A World At War

New Republic - Bill McKibben*

We're under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.

 Andrew Colin Beck

In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears. Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the war. "In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half," said a scientist who examined the onslaught. "There doesn't seem anything able to stop this."
In the Pacific this spring, the enemy staged a daring breakout across thousands of miles of ocean, waging a full-scale assault on the region's coral reefs. In a matter of months, long stretches of formations like the Great Barrier Reef—dating back past the start of human civilization and visible from space—were reduced to white bone-yards.
Day after day, week after week, saboteurs behind our lines are unleashing a series of brilliant and overwhelming attacks. In the past few months alone, our foes have used a firestorm to force the total evacuation of a city of 90,000 in Canada, drought to ravage crops to the point where southern Africans are literally eating their seed corn, and floods to threaten the priceless repository of art in the Louvre. The enemy is even deploying biological weapons to spread psychological terror: The Zika virus, loaded like a bomb into a growing army of mosquitoes, has shrunk the heads of newborn babies across an entire continent; panicked health ministers in seven countries are now urging women not to get pregnant. And as in all conflicts, millions of refugees are fleeing the horrors of war, their numbers swelling daily as they're forced to abandon their homes to escape famine and desolation and disease.
World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing. For years, our leaders chose to ignore the warnings of our best scientists and top military strategists. Global warming, they told us, was beginning a stealth campaign that would lay waste to vast stretches of the planet, uprooting and killing millions of innocent civilians. But instead of paying heed and taking obvious precautions, we chose to strengthen the enemy with our endless combustion; a billion explosions of a billion pistons inside a billion cylinders have fueled a global threat as lethal as the mushroom-shaped nuclear explosions we long feared. Carbon and methane now represent the deadliest enemy of all time, the first force fully capable of harrying, scattering, and impoverishing our entire civilization.

It's not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. And we are losing. 

We're used to war as metaphor: the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on cancer. Usually this is just a rhetorical device, a way of saying, "We need to focus our attention and marshal our forces to fix something we don't like." But this is no metaphor. By most of the ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal: Carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and panic, racking up casualties, and even destabilizing governments. (Over the past few years, record-setting droughts have helped undermine the brutal strongman of Syria and fuel the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria.) It's not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. Its first victims, ironically, are those who have done the least to cause the crisis. But it's a world war aimed at us all. And if we lose, we will be as decimated and helpless as the losers in every conflict--except that this time, there will be no winners, and no end to the planetwide occupation that follows.
The question is not, are we in a world war? The question is, will we fight back? And if we do, can we actually defeat an enemy as powerful and inexorable as the laws of physics?
To answer those questions—to assess, honestly and objectively, our odds of victory in this new world war—we must look to the last one.
For four years, the United States was focused on a single, all-consuming goal, to the exclusion of any other concern: defeating the global threat posed by Germany, Italy, and Japan. Unlike Adolf Hitler, the last force to pose a planetwide threat to civilization, our enemy today is neither sentient nor evil. But before the outbreak of World War II, the world's leaders committed precisely the same mistake we are making today—they tried first to ignore their foe, and then to appease him.
Eager to sidestep the conflict, England initially treated the Nazis as rational actors, assuming that they would play by the existing rules of the game. That's why Neville Chamberlain came home from Munich to cheering crowds: Constrained by Britain's military weakness and imperial overreach, he did what he thought necessary to satisfy Hitler. Surely, the thinking went, the dictator would now see reason.
But Hitler was playing by his own set of rules, which meant he had contempt for the political "realism" of other leaders. (Indeed, it meant their realism wasn't.) Carbon and methane, by contrast, offer not contempt but complete indifference: They couldn't care less about our insatiable desires as consumers, or the sunk cost of our fossil fuel infrastructure, or the geostrategic location of the petro-states, or any of the host of excuses that have so far constrained our response to global warming. The world came back from signing the climate accord in Paris last December exactly as Chamberlain returned from Munich: hopeful, even exhilarated, that a major threat had finally been tackled. Paul Krugman, summing up the world's conventional wisdom, post-Paris, concluded that climate change "can be avoided with fairly modest, politically feasible steps. You may want a revolution, but we don't need one to save the planet." All it would take, he insisted, is for America to implement Obama's plan for clean power, and to continue "guiding the world as a whole toward sharp reductions in emissions," as it had in Paris.

Andrew Colin Beck

This is, simply put, as wrong as Chamberlain's "peace in our time." Even if every nation in the world complies with the Paris Agreement, the world will heat up by as much as 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100—not the 1.5 to 2 degrees promised in the pact's preamble. And it may be too late already to meet that stated target: We actually flirted with that 1.5 degree line at the height of the El Niño warming in February, a mere 60 days after the world's governments solemnly pledged their best efforts to slow global warming. Our leaders have been anticipating what French strategists in World War II called the guerre du longue durée, even as each new edition of Science or Nature makes clear that climate change is mounting an all-out blitzkrieg, setting new record highs for global temperatures in each of the past 14 months.
Not long after Paris, earth scientists announced that the West Antarctic ice sheet is nowhere near as stable as we had hoped; if we keep pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will shed ice much faster than previous research had predicted. At an insurance industry conference in April, a federal official described the new data as "an OMG thing." "The long-term effect," The New York Times reported, "would likely be to drown the world's coastlines, including many of its great cities." If Nazis were the ones threatening destruction on such a global scale today, America and its allies would already be mobilizing for a full-scale war.
The Antarctic research did contain, as the Times reported, one morsel of good news. Yes, following the Paris accord would doom much of the Antarctic—but a "far more stringent effort to limit emissions of greenhouse gases would stand a fairly good chance of saving West Antarctica from collapse."
What would that "far more stringent effort" require? For years now, climate scientists and leading economists have called for treating climate change with the same resolve we brought to bear on Germany and Japan in the last world war. In July, the Democratic Party issued a platform that called for a World War II–type national mobilization to save civilization from the "catastrophic consequences" of a "global climate emergency." In fact, Hillary Clinton's negotiators agreed to plans for an urgent summit "in the first hundred days of the next administration" where the president will convene "the world's best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to chart a course to solve the climate crisis."
But what would that actually look like? What would it mean to mobilize for World War III on the same scale as we did for the last world war?
As it happens, American scientists have been engaged in a quiet but concentrated effort to figure out how quickly existing technology can be deployed to defeat global warming; a modest start, in effect, for a mighty Manhattan Project. Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and the director of its Atmosphere and Energy Program, has been working for years with a team of experts to calculate precisely how each of the 50 states could power itself from renewable resources. The numbers are remarkably detailed: In Alabama, for example, residential rooftops offer a total of 59.7 square kilometers that are unshaded by trees and pointed in the right direction for solar panels. Taken together, Jacobson's work demonstrates conclusively that America could generate 80 to 85 percent of its power from sun, wind, and water by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. In the past year, the Stanford team has offered similar plans for 139 nations around the world.
The research delves deep into the specifics of converting to clean energy. Would it take too much land? The Stanford numbers show that you would need about four-tenths of one percent of America's landmass to produce enough renewable energy, mostly from sprawling solar power stations. Do we have enough raw materials? "We looked at that in some detail and we aren't too worried," says Jacobson. "For instance, you need neodymium for wind turbines—but there's seven times more of it than you'd need to power half the world. Electric cars take lithium for batteries—but there's enough lithium just in the known resources for three billion cars, and at the moment we only have 800 million."
But would the Stanford plan be enough to slow global warming? Yes, says Jacobson: If we move quickly enough to meet the goal of 80 percent clean power by 2030, then the world's carbon dioxide levels would fall below the relative safety of 350 parts per million by the end of the century. The planet would stop heating up, or at least the pace of that heating would slow substantially. That's as close to winning this war as we could plausibly get. We'd endure lots of damage in the meantime, but not the civilization-scale destruction we currently face. (Even if all of the world's nations meet the pledges they made in the Paris accord, carbon dioxide is currently on a path to hit 500 or 600 parts per million by century's end—a path if not to hell, then to someplace with a similar setting on the thermostat.)

