YES! Magazine - Bill McKibben
Life depends on it. Bill McKibben on the big changes we've already made in remarkably short order.
Physics can impose a bracing clarity on the normally murky world of politics. It can make things simple. Not easy, but simple.
Most of the time, public policy is a series of trade-offs: higher
taxes or fewer services, more regulation or more freedom of action. We
attempt to balance our preferences: for having a beer after work, and
for sober drivers. We meet somewhere in the middle, compromise, trade
off. We tend to think we're doing it right when everyone's a little
unhappy.
But when it comes to climate change, the essential problem is not one
group's preferences against another's. It's not—at bottom—industry
versus environmentalists or Republicans against Democrats. It's people
against physics, which means that compromise and trade-off don't work.
Lobbying physics is useless; it just keeps on doing what it does.
So here are the numbers: We have to keep 80 percent of the
fossil-fuel reserves that we know about underground. If we don't—if we
dig up the coal and oil and gas and burn them—we will overwhelm the
planet's physical systems, heating the Earth far past the red lines
drawn by scientists and governments. It's not "we should do this," or
"we'd be wise to do this." Instead it's simpler: "We have to do this."
And we can do this. Five years ago, "keeping it in the ground" was a
new idea. When environmentalists talked about climate policy, it was
almost always in terms of reducing demand. On the individual level:
Change your light bulb. On the government level: Put a price on carbon.
These are excellent ideas, and they're making slow but steady progress
(more slowly in the United States than elsewhere, but that's par for the
course). Given enough time, they'd bring down carbon emissions
gradually but powerfully.
Time, however, is precisely what we don't have. We pushed through the
400 parts per million level of CO2 in the atmosphere last spring; 2015
was the hottest year in recorded history, smashing the record set in …
2014. So we have to attack this problem from both ends, going after
supply as well as demand. We have to leave fossil fuel in the ground.
Money, in fact, is a key part of the Keep It in the Ground strategy.
Most of that coal and oil and gas—most of that money—is concentrated
in a few huge underground pools of carbon. There's oil in the Arctic,
and in the tar sands of Canada and Venezuela, and in the Caspian Sea;
there's coal in Western Australia, Indonesia, China, and in the Powder
River Basin; there's gas to be fracked in Eastern Europe. Call these the
"carbon bombs." If they go off—if they're dug up and burnt—they'll
wreck the planet. Of course, you could also call them "money pits." Lots
of money—that coal and gas and oil may be worth $20 trillion. Maybe
more.
Because of that, there are people who say that the task is simply
impossible—that there's no way the oil barons and coal kings will leave
those sums underground. And they surely won't do it voluntarily. Take
the Koch brothers, for instance: They're among the largest leaseholders
in Canada's tar sands and plan nearly $900 million in political spending
during 2016, more than the Republicans or the Democrats. Because they
won't be among the richest men on Earth anymore if that oil stays
beneath the ground.
But in fact it's not a hopeless task. We've begun to turn the tide, and in remarkably short order.
If you understand the logic of the Keep It in the Ground campaign,
for instance, then you understand the logic of the Keystone pipeline
fight. Pundits said it was "just one pipeline," but efforts to block it
meant that the expansion of Canada's tar sands suddenly, sharply slowed.
Investors, unsure that there would ever be affordable ways to bring
more of that oil to market, pulled tens of billions of dollars off the
table, even before the price of oil began to fall. So far, only about 3
percent of the oil in those tar sands has been extracted; the bomb is
still sitting there, and if we block pipelines, then we cut the fuse.
And the same tactics are working elsewhere, too. In Australia, there
was unrelenting pressure from indigenous groups and climate scientists
to block what would have been the world's largest coal mine in
Queensland's Galilee Valley. Activists tied up plans long enough that
other campaigners were able to pressure banks around the world to
withdraw financing for the giant mine. By spring 2015, most of the
world's major financial institutions had vowed not to provide loans for
the big dig, and by summer the mining company was closing down offices
and laying off its planning staff.
If their business plan would break the planet, then we need to break ties with them.
Money, in fact, is a key part of the Keep It in the Ground strategy.
