shortages, out-of-control inflation, rationing, and eventually, a total collapse of our carbon-powered consumption and waste-driven world economy.
Clearly, a vision/mental model that denies the reality of the damage it inflicts on our planet can provide no viable first steps for how to move beyond the pain it produces. Indeed, it denies that any such steps are necessary. Instead, it offers Business As Usual with some tinkering around the edges — a few EVs here, a wind farm there, “green growth”, and promises to clean it all up with magical carbon capture technologies sometime later in the century.
Most politicians operating in the Global North today could never embrace an alternative to economic growth. Even the most passionate climate-focused politicians, like Jay Inslee, Governor of Washington State, are still wedded to the idea that any pro-environmental policies must allow for — indeed, stimulate — the continuation of economic growth.
This is a fundamental assumption underlying the “Green New Deal” concept promoted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others. It also underlies every other “Green Growth” initiative. “Growth” is even in the name.
I really hope you will take the time to read and think about what Steve is suggesting. Those of us who can see that our modern industrial society is in danger of collapse are often criticized for not offering any solutions. That's not true, of course. We have many important and constructive ideas. Let's spread the word.
The super-rich are killing us. Not just figuratively, but literally.
Climate change is overwhelmingly a problem of wealthy people. The wealthiest 1% of humanity produce over 1,000 times the emissions of the poorest 1%. In fact, these 77 million people are responsible for more climate-changing emissions than the poorest 66% (5 billion people) of humanity.
Since 1990, the personal emissions of the world’s wealthiest have exploded. They are now 77 times larger than the level that would be compatible with a 1.5°C warming limit.
Who are these super-polluters? The richest 1% are billionaires, millionaires and people earning over US$140,000 (£110,000). The threshold to join the rarefied club of the top 10% is US$41,000 (£32,000), including most of the middle class in wealthier countries.
But the super-rich are responsible for climate change well beyond consumption-based emissions. The super-rich, by and large, run major companies, direct investments and shape national and international laws. They have an oversized and controlling impact on our media and public opinion, including through advertising and ownership of media outlets. And they directly shape policy through lobbying and paid-for influence.
While their money and power make them overwhelmingly responsible for climate change, they are also insulated from the worst impacts. They are less affected by increased food prices and climate disasters, can afford insurance and to move from one place to another, and have greater resources to draw on in times of crisis.
It is the poorest – those least responsible for climate changing emissions – who suffer the most. They suffer higher losses, live in the most impacted regions, and have little to no access to savings, public support or welfare when crisis strikes. They are also least able to exercise their rights as they are the least powerful and less well represented politically.
It would take approximately 1,500 years for someone in the bottom 99% to produce as much carbon as a single billionaire does in a year.
The choice is very simple. Either we can have a livable biosphere or we can have billionaires. But we can't have both.
Kevin Anderson is professor of energy and climate change at the Universities of Manchester (UK), Uppsala (Sweden), and Bergen (Norway). Formerly director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, he also is one of the scientists most relied upon by Greta Thunberg in her assessment of where we stand and what we must do now.
In a hard-hitting new article, Professor Anderson delivers some truths we may not want to hear. This is how it begins...
For a flip-of-a-coin chance of staying at or below 1.5°C we have, globally, just five to eight years of current emissions before we blow our carbon budget. For a good chance of 2°C this extends to 15 to 18 years. We are using up the 1.5°C budget at a rate of about 1% each month, and the 2°C budget at around 0.5% each month.
But it’s not being spent evenly. According to new research by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, the wealthiest 1% of people on the planet are responsible for double the greenhouse gas emissions of the poorest half.
This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate societal aspirations and the narratives around climate change. These extend from well-funded advertising to pseudo-technical solutions, from the financialisation of carbon emissions (and increasingly, nature) to labelling extreme any meaningful narrative that questions inequality and power.