Defeating the Nazis required more than brave soldiers. It required a wholesale industrial retooling. 

To make the Stanford plan work, you would need to build a hell of a lot of factories to turn out thousands of acres of solar panels, and wind turbines the length of football fields, and millions and millions of electric cars and buses. But here again, experts have already begun to crunch the numbers. Tom Solomon, a retired engineer who oversaw the construction of one of the largest factories built in recent years—Intel's mammoth Rio Rancho semiconductor plant in New Mexico—took Jacobson's research and calculated how much clean energy America would need to produce by 2050 to completely replace fossil fuels. The answer: 6,448 gigawatts.
"Last year we installed 16 gigawatts of clean power," Solomon says. "So at that pace, it would take 405 years. Which is kind of too long."
So Solomon did the math to figure out how many factories it would take to produce 6,448 gigawatts of clean energy in the next 35 years. He started by looking at SolarCity, a clean-energy company that is currently building the nation's biggest solar panel factory in Buffalo. "They're calling it the giga-factory," Solomon says, "because the panels it builds will produce one gigawatt worth of solar power every year." Using the SolarCity plant as a rough yardstick, Solomon calculates that America needs 295 solar factories of a similar size to defeat climate change—roughly six per state—plus a similar effort for wind turbines.
Building these factories doesn't require any new technology. In fact, the effort would be much the same as the one that Solomon oversaw at Intel's semiconductor factory in New Mexico: Pick a site with good roads and a good technical school nearby to supply the workforce; find trained local contractors who can deal with everything from rebar to HVAC; get the local permits; order long-lead-time items like I-beam steel; level the ground and excavate; lay foundations and floors; build walls, columns, and a roof; "facilitate each of the stations for factory machine tooling with plumbing, piping, and electrical wiring"; and train a workforce of 1,500. To match the flow of panels needed to meet the Stanford targets, in the most intense years of construction we need to erect 30 of these solar panel factories a year, plus another 15 for making wind turbines. "It's at the upper end of what I could possibly imagine," Solomon says.
Turning out more solar panels and wind turbines may not sound like warfare, but it's exactly what won World War II: not just massive invasions and pitched tank battles and ferocious aerial bombardments, but the wholesale industrial retooling that was needed to build weapons and supply troops on a previously unprecedented scale. Defeating the Nazis required more than brave soldiers. It required building big factories, and building them really, really fast.
In 1941, the world's largest industrial plant under a single roof went up in six months near Ypsilanti, Michigan; Charles Lindbergh called it the "Grand Canyon of the mechanized world." Within months, it was churning out a B-24 Liberator bomber every hour. Bombers! Huge, complicated planes, endlessly more intricate than solar panels or turbine blades—containing 1,225,000 parts, 313,237 rivets. Nearby, in Warren, Michigan, the Army built a tank factory faster than they could build the power plant to run it—so they simply towed a steam locomotive into one end of the building to provide steam heat and electricity. That one factory produced more tanks than the Germans built in the entire course of the war.
It wasn't just weapons. In another corner of Michigan, a radiator company landed a contract for more than 20 million steel helmets; not far away, a rubber factory retooled to produce millions of helmet liners. The company that used to supply fabrics for Ford's seat cushions went into parachute production. Nothing went to waste--when car companies stopped making cars for the duration of the fighting, GM found it had thousands of 1939 model-year ashtrays piled up in inventory. So it shipped them out to Seattle, where Boeing put them in long-range bombers headed for the Pacific. Pontiac made anti-aircraft guns; Oldsmobile churned out cannons; Studebaker built engines for Flying Fortresses; Nash-Kelvinator produced propellers for British de Havillands; Hudson Motors fabricated wings for Helldivers and P-38 fighters; Buick manufactured tank destroyers; Fisher Body built thousands of M4 Sherman tanks; Cadillac turned out more than 10,000 light tanks. And that was just Detroit—the same sort of industrial mobilization took place all across America.
According to the conventional view of World War II, American business made all this happen simply because it rolled up its sleeves and went to war. As is so often the case, however, the conventional view is mostly wrong. Yes, there are endless newsreels from the era of patriotic businessmen unrolling blueprints and switching on assembly lines—but that's largely because those businessmen paid for the films. Their PR departments also put out their own radio serials with titles like "Victory Is Their Business," and "War of Enterprise," and published endless newspaper ads boasting of their own patriotism. In reality, many of America's captains of industry didn't want much to do with the war until they were dragooned into it. Henry Ford, who built and managed that Ypsilanti bomber plant, was an America Firster who urged his countrymen to stay out of the war; the Chamber of Commerce (now a leading opponent of climate action) fought to block FDR's Lend-Lease program to help the imperiled British. "American businessmen oppose American involvement in any foreign war," the Chamber's president explained to Congress.

