The unsubsidised cost of wind and solar now
beats coal as the cheapest form of bulk generation in all major
economies except Japan, according to the latest levellised cost of
electricity analysis by leading energy analyst BloombergNEF.
The latest report says the biggest news comes in the two fastest
growing energy markets, China and India, where it notes that “not so
long ago coal was king”. Not any more.
“In India, best-in-class solar and wind plants are now half the cost
of new coal plants,” the report says, and this is despite the recent
imposition of import tariffs on solar cells and modules.
The China experience is also significant. While local authorities
have put a brake on local installations, causing the domestic market to
slump by one third in 2018, this has created a “global wave of cheap
equipment” that has more than compensated for increased financing costs
caused by rising interest rates.
The cost of battery storage is also falling – so much so that in
countries like Australia and India, pairing unsubsidised wind and solar
with four hours of battery storage can be cost competitive with new coal
or gas plants.
“Short-duration batteries are today the cheapest source of new
fast-response and peaking capacity in all major economies except the US,
where cheap gas gives peaker gas plants an edge. As electric vehicle
manufacturing ramps-up, battery costs are set to drop another 66 per
cent by 2030, according to our analysis,” the report says.
This is stunning stuff. BloombergNEF’s assessment of the ability of
wind, solar and storage to beat new fossil fuel plants in Australia
comes nearly a full decade before the prediction made by the Australian
Energy Market Operator in its Integrated System Plan.
It would also suggest that the only hope that the current federal
Coalition government has in trying to encourage new investment in coal
is for upgrades and extensions of existing coal plant, which may become
the limit of its rushed attempts to contract new “24/7” or “fair dinkum”
generation.
(RenewEconomy sought more information about the estimated costs, but the report details have been reserved for clients).
BloombergNEF says the emergence of battery storage as a source of
peak power and flexible capacity means that the costs of these services
will fall to levels never reached before by conventional fossil-fuel
peaking plants.
“Batteries co-located with PV or wind are becoming more common,” the report says.
“Our analysis suggests that new-build solar and wind paired with
four-hour battery storage systems can already be cost competitive,
without subsidy, as a source of dispatchable generation compared with
new coal and new gas plants in Australia and India.
The Bloomberg analysis follows quickly on the heals of the recent
annual Lazard uptake, and the voluminous World Energy Outlook from the
more conservative International Energy Agency. All three come to the
same conclusions: wind and solar and storage will beat out fossil fuels.
Globally, BloombergNEF says the benchmark global levellised cost of
new PV (no-tracking) has fallen 13 per cent from the first half of the
year to $US60/MWh, although the lowest costs occur in countries with
excellent solar resources such as Australia.
This graph above shows the costs in China, where solar and wind have now
begun to challenge coal, beat nuclear and also gas. If the combination
of solar and battery appears to put it out of the market, this next
graph may provide some context, as it shows the comparison between
battery storage and the current choice of meeting peak demand, gas
peakers.
It shows that for short one hour durations, battery storage is
already easily the cheapest, and as battery costs continue to fall, even
four hour battery storage will beat the current thermal options for
meeting demand peaks and fast response.
BloombergNEF’s benchmark global levelized cost for onshore wind sits
at $US52/MWh, a six per cent fall from its analysis six months ago,
thanks to cheaper turbines and a stronger US dollar. The technology is
now as cheap as $US27/MWh in India and Texas, without subsidy.
In the US, even with cheap shale gas, wind beats combined-cycle gas
plants (CCGT) as a source of new bulk generation. And if the gas price
rises above $US3/MMBtu, BloombergNEG suggest existing CCGT are going to
run the risk of becoming rapidly undercut by new solar and wind.
“This means fewer run-hours and a stronger case for flexible
technologies such as gas peaker plants and batteries that do well at
lower utilization (capacity factor),” it says.
In the Asia-Pacific, gas is more expensive which means that new-build
combined-cycle gas plants with a levelized cost of $US70-117/MWh
continue to be less competitive than new coal-fired power at
$US59-81/MWh. This remains a major hurdle for reducing the carbon
intensity of electricity generation in this part of the world.
BlombergNEF’s LCOE analysis covers nearly 7,000 projects across 20 technologies and 46 countries globally.
With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its assault on the facts.
California is currently ablaze, after a record hot summer and a dry fall set the stage for the most destructive fires in the state’s history. Above: The Woolsey fire, near Los Angeles, seen from the West Hills. Photograph by Kevin Cooley for The New Yorker
Thirty years ago, this magazine published "The End of Nature," a long
article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my
twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate
science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted
with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that
nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its
capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic
metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its
water. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began
referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man.
I was frightened by my reporting, but, at the time, it seemed likely
that we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening. In 1988,
George H. W. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight
“the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did
his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world,
and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has
become a fierce daily reality. As this essay goes to press, California
is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu,
and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the
most destructive in California’s history. After a summer of
unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than
half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city
called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten
thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people; more than
six hundred others are missing. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs,
a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and
anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on
how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments.
For the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held that
conditions for human beings around the globe have been improving. Wars
are scarcer, poverty and hunger are less severe, and there are better
prospects for wide-scale literacy and education. But there are newer
signs that human progress has begun to flag. In the face of our
environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the
human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out. Late in
2017, a United Nations agency announced that the number of chronically
malnourished people in the world, after a decade of decline, had started
to grow again—by thirty-eight million, to a total of eight hundred and
fifteen million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts
and climate-related shocks.” In June, 2018, the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the U.N. found that child labor, after years of falling,
was growing, “driven in part by an increase in conflicts and
climate-induced disasters.”