This dangerous framing is compounded by a generally supine media owned or controlled by the 1%. Many climate experts also reside in the 1% or seek funding from them, with the dangerous repercussion of giving the impression of objective conclusions. Add to this the reflected glory of hobnobbing with the elites and the prestige of honours awarded to those supporting hierarchical norms – and the closure of alternative narratives for addressing climate change is complete.
This may all sound flippant. But I argue that the tendrils of the 1% have twisted society into something deeply self-destructive. Layer upon of layer of lies and delusion have left us ill-equipped to address so many of our problems, of which climate change is only one symptom.
There is much more in the full piece, including an introductory passage that describes how Professor Anderson has been censored in his attempts to get this message out to the public. Must-read!
Left to themselves, the majority of consumers in the Global North will never make all the adjustments that are required. We are in urgent and desperate need of bold leadership, but we’re not getting it.
"Climate change is happening, so why do we still act like it's not?"
Climate researchers initially assumed that if you gave people the right information, we would act on it. Burning fossil fuels comes with severe consequences — so let's phase out fossil fuels. But they found out very quickly this was not the case.
For many people, it triggered cognitive dissonance, where they knew climate change was happening but acted like it wasn't. After all, many people still smoke, even though they know it is bad for their health. And many of us still fly to Italy — even though we know how many extra tons of carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere.
Why is it so easy to understand but not act?
It's because of public and private narratives we have grown up with. Our expectations of life are geared towards wanting comfort and stability.
Here's Sarah Miller (@sarahmiller_22747) describing how capitalism operates, and how Business As Usual will be extended for as long as possible — until, that is, it collapses. But not until after every last dollar has been squeezed out of us and extracted from our ravaged environment.
News from the climate front has become incoherent. One day a report comes out noting how fast solar and EVs are transforming power generation and transportation, and how the world can still limit climate warming to 1.5℃. A few days later, new reports, including one from the UN, conclude the world is lagging “massively” in efforts to keep climate change within those same 1.5℃ bounds.
Meanwhile, temperatures and ocean levels keep on rising at rates that exceed expectations, suggesting we may be relying on unrealistic assumptions about the impacts of greenhouse gas pollution.
Some of the incoherence is inevitable in an unprecedented, fast-moving, and frightening situation. But some of it is created on purpose. It’s Big Everything throwing up a smoke screen, putting out misleading information designed to improve the chances of its own survival.
Big Everything includes but is not limited to Big Oil. It also encompasses Big Finance, Big Tech, Big Manufacturing, and a bunch of billionaires.
That's what both the United Nations and the International Energy Agency have told us is 100% necessary at this point.
But apparently someone didn't get the message. Because climate-wrecking fossil fuel projects continue to be approved.
The massive Willow oil project on Alaska’s North Slope is all but certain to be built now that a federal judge has ruled against environmental groups hoping to halt the development. While it’s set to be Alaska’s biggest new oil field in decades, it very well may not be the last: Willow could give ConocoPhillips and other oil companies cheaper access to vast, untapped reserves beneath the tundra.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason denied a challenge last week to the $7.5 billion project which the Biden administration controversially approved in March. The judge’s ruling paves the way for Conoco to drill through permafrost and slurp up 600 million barrels of oil in the northeastern corner of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.
But that’s not all. As the company moves ahead with construction of the new oil field, it’s looking to gain access to millions, perhaps billions, more barrels farther west and southwest in the reserve.
“It’s not only itself a huge project,” said Erik Grafe, an attorney at Earthjustice, which represents the environmental groups that sued to stop the project. “It’s designed to be a hub for future development and that’s an even bigger problem.”
Conoco told investors two years ago that Willow could be “the next great Alaska hub” for Arctic oil. The company leases a total of 1.1 million acres in the federal petroleum reserve, sitting on an estimated 3 billion barrels of oil. Other companies lease another 1.4 million acres combined.