Andrew Colin Beck

Luckily, Roosevelt had a firm enough grip on Congress to overcome the Chamber, and he took the lead in gearing up America for the battles to come. Mark Wilson, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, has just finished a decade-long study of the mobilization effort, entitled Destructive Creation. It details how the federal government birthed a welter of new agencies with names like the War Production Board and the Defense Plant Corporation; the latter, between 1940 and 1945, spent $9 billion on 2,300 projects in 46 states, building factories it then leased to private industry. By war's end, the government had a dominant position in everything from aircraft manufacturing to synthetic rubber production.
"It was public capital that built most of the stuff, not Wall Street," says Wilson. "And at the top level of logistics and supply-chain management, the military was the boss. They placed the contracts, they moved the stuff around." The feds acted aggressively—they would cancel contracts as war needs changed, tossing factories full of people abruptly out of work. If firms refused to take direction, FDR ordered many of them seized. Though companies made money, there was little in the way of profiteering—bad memories from World War I, Wilson says, led to "robust profit controls," which were mostly accepted by America's industrial tycoons. In many cases, federal authorities purposely set up competition between public operations and private factories: The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard built submarines, but so did Electric Boat of Groton, Connecticut. "They were both quite impressive and productive," Wilson says.
"Usually, when people from different worlds are dealing with each other, they get into conflicts and then dig in their heels deeper," Berk says. "But because the stakes are so high and it's moving so fast, no one doubts that if you don't get a handle on this battle in the Atlantic, then the immediate consequences will be really grave. So they're willing to do this kind of pragmatic trial and error. They start to see that 'I can't dig in my heels--I need this other person to learn from.'" In the face of a common enemy, Americans worked together in a way they never had before.
That attitude quickly reset after the war, of course; solidarity gave way to the biggest boom in personal consumption the world had ever seen, as car-packed suburbs sprawled from every city and women were retired to the kitchen. Business, eager to redeem its isolationist image and shake off New Deal restrictions, sold itself as the hero of the war effort, patriotic industrialists who had overcome mountains of government red tape to get the job done. And the modest "operations researchers," who had entered and learned from the real world when they managed radar development during the war, retreated to their ivory towers and became much grander "systems analysts" once the conflict ended. Robert McNamara, a former Ford executive, brought an entire wing of the Rand Corporation to the Defense Department during the Kennedy administration, where the think-tank experts promptly privatized most of the government shipyards and plane factories, and used their out-of-touch computer models to screw up government programs like Model Cities, the ambitious attempt at urban rehabilitation during the War on Poverty. "The systems analysts completely took over," Berk says, "and the program largely failed for that reason."
Today we live in the privatized, siloed, business-dominated world that took root under McNamara and flourished under Reagan. The actual wars we fight are marked by profiteering, and employ as many private contractors as they do soldiers. Our spirit of social solidarity is, to put it mildly, thin. (The modern-day equivalent of Father Coughlin is now the Republican candidate for president.) So it's reasonable to ask if we can find the collective will to fight back in this war against global warming, as we once fought fascism.
For starters, it's important to remember that a truly global mobilization to defeat climate change wouldn't wreck our economy or throw coal miners out of work. Quite the contrary: Gearing up to stop global warming would provide a host of social and economic benefits, just as World War II did. It would save lives. (A worldwide switch to renewable energy would cut air pollution deaths by 4 to 7 million a year, according to the Stanford data.) It would produce an awful lot of jobs. (An estimated net gain of roughly two million in the United States alone.) It would provide safer, better-paying employment to energy workers. (A new study by Michigan Technological University found that we could retrain everyone in the coal fields to work in solar power for as little as $181 million, and the guy installing solar panels on a roof averages about $4,000 more a year than the guy risking his life down in the hole.) It would rescue the world's struggling economies. (British economist Nicholas Stern calculates that the economic impacts of unchecked global warming could far exceed those of the world wars or the Great Depression.) And fighting this war would be socially transformative. (Just as World War II sped up the push for racial and gender equality, a climate campaign should focus its first efforts on the frontline communities most poisoned by the fossil fuel era. It would help ease income inequality with higher employment, revive our hollowed-out rural states with wind farms, and transform our decaying suburbs with real investments in public transit.)
There are powerful forces, of course, that stand in the way of a full-scale mobilization. If you add up every last coal mine and filling station in the world, governments and corporations have spent $20 trillion on fossil fuel infrastructure. "No country will walk away from such investments," writes Vaclav Smil, a Canadian energy expert. As investigative journalists have shown over the past year, the oil giant Exxon knew all about global warming for decades—yet spent millions to spread climate-denial propaganda. The only way to overcome that concerted opposition—from the very same industrial forces that opposed America's entry into World War II—is to adopt a wartime mentality, rewriting the old mindset that stands in the way of victory. "The first step is we have to win," says Jonathan Koomey, an energy researcher at Stanford University. "That is, we have to have broad acceptance among the broader political community that we need urgent action, not just nibbling around the edges, which is what the D.C. crowd still thinks."

FDR geared up early: The ships and planes that won the Battle of Midway were all built before Pearl Harbor.

That political will is starting to build, just as it began to gather in the years before Pearl Harbor. A widespread movement has killed off the Keystone pipeline, stymied Arctic drilling, and banned fracking in key states and countries. As one oil industry official lamented in July, "The 'keep-it-in-the-ground' campaign" has "controlled the conversation." This resembles, at least a little, the way FDR actually started gearing up for war 18 months before the "date which will live in infamy." The ships and planes that won the Battle of Midway six months into 1942 had all been built before the Japanese attacked Hawaii. "By the time of Pearl Harbor," Wilson says, "the government had pretty much solved the problem of organization. After that, they just said, 'We're going to have to make twice as much.'"
Pearl Harbor did make individual Americans willing to do hard things: pay more in taxes, buy billions upon billions in war bonds, endure the shortages and disruptions that came when the country's entire economy converted to wartime production. Use of public transit went up 87 percent during the war, as Naomi Klein points out in This Changes Everything; 40 percent of the nation's vegetables were grown in victory gardens. For the first time, women and minorities were able to get good factory jobs; Rosie the Riveter changed our sense of what was possible.
Without a Pearl Harbor, in fact, there was only so much even FDR could have accomplished. So far, there has been no equivalent in the climate war—no single moment that galvanizes the world to realize that nothing short of total war will save civilization. Perhaps the closest we've come to FDR's "date of infamy" speech—and it wasn't all that close—was when Bernie Sanders, in the first debate, was asked to name the biggest security threat facing the planet. "Climate change," he replied—prompting all the usual suspects to tut-tut that he was soft on "radical Islamic terrorism." Then, in the second debate, the question came up again, a day after the Paris massacres. "Do you still believe that?" the moderator asked, in gotcha mode. "Absolutely," replied Sanders, who then proceeded to give an accurate account of how record drought will lead to international instability.

