The New Yorker
- Bill McKibben
And do it as quickly as possible
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Natural gas—which is primarily made of methane—leaks unburned
at every stage from fracking to combustion.
Photograph by Ed Kashi / VII / Redux
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Author
Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a
contributing writer to The New Yorker. He writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker’s newsletter on the environment.
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We’re used to the idea that CO2—one carbon atom, two oxygen atoms—is a dangerous
molecule. Indeed, driving down carbon-dioxide emissions has become the way that
many leaders and journalists describe our task.
But CH4—one carbon atom combined with four hydrogen atoms, otherwise known as
methane—is carbon dioxide’s evil twin. It traps heat roughly eighty times more
efficiently than carbon dioxide does, which explains why the fact that
it’s spiking
in the atmosphere scares scientists so much.
Despite the
pandemic lockdown, 2020
saw the largest single increase in methane in the atmosphere since we started
taking measurements, in the nineteen-eighties. It’s a
jump
that, last month, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration called “fairly surprising and disturbing.”
If there’s any good news, it’s that the spike in methane doesn’t—yet—seem to be
coming in large percentages from the runaway melt of methane-ice formations
beneath the polar oceans or those in tundra soils. That would be a nightmare
scenario because there wouldn’t be anything we could do about it—it’s global
heating on automatic. For the moment, most of the increase seems to be from
sources we
can control: rice paddies, livestock, and, especially, the
rapid rise in drilling and fracking for gas.
Two decades ago, people thought that natural gas, though a fossil fuel, might
help slow climate change because, when you burn it in a power station, it
produces less carbon than burning coal does. Now we understand that natural
gas—which is primarily made of methane—leaks unburned at every stage from
fracking to combustion, whether in a power plant or on top of your stove, in
sufficient quantities to make it an enormous climate danger.
The
Trump Administration
abandoned any effort even to reduce that leakage, an absurd gift to the
fossil-fuel industry that the
Biden Administration is
preparing to
take away. But plugging leaks isn’t enough: we’ve got to stop producing natural gas as
quickly as possible, and replace it with renewables that generate neither carbon
nor methane. As I wrote last month, that’s now entirely possible; sun and wind
power have become
so cheap so fast
that they’re more economical than gas, and batteries are coming down the same
kind of cost curve, so nightfall is no longer the problem it once was.
But there are other reasons to kick gas.
A report
from Australia’s Climate Council, released last week, finds that the health
impact of having a gas cooktop in your home is roughly equivalent to having a
cigarette smoker puffing away in the corner, and accounts for about twelve per
cent of childhood asthma. “It’s odourless, it’s invisible, it’s a bit of silent
enemy,” the C.E.O. of Asthma Australia said. “People might feel differently if
they understood that their gas appliances were emitting a range of toxic
substances.”
That is why the gas industry has lobbied so hard to prevent that perception. In
at least fourteen U.S. states, the industry lobby is
pushing bills
that would prevent local governments from restricting the use of gas; a
particular threat comes from the new appliances—chiefly air-source heat pumps
and water heaters, and induction cooktops—that are now widely available and
increasingly cheap. (Even the
Wall Street Journal, whose opinion pages
unfailingly defend the oil-and-gas industry,
admitted in a review
that induction cooking is “safer and faster than gas.”)
Indeed,
leaked documents
obtained last week by E&E News show that fifteen big gas utilities have
mounted a Consortium to Combat Electrification. “None of these companies want to
write their own obituary,” Deborah Gordon, a former petroleum engineer now at
the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank, said. “If you’re going to
bend this curve, and we bend it quickly, there are going to be casualties. Some
will transform, some will consolidate, some will go away.”
At the moment, however, they’re still very much here, and they might as well
call the effort a Consortium to Promote Asthma and Melt the Poles. But, if we
can kick gas quickly, there’s some hope that lies in the structure of that CH4
molecule: it only lasts about ten years in the atmosphere, as opposed to a
century for carbon dioxide.
This means that, if we can somehow reduce emissions dramatically, it will fade
fast, buying us a little time to take on carbon. “If we can make a big enough
cut in methane in the next decade, we’ll see public-health benefits within the
decade, and climate benefits within two decades,” Drew Shindell, an earth
scientist at Duke University who has worked extensively on methane,
told the Times.