Just last month Conoco proposed seismic surveys on about 272,000 acres of frozen earth, including an area west of the Willow site, deeper into the national oil reserve. The company initially said the surveys were intended to “determine the most efficient development” at Willow and “to identify potential future development areas” on Conoco’s leases.
Conoco has drilled two exploratory wells in an area named “West Willow.” The several miles of new roads and pipelines that the company plans to build at Willow could significantly lower the cost of tapping into the estimated 75 million barrels of crude beneath West Willow.
That oil “seems like the obvious next target,” Grafe said. “Willow puts in processing facilities, central operating facilities, pipelines, roads. Once that’s in place, it’s a lot cheaper for Conoco and maybe others to develop their leases and tie into that infrastructure.”
How the previously discussed "Faustian bargain" plays out in real life...
Air pollution, a global scourge that kills millions of people a year, is shielding us from the full force of the sun. Getting rid of it will accelerate climate change.
That's the unpalatable conclusion reached by scientists poring over the results of China's decade-long and highly effective "war on pollution," according to leading climate experts.
The drive to banish pollution, caused mainly by sulphur dioxide (SO2) spewed from coal plants, has cut SO2 emissions by close to 90% and saved hundreds of thousands of lives, Chinese official data and health studies show.
Yet stripped of its toxic shield, which scatters and reflects solar radiation, China's average temperatures have gone up by 0.7 degrees Celsius since 2014, triggering fiercer heatwaves, according to scientists interviewed.
"It's this Catch-22," said Patricia Quinn, an atmospheric chemist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), speaking about cleaning up sulphur pollution globally. "We want to clean up our air for air quality purposes but, by doing that, we're increasing warming."
The removal of the air pollution — a term scientists call "unmasking" — may have had a greater effect on temperatures in some industrial Chinese cities over the last decade than the warming from greenhouse gases themselves, the scientists said.
Other highly polluted parts of the world, such as India and the Middle East, would see similar jumps in warming if they follow China's lead in cleaning the skies of sulphur dioxide and the polluting aerosols it forms, the experts warned.
In India, sulphur pollution is still rising, roughly doubling in the last two decades, according to calculations by NOAA researchers.
In 2020, when that pollution plummeted due to COVID lockdowns, ground temperatures in India were the eighth warmest on record, 0.29C higher than the 1981-2010 average, despite the cooling effects of the La Niña climate pattern, according to the India Meteorological Department.
India aims for an air cleanup like China's, and in 2019 launched its National Clean Air Programme to reduce pollution by 40% in more than 100 cities by 2026.
Once polluted regions in India or the Middle East improve their air quality by abandoning fossil fuels and transitioning to green energy sources, they too will lose their shield of sulphates, scientists said.
"You stop your anthropogenic activities for a brief moment of time and the atmosphere cleans up very, very quickly and the temperatures jump instantaneously," added Sergey Osipov, a climate modeller at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.
We keep hearing from our friends in the hope-happy corporate media that the clean green revolution is taking off, that solar and wind and other renewable energy sources are growing quickly.
And it's true, they are.
Except you know what? The oil industry isn't going away any time soon. In fact, giant companies like Exxon and Chevron are choosing to invest even MORE in the production of fossil fuels.
But why? Can't they see the writing on the wall?
The world may be shifting to clean energy, but big oil is doubling down on fossil fuel.
The International Energy Agency's (IEA) prediction of oil demand peaking by 2030 amid greater adoption of green energy technology — including solar, wind, and electric cars — undercuts the rationale for increased spending on fossil fuel. It also begs the question of why oil giants flush with cash aren’t diversifying into clean energy projects.
"There's going to be an energy transition, but it's going to be a lot longer, it's going to be a lot tougher, and it's going to be a lot more expensive," Wells Fargo senior energy analyst Roger Read warned.
Exxon’s merger with Pioneer Natural Resources more than doubles the oil giant’s production in the Permian Basin, a highly sought after oilfield straddling western Texas and southeastern New Mexico.