Andrew Colin Beck

Had he won, it's possible that Bernie could have combined his focus on jobs and climate and infrastructure into some kind of overarching effort that really mattered—he was, after all, the presidential candidate most comfortable with big government since FDR. Donald Trump, of course, will dodge this war just as he did Vietnam. He thinks (if that's actually the right verb) that climate change is a hoax manufactured by the Chinese, who apparently in their Oriental slyness convinced the polar ice caps to go along with their conspiracy. Clinton's advisers originally promised there would be a "climate war room" in her White House, but then corrected the record: It would actually be a "climate map room," which sounds somewhat less gung ho.
In fact, one of the lowest points in my years of fighting climate change came in late June, when I sat on the commission appointed to draft the Democratic Party platform. (I was a Sanders appointee, alongside Cornel West and other luminaries.) At 11 p.m. on a Friday night, in a mostly deserted hotel ballroom in St. Louis, I was given an hour to offer nine amendments to the platform to address climate change. More bike paths passed by unanimous consent, but all the semi-hard things that might begin to make a real difference—a fracking ban, a carbon tax, a prohibition against drilling or mining fossil fuels on public lands, a climate litmus test for new developments, an end to World Bank financing of fossil fuel plants—were defeated by 7–6 tallies, with the Clinton appointees voting as a bloc. They were quite concerned about climate change, they insisted, but a "phased-down" approach would be best. There was the faintest whiff of Munich about it. Like Chamberlain, these were all good and concerned people, just the sort of steady, evenhanded folks you'd like to have leading your nation in normal times. But they misunderstood the nature of the enemy. Like fascism, climate change is one of those rare crises that gets stronger if you don't attack. In every war, there are very real tipping points, past which victory, or even a draw, will become impossible. And when the enemy manages to decimate some of the planet's oldest and most essential physical features—a polar ice cap, say, or the Pacific's coral reefs—that's a pretty good sign that a tipping point is near. In this war that we're in—the war that physics is fighting hard, and that we aren't—winning slowly is exactly the same as losing.
To my surprise, things changed a couple weeks later, when the final deliberations over the Democratic platform were held in Orlando. While Clinton's negotiators still wouldn't support a ban on fracking or a carbon tax, they did agree we needed to "price" carbon, that wind and sun should be given priority over natural gas, and that any federal policy that worsened global warming should be rejected.
Maybe it was polls showing that Bernie voters—especially young ones—have been slow to sign on to the Clinton campaign. Maybe the hottest June in American history had opened some minds. But you could, if you squinted, create a hopeful scenario. Clinton, for instance, promised that America will install half a billion solar panels in the next four years. That's not so far off the curve that Tom Solomon calculates we need to hit. And if we do it by building solar factories of our own, rather than importing cheap foreign-made panels, we'll be positioning America as the world's dominant power in clean energy, just as our mobilization in World War II ensured our economic might for two generations. If we don't get there first, others will: Driven by anger over smog-choked cities, the Chinese have already begun installing renewable energy at a world-beating rate.

In this war we're in—the war  that physics is fighting hard, and that we aren't—winning slowly is the same as losing.

"It would be a grave mistake for the United States to wait for another nation to take the lead in combating the global climate emergency," the Democratic platform asserts. "We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II."
The next president doesn't have to wait for a climate equivalent of Pearl Harbor to galvanize Congress. Much of what we need to do can—and must—be accomplished immediately, through the same use of executive action that FDR relied on to lay the groundwork for a wider mobilization. The president could immediately put a halt to drilling and mining on public lands and waters, which contain at least half of all the untapped carbon left in America. She could slow the build-out of the natural gas system simply by correcting the outmoded way the EPA calculates the warming effect of methane, just as Obama reined in coal-fired power plants. She could tell her various commissioners to put a stop to the federal practice of rubber-stamping new fossil fuel projects, rejecting those that would "significantly exacerbate" global warming. She could instruct every federal agency to buy all their power from green sources and rely exclusively on plug-in cars, creating new markets overnight. She could set a price on carbon for her agencies to follow internally, even without the congressional action that probably won't be forthcoming. And just as FDR brought in experts from the private sector to plan for the defense build-out, she could get the blueprints for a full-scale climate mobilization in place even as she rallies the political will to make them plausible. Without the same urgency and foresight displayed by FDR—without immediate executive action—we will lose this war.
Normally in wartime, defeatism is a great sin. Luckily, though, you can't give aid and comfort to carbon; it has no morale to boost. So we can be totally honest. We've waited so long to fight back in this war that total victory is impossible, and total defeat can't be ruled out.
While the Democrats were meeting in that depressing St. Louis hotel room last June, I had my laptop open. Even as they voted down one measure after another to combat climate change, news kept coming in from the front lines:
In Japan, 700,000 people were told to evacuate their homes after record rainfall led to severe flooding and landslides. The deluge continued for five days; at its peak, nearly six inches of rain were falling every hour.
In California, thousands of homes were threatened in a wildfire described by the local fire chief as "one of the most devastating I've ever seen." Suburban tracts looked like Dresden after the bombing. Planes and helicopters buzzed overhead, dropping bright plumes of chemical retardants; if the "Flight of the Valkyries" had been playing, it could have been a scene from Apocalypse Now.
And in West Virginia, a "one in a thousand year" storm dropped historic rain across the mountains, triggering record floods that killed dozens. "You can see people in the second-story windows waiting to be evacuated," one local official reported. A particularly dramatic video—a kind of YouTube Guernica for our moment—showed a large house being consumed by flames as it was swept down a rampaging river until it crashed into a bridge. "Everybody lost everything," one dazed resident said. "We never thought it would be this bad." A state trooper was even more succinct. "It looks like a war zone," he said.
Because it is.

*Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of the climate group 350.org.