In 2015, at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris, the
world’s governments, noting that the earth has so far warmed a little
more than one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, set a goal of
holding the increase this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees
Fahrenheit), with a fallback target of two degrees (3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit). This past October, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change published a special report stating that global warming
“is likely to reach 1.5 C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to
increase at the current rate.” We will have drawn a line in the sand and
then watched a rising tide erase it. The report did not mention that,
in Paris, countries’ initial pledges would cut emissions only enough to
limit warming to 3.5 degrees Celsius (about 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by
the end of the century, a scale and pace of change so profound as to
call into question whether our current societies could survive it.
Scientists have warned for decades that climate change would lead to
extreme weather. Shortly before the I.P.C.C. report was published,
Hurricane Michael, the strongest hurricane ever to hit the Florida
Panhandle, inflicted thirty billion dollars’ worth of material damage
and killed forty-five people. President Trump, who has argued that
global warming is “a total, and very expensive, hoax,” visited Florida
to survey the wreckage, but told reporters that the storm had not caused
him to rethink his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate
accords. He expressed no interest in the I.P. C.C. report beyond asking
“who drew it.” (The answer is ninety-one researchers from forty
countries.) He later claimed that his “natural instinct” for science
made him confident that the climate would soon “change back.” A month
later, Trump blamed the fires in California on “gross mismanagement of
forests.”
Human beings have always experienced wars and truces, crashes and
recoveries, famines and terrorism. We’ve endured tyrants and outlasted
perverse ideologies. Climate change is different. As a team of
scientists recently pointed out in the journal Nature Climate Change,
the physical shifts we’re inflicting on the planet will “extend longer
than the entire history of human civilization thus far.”
The poorest and most vulnerable will pay the highest price. But
already, even in the most affluent areas, many of us hesitate to walk
across a grassy meadow because of the proliferation of ticks bearing
Lyme disease which have come with the hot weather; we have found
ourselves unable to swim off beaches, because jellyfish, which thrive as
warming seas kill off other marine life, have taken over the water. The
planet’s diameter will remain eight thousand miles, and its surface
will still cover two hundred million square miles. But the earth, for
humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet and in our minds.
“Climate change,” like “urban sprawl” or “gun
violence,” has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it.
But exactly what we’ve been up to should fill us with awe. During the
past two hundred years, we have burned immense quantities of coal and
gas and oil—in car motors, basement furnaces, power plants, steel
mills—and, as we have done so, carbon atoms have combined with oxygen
atoms in the air to produce carbon dioxide. This, along with other gases
like methane, has trapped heat that would otherwise have radiated back
out to space.
There are at least four other episodes in the earth’s half-billion-year history of animal life when CO2
has poured into the atmosphere in greater volumes, but perhaps never at
greater speeds. Even at the end of the Permian Age, when huge
injections of CO2 from volcanoes burning through coal deposits culminated in “The Great Dying,” the CO2 content of the atmosphere grew at perhaps a tenth of the current pace. Two centuries ago, the concentration of CO2
in the atmosphere was two hundred and seventy-five parts per million;
it has now topped four hundred parts per million and is rising more than
two parts per million each year. The extra heat that we trap near the
planet every day is equivalent to the heat from four hundred thousand
bombs the size of the one that was dropped on Hiroshima.
As a result, in the past thirty years we’ve seen all twenty of the
hottest years ever recorded. The melting of ice caps and glaciers and
the rising levels of our oceans and seas, initially predicted for the
end of the century, have occurred decades early. “I’ve never been
at . . . a climate conference where people say ‘that happened slower
than I thought it would,’ ” Christina Hulbe, a New Zealand
climatologist, told a reporter for Grist last year. This past
May, a team of scientists from the University of Illinois reported that
there was a thirty-five-per-cent chance that, because of unexpectedly
high economic growth rates, the U.N.’s “worst-case scenario” for global
warming was too optimistic. “We are now truly in uncharted territory,”
David Carlson, the former director of the World Meteorological
Organization’s climate-research division, said in the spring of 2017,
after data showed that the previous year had broken global heat records.
We are off the literal charts as well. In August, I visited
Greenland, where, one day, with a small group of scientists and
activists, I took a boat from the village of Narsaq to a glacier on a
nearby fjord. As we made our way across a broad bay, I glanced up at the
electronic chart above the captain’s wheel, where a blinking icon
showed that we were a mile inland. The captain explained that the chart
was from five years ago, when the water around us was still ice. The
American glaciologist Jason Box, who organized the trip, chose our
landing site. “We called this place the Eagle Glacier because of its
shape,” he said. The name, too, was five years old. “The head and the
wings of the bird have melted away. I don’t know what we should call it
now, but the eagle is dead.”
There were two poets among the crew, Aka Niviana, who is Greenlandic,
and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, from the low-lying Marshall Islands, in the
Pacific, where “king tides” recently washed through living rooms and
unearthed graveyards. A small lens of fresh water has supported life on
the Marshall Islands’ atolls for millennia, but, as salt water intrudes,
breadfruit trees and banana palms wilt and die. As the Greenlandic ice
we were gazing at continues to melt, the water will drown
Jetnil-Kijiner’s homeland. About a third of the carbon responsible for
these changes has come from the United States.
A few days after the boat trip, the two poets and I accompanied the
scientists to another fjord, where they needed to change the memory card
on a camera that tracks the retreat of the ice sheet. As we took off
for the flight home over the snout of a giant glacier, an eight-story
chunk calved off the face and crashed into the ocean. I’d never seen
anything quite like it for sheer power—the waves rose twenty feet as it
plunged into the dark water. You could imagine the same waves washing
through the Marshalls. You could almost sense the ice elevating the
ocean by a sliver—along the seafront in Mumbai, which already floods on a
stormy day, and at the Battery in Manhattan, where the seawall rises
just a few feet above the water.