But it had better happen fast. Here’s Euan Nisbet, a climate scientist at Royal
Holloway, University of London, reacting to last month’s news of spiking methane
levels: “I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know it was this bad. This breaks my
heart.”
Passing the Mic
Christina Conklin, an artist, writer, and researcher, and
Marina Psaros, a sustainability expert, will publish “
The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate
Crisis” in July. With maps and text, it explores port cities and coastlines that may
be obliterated by rising seas—Shanghai, Houston, New York, the Cook Islands, and
Bến Tre, in Vietnam. I spoke with Conklin, who lives next to the Pacific, in
Half Moon Bay, California. (Our conversation has been edited.)
Bill McKibben: Humans built many of their most important settlements along
the ocean for obvious reasons, but how should we be thinking about that
now?
Christina Conklin: The hard truth is that seas are going to rise for
centuries to come—it could be at least three feet this century and much more
after that. This is difficult to absorb, but we need to have realistic, civic
conversations about moving to higher ground in the coming decades. Water always
finds its level, so we will need to rebuild over time, finding ways to fairly
relocate vulnerable communities away from flood zones.
Strengthening storms and rising seas may be the easier climate challenges to
address: all we need to do is move out of the way. Actually, changing ocean
chemistry and warming waters are far more critical in my view, because they are
altering the living system of the ocean itself, which is the foundation and
source of life on earth.
The fact is, our current addiction to fossil fuels is causing ocean
acidification, deoxygenation, and warming that is throwing many marine
ecosystems into crisis. Half the stories in “The Atlas of Disappearing Places”
cover these impacts on food webs, feedback loops, and basic biological
processes. I illustrated it with ink-on-seaweed maps to convey the scope and
scale of the issues.
Bill McKibben: What’s a place that really illustrates our troubles?
Christina Conklin: The Cook Islands is a good example. It is a tiny
island nation in the South Pacific that voted in 2017 to designate its
territorial waters as the world’s largest marine protected area. The commitment
reflected Cook Islanders’ values and heritage as an indigenous, seagoing people,
and also allowed for sustainable development.
Around the same time, a few powerful people invited seabed-mining companies to
“explore” the possibility of scraping manganese nodules off the seafloor in
these waters, potentially destroying the ecosystem—and the Prime Minister gave
in to pressure for quick profit. [Last year, the government said that it would
allow mining to offset the loss of tourism business during the pandemic.] This
sort of conflict between local communities and extractive industries is often
out of sight, but every choice we make has an environmental impact somewhere.
We each have the responsibility—the response-ability—to imagine and build
healthy societies. Each of the book’s twenty chapters envisions a “future
history” from the year 2050, showing things that we can do to change the story
from one of heedless consumption to one of resilient, regenerative culture.
Bill McKibben: And what’s a place that gives you some sense of how humans are, well, rising
to the rising sea level, and figuring out some possibilities?
Christina Conklin: I think often of Leo Manston, a six-year-old boy
who spoke at a county-council meeting in Kent, England, in 2019, and asked them
to consider including children on their climate-change committee. His mom,
Laura, was new to climate activism, having recently learned how dire the climate
crisis is, at an Extinction Rebellion march, in London.
I so admire the determination, joy, courage, and creativity of Extinction
Rebellion’s nonviolent-resistance methods. We can learn a lot from them about
how to work for change, individually and collectively.
That said, the British government is making poor planning decisions regarding
sea-level rise and is kicking the can on carbon emissions, so my story about
rising seas in the Thames estuary is largely a cautionary tale. But perhaps it
will help people wake up to the disastrous floods that will eventually happen if
more is not done to face the planetary emergency of intersecting crises we now
face. As you know, we have only a few years to change our path.
Climate School
The Texas Observer carries a fine
profile
of the environmental-justice pioneer Robert Bullard, describing a 1979 study of
his that found landfills and waste dumps mostly situated in Houston’s
communities of color. “To this day, low-income communities of color are
significantly more likely than white residents to live near hazardous waste and
air pollution,” the magazine reports.