Links

• The Last Stand for Sanders's Environmental Activists?
• Brexit Is Bad News for the Environment
• Green Lefties Are Grieving Over Sanders's Loss. Can They Learn to Love Clinton?
• The Next Frontier of Climate Change: Climate & Social Justice
• Donald Trump's Energy Adviser Doesn't Care Whether Climate Change Is Real
• Should We Respond to Climate Change Like We Did to WWII?
• Why Hillary Clinton Can't Win in Coal Country

Range Anxiety? Today’s Electric Cars Can Cover Vast Majority Of Daily U.S. Driving Needs

The Conversation - Jessika E. Trancik

Despite worries over the lower driving range of electric cars, most trips can be done with existing electric vehicles. unten44/flickr, CC BY

Electrifying transportation is one of the most promising ways to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, but so-called range anxiety – concern about being stranded with an uncharged car battery – remains a barrier to electric vehicle adoption. Is range anxiety justified given current cars and charging infrastructure?
It's a question my research group and I addressed in a paper published in Nature Energy, by taking a close look at this problem with a new model.
Specifically we asked: when looking down on the geographic area of the U.S. from a bird's-eye view, how many personal vehicles on the road daily could be replaced with a low-cost battery electric vehicle, even if daytime charging isn't available? Our analysis is, to our knowledge, the most expansive yet detailed study to date of how current and future-improved electric vehicle technology measures up to people's energy-consuming behavior.
We found nearly 90 percent of vehicles on the road could be replaced by a low-cost electric vehicle available on the market today. What's more, this number is remarkably similar across very different cities, from New York to Houston to Los Angeles. That is, there is a high potential for electrification of cars in both dense and more sprawling cities in the United States.
To realize this potential, however, the needs of prospective electric vehicle drivers have to be met on all days, even high-energy ones, such as days that require long-distance travel.
Two key innovations can enable this. The first is to predict the days on which drivers are likely to exceed the car's range, which our model is designed to do. And the second is institutional or business-model innovation to provide alternative long-range vehicles on those high-energy days. For example, conventional cars and eventually low-carbon, long-range alternatives, might show up at a user's door at the click of a button. This need may last for some time even as battery technology improves and charging infrastructure expands.

Vehicle range is not a single number
An electric vehicle's range is typically thought of in terms of a fixed number, but the number of miles covered on a single charge changes with factors including driving speed and style, and outdoor temperature. To understand the range of a car we need to look beyond the car itself to how people are behaving.
Over the last four years in my research group, we've built a model (called 'TripEnergy') of the second-by-second driving behavior of people across the United States, how they are likely to use heating and cooling systems in their cars, and how various electric and conventional vehicles would consume energy if driven in this way.

General Motors is developing the all-electric 2017 Chevrolet Bolt, which is designed to have a driving range of about 200 miles. General Motors

This approach gives us a probabilistic view of electric vehicle range. For example, for the Nissan Leaf, we find that 74 miles is the median range – based on driving patterns, half of the cars on the road in the U.S. would be able to travel this far, and half would not. (A Ford Focus electric performs similarly.)
There is a distribution in this range, which demonstrates how widely actual performance can vary. We estimate, for instance, that five percent of 58-mile trips could not be covered on one charge, and five percent of 90-mile trips could.

Evaluating electric vehicle technology against driving behavior
With the TripEnergy model in hand, we asked how many cars on the road could be replaced with a low-cost electric vehicle available today. We considered a case where drivers can only charge once daily, for example at home overnight. This allowed us to study a situation where only limited changes are needed to existing public charging infrastructure and cars can use power plants that would otherwise sit idle overnight.
We found that, given how people are driving across the U.S., 87 percent of cars on an average day could be replaced with a current generation, low-cost electric vehicle, with only once-daily charging. This is based on the driving behavior of millions of people across the U.S. across diverse cities and socioeconomic classes.
Switching from conventional to electric vehicles for those cars would cut emissions by an estimated 30 percent, even with today's fossil fuel based supply mix. In total, the trips taken by those cars represent roughly 60 percent of gasoline consumption in the U.S.
This large daily adoption potential is remarkably similar across both dense and more sprawling U.S. cities, ranging from 84 percent to 93 percent.
While it's true that people behave differently across cities – in how they use public transport, whether they own a car, and how often they drive the cars they own – when they do drive, we found that a similar number of cars in different cities fall within the range provided by a low-cost electric vehicle.

Returns on technology improvement
What if batteries improve, and allow for longer driving range for the same cost as current-generation lithium ion batteries?
The federal research agency ARPA-E has set a target for batteries to store roughly two times more energy by weight than today's batteries in electric vehicles. If that technical target is reached, we estimate that the 87 percent daily adoption potential estimate would rise to 98 percent, and the gasoline substitution potential would rise from 61 percent to 88 percent.
The 2017 Chevy Bolt and 2018 Tesla Model 3 are expected to achieve roughly similar increases in potentials at an increased cost compared to today's Nissan Leaf, though these costs are still close to the average cost of new cars.
The Tesla Model S travels even further but costs significantly more.
Even with substantial battery improvements, however, other types of powertrain technologies will be needed to cover those days with the highest energy consumption. This need may persist for some time, even with expanded charging infrastructure, due to a small number of very-high-energy days.

The upshot on range constraints
For people to overcome range anxiety and feel comfortable buying an electric vehicle, they need to know their needs will be met on all days, including high-energy days. Predicting when this will occur – and in advance when buying a vehicle on how many days this will occur – is something that our model is well-suited for.

The expansion of car-sharing services makes it easier to get a car for a long-distance trip. davereid/flickr, CC BY-NC

Our model can, with limited input on travel distance, time and location, predict the probability of exceeding the car's range, and point to days where drivers need to turn to other, longer-range cars, for example withing households, or even within communities and through commercial car-sharing programs.
The results also shed light on the quantity of long-range cars that would be needed at the population level, a gap to be filled by private sector innovation as well as national and local policy.
Reasonable financing to help distribute the upfront costs over the car's lifetime and increasing the opportunities for charging, even if only once-daily, would also encourage EV adoption.
In all, our analysis shows that current electric vehicles can meet most daily driving needs in the U.S. Improved access to shared, long-range transport, alongside further-advanced batteries and cars and decarbonized electricity, provide a pathway to reaching a largely decarbonized personal vehicle fleet.

Links

• Explainer: For the future of electric vehicles, one size does not fit all
• Will the Tesla Model 3 recharge the U.S. electric vehicle market?
• Can Tesla's enthusiast customers help it sell the electric car for the everyperson?
• When will we have better batteries than lithium-ion for gadgets and electric vehicles?