When I say the world has begun to shrink, this is
what I mean. Until now, human beings have been spreading, from our
beginnings in Africa, out across the globe—slowly at first, and then
much faster. But a period of contraction is setting in as we lose parts
of the habitable earth. Sometimes our retreat will be hasty and violent;
the effort to evacuate the blazing California towns along narrow roads
was so chaotic that many people died in their cars. But most of the
pullback will be slower, starting along the world’s coastlines. Each
year, another twenty-four thousand people abandon Vietnam’s sublimely
fertile Mekong Delta as crop fields are polluted with salt. As sea ice
melts along the Alaskan coast, there is nothing to protect towns,
cities, and native villages from the waves. In Mexico Beach, Florida,
which was all but eradicated by Hurricane Michael, a resident told the
Washington Post, “The older people can’t rebuild; it’s too late in their lives. Who is going to be left? Who is going to care?”
In one week at the end of last year, I read accounts from Louisiana,
where government officials were finalizing a plan to relocate thousands
of people threatened by the rising Gulf (“Not everybody is going to live
where they are now and continue their way of life, and that is a
terrible, and emotional, reality to face,” one state official said);
from Hawaii, where, according to a new study, thirty-eight miles of
coastal roads will become impassable in the next few decades; and from
Jakarta, a city with a population of ten million, where a rising Java
Sea had flooded the streets. In the first days of 2018, a nor’easter
flooded downtown Boston; dumpsters and cars floated through the
financial district. “If anyone wants to question global warming, just
see where the flood zones are,” Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston, told
reporters. “Some of those zones did not flood thirty years ago.”
According to a study from the United Kingdom’s National Oceanography
Centre last summer, the damage caused by rising sea levels will cost the
world as much as fourteen trillion dollars a year by 2100, if the U.N.
targets aren’t met. “Like it or not, we will retreat from most of the
world’s non-urban shorelines in the not very distant future,” Orrin
Pilkey, an expert on sea levels at Duke University, wrote in his book
“Retreat from a Rising Sea.” “We can plan now and retreat in a strategic
and calculated fashion, or we can worry about it later and retreat in
tactical disarray in response to devastating storms. In other words, we
can walk away methodically, or we can flee in panic.”
But it’s not clear where to go. As with the rising seas, rising
temperatures have begun to narrow the margins of our inhabitation, this
time in the hot continental interiors. Nine of the ten deadliest heat
waves in human history have occurred since 2000. In India, the rise in
temperature since 1960 (about one degree Fahrenheit) has increased the
chance of mass heat-related deaths by a hundred and fifty per cent. The
summer of 2018 was the hottest ever measured in certain areas. For a
couple of days in June, temperatures in cities in Pakistan and Iran
peaked at slightly above a hundred and twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit,
the highest reliably recorded temperatures ever measured. The same heat
wave, nearer the shore of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman,
combined triple-digit temperatures with soaring humidity levels to
produce a heat index of more than a hundred and forty degrees
Fahrenheit. June 26th was the warmest night in history, with the mercury
in one Omani city remaining above a hundred and nine degrees Fahrenheit
until morning. In July, a heat wave in Montreal killed more than
seventy people, and Death Valley, which often sets American records,
registered the hottest month ever seen on our planet. Africa recorded
its highest temperature in June, the Korean Peninsula in July, and
Europe in August. The Times reported that, in Algeria,
employees at a petroleum plant walked off the job as the temperature
neared a hundred and twenty-four degrees. “We couldn’t keep up,” one
worker told the reporter. “It was impossible to do the work.”
This was no illusion; some of the world is becoming too hot for
humans. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, increased heat and humidity have reduced the amount of
work people can do outdoors by ten per cent, a figure that is predicted
to double by 2050. About a decade ago, Australian and American
researchers, setting out to determine the highest survivable so-called
“wet-bulb” temperature, concluded that when temperatures passed
thirty-five degrees Celsius (ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit) and the
humidity was higher than ninety per cent, even in “well-ventilated
shaded conditions,” sweating slows down, and humans can survive only
“for a few hours, the exact length of time being determined by
individual physiology.”
As the planet warms, a crescent-shaped area encompassing parts of
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the North China Plain, where about 1.5
billion people (a fifth of humanity) live, is at high risk of such
temperatures in the next half century. Across this belt, extreme heat
waves that currently happen once every generation could, by the end of
the century, become “annual events with temperatures close to the
threshold for several weeks each year, which could lead to famine and
mass migration.” By 2070, tropical regions that now get one day of truly
oppressive humid heat a year can expect between a hundred and two
hundred and fifty days, if the current levels of greenhouse-gas
emissions continue. According to Radley Horton, a climate scientist at
the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, most people would “run into
terrible problems” before then. The effects, he added, will be
“transformative for all areas of human endeavor—economy, agriculture,
military, recreation.”
Humans share the planet with many other creatures, of course. We have
already managed to kill off sixty per cent of the world’s wildlife
since 1970 by destroying their habitats, and now higher temperatures are
starting to take their toll. A new study found that peak-dwelling birds
were going extinct; as temperatures climb, the birds can no longer find
relief on higher terrain. Coral reefs, rich in biodiversity, may soon
be a tenth of their current size.
