How can people and planet survive? Photo: Photo: Mike Morris / flickr CC.
The burning question
Janet Toye asks: How can people and planet survive?
…avoiding unacceptable risks of catastrophic climate change means burning less than half of the oil, coal and gas in currently commercial reserves – and a much smaller fraction of all the fossil fuels under the ground. This warning is from the first paragraph of The Burning Question: We can’t burn half the world’s oil, coal and gas, so how do we quit? by Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark. It highlights a complex and compelling argument for what must happen if catastrophic climate change is to be avoided. In one respect the argument is discouraging. The efforts that responsible individuals and organisations are making worldwide to cut emissions are not, at present, having the desired effect: emissions continue to rise.
What needs to happen for those efforts to be effective is a globally agreed and enforced cap on emissions. We can be encouraged in our efforts by the fact that many people now realise the urgency of action to combat climate change. This is very useful. We are contributing to behaviour and attitudes that play a role in persuading others that a global cap on emissions is necessary. But we have to be aware that other action globally is necessary, too.
The reasons that fossil fuel reserves play such a large part in the situation we face are threefold. Firstly, fossil fuel extraction and exploitation have created, and continue to create, the energy that produces emissions worldwide. Secondly, fossil fuel reserves that have been identified, and are likely to be exploited unless action is taken to stop it, are more than enough to take the world above a level that would be catastrophic. Thirdly, there are huge vested commercial interests and complicity by governments that resist the necessary action.
How we got to this point
Humans’ discovery of how to exploit energy resources is the underlying reason for a steady increase in carbon emissions. These have risen most quickly since the start of the industrial revolution. Once the use of fossil fuels took off in a big way, and new processes of using energy developed, people found ways of using it more efficiently. As more energy became available, people invented more ways of using it.
Those who could afford to bought inventions like electric lighting and the combustion engine. Demand for such products and the fuel they use increased. The consequence of this process is that there are always financial incentives to produce more energy. That is why individual and organisational efforts are not reducing emissions overall. As less energy is used by some people more becomes available for the use of others. The authors call this the ‘rebound effect’.
Once there was talk of ‘peak oil’ that would force us to cut back on our energy usage. But now business and investors have realised that, with sufficient ingenuity, determination and money, they can find and exploit new sources. Coal continues to be extracted, and we now also have tar sands and fracking as the latest ways of obtaining energy. Governments and corporate vested interests continue to pursue these means of extraction and the profits they provide.
Population, affluence and economic growth
The centrality of energy exploitation and use also provides an explanation of increasing population and growing affluence. For more than 200 years both have increased worldwide as a result of the prosperity created by economic growth. Each of these phenomena has been regarded by some in the climate change debate as itself the main factor we should try to deal with, for instance by worldwide efforts to reduce the birth rate, or by discouraging consumerism.
Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark argue that population, affluence, energy and carbon intensity are all interrelated, and that a slowdown in population can easily be offset by increases in consumption: countries with high birth rates tend to be poor and have low carbon emissions while areas with lower birth rates are richer and have higher emissions. Reducing economic growth in richer economies on its own would not have much effect either. Poorer countries, such as China, Venezuela and India with fairly large fuel reserves, have been resistant to progress in global climate talks, and rich countries now account for less than half of global carbon emissions.
If this explanation is correct – and the authors’ argu-ments are convincing – a stop to fossil fuel exploitation is the most important action that can be taken. It is likely to happen only if countries agree to, and observe, a global cap on emissions.
How could a global agreement happen?
The authors recognise that this will be extremely difficult, taking into account all factors contributing to climate change, not only fossil fuels, which on their own are the biggest threat. These are methane, nitrous oxide, soot, aviation emissions, modern farming practices, deforestation and biofuels. Here the overall argument functions at two levels. In one the authors explain a range of additional policies which would be effective for dealing with those other factors, many very simple.
Other techniques are more complex and expensive, such as a method for reversing desertification and the use of renewables, carbon capture and, controversially, nuclear energy. Their second line of argument is that the more progress that can be made in developing and using such approaches the better chance we have of making a global cap on emissions more palatable for people in general, big business and governments. For instance, the more complex and expensive methods provide investment opportunities that can appeal to investors as alternatives to fossil fuel investment. Pension funds are an investing group who are also responsible to their members. Their members thus have an opportunity to influence them.
Being honest
There are also chapters in the book about the psycho-logical factors that interfere with people’s ability to face up to the situation, the complexities of reducing the influence of fossil fuel economic interests and the difficulties of intergovernmental negotiations. On all aspects we are offered constructive ideas and thinking.
Members of the Oxford Quaker Environment and Economic Justice group greatly value this book for two reasons. It provides a comprehensive, well-informed and persuasive account of what can be done. It also demonstrates the importance of honesty. Pussy-footing around the subject maintains people’s fears without addressing them. By contrast, a recent truthful and hard-hitting statement made in the USA had a very big positive response from college students. It was by Bill McKibben, who wrote the foreword to The Burning Question and whose powerful advocacy is available on Youtube.
We should be speaking the truth, as Bill McKibben has done, and making it clear that climate change will hurt us as well as people in other parts of the world. Honesty and plain speaking are vital now.
The Burning Question: We can’t burn half the world’s oil, coal and gas, so how do we quit? by Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark. Profile Books. ISBN: 9781781250457. £9.99.
Further information: http://bit.ly/MathMcKibben