World's Hottest Month Shows Challenges Global Warming Will Bring

The Guardian - Emma Graham-Harrison

July was hotter than any month globally since records began – but some areas, such as the Middle East, suffer more than others

High temperatures are hitting places already suffering from drought. Photograph: Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images

In Siberia, melting permafrost released anthrax that had been frozen in a reindeer carcass for decades, starting a deadly outbreak. In Baghdad, soaring temperatures forced the government to shut down for days at a time. In Kuwait, thermometers hit a record 54C (129F).
July was the hottest month the world has endured since records began in 1880, scientists have said, and brought a painful taste of the troubles people around the world may have to grapple with as global warming intensifies. Results compiled by Nasa showed the month was 0.84C hotter than the 1951-1980 average for July, and 0.11C hotter than the previous record set in July 2015.
The temperature increase last month was not all due to climate change. Part of the increase came from the tail end of the El Niño phenomenon, which spreads warm water across the Pacific, giving a boost to global temperatures.
But scientists said the July record, which came after a string of new month-high temperatures, was particularly striking because it came as the impact of El Niño faded, and added weight to fears that 2016 will go down in history as the hottest year since records began.
“Even if we have it augmented by El Niño, it’s quite concerning as a citizen to see that we are flirting with very high numbers, and a record is a record,” said Jean-Noël Thepaut, head of Europe’s Copernicus climate change service.
He had not expected such a warm July, and said that although his organisation did not forecast temperatures, the high temperatures continued through the start of August and made a record for the year extremely likely.
“What we can say over the last seven months is that every month has been a record; we are on good track to have another record year,” he said. Beyond immediate trends, longer-term weather patterns made clear the rise could not be dismissed as the impact of a severe El Niño, he said.
“One fact beyond what we are seeing today, among the last warmest years, 15 years have been obtained in the 21st century and we have not been in El Niño for 10 years. So there is a general longer-term trend,” Thepaut said.
The challenge for climate scientists, and politicians seeking to drive climate policy, has often been linking changes in global averages to shifting weather patterns at home that may or may not appear to reflect the worldwide data.

Mercury hits the heights in Baghdad. Photograph: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images

 “This is a global average, so it can be difficult for people everywhere to perceive it themselves,” said Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the LSE’s Grantham research institute on climate change and the environment.
As extremes become more common, however, that is also starting to change, even in places such as the UK where changes have so far been relatively more manageable.
“We can see that locally there is evidence of changes in many places – for instance, in the UK, our eight warmest years have all occurred since 2000, as have six of our seven wettest years, so the UK is becoming warmer and wetter.”
The provisional average temperature in the UK for July was 15.3C, which is 0.2C above the 1981-2010 long-term average, according to the Met Office.
However, it is well below the record set in 2006, the hottest UK month on record, when the average temperature was 17.8C.
The temperature increases in July were not spread evenly, with brutal heat across the Middle East potentially warning of troubles to come for a region that is particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures.
Climate scientists say individual areas of extreme weather cannot be directly linked to global warming even as overall temperatures rise, but they give an indication of the challenges to come in a hotter world.
“If the global mean [average] increases a certain amount, the temperatures in this region in summer will increase even more,” said Jos Lelieveld, an atmospheric researcher at the Max Planck institute for chemistry, who earlier this year published a report on how climate change would affect the Middle East and North Africa.
He warned then that large areas could become so hot that they would be virtually uninhabitable for human beings, and could trigger an exodus of hundreds of millions of refugees. The July temperatures just underlined the urgency of the crisis, he said.
“This worries me a lot because we have a lot of problems there already; there is a documented drought that has been going on for fifteen years,” he said. “This is already one of the driest regions in the world.”
Some experts think those problems have already contributed to the violence in the region, with some researchers claiming drought fuelled Syria’s civil war.
But perhaps because of the huge security and humanitarian crises crippling many countries there, most governments have spared little thought to dealing with a problem that seems less urgent, even if its fallout could be just as devastating.
“Climate change and challenges associated with it or provoked by it didn’t yet reach the attention of heads of states,” said Adel Abdellatif, a senior regional advisor with the UN development programme focused on climate change in the region.
“Attention is mainly paid to threats emanating from armed groups, and climate change threats are not seen within the framework of national security,” he said.
Adding to the problem is the fact that those likely to be most vulnerable to the flooding, droughts and rising temperatures are those least able to push for change, both within countries and across the region.
“Those affected by threats of climate change are the people living at the edge of vulnerability and in the frontline of the perfect storm,” said Abdellatif.
When Kuwait recorded temperatures of 54C this summer, the highest ever recorded in the eastern hemisphere, its relatively wealthy citizens were mostly able to combat the raging heat by turning on the air conditioning.
In neighbouring Iraq, where electricity supplies are sporadic, not everyone can afford coolers and millions of refugees were stranded under little more than tents in the desert, heat is much more dangerous.
The July temperatures have given added urgency to calls for governments to deliver on commitments made in Paris last year to limit temperature rises to 1.5C beyond pre-industrial levels – a limit not far off the record set in July.
“People should be in no doubt that global warming continues apace and that should focus governments on the task of delivering what was agreed in Paris last year,” said the LSE’s Ward.
Nasa’s records indicate July was about 1.3C warmer than the pre-industrial average, said David Karoly, a climate scientist from the University of Melbourne, who pointed out that Nasa’s baseline temperatures already included about 0.5C of warming in global temperatures.
Karoly said about 0.2C of that anomaly was likely to be owing to El Niño, leaving about 1.1C mostly caused by human-induced climate change.

Links

• July 2016 was world's hottest month since records began, says NASA
• Q&A smackdown: Brian Cox brings graphs to grapple with Malcolm Roberts
• Disasters like Louisiana floods will worsen as planet warms, scientists warn
• Climate change is here now and it could lead to global conflict
• Global warming likely to breach 2C threshold, climate scientists conclude
• Cooling Pacific has dampened global warming, research shows
• Global warming study finds no grounds for climate sceptics' concerns
• Food prices driven up by global warming, study shows
• Climategate scientists cleared of manipulating data on global warming
• Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes
• Chinese government adviser warns that 2C global warming target is unrealistic

Climate Urgency: We've Locked In More Global Warming Than People Realize

The Guardian - Dana Nuccitelli

Today's carbon pollution will have climate consequences for centuries to come. We're in the midst of a critical decade

An Adelie penguin standing atop a block of melting ice in East Antarctica. Slowly-melting ice is a 'feedback' through which today's carbon pollution will heat the planet for centuries to come. Photograph: Reuters

While most people accept the reality of human-caused global warming, we tend not to view it as an urgent issue or high priority. That lack of immediate concern may in part stem from a lack of understanding that today's pollution will heat the planet for centuries to come, as explained in this Denial101x lecture:

Denial101x carbon cycle lecture by Gavin Cawley.