As some people flee humidity and rising sea
levels, others will be forced to relocate in order to find enough water
to survive. In late 2017, a study led by Manoj Joshi, of the University
of East Anglia, found that, by 2050, if temperatures rise by two degrees
a quarter of the earth will experience serious drought and
desertification. The early signs are clear: São Paulo came within days
of running out of water last year, as did Cape Town this spring. In the
fall, a record drought in Germany lowered the level of the Elbe to below
twenty inches and reduced the corn harvest by forty per cent. The
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research concluded in a recent
study that, as the number of days that reach eighty-six degrees
Fahrenheit or higher increases, corn and soybean yields across the U.S.
grain belt could fall by between twenty-two and forty-nine per cent.
We’ve already overpumped the aquifers that lie beneath most of the
world’s breadbaskets; without the means to irrigate, we may encounter a
repeat of the nineteen-thirties, when droughts and deep plowing led to
the Dust Bowl—this time with no way of fixing the problem. Back then,
the Okies fled to California, but California is no longer a green oasis.
A hundred million trees died in the record drought that gripped the
Golden State for much of this decade. The dead limbs helped spread the
waves of fire, as scientists earlier this year warned that they could.
Thirty years ago, some believed that warmer temperatures would expand
the field of play, turning the Arctic into the new Midwest. As Rex
Tillerson, then the C.E.O. of Exxon, cheerfully put it in 2012, “Changes
to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we’ll adapt
to that.” But there is no rich topsoil in the far North; instead, the
ground is underlaid with permafrost, which can be found beneath a fifth
of the Northern Hemisphere. As the permafrost melts, it releases more
carbon into the atmosphere. The thawing layer cracks roads, tilts
houses, and uproots trees to create what scientists call “drunken
forests.” Ninety scientists who released a joint report in 2017
concluded that economic losses from a warming Arctic could approach
ninety trillion dollars in the course of the century, considerably
outweighing whatever savings may have resulted from shorter shipping
routes as the Northwest Passage unfreezes.
Churchill, Manitoba, on the edge of the Hudson Bay, in Canada, is
connected to the rest of the country by a single rail line. In the
spring of 2017, record floods washed away much of the track. OmniTrax,
which owns the line, tried to cancel its contract with the government,
declaring what lawyers call a “force majeure,” an unforeseen event
beyond its responsibility. “To fix things in this era of climate
change—well, it’s fixed, but you don’t count on it being the fix
forever,” an engineer for the company explained at a media briefing in
July. This summer, the Canadian government reopened the rail at a cost
of a hundred and seventeen million dollars—about a hundred and ninety
thousand dollars per Churchill resident. There is no reason to think the
fix will last, and every reason to believe that our world will keep
contracting.
All this has played out more or less as scientists
warned, albeit faster. What has defied expectations is the slowness of
the response. The climatologist James Hansen testified before Congress
about the dangers of human-caused climate change thirty years ago. Since
then, carbon emissions have increased with each year except 2009 (the
height of the global recession) and the newest data show that 2018 will
set another record. Simple inertia and the human tendency to prioritize
short-term gains have played a role, but the fossil-fuel industry’s
contribution has been by far the most damaging. Alex Steffen, an
environmental writer, coined the term “predatory delay” to describe “the
blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off
unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” The behavior of the oil
companies, which have pulled off perhaps the most consequential
deception in mankind’s history, is a prime example.
As journalists at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times
have revealed since 2015, Exxon, the world’s largest oil company,
understood that its product was contributing to climate change a decade
before Hansen testified. In July, 1977, James F. Black, one of Exxon’s
senior scientists, addressed many of the company’s top leaders in New
York, explaining the earliest research on the greenhouse effect. “There
is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which
mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon-dioxide
release from the burning of fossil fuels,” he said, according to a
written version of the speech which was later recorded, and which was
obtained by InsideClimate News. In 1978, speaking to the company’s
executives, Black estimated that a doubling of the carbon-dioxide
concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global
temperatures by between two and three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees
Fahrenheit), and as much as ten degrees Celsius (eighteen degrees
Fahrenheit) at the poles.
Exxon spent millions of dollars researching the problem. It outfitted an oil tanker, the Esso Atlantic, with CO2
detectors to measure how fast the oceans could absorb excess carbon,
and hired mathematicians to build sophisticated climate models. By 1982,
they had concluded that even the company’s earlier estimates were
probably too low. In a private corporate primer, they wrote that heading
off global warming and “potentially catastrophic events” would “require
major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”
An investigation by the L.A. Times revealed that Exxon
executives took these warnings seriously. Ken Croasdale, a senior
researcher for the company’s Canadian subsidiary, led a team that
investigated the positive and negative effects of warming on Exxon’s
Arctic operations. In 1991, he found that greenhouse gases were rising
due to the burning of fossil fuels. “Nobody disputes this fact,” he
said. The following year, he wrote that “global warming can only help
lower exploration and development costs” in the Beaufort Sea. Drilling
season in the Arctic, he correctly predicted, would increase from two
months to as many as five months. At the same time, he said, the rise in
the sea level could threaten onshore infrastructure and create bigger
waves that would damage offshore drilling structures. Thawing permafrost
could make the earth buckle and slide under buildings and pipelines. As
a result of these findings, Exxon and other major oil companies began
laying plans to move into the Arctic, and started to build their new
drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate for the anticipated
rises in sea level.
The implications of the exposés were startling. Not only did Exxon
and other companies know that scientists like Hansen were right; they
used his NASA climate models to figure out how
low their drilling costs in the Arctic would eventually fall. Had Exxon
and its peers passed on what they knew to the public, geological history
would look very different today. The problem of climate change would
not be solved, but the crisis would, most likely, now be receding. In
1989, an international ban on chlorine-containing man-made chemicals
that had been eroding the earth’s ozone layer went into effect. Last
month, researchers reported that the ozone layer was on track to fully
heal by 2060. But that was a relatively easy fight, because the
chemicals in question were not central to the world’s economy, and the
manufacturers had readily available substitutes to sell. In the case of
global warming, the culprit is fossil fuel, the most lucrative commodity
on earth, and so the companies responsible took a different tack.