Meanwhile, Chevron’s Hess acquisition will give the company 30% ownership of more than 11 billion barrels-equivalent of recoverable resources in Guyana, which Third Bridge’s Peter McNally referred to as the "real prize" in the portfolio and "one of the most important growth areas for non-OPEC oil production."
If the IEA is right and demand for oil and gas peaks by 2030, it’s important to put the forecasted decline in context. Yes, the expectation is for demand to decline in mature markets but, at the same time, the need for oil will grow in emerging and developing economies.
According to the IEA, the world will consume up to 102 million barrels a day of oil at its peak before falling slightly to 97 million barrels a day by 2050.
"I’d be cautious about predicting a big decline because it’s a very Western view of the world," said Greg Beard, who was Apollo Global Management’s Head of Energy for over a decade. "Population growth and a growing middle class in emerging markets will spur more oil demand in spite of established economies increasing use of EVs."
So if you're an oil investor, don't worry. Your money is perfectly safe.
The fossil fuel industry is betting that governments will NOT meet their "announced pledges" [see chart below] and will never get close to "net zero by 2050."
Instead, they're assuming that demand will continue with perhaps only a slight downturn after 2030. But there is still a HUGE amount of profit to be made in extracting and burning oil and gas while wrecking the climate.
In order to maintain the momentum of the pro-growth economy and continue with Business As Usual, our capitalist rulers will happily allow us to believe that the world is actually changing for the better and that a gradual shift to "clean green energy" will solve all of our problems. It is in their interest, clearly, to preserve the status quo.
But reality does not match up with their rhetoric, as discussed here by Kwolanne Felix at TruthOut...
We must address the appeal of these promised ideal green technologies that continue to capture the public imagination and corporate interest. Emerging technologies like carbon capture and storage and nuclear fusion promise a future where people who live resource-intensive lives, particularly wealthy people in Western countries, can continue to do so in a “green way.” This vision of the world is one where fossil fuels are swapped out for renewable resources without any fundamental challenge to our economic, social, or political systems.
This narrow and unimaginative vision of a sustainable world is unfortunately holding us back from what needs to happen to address the climate crisis. There will be no magical technology that will save us. The answer to climate change has always been much more than just scientific innovation — it is economic, social, and geopolitical.
We are not in this climate crisis because we have bad technology. We are here because our societies have prioritized the resource-intensive livelihoods of a few, at the cost of the environment and well-being of many. The unsustainable and polluting technology we have is only responding to our society’s obsession to go faster, grow bigger, and consume more at any cost. It is that system of value that must be disrupted to solve the climate crisis. Relying on green technology without systemic change is a Band-Aid approach.
In my work as a climate advocate, I’ve had to accept that our world will have to look very different if we hope to address the climate crisis. The logic of our economic system must be fundamentally challenged. We live on an Earth with a finite number of resources, and infinite economic growth is not only impossible, it is destructive.
Our economic logic must shift to calculating success through collective social and environmental well-being, not stakeholder profits. The most carbon-intensive industries and fossil fuel production that continue to jeopardize the livability of our planet must be quickly phased out. Our politicians must prioritize social and ecological health as two sides of the same coin in promoting well-being.
We absolutely MUST have system change. Anything else leaves us treading the road to ruin.
Sometimes in news reports about the increasing pace of climate change, you might see someone refer to a "temporary overshoot."
That means they're essentially admitting we now have zero chance of avoiding 1.5°C above baseline and little chance of staying under 2°C. But they use the word 'temporary' because they want you to believe that even if world temperatures do go that high, it will only be for a short time.
See, the plan is that by 2050 or so we will have invented some fancy new technology that will quickly and easily capture and remove a HUGE amount of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere — and somehow accomplish that without using an equivalent amount of fossil fuels to do it. It’ll be a green solution! Yay! We’re saved! 😃
No such technology exists, of course, nor is one likely ever to be invented. We might just as well hope to develop perpetual motion machines. 😕
However, by selling you on the idea that a temporary overshoot will be okay, that there's nothing to worry about, that our leaders have everything under control, they're allowed to carry on with Business As Usual.