So far humans have caused about 1°C warming of global surface temperatures, but if we were to freeze the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide at today's levels, the planet would continue warming. Over the coming decades, we'd see about another 0.5°C warming, largely due to what's called the "thermal inertia" of the oceans (think of the long amount of time it takes to boil a kettle of water). The Earth's surface would keep warming about another 1.5°C over the ensuing centuries as ice continued to melt, decreasing the planet's reflectivity.
To put this in context, the international community agreed in last year's Paris climate accords that we should limit climate change risks by keeping global warming below 2°C, and preferably closer to 1.5°C. Yet from the carbon pollution we've already put into the atmosphere, we're committed to 1.5–3°C warming over the coming decades and centuries, and we continue to pump out over 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year.

The importance of reaching zero or negative emissions
We can solve this problem if, rather than holding the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide steady, it falls over time. As discussed in the above video, Earth naturally absorbs more carbon than it releases, so if we reduce human emissions to zero, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide will slowly decline. Humans can also help the process by finding ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it. Scientists are researching various technologies to accomplish this, but we've already put over 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Pulling a significant amount of that carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it safely will be a tremendous challenge, and we won't be able to reduce the amount in the atmosphere until we first get our emissions close to zero.
There are an infinite number of potential carbon emissions pathways, but the 2014 IPCC report considered four possible paths that they called RCPs. In one of these (called RCP 2.6 or RCP3-PD), we take immediate, aggressive, global action to cut carbon pollution, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels peak at 443 ppm in 2050, and by 2100 they've fallen back down to today's level of 400 ppm. In two others (RCPs 4.5 and 6.0) we act more slowly, and atmospheric levels don't peak until the year 2150, then they remain steady, and in the last (RCP8.5) carbon dioxide levels keep rising until 2250.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the four IPCC RCP scenarios. Illustration: Dana Nuccitelli

As the figure below shows, in the first scenario, global warming peaks at 2°C and then temperatures start to fall toward the 1.5°C level, meeting our Paris climate targets. In the other scenarios, temperatures keep rising centuries into the future.

Global annual mean surface air temperature anomalies (relative to 1986–2005) from CMIP5 climate model runs. Discontinuities at 2100 are due to different numbers of models performing the extension runs beyond the 21st century and have no physical meaning. No ranges are given for the RCP6.0 projections beyond 2100, as only two models are available. Illustration: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

This is the critical decade
We don't know what technologies will be available in the future, but we do know that the more carbon pollution we pump into the atmosphere today, the longer it will take and more difficult it will be to reach zero emissions and stabilize the climate. We'll also have to pull that much more carbon out of the atmosphere.
It's possible that as in three of the IPCC scenarios, we'll never get all the way down to zero or negative carbon emissions, in which case today's pollution will keep heating the planet for centuries to come. Today's carbon pollution will leave a legacy of climate change consequences that future generations may struggle with for the next thousand years.
Five years ago, the Australian government established a Climate Commission, which published a report discussing why we're in the midst of the 'critical decade' on climate change:

The risks of future climate change – to our economy, society and environment – are serious, and grow rapidly with each degree of further temperature rise. Minimising these risks requires rapid, deep and ongoing reductions to global greenhouse gas emissions. We must begin now if we are to decarbonise our economy and move to clean energy sources by 2050. This decade is the critical decade.

Our is the first generation to understand the problems our carbon pollution is causing, and the last that can take the necessary action to prevent them from causing a climate destabilization. In addition to the Australian Climate Commission, 31 major scientific organizations recently warned policymakers that:

To reduce the risk of the most severe impacts of climate change, greenhouse gas emissions must be substantially reduced.

We have no excuse for inaction or complacency; the experts have clearly warned us. If we refuse to urgently act on this information, future generations will suffer the consequences of our failures today.

Links

• Q&A smackdown: Brian Cox brings graphs to grapple with Malcolm Roberts
• Climate scientists make a bold prediction about sea level rise
• Rejection of experts spreads from Brexit to climate change with 'Clexit'
• New research shows penguins will suffer in a warming world
• A climate scientist and economist made big bucks betting on global warming

Malcolm Roberts Leaves NASA 'Flummoxed' With Q&A Climate Claims

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

It probably takes a lot to faze Gavin Schmidt, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, but the outlandish views of Malcolm Roberts, the newly elected One Nation senator, can do it from half a world away.
On Monday night's Q&A program on the ABC, Roberts was venting his now well-worn view that there was no empirical evidence of climate change.

Q&A: Malcolm Roberts v science: The debate turned to Climate Change on Q&A and even physicist Brian Cox was dumbfounded by One Nation sentator-elect Malcolm Roberts' arguments.

Among those exasperated was fellow panelist, Brian Cox, the physicist and rock star science communicator of this generation, who told Roberts: "I could sit here and read out figures until I'm blue in the face".
Indeed, how much data do you want?
Richard Muller, a former prominent sceptic US scientist, re-examined 14 million temperature observations from 44,455 sites across the world going back to 1753. The results prompted a "total turnaround" in his views, as my colleague Ben Cubby wrote in 2012.
"Our results show that the average temperature of the earth's land has risen by 2½ degrees fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1½ degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases," Professor Muller wrote.
Roberts, a former coal engineer, and then manager of the Galileo Movement, was unimpressed.
"We've based our views on empirical science, and there's nothing in the Muller study to undercut that," Roberts told Cubby at the time. Climate change science had been captured by "some of the major banking families in the world" who form a "tight-knit cabal", he insisted.

Record global temperatures are being set at an unprecedented rate. Photo: Iwan van Hagen

That sense of capture - if not the sinister anti-semitic hints that prompted even fellow denier commentator Andrew Bolt to distance himself from Roberts - remains four years on.
Anyway, when Cox pulled out some charts on Q&A from US space agency NASA showing a clear upward trend in global temperatures, Roberts readily dismissed the data as "corrupted" and "manipulated".

Former coal miner and now One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts says NASA data on climate change is 'corrupted'. Photo: Robert Shakespeare

Roberts' argument, apparently, is that the world was hotter in the 1930s but NASA had altered the figures to make the current era look warmer. (According to one take, the issue is whether the continental US was warmer in 1934 than in the hot years of 1998 or 2006 - but 2012 then blew away all previous records.)