A document uncovered by the L.A. Times showed that, a month
after Hansen’s testimony, in 1988, an unnamed Exxon “public affairs
manager” issued an internal memo recommending that the company
“emphasize the uncertainty” in the scientific data about climate change.
Within a few years, Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Amoco, and others had joined
the Global Climate Coalition, “to coordinate business participation in
the international policy debate” on global warming. The G.C.C.
coördinated with the National Coal Association and the American
Petroleum Institute on a campaign, via letters and telephone calls, to
prevent a tax on fossil fuels, and produced a video in which the agency
insisted that more carbon dioxide would “end world hunger” by promoting
plant growth. With such efforts, it ginned up opposition to the Kyoto
Protocol, the first global initiative to address climate change.
In October, 1997, two months before the Kyoto meeting, Lee Raymond,
Exxon’s president and C.E.O., who had overseen the science department
that in the nineteen-eighties produced the findings about climate
change, gave a speech in Beijing to the World Petroleum Congress, in
which he maintained that the earth was actually cooling. The idea that
cutting fossil-fuel emissions could have an effect on the climate, he
said, defied common sense. “It is highly unlikely that the temperature
in the middle of the next century will be affected whether policies are
enacted now, or twenty years from now,” he went on. Exxon’s own
scientists had already shown each of these premises to be wrong.
On a December morning in 1997 at the Kyoto Convention Center, after a
long night of negotiation, the developed nations reached a tentative
accord on climate change. Exhausted delegates lay slumped on couches in
the corridor, or on the floor in their suits, but most of them were
grinning. Imperfect and limited though the agreement was, it seemed that
momentum had gathered behind fighting climate change. But as I watched
the delegates cheering and clapping, an American lobbyist, who had been
coördinating much of the opposition to the accord, turned to me and
said, “I can’t wait to get back to Washington, where we’ve got this
under control.”
He was right. On January 29, 2001, nine days after George W. Bush was
inaugurated, Lee Raymond visited his old friend Vice-President Dick
Cheney, who had just stepped down as the C.E.O. of the oil-drilling
giant Halliburton. Cheney helped persuade Bush to abandon his campaign
promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Within the year, Frank
Luntz, a Republican consultant for Bush, had produced an internal memo
that made a doctrine of the strategy that the G.C.C. had hit on a decade
earlier. “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global
warming within the scientific community,” Luntz wrote in the memo, which
was obtained by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based
organization. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific
issues are settled, their views about global warming will change
accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of
scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”
The strategy of muddling the public’s impression of climate science
has proved to be highly effective. In 2017, polls found that almost
ninety per cent of Americans did not know that there was a scientific
consensus on global warming. Raymond retired in 2006, after the company
posted the biggest corporate profits in history, and his final annual
salary was four hundred million dollars. His successor, Rex Tillerson,
signed a five-hundred-billion-dollar deal to explore for oil in the
rapidly thawing Russian Arctic, and in 2012 was awarded the Russian
Order of Friendship. In 2016, Tillerson, at his last shareholder meeting
before he briefly joined the Trump Administration as Secretary of
State, said, “The world is going to have to continue using fossil fuels,
whether they like it or not.”
It’s by no means clear whether Exxon’s deception and obfuscation are
illegal. The company has long maintained that it “has tracked the
scientific consensus on climate change, and its research on the issue
has been published in publicly available peer-reviewed journals.” The
First Amendment preserves one’s right to lie, although, in October, New
York State Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood filed suit against
Exxon for lying to investors, which is a crime. What is certain
is that the industry’s campaign cost us the efforts of the human
generation that might have made the crucial difference in the climate
fight.
Exxon’s behavior is shocking, but not entirely
surprising. Philip Morris lied about the effects of cigarette smoking
before the government stood up to Big Tobacco. The mystery that
historians will have to unravel is what went so wrong in our governance
and our culture that we have done, essentially, nothing to stand up to
the fossil-fuel industry.
There are undoubtedly myriad intellectual, psychological, and
political sources for our inaction, but I cannot help thinking that the
influence of Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré novelist, may have played a
role. Rand’s disquisitions on the “virtue of selfishness” and unbridled
capitalism are admired by many American politicians and economists—Paul
Ryan, Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, Andrew Puzder, and Donald Trump, among
them. Trump, who has called “The Fountainhead” his favorite book, said
that the novel “relates to business and beauty and life and inner
emotions. That book relates to . . . everything.” Long after Rand’s
death, in 1982, the libertarian gospel of the novel continues to sway
our politics: Government is bad. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft.
The Koch brothers, whose enormous fortune derives in large part from the
mining and refining of oil and gas, have peddled a similar message,
broadening the efforts that Exxon-funded groups like the Global Climate
Coalition spearheaded in the late nineteen-eighties.
Fossil-fuel companies and electric utilities, often led by
Koch-linked groups, have put up fierce resistance to change. In Kansas,
Koch allies helped turn mandated targets for renewable energy into
voluntary commitments. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker’s administration
prohibited state land officials from talking about climate change. In
North Carolina, the state legislature, in conjunction with real-estate
interests, effectively banned policymakers from using scientific
estimates of sea-level rise in the coastal-planning process. Earlier
this year, Americans for Prosperity, the most important Koch front
group, waged a campaign against new bus routes and light-rail service in
Tennessee, invoking human liberty. “If someone has the freedom to go
where they want, do what they want, they’re not going to choose public
transit,” a spokeswoman for the group explained. In Florida, an
anti-renewable-subsidy ballot measure invoked the “Rights of Electricity
Consumers Regarding Solar Energy Choice.”
