Carbunckle

While many nations are responding to pressure to limit greenhouse emissions, the countervailing pressures for economic growth are creating demand for new exploration and power generation based on fossil fuels. The long time-line on nuclear power plants, the fears engendered by colossal failures at Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi in recent years and the massive expense of such plants have de-prioritized nuclear power generation as the go-to primary electrical-power generating system. Solar, wind power and similar such natural systems are not faring well as still-relatively-cheap fossil fuels dominate. As many Evangelicals continue to deny the existence of man-made global warming (the above picture is from Texas) – ignoring the hard evidence of sustain periods of fire dangers, record temperatures and an acceleration of intense weather-related disasters – the move to find and open new U.S. oil reserves, to exploit our massive coal and natural gas reserves is very much alive.

Sales of alternative fuel cars lag behind estimates, and the number one source of new electrical power generation is coal, much of it very cheap grades that emit more pollutants. The myth of “clean coal” persists, notwithstanding the fact that such “cleaning” means little more than pressure-storing the noxious gaseous effluents deep underground for future generations to deal with. Bottom line, if you have enjoyed the recent fires, droughts, flooding in other areas, searing temperatures in the summer, tornadoes, storm surges, rising seas, hurricanes and super-storms, you are going to have a jolly good time in the coming years according to a study from Ecofys, an environmental consulting firm, commissioned by Greenpeace. The report, summarized below, is terrifying.

Globally, there are 14 major fossil fuel initiatives, which if implemented would shove our temperature change up a further 5 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit, which could increase the aggregate of global emissions by a whopping 20% by 2020… as if the earth added an entire new country the size of the United States. Without these initiatives, according to the World Bank, we were still on track to heat up by up to 4 degrees, perhaps dropping to 2 degrees if were able to implement serious cutbacks in greenhouse emissions. By the way, scientists seem to have developed a consensus that holding the temperature rise to 2%, while not a good trend by any means, is sufficiently “tolerable” so as not to materially alter our quality of life. At best, such new projects will set back global climate initiatives by at least a full decade.

China continues to be the big offender, with a massive population and powerful growth initiatives in the less-developed interior, and just its five northwestern provinces alone are slated to dump 1,543 million tons of additional greenhouse gases (from new coal plants) by 2015. But fossil fuel extraction remains a priority not just in China and the U.S., but in Canada, Indonesia, the Arctic, Brazil (with the recent discovery of massive new oil reserves), Venezuela, Mexico, Australia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Russia and across various regions of Africa.

“Greenpeace says the 14 developments would produce 54,674 million tons of coal, 29,400 billion cubic meters of natural gas, and 260,000 million barrels of oil--but add 330 billion tons of CO2-equivalent emissions by 2050 (see here for the methodology). To stay within the 2-degree increase, emissions have to start falling before 2015, which means canceling, rather than rushing ahead, with some of the plans on the table. That doesn’t seem likely--but it is the wide consensus not only of the enviro-lobby, but of plenty of sensible people who’ve studied the issue.” FastCompany.com, February 14^th.

I probably won’t be alive to witness the greatest devastating events generated by global warming, but my son and his children will have to struggle with the staggering economic costs, powerful lifestyle disruptions, repositioning of weather systems, changes in land use and value, etc., etc. I am stunned at the rapidity of horrific recent occurrences that have slammed us with major catastrophes years before such calamities were projected to occur. In the end, nature doesn’t really care what we do with our planet. She had fun building the current aggregation of species over billions of years, and she can do it again. Time, she has. Time, we don’t.

I’m Peter Dekom, and even as we know how we are destroying ourselves, we simply don’t seem to have the will to stop