No
fracking, drilling or digging: it’s the only way to save life on
Earth
George Monbiot
Tuesday 27 September
2016 19.10 BST
The Paris climate
change agreement is worthless. Politicians can’t possibly honour it
unless we stop developing all new fossil fuel reserves
Do they understand
what they have signed? Plainly they do not. Governments such as ours,
now ratifying the Paris agreement on climate change, haven’t the
faintest idea what it means – either that or they have no intention
of honouring it.
For the first time
we can see the numbers on which the agreement depends, and their
logic is inescapable. Governments can either meet their international
commitments or allow the prospecting and development of new fossil
fuel reserves. They cannot do both.
The Paris agreement,
struck by 200 nations in December, pledged to hold “the increase in
the global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial
levels”, and aspired to limit it to 1.5C. So what does this mean?
Thanks to a report by Oil Change International, we can now answer
this question with a degree of precision.
Using the industry’s
own figures, it shows that burning the oil, gas and coal in the
fields and mines that is already either in production or being
developed, is likely to take the global temperature rise beyond 2C.
And even if all coal mining were to be shut down today, the oil and
gas lined up so far would take it past 1.5C. The notion that we can
open any new reserves, whether by fracking for gas, drilling for oil
or digging for coal, without scuppering the Paris commitments is
simply untenable.
There are tax breaks
for North Sea oil and gas companies, and fracking, but not of course
for renewables
This is not an
extreme precautionary case. Quite the opposite, in fact: the report
uses the hazard assessment adopted by the United Nations. This means
a 66% chance of preventing 2C of global warming and a 50% chance of
preventing 1.5C – an assumption of risk that in any other field
would be regarded as reckless.
Even so, to prevent
the odds from becoming any worse, a 2C target means that we can use
only around 85% of the fossil fuel that’s currently good to go,
while a 1.5C target means we can extract little more than a third
(the figures are explained by the US environmentalist Bill McKibben
in an article in New Republic). So what’s the point of developing
new reserves if the Paris agreement precludes the full extraction of
those already in production?
The only means of
reconciling governments’ climate change commitments with the
opening of new coal mines, oilfields and fracking sites is carbon
capture and storage: extracting carbon dioxide from the exhaust gases
of power stations and burying it in geological strata. But despite
vast efforts to demonstrate the technology, it has not been proved at
scale, and appears to be going nowhere. Our energy policies rely on
vapourware.
As for the belief
among some governments that they can overshoot the climate targets,
then at a later date suck carbon dioxide out of the air: this depends
on scenarios that would be no less realistic if they involved
sorcery. The most popular proposal is to combine the capture and
storage phantasm with biofuel plantations covering an area between
one and three times the size of India, then harvesting the material
they grow, burning it in power stations and burying the emissions.
The use of a mere few hundred million hectares of fertile land would
have to compete with all the other problems the biofuel wand is meant
to magic away, such as the use of petroleum in cars and kerosene in
planes, as well as the minor issue of feeding the world’s people.
All this nonsense is
a substitute for a simple proposition: stop digging. There is only
one form of carbon capture and storage that is scientifically proven,
and which can be deployed immediately: leaving fossil fuels in the
ground.
Not developing
fossil fuel reserves is much easier than breaking them open then
having to close them later. As the Oil Change report points out,
shutting working mines and wellheads means confronting and
compensating companies that have invested heavily in production, and
retraining and re-employing the people who would lose work. Some of
this will have to happen anyway, if governments are to honour their
promise in Paris. But their effort should be to minimise pain, not to
extend it.
Their choices are as
follows. First: a gradual, managed decline of existing production and
its replacement with renewable energy and low-carbon infrastructure,
which offer great potential for employment. Second: allowing fossil
fuel production to continue at current rates for a while longer,
followed by a sudden and severe termination of the sector, with dire
consequences for both jobs and economies. Third: continuing to
produce fossil fuels as we do today, followed by climate breakdown.
Why is this a hard choice to make?
Our governments seem
determined to choose option three. Globally, some $14tr is being
lined up for new fossil fuel extraction and freight over the next 20
years. Governments are intervening all right: to try to crush
political opposition to these projects, while using public money to
protect them from market forces.
In Britain, for
example, tax rebates for North Sea oil and gas companies are so
generous that over the next five years the government is likely to
give them around £5bn more than it receives in revenues. There are
similar tax breaks for fracking companies – but not, of course, for
renewable energy.
While local people
have been granted a special veto over wind turbines, the government
has awarded itself special powers to override local decisions on
fracking, to ensure that it goes ahead. And if brute power is
insufficient, it is backed up by bribery: the prime minister, Theresa
May, has offered local people cash payments of up to £10,000 per
household from the tax revenues (if there are any) that fracking is
meant to generate. There is no such entitlement to share the income
from wind power: we wouldn’t want to encourage it.
There’s a reason
for this blatant asymmetry: fossil fuel companies are rich and
powerful. Preventing climate breakdown means defending democracy from
plutocrats. It’s their interests versus the rest of humanity’s.
So when May
announced at the UN last week that she was ratifying the Paris
agreement, perhaps what she meant was that she was going to reverse
her government’s suite of energy policies. Or maybe it wasn’t
that. Perhaps she meant that she doesn’t intend to do anything
except sign a piece of paper. Has she even considered the
implications of this choice? I doubt it. After all, it’s only the
future of life on Earth that’s at stake.
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