Such efforts help explain why, in 2017, the growth of American
residential solar installations came to a halt even before March, 2018,
when President Trump imposed a thirty-per-cent tariff on solar panels,
and why the number of solar jobs fell in the U.S. for the first time
since the industry’s great expansion began, a decade earlier. In
February, at the Department of Energy, Rick Perry—who once skipped his
own arraignment on two felony charges, which were eventually dismissed,
in order to attend a Koch brothers event—issued a new projection in
which he announced that the U.S. would go on emitting carbon at current
levels through 2050; this means that our nation would use up all the
planet’s remaining carbon budget if we plan on meeting the 1.5-degree
target. Skepticism about the scientific consensus, Perry told the media
in 2017, is a sign of a “wise, intellectually engaged person.”
Of all the environmental reversals made by the Trump Administration,
the most devastating was its decision, last year, to withdraw from the
Paris accords, making the U.S., the largest single historical source of
carbon, the only nation not engaged in international efforts to control
it. As the Washington Post reported, the withdrawal was the
result of a collaborative venture. Among the anti-government ideologues
and fossil-fuel lobbyists responsible was Myron Ebell, who was at
Trump’s side in the Rose Garden during the withdrawal announcement, and
who, at Frontiers of Freedom, had helped run a “complex influence
campaign” in support of the tobacco industry. Ebell is a director of the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, which was founded in 1984 to advance
“the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual
liberty,” and which funds the Cooler Heads Coalition, “an informal and
ad-hoc group focused on dispelling the myths of global warming,” of
which Ebell is the chairman. Also instrumental were the Heartland
Institute and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. After Trump’s
election, these groups sent a letter reminding him of his campaign
pledge to pull America out. The C.E.I. ran a TV spot: “Mr. President,
don’t listen to the swamp. Keep your promise.” And, despite the
objections of most of his advisers, he did. The coalition had used its
power to slow us down precisely at the moment when we needed to speed
up. As a result, the particular politics of one country for one
half-century will have changed the geological history of the earth.
We are on a path to self-destruction, and yet
there is nothing inevitable about our fate. Solar panels and wind
turbines are now among the least expensive ways to produce energy.
Storage batteries are cheaper and more efficient than ever. We could
move quickly if we chose to, but we’d need to opt for solidarity and
coördination on a global scale. The chances of that look slim. In
Russia, the second-largest petrostate after the U.S., Vladimir Putin
believes that “climate change could be tied to some global cycles on
Earth or even of planetary significance.” Saudi Arabia, the
third-largest petrostate, tried to water down the recent I.P.C.C.
report. Jair Bolsonaro, the newly elected President of Brazil, has vowed
to institute policies that would dramatically accelerate the
deforestation of the Amazon, the world’s largest rain forest. Meanwhile,
Exxon recently announced a plan to spend a million dollars—about a
hundredth of what the company spends each month in search of new oil and
gas—to back the fight for a carbon tax of forty dollars a ton. At a
press conference, some of the I.P.C.C.’s authors laughed out loud at the
idea that such a tax would, this late in the game, have sufficient
impact.The possibility of swift change lies in people coming together in
movements large enough to shift the Zeitgeist. In recent years,
despairing at the slow progress, I’ve been one of many to protest
pipelines and to call attention to Big Oil’s deceptions. The movement is
growing. Since 2015, when four hundred thousand people marched in the
streets of New York before the Paris climate talks, activists—often led
by indigenous groups and communities living on the front lines of
climate change—have blocked pipelines, forced the cancellation of new
coal mines, helped keep the major oil companies out of the American
Arctic, and persuaded dozens of cities to commit to one-hundred-per-cent
renewable energy.
Each of these efforts has played out in the shadow of the industry’s
unflagging campaign to maximize profits and prevent change. Voters in
Washington State were initially supportive of a measure on last month’s
ballot which would have imposed the nation’s first carbon tax—a modest
fee that won support from such figures as Bill Gates. But the major oil
companies spent record sums to defeat it. In Colorado, a similarly
modest referendum that would have forced frackers to move their rigs
away from houses and schools went down after the oil industry outspent
citizen groups forty to one. This fall, California’s legislators
committed to using only renewable energy by 2045, which was a great
victory in the world’s fifth-largest economy. But the governor refused
to stop signing new permits for oil wells, even in the middle of the
state’s largest cities, where asthma rates are high.
New kinds of activism keep springing up. In Sweden this fall, a
one-person school boycott by a fifteen-year-old girl named Greta
Thunberg helped galvanize attention across Scandinavia. At the end of
October, a new British group, Extinction Rebellion—its name both a
reflection of the dire science and a potentially feisty
response—announced plans for a campaign of civil disobedience. Last
week, fifty-one young people were arrested in Nancy Pelosi’s office for
staging a sit-in, demanding that the Democrats embrace a “Green New
Deal” that would address the global climate crisis with policies to
create jobs in renewable energy. They may have picked a winning issue:
several polls have shown that even Republicans favor more government
support for solar panels. This battle is epic and undecided. If we miss
the two-degree target, we will fight to prevent a rise of three degrees,
and then four. It’s a long escalator down to Hell.
Last June, I went to Cape Canaveral to watch Elon
Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket lift off. When the moment came, it was as I’d
always imagined: the clouds of steam venting in the minutes before
launch, the immensely bright column of flame erupting. With remarkable
slowness, the rocket began to rise, the grip of gravity yielding to the
force of its engines. It is the most awesome technological spectacle
human beings have produced.
Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson are among the billionaires who
have spent some of their fortunes on space travel—a last-ditch effort to
expand the human zone of habitability. In November, 2016, Stephen
Hawking gave humanity a deadline of a thousand years to leave Earth. Six
months later, he revised the timetable to a century. In June, 2017, he
told an audience that “spreading out may be the only thing that saves us
from ourselves.” He continued, “Earth is under threat from so many
areas that it is difficult for me to be positive.”
But escaping the wreckage is, almost certainly, a fantasy. Even if
astronauts did cross the thirty-four million miles to Mars, they’d need
to go underground to survive there. To what end? The multimillion-dollar
attempts at building a “biosphere” in the Southwestern desert in 1991
ended in abject failure. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of a trilogy
of novels about the colonization of Mars, recently called such projects a
“moral hazard.” “People think if we fuck up here on Earth we can always
go to Mars or the stars,” he said. “It’s pernicious.”
The dream of interplanetary colonization also distracts us from
acknowledging the unbearable beauty of the planet we already inhabit.
The day before the launch, I went on a tour of the vast grounds of the
Kennedy Space Center with NASA’s public-affairs officer, Greg Harland, and the biologist Don Dankert. I’d been warned beforehand by other NASA officials not to broach the topic of global warming; in any event, NASA’s
predicament became obvious as soon as we climbed up on a dune
overlooking Launch Complex 39, from which the Apollo missions left for
the moon, and where any future Mars mission would likely begin. The
launchpad is a quarter of a mile from the ocean—a perfect location, in
the sense that, if something goes wrong, the rockets will fall into the
sea, but not so perfect, since that sea is now rising. NASA started worrying about this sometime after the turn of the century, and formed a Dune Vulnerability Team.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy, even at a distance of a couple of hundred
miles, churned up waves strong enough to break through the barrier of
dunes along the Atlantic shoreline of the Space Center and very nearly
swamped the launch complexes. Dankert had millions of cubic yards of
sand excavated from a nearby Air Force base, and saw to it that a
hundred and eighty thousand native shrubs were planted to hold the sand
in place. So far, the new dunes have yielded little ground to storms and
hurricanes. But what impressed me more than the dunes was the men’s
deep appreciation of their landscape. “Kennedy Space Center shares real
estate with the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge,” Harland said. “We use
less than ten per cent for our industrial purposes.”
“When you look at the beach, it’s like eighteen-seventies Florida—the
longest undisturbed stretch on the Atlantic Coast,” Dankert said. “We
launch people into space from the middle of a wildlife refuge. That’s
amazing.”
The two men talked for a long time about their favorite local
species—the brown pelicans that were skimming the ocean, the Florida
scrub jays. While rebuilding the dunes, they carefully bucket-trapped
and relocated dozens of gopher tortoises. Before I left, they drove me
half an hour across the swamp to a pond near the Space Center’s
headquarters building, just to show me some alligators. Menacing snouts
were visible beneath the water, but I was more interested in the sign
that had been posted at each corner of the pond explaining that the
alligators were native species, not pets. “Putting any food in the water
for any reason will cause them to become accustomed to people and
possibly dangerous,” it went on, adding that, if that should happen,
“they must be removed and destroyed.”
Something about the sign moved me tremendously. It would have been
easy enough to poison the pond, just as it would have been easy enough
to bulldoze the dunes without a thought for the tortoises. But NASA
hadn’t done so, because of a long series of laws that draw on an
emerging understanding of who we are. In 1867, John Muir, one of the
first Western environmentalists, walked from Louisville, Kentucky, to
Florida, a trip that inspired his first heretical thoughts about the
meaning of being human. “The world, we are told, was made especially for
man—a presumption not supported by all the facts,” Muir wrote in his
diary. “A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they
find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot
eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.” Muir’s
proof that this self-centeredness was misguided was the alligator, which
he could hear roaring in the Florida swamp as he camped nearby, and
which clearly caused man mostly trouble. But these animals were
wonderful nonetheless, Muir decided—remarkable creatures perfectly
adapted to their landscape. “I have better thoughts of those alligators
now that I’ve seen them at home,” he wrote. In his diary, he addressed
the creatures directly: “Honorable representatives of the great saurian
of an older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be
blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of
dainty.”
That evening, Harland and Dankert drew a crude map to help me find
the beach, north of Patrick Air Force Base and south of the spot where,
in 1965, Barbara Eden emerged from her bottle to greet her astronaut at
the start of the TV series “I Dream of Jeannie.” There, they said, I
could wait out the hours until the pre-dawn rocket launch and perhaps
spot a loggerhead sea turtle coming ashore to lay her eggs. And so I sat
on the sand. The beach was deserted, and under a near-full moon I
watched as a turtle trundled from the sea and lumbered deliberately to a
spot near the dune, where she used her powerful legs to excavate a pit.
She spent an hour laying eggs, and even from thirty yards away you
could hear her heavy breathing in between the whispers of the waves. And
then, having covered her clutch, she tracked back to the ocean, in the
fashion of others like her for the past hundred and twenty million
years.
In a prolonged warming scenario, the organisms that are most relied upon to sustain food networks will die out first. Photo: istock
It may feel sad but not the end of the word to lose a few species of
plants or animals from global warming. It’s a crowded world, right?
Plenty of species are dying out and life goes on is a common fatalist
mantra.
But a new study from Australia and Italy has proved that idea horribly wrong.
Researchers
from Australia and Italy created 2000 virtual Earths (variations of the
planet we live on) and then subjected them to different stresses such
as runaway global warming, nuclear winter following the detonation of
multiple atomic bombs, and a large asteroid impact.
