Bill McKibben, writing in the New Yorker, comments that this year, we may need to compensate for banning the importation of Russian oil with American hydrocarbons.
The only way, however, to eliminate Putin’s and every other producing country’s ability to use oil as an economic weapon is to reduce our dependence on oil. New numbers turn the economic logic we’re used to upside down.
A few years ago, at a petroleum-industry conference in Texas, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said something both terrible and true: that “no country would find a hundred and seventy-three billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.” He was referring to Alberta’s tar sands, where a third of Canada’s natural gas is used to heat the oil trapped in the soil sufficiently to get it to flow to the surface and separate it from the sand. Just extracting the oil would put Canada over its share of the carbon budget set in Paris, and actually burning it would heat the planet nearly half a degree Celsius and use up about a third of the total remaining budget. (And Canadians account for only about one half of one percent of the world’s population.)1
Mark Jacobson showed a gift for science, and also for tennis. He travelled for tournaments to Los Angeles and San Diego, where he was shocked by how dirty the air was. He eventually wound up at Stanford as a professor of civil and environmental engineering, It was clear that visible air pollution was only part of the problem. It was understood that the unseen gas produced by combustion—carbon dioxide—posed an even more comprehensive threat.
Accepting nuclear power for a while longer is not the only place environmentalists will need to bend. A reason I supported shutting down Vermont’s nuclear plant was because campaigners had promised that its output would be replaced with renewable energy. In the years that followed, though, advocates of scenery, wildlife, and forests managed to put the state’s mountaintops off limits to wind turbines. More recently, the state’s public-utility commission blocked construction of an eight-acre solar farm on aesthetic grounds. Those of us who live in and love rural areas have to accept that some of that landscape will be needed to produce energy. Not all of it, or even most of it— Mark Jacobson’s latest numbers show that renewable power actually uses less land than fossil fuels, which require drilling fifty thousand new holes every year in North America alone. But we do need to see our landscape differently—as Ezra Klein wrote this week in the Times, “to conserve anything close to the climate we’ve had, we need to build as we’ve never built before.”1
Renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel, and becoming more so. Some analysts calculate a “decisive transition” to renewable energy would save the world twenty-six trillion dollars in energy costs in the coming decades. This is precisely the opposite of how we have viewed energy transition. It has long been seen as an economically terrifying undertaking: if we had to transition to avoid calamity (and obviously we did), we should go as slowly as possible.
Bill Gates, just last year, wrote a book, arguing that consumers would need to pay a “green premium” for clean energy because it would be more expensive. But Emily Grubert, a Georgia Tech engineer who now works for the Department of Energy, has recently shown that it could cost less to replace every coal plant in the country with renewables than to simply maintain the existing coal plants. You could call it a “green discount.”1
For Americans, the best part of the Build Back Better bill may be that it tries to target significant parts of its aid to communities hardest hit by poverty and environmental damage, a residue of the Green New Deal that is its parent. Advocates are already pressing to ensure that at least some of the new technology is owned by local communities—by churches and local development agencies, not by the solar-era equivalents of Koch Industries or Exxon.
Amy Cardinal Christianson, who works for the Canadian equivalent of the Forest Service, is a member of the Métis Nation. Her family kept trapping lines near Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta, but left them for the city because the development of the vast tar-sands complex overwhelmed the landscape. (That’s the hundred and seventy-three billion barrels that Justin Trudeau says no country would leave in the ground—a pool of carbon so vast the climate scientist James Hansen said that pumping it from the ground would mean “game over for the climate.”) The industrial fires it stoked have helped heat the Earth, and one result was a truly terrifying forest fire that overtook Fort McMurray in 2016, after a stretch of unseasonably high temperatures. The blaze forced the evacuation of eighty-eight thousand people, and became the costliest disaster in Canadian history.1
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has required Western nations to rework energy supply arrangements. Unfortunately, a number of corporations, organisations and politicians have attempted to use this crisis in an attempt to restart fossil fuel exploration and production. The opportunity that aligns with the scientific data from the IPCC is to begin now to increase production of energy from sources with low fossil fuel use.
Reference
[1] (2022, March 18). In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things | The New Yorker. Retrieved March 18, 2022, from https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/in-a-world-on-fire-stop-burning-things
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