António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations,
called on
all international lending agencies to stop funding big fossil-fuel
infrastructure projects. “We can no longer afford big fossil fuel infrastructure
anywhere,” he said. “Such investments simply deepen our predicament.”
If someone tells you that a small ball of fungi will help your lawn sequester a
ton of carbon dioxide every year, it’s possible that their claims
should be investigated closely, at least according to reporting from Zahra Hirji for BuzzFeed News.
As noted above, gas causes lots of asthma and premature deaths.
New studies
show that biomass burning does the same. In fact, setting fire to biomass, gas,
and wood now cause more premature deaths in the U.S. than burning coal.
News broke Saturday of a
cyberattack
shutting down the Colonial Pipeline system, which carries gasoline and jet fuel
from Texas up the East Coast. The independent journalist Robbie Jaeger has been
following up on the story of last year’s gasoline spill from the pipeline in
North Carolina— which the company originally pegged at sixty-three thousand
gallons, but turned out to be at least 1.2 million gallons. Reviewing
documents, Jaeger found that the company only inspected less than half the length of the
pipeline the year before the accident, even though much of the pipe is forty
years old.
Naomi Klein offers up a remarkable
piece
of reporting and thinking from the Sierra-foothills town of Chico, California,
where residents displaced by forest fires in recent years are now being evicted
from encampments in which they’re trying to keep their lives going. Her article
provides a sharp warning of what it will mean to live on a planet with ever more
climate refugees.
Scoreboard
The veteran energy analyst (and Seattle resident)
Dave Roberts argues
that Washington State now has the most progressive climate policy in America.
“Spoiler: the one weird trick is electing Democrats,” he writes. Meanwhile, Kate
Aronoff
points out
that BP may have figured out a way to play both sides of the carbon-pricing
policy that Washington Governor Jay Inslee is expected to sign into law.
Legislation
has been introduced in the New York State Assembly that would place a moratorium
on cryptocurrency mining in the state while its effects on energy use are
investigated. Grist has a detailed
account
of a once defunct power plant on Seneca Lake that’s now burning gas to mine
bitcoin and
was featured in a New Yorker story
by Elizabeth Kolbert.
Amsterdam has
become
the first city to start banning fossil-fuel advertisements, beginning in its
subway system. “Advertisements that portray fossil fuels as normal and aggravate
climate disruption have no place in a city or country that has complied to
Paris,” the campaign coördinator Femke Sleegers said.
Writing in CleanTechnica, the energy analyst Michael Barnard
makes the case
that small, modular nuclear reactors may not be the lifesaver that advocates
have been hoping for. He writes that they “won’t achieve economies of
manufacturing scale, won’t be faster to construct, forego efficiency of vertical
scaling, won’t be cheaper, aren’t suitable for remote or brownfield coal sites,
still face very large security costs, will still be costly and slow to
decommission, and still require liability insurance caps.”
Research from Oxford Brookes University, in England,
indicates
that vertical-axis wind turbines—look at the picture!—may be more efficient than
the giant sweeping blades that we’ve grown accustomed to, primarily because they
don’t rob one another of wind and can be spaced more closely together.
The Green Party seems likely to share power in Germany—or even control the
country outright—after elections this fall, new polling suggests. “The timing
would make this a continental game-changer,” the
Guardian notes in
an editorial. “Germany’s Greens have the potential to become the leading force in a
rehabilitation of progressive politics in Europe.”
Last week, I mentioned the frightening news that the Amazon forest has flipped
from a carbon sink to a carbon source.
New data indicate
that the same thing has happened to Canada’s vast boreal forest. Barry Saxifrage
outlines the numbers in a revealing report for the
National Observer,
adding, “It’s bad news for Canada’s plans to use forest ‘offsets’ to green-light
extra fossil fuel burning.”
Warming Up
Seth Bernard is one of my all-time favorite songwriters. Also a
ripping guitarist, he’s helped build a community of musician-activists across
his native Michigan, who work on issues environmental and social. Now he’s
offered up “
The Time Has Come,” a climate anthem that he’s releasing to aid local climate campaigners.
Here’s the chorus:
We never give up,
keep showing up.
In love we trust;
the Earth loves us.
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