The domino effect
Each
scenario came to the same disturbing conclusion: plant or animal
species killed off by extreme environmental change dramatically
increases the risk of an extinction domino effect that could annihilate
all life on Earth.
Once certain species fell to oblivion, others followed – and the whole system eventually collapsed.
Even when some species were blessed with artificial adaptations to climate change, the mass of life was lost.
“Even
the most resilient species will inevitably fall victim to the synergies
among extinction drivers as extreme stresses drive ecosystems to
collapse,” said lead author Dr Giovanni Strona of the European
Commission’s Joint Research Centre based in Ispra, northern Italy.
The co-extinction syndrome
As
a statement from Finders University in Adelaide put it: “This is the
worst-case scenario of what scientists call ‘co-extinctions’, where an
organism dies out because it depends on another doomed species.”
The findings were published this week in the journal Scientific Reports.
Professor
Corey Bradshaw is the Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology at
Flinders University. He and his team develop models to predict ecosystem
function, resilience, and change in the past, present, and future.
Dr Bradshaw told The New Daily that working with a virtual Earth allowed the team to do any “crazy God-like experiment” they wanted.
“And
so we’d take out species at random and see what happened,” he said.
“We’d do that progressively until we got a full extinction curve for all
life.”
The speediest end
The quickest way to kill the planet, he said, was taking out the most ecologically important species first.
“They’re
the ones with the most connections in a network. Losing them is the
worst-case scenario. When something that is only connected to one or two
species dies off, it isn’t going to be missed so much,” Dr Bradshaw
said.
When the team warmed up the planet, they found that warming
“effectively mimicked the experiment where we knocked out the
ecologically most important species. This is what surprised us: warming
turns out to be the worst case scenario”.
The beginning of the end
comes with the loss of plant life. “Plants have a low tolerance to
temperatures at the top end. When you knock out certain plant
communities, the herbivores have nothing to eat. Then the predators that
eat the herbivores have nothing to eat.”
As the world warms up,
it’s the trees that will begin to die out in greater numbers. “A tree
can only stand a couple of days above 45 degrees. If that heatwave lasts
a couple of weeks, they’re wiped out. Then all the things that live in
the trees, the bird and insects, they all go as well. Warming is the
worst because it affects the plants the most.”
Dr Bradshaw said
that failing to take into account these co-extinctions means we are
underestimating the rate and magnitude of the loss of entire species
from events like climate change “by up to 10 times.”
He said that
humans had evolved to not think about the worst-case scenario “because
it’s psychologically stressful” and easier to say that things will never
get so bad.
“But not taking into account this domino effect gives
an unrealistic and exceedingly optimistic perspective about the impact
of future climate change.”
In a statement, Dr Strona said: “In the
case of global warming in particular, the combination of intolerance to
heat combined with co-extinctions mean that five to six degrees of
average warming globally is enough to wipe out most life on the planet.”
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant
who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has
appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Common Dreams, Le Monde
Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com,
Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an
oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights.
There’s a reason that few people are thinking about world grain
supplies. Last year saw record worldwide production of grains and record
stocks of grains left over.
But this year worldwide production slipped about 2 percent, owing in
large part to the plunge in Australia’s production caused by an ongoing
severe drought. Production is expected to fall 23 percent.
Fortunately, in our globalized grain markets, this hasn’t affected
overall supplies or prices very much as grain stocks are high and
supplies are mobile and shipped all over the world as needed.
But Australia is the world’s fifth largest wheat exporter, accounting
for nearly 9 percent of the total in 2016 according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
In fact, the top five wheat exporting countries account for 56 percent
of world wheat exports. The rest of the world is highly dependent on
these exporters to make up the difference between what they grow and
what they eat.
But it’s not just wheat. For rice the numbers are even more striking.
The top five rice exporting countries supplied nearly 80 percent of
total world exports. For corn (called maize in most countries) the
number is a bit higher. The top five corn exporting countries supplied
almost 81 percent of all exports.
Why is this important? First, about 80 percent of all calories consumed come from grains,
either through direct consumption (46 percent) or indirectly through
livestock in the form of meat, milk, eggs and other animal products (33
percent). Second, as climate change begins to scorch the major grain
growing areas of the world, the large exporters may find themselves with
much less to export or even begin competing for imports. One major study
forecasts that wheat, soybean and corn production in the United
States—the world’s largest exporter of soybeans and corn and the second
largest exporter of wheat—could drop between 22 and 49 percent by the
end of the century. By 2030 combined rice, corn and wheat harvests in China could drop by 8 percent.
China is, of course, a major consumer of grains and the world’s 13th
largest rice exporter. Perhaps most worrying of all is the possibility
that there will be a rising likelihood of simultaneous crop failures in several major growing areas.
This all comes in the face of world population projections of 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100 compared to 7.7 billion today.
These projections, however, are based on smooth sailing from today
forward, something that climate change and all its attendant effects
call into question. If food supplies are declining in the coming
decades, these population projections hardly seem credible.
The vulnerability we face comes not only from perilous conditions
stemming from climate change, but also, of course, from the
concentration of the growing areas for our main sources of food
calories. It is true that every country grows some of its own food. But
the emerging picture of climate change suggests that in the future those
who do not grow enough of their own food may not be able to count on
those who currently grow more than they need to make up the difference.
This would imply a necessity for a move toward self-sufficiency, that
is, eating what can be grown in one’s own soil; an end to the
destruction of farmland for so-called “development;” a move away from
grain-intensive livestock-based foods; and the enlisting of many more
people into the production of food.
Today, for the globe as a whole, all these trends are moving in the wrong direction.
