If we could see the world with a
particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one
of its most prominent features at the moment would
be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday
will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a
lark. As yet - as we shall see - it's
unfortunately largely invisible to us.
In
compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful
images made possible by new technology. Last
month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic
photograph in our civilization's
gallery: "Blue Marble",
originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. [1] The
spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of
the Americas on January 4, a good day for snapping
photos because there weren't many clouds.
It was also a good day because of the
striking way it could demonstrate to us just how
much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff
Masters, the web's most widely read meteorologist,
explains, "The US and Canada are virtually
snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare
for a January day. The lack of snow in the
mountains of the Western US is particularly
unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this
cloud-free with so little snow on the ground
throughout the entire satellite record, going back
to the early 1960s."
In fact, it's likely
that the week that photo was taken will prove "the
driest first week in recorded US history". Indeed,
it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest
weather extremes in our history - 56% of the
country was either in drought or flood, which was
no surprise since "climate change science predicts
wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas
will tend to get drier". Indeed, the nation
suffered 14 weather disasters, each causing $1
billion or more in damage, last year. (The old
record was nine.) Masters again: "Watching the
weather over the past two years has been like
watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids."
In the face of such data - statistics that
you can duplicate for almost every region of the
planet - you'd think we'd already be in an all-out
effort to do something about climate change.
Instead, we're witnessing an all-out effort to ...
deny there's a problem.
Our GOP
presidential candidates are working hard to make
sure no one thinks they'd appease chemistry and
physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida,
Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the
nominee because he'd caught on earlier than Newt
Gingrich or Mitt Romney to the global warming
"hoax".
Most of the media pays remarkably
little attention to what's happening. Coverage of
global warming has dipped 40% over the past two
years. When, say, there's a rare outbreak of
January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss
"extreme weather", but climate change is the
disaster that dare not speak its name.
And
when they do break their silence, some of our
elite organs are happy to indulge in outright
denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street
Journal published an op-ed by "16 scientists and
engineers" headlined "No Need to Panic About
Global Warming". The article was easily debunked.
It was nothing but a mash-up of
long-since-disproved arguments by people who
turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at
all, quoting other scientists who immediately said
their actual work showed just the opposite.
It's no secret where this denialism comes
from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of
the 16 authors of the Journal article, for
instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers
from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this
case with such overwhelming power that no one even
really tries denying it any more. The open
question is why the industry persists in denial in
the face of an endless body of fact showing
climate change is the greatest danger we've ever
faced.
Why doesn't it fold the way the
tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn't it
invest its riches in things like solar panels and
so profit handsomely from the next generation of
energy? As it happens, the answer is more
interesting than you might think.
Part of
it's simple enough: the giant energy companies are
making so much money right now that they can't
stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after
year, pulls in more money than any company in
history. Chevron's not far behind. Everyone in the
business is swimming in money.
Still, they
could theoretically invest all that cash in new
clean technology or research and development for
the same. As it happens, though, they've got a
deeper problem, one that's become clear only in
the last few years. Put briefly: their value is
largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won't
be burned if we ever take global warming
seriously.
When I talked about a carbon
bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is
what I meant. Here are some of the relevant
numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: we're
already seeing widespread climate disruption, but
if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking
disaster, many scientists have pointed to a
two-degree rise in global temperatures as the most
we could possibly deal with.
If we spew
565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere,
we'll quite possibly go right past that reddest of
red lines. But the oil companies, private and
state-owned, have current reserves on the books
equivalent to 2,795 gigatons - five times more
than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in
the ground.
Put another way, in ecological
terms it would be extremely prudent to write off
$20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic
terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first
and foremost for shareholders and executives of
companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places
like Venezuela).
If you run an oil
company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous
future staring you in the face as soon as climate
change is taken as seriously as it should be, and
that's far scarier than drought and flood. It's
why you'll do anything - including fund an endless
campaigns of lies - to avoid coming to terms with
its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead.
To take just one example, last month the boss of
the US Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called
for burning all the country's newly discovered
coal, gas, and oil - believed to be 1,800 gigatons
worth of carbon from our nation alone.
What he and the rest of the
energy-industrial elite are denying, in other
words, is that the business models at the center
of our economy are in the deepest possible
conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon
bubble that looms over our world needs to be
deflated soon.
As with our fiscal crisis,
failure to do so will cause enormous pain - pain,
in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if
you think banks are too big to fail, consider the
climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the
bailout that would face us when that bubble
finally bursts.
Unfortunately, it won't
burst by itself - not in time, anyway. The
fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded
denialism and their record campaign contributions,
have been able to keep at bay even the tamest
efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each
passing day, they're leveraging us deeper into an
unpayable carbon debt - and with each passing day,
they're raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil
last week reported its 2011 profits at $41
billion, the second highest of all time. Do you
wonder who owns the record? That would be
ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion.
Telling
the truth about climate change would require
pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history,
right when the party is in full swing. That's why
the fight is so pitched. That's why those of us
battling for the future need to raise our game.
And it's why that view from the satellites,
however beautiful from a distance, is likely to
become ever harder to recognize as our home
planet.
Bill McKibben is Schumann
Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College,
founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a
TomDispatch regular, and the author, most
recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough
New Planet.
(Copyright 2012 Bill McKibben)
(Used by permission Tomdispatch.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and
join us on Facebook.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