This carbon capture 'solution' is just a capitalist scam, a snake-oil remedy concocted by the fossil fuel industry and their financiers to buy more time so they can continue making piles of money while trashing the planet.
Strong words from climate scientist Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman)...
There is now no conceivable way we can stay under 1.5°C of mean global heating. We probably still had that chance a few years ago, but it has been squandered out of political cowardice, media distraction, apathy, a steady diet of false hope and false solutions, and above all a continued stream of disinformation and legalized bribes from the fossil fuel industry.
The more fossil fuel we burn, the hotter the planet will get. This is basic, incontrovertible, unassailable physics. It's a dead certainty. And the people currently in charge are still doing everything they can to expand fossil fuels.
Just this year, for example, President Biden approved the Willow Project in Alaska and forced a construction restart on the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia. These two "carbon bomb" projects, and many, many others occurring all around the world, ensure a hotter, less habitable, and far more dangerous planet.
As a scientist studying extreme heat, I dread the first time we get a heat wave that kills more than a million people over the course of a few days, something I now feel is inevitable. But — if we continue to burn fossil fuels, it won't stop there.
If we continue burning more fossil fuels, it will get hotter, until at some point heat waves kill 2 million people, and then 3 million, and then 10 million. And that's just extreme heat. Wildfires, floods, migration, food system collapse — it's all driven by increasing global heat, so it will all get worse as well. All at the same time.
I don't know how to be any clearer: This is why we must get off this path as soon as we can. And because the fossil fuel industry is the cause of the global heating that's driving all this, the only real way to make a change is to ramp down and then end the fossil fuel industry.
We will not solve things by direct air capture, nuclear fusion, or any other whiz-bang technology. We must accept that these are distractions. We must directly confront this system of deeply inequitable and deadly fossil-fueled capitalism, which has become a planet-sized runaway diesel engine.
We are in a war. It's a real war, not a figurative one, although it's not like any other war in human history. People are dying, all over the world, because of decisions made by fossil fuel executives. And I can confidently state that many more people will die from climate impacts in the coming years.
Fossil fuel executives knew their decisions would lead to loss of habitability and death, but they made them anyway, and then colluded to block mitigating action and increase their profits. These "scorched earth" tactics are now leading to the collapse of ocean currents, the death of coral reefs and tropical forests, including the Amazon.
If allowed to continue, they will lead to uninhabitable tropics, mass migration, and more frequent and severe catastrophes all over the world. Meanwhile, governments are bringing harsher charges against climate activists. In some places, they are even being murdered. Against this backdrop, climate civil disobedience is perhaps the least we can do.
Once enough of us start to fight, we will win. The only question is how long it will take to get to that point, and how much we will irreversibly lose before we do.
The military-industrial complex is closely allied with the fossil fuel industry in their immensely profitable fight to continue with 💵 Business As Usual 💵 for as long as possible.
Our bloated US imperialism budget is eagerly supported by the leaders of both parties, urged on by free-spending lobbyists. This would be comically embarrassing if it wasn’t so tragic. 🤦♂️
The heartbreaking, disgusting, and brutally tragic story of how we got to where we are today…
"Why Action on the Climate Crisis is All Hot Air"
How did we reach this point of abject failure: where the greater the scientific consensus and real-world evidence, the smaller the impact that consensus has on decision-making?
The astonishing disjunct between threat and response is possible only because the oil lobby has historically shaped, and continues to shape, popular understanding of the gravity of what lies ahead.
Cognitive dissonance reigns.
It is true that the establishment media has, very belatedly, started to diagnose more unpredictable and extreme weather patterns as symptoms of a wider climate crisis. It is hard to deny reality when reality keeps slapping you in the face.
But otherwise, the media has been, and continues to be, the core of the problem. It still plays cover both for the oil lobby and for the global corporations whose bottom line depends on a continuing addiction to over-consumption and “economic growth.”