In fall 2012, students, faith leaders, and other activists launched a
fossil-fuel divestment campaign in the United States, supported by
350.org (an organization I co-founded), that soon spread Down Under and
to Europe. The argument was simple: If Exxon and Chevron and BP and
Shell plan to dig up and burn more carbon than the planet can handle,
they're not normal companies.
If their business plan would break the planet, then we need to break ties with them.
At first, the institutions that joined in were small. Tiny Unity
College in Maine was first, selling the fossil fuel stock in its $13
million portfolio. But the campaign accelerated quickly because the math
was so clear, the physics so irrefutable. By now colleges from Stanford
to Oxford, from Sydney to Edinburgh, have joined in, pointing out that
it makes no sense to educate young people and then break the planet
they'll inhabit. Ditto doctors associations on several continents, which
argue that you can't pretend to be interested in public health if you
invest in companies destroying it. Ditto the United Church of Christ and
the Unitarians and the Church of England and the Episcopalians, who
insist that care for creation is incompatible with such destruction.
But the fight remains damnably hard, because politicians are so used to doing the bidding of the oil companies.
These divestments are hurting companies directly—coal giant Peabody
formally told shareholders in 2014 that the campaign was affecting its
stock price and making it hard to raise capital. But even more, they've
driven the necessity of keeping carbon underground from the fringes into
the heart of the world's establishment. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund
started divesting its fossil fuel stocks, while Deutsche Bank, the World
Bank, and the International Monetary Fund have started down the same
road. A month after the Rockefeller announcement, the governor of the
Bank of England told a conference that "the vast majority" of carbon
reserves are "unburnable," warning of massive "stranded assets." Trying
to get out from under this "carbon bubble" is one reason why huge funds
are now beginning to divest. The California Public Employees' Retirement
System, for instance, lost $5 billion before it saw the light and
started selling its stock.
But the fight remains damnably hard, because politicians are so used
to doing the bidding of the oil companies. In fact, just days after the
theoretically landmark Paris climate accord, the Obama administration
and Congress gave the oil industry a much-sought-after gift: ending the
40-year ban on crude oil exports. We're making progress (it was
something of a breakthrough, for instance, when cautious Hillary Clinton
came out against Arctic oil) but not fast enough.
Which is why, this spring, the climate movement will be rallying on
the sites of as many of those carbon bombs as possible, in massive
peaceful resistance designed to slow extraction of fossil fuels, but
even more to shine a light on these massive, remote deposits. The
leaders, as always, will be the frontline communities that live nearby.
Some of the rest of us will make the trek to these locations; others
will rally at embassies and banks to bring the same point home. Because
once we've marked them on the planet's mental map as mortal dangers, our
odds of winning go up.
Alternatives to fossil fuel are becoming cheaper with every passing day.
If you're still skeptical, consider what happened in the Amazon after
the world's scientists, in the 1980s, identified the rainforest as
absolutely necessary to the planet's survival. Much to the surprise of
many, the government of Brazil moved to slow deforestation. Its efforts
haven't been perfectly successful, but they've kept those trees above
the ground, just the way we need to keep that oil below it.
And we've got a couple of advantages in this fight the Brazilians
didn't. For one, they were a poor country. Many of the big carbon bombs
lie in richer nations like Canada, the United States, and Australia; we
can afford to let them be.
More importantly, it's beginning to look like we don't need to win
this fight forever. That's because alternatives to fossil fuel are
becoming cheaper with every passing day. The price of a solar panel has
fallen more than 70 percent in the last six years. That's a mortal
threat to the hydrocarbon tycoons. They know that they have to get new
infrastructure in place in the next few years. If they can build those
pipelines and mines, then for the next 40 or 50 years they'll be able to
get carbon out cheaply enough to compete (and to wreck the planet). If
they can't—if we can hold them off for just a few more years—then we'll
have made the transition to clean energy irreversible.
I don't know if we're going to win this fight in time. The flood of
scientific data about the damage that's already been done unnerves me.
But I do know we're now fighting on every front. And the most important
one is the simplest: We can, and we must, and we will keep that coal and
gas and oil underground.
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