That should be no surprise, because media corporations, whose job it is to frame our understanding of the world, are themselves deeply embedded in corporate profiteering at the planet’s expense.
Under the capitalist system, the primary duty of oil corporations – like other corporations – is to maintain profitability and guarantee value for investors and stockholders. Ethics never got a look-in.
So the fossil-fuel industry spent part of its vast profits pursuing a twin-track: first, muddying the waters about the climate science, then channeling attention towards largely meaningless, small-scale fixes that fell to the public to implement.
For the critical years when urgent, state-backed action was needed on a massive scale, climate denial, funded by dark money from Big Business, was given regular airtime on influential media channels like the BBC. Ordinary people were left, as they were supposed to be, confused and unsure.
We are still encouraged through advertising to consume as much as possible and throw away items of new technology – from personal computers to phones – every few years through planned obsolescence.
But this individualised, competitive, wasteful way of life is being given a makeover. Cars are now hybrid or electric. Holidays are “carbon offset” somehow. Plastic on our food is described as recyclable. Advertising now explains to us how all the stuff we buy is saving the planet.
Living ever more of our lives online supposedly helps too, because it reduces our carbon footprint. It is a green revolution in which everything stays pretty much the same – including the ability of giant corporations to make massive profits.
Armed with warnings – decades in advance – from their own scientists, the oil industry had enough of a head-start to invent a self-serving narrative. It's one in which ordinary people are encouraged to consume as much as before, while being persuaded either that they are making a difference or that the damage they are causing will be reversed by imminent technologies.
The new watchword is “net zero”. But in truth, it is a giant psy-op, as climate scientists have gradually started to appreciate.
In 2021 a group of three leading academics admitted that for years they had been duped into championing the promises of the Green New Deal. Technological fixes, such as carbon capture, offsetting and geoengineering, were “no more than fairy tales”, they warned. Net zero policies “were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate”.
James Dyke, an expert in global systems at Exeter University, observed: “It’s astonishing how the continual absence of any credible carbon removal technology seems to never affect net zero policies. I've now realised that we have all been subject to a form of gaslighting.”
There's much more in this brilliant piece by Jonathon Cook, and I hope you will read the whole thing.
In the piece below, the author asks, "Why is the government putting big money behind dubious carbon capture projects that specifically benefit Big Oil and help delay climate action?"
Spoiler: It's capitalism.
You probably already knew that, but the article does a great job of explaining exactly why subsidizing carbon capture is such a disastrous policy choice, and why the Biden administration nevertheless is pouring billions of dollars into it...
Record heat waves. Widespread fires. Devastating storms. The tragic toll of climate change is becoming more evident every day.
To avoid even more severe impacts in the future, we must quickly and dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions — largely caused by fossil fuels. Fortunately, the tools we need to cut emissions through energy efficiency, renewable energy, and beyond are growing quickly, becoming better and more affordable over time.
We will also need some “carbon removal” in the future — where we use nature (with trees or soils) or industrial processes to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, sequester it, and keep it from adding to our climate woes.
In the last few years, more attention has focused on industrial methods, because they can bury carbon in permanent, geologic reservoirs, unlike trees and soils that can burn down or be plowed up. In principle, this makes sense. But in practice, industrial carbon removal is wildly expensive, far too energy and resource intensive, and only removes pathetically small amounts of carbon. It’s nowhere near being a viable solution to climate change.
For the foreseeable future, cutting emissions is the most feasible means of addressing climate change. And whatever carbon removal we might eventually develop should only be used to address the final, hard-to-abate emissions left after fossil fuels are phased out. Most of all, carbon removal should never be used as a substitute for cutting emissions, or to help delay phasing out fossil fuels.
So why is the federal government doing exactly the opposite — putting big money behind dubious carbon capture projects, in ways that specifically benefit Big Oil and help delay climate action?