Record heat - again
Roberts wasn't to know it but NASA's regular monthly readings on global temperature were just hours from being released.
A glance at the chart below released overnight suggests herculean efforts would be needed to make the 1930s look warmer than any recent decade, let alone the current one. Note, too, the prediction for this year.

Meanwhile, Schmidt, the climate modeller who is also the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, was clearly following the live Australian debate on Q&A.
In rapid succession, Schmidt fired out a dozen tweets, bemused by the claims of manipulation.
His world-renowned centre had been estimating global temperature changes since 1981, and the data has been available to the public since 2007, Schmidt said.

Spot the 'pause'
Mind you, the NASA data is scary enough to concern anyone paying attention.
Since July is typically the hottest month of the year given the preponderance of land in the northern hemisphere now in summer, a record hot July also means we just posted the warmest for any month on record.
For more than a year, each month has set records for heat, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
However, Roberts and his friends routinely claim the world hasn't warmed in the past two decades - the senator plucked out 1995 as the beginning of the "pause" on Monday.
Usually the starting point is 1998 when a record large El Nino made for a temperature spike that took some years of background warming to eclipse.
But now we have 2005, 2010, 2014 and 2015 all exceeding 1998, with 2016 a 99 per cent chance of being yet hotter, Schmidt says. (NOAA in 2015 ruled out any slowdown in global warming.)
Here's how this year is tracking, courtesy of Schmidt again:

July 2016 was the hottest month since the instrumental records began.

Japan 'corrupted' too
Other data out on Monday from the Japan Meteorological Agency - no doubt corrupted too, in Roberts' musings - echoed NASA's results.
According to JMA, last month was the hottest July in records going back to 1891.
It was 0.44 degrees above the 1981-2010 base that it uses, and narrowly above the previous record set just a year earlier.
Last month's temperature anomaly was also 0.14 degrees above the July that came at the end of that huge 1997-98 El Nino.
(See chart below with the black line indicating surface temperature anomaly, the blue line showing the five-year running mean and the red line showing the long-term linear trend.)

Roberts, of course, won't be moved.

'It does sound outlandish'
For Roberts to be right, at least 80 science academies around the world have to be wrong, as would almost 100 per cent of the scientists publishing work in the field.
John Cook, a climate communications research fellow at the University of Queensland, is part of a crew offering a free lecture series  "Making Sense of Climate Science Denial" to help explain why "empirical science" will never sate Roberts or sceptics like him.
As Cook notes, the onus really should sit with Roberts to explain why so many changes predicted by climate science are being observed - such as cooling in the upper atmosphere as less heat escapes to space because of the additional greenhouse gases accumulating in the biosphere.
But Roberts and One Nation find an easier target in the messengers.
The party wants "a Royal Commission (or similar) into the corruption of climate science and identify whether any individual or organisation has misled government to effect climate and energy policy".
One Nation also demands a "review the Bureau of Meteorology to ensure independence and accountability for weather and climate records including public justification of persistent upward adjustments to historical climate records", while the CSIRO must also be investigated.
If Monday night's QandA was any guide, Roberts now will be granted a regular perch to air his nonsense, serving a useful purpose for those wanting to delay or reverse action to curb consumption of coal, oil and gas.
"It does sound outlandish," Roberts told Cubby in 2012. "I, like you, was reluctant to believe it [but] there are significant things going on in Australia that people are waking up to".
For Australian voters, the nightmare of electing Roberts and One Nation to the senate has just begun.

Links

• One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts makes cringeworthy debut on Q&A
• Q&A: One Nation's Malcolm Roberts continues to deny the existence of climate change 
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Global Analysis - June 2016
• One Nation's Malcolm Roberts maintains climate change denial
• The senator from Wonderland dons his special aluminium helmet
• Epic Middle East heatwave could be global warming's hellish curtain-raiser

The Australian Government Just Gave Millions Of Dollars To An Overseas Coal Mining Company

Junkee - Osman Faruqi

The federal Coalition government has been crying poor when it comes to investing in science and innovation. They've slashed more than $100 million and hundreds of jobs from the CSIRO, and wound back a number of climate change focused programs. Which is a smart thing to do when sea levels are rising and ice caps are melting, right? But despite cutting environmental programs and research, the government has managed to find $24 million to fund so called "clean coal" technologies.
Last week the Minister for Resources, Senator Matt Canavan, announced the details of seven grants worth nearly $24 million funded through the "Carbon Capture and Storage Research Development and Demonstration Fund". The largest grant, worth nearly $9 million, was handed over to Swiss company Glencore. The government also handed over $700,000 to multi-national oil firm Shell, and gave millions to the CSIRO — but only to test carbon dioxide storage programs.
So what are carbon dioxide storage programs, why are we funding them and do they work?

What Is Carbon Capture And Storage?
Coal is the biggest contributor to global climate change. The burning of fossil fuels like coal leads to the release of carbon dioxide, which then enters our atmosphere and leads to global warming through the greenhouse effect. Scientists are telling us that we need to stop burning coal and rapidly invest in clean, renewable energy technologies that are less harmful to the environment if we want to avoid runaway climate change.
But because this is Australia and our politicians love ignoring the advice of scientists, we've managed to avoid the shift to renewable energy, and are still obsessed with mining and burning coal. That's where carbon capture comes in. The idea is to physically capture the carbon dioxide released from the burning of coal and bury it somewhere underground so it doesn't enter the atmosphere. Sounds like a crazy plan cooked up by a Bond villain? That's because it basically is.
The problem with carbon capture and storage is that it doesn't work. And trying to make it work will cost a lot of money. Money that would be better spent on building proven alternatives to coal like solar and wind power. The UK government this year scrapped its $1.7 billion carbon capture and storage program and will instead look at alternative ways of reducing emissions.
Last week's announcement shows that our government is still committed to carbon capture and storage. They've slashed $100 million from the CSIRO, much of it from climate change mitigation and adaptation programs, and spent $24 million on an unproven, expensive technology.

Subsidising Massive Coal Companies Doesn't Make Any Sense
Glencore is a massive, multinational commodities company that made a $10.5 billion profit last year. So why exactly are Australian taxpayers giving them millions of dollars to experiment with carbon capture and storage? The grant will be used to test whether or not it's viable to inject carbon dioxide emissions from a nearby coal fired power plant deep underground. The Group Executive for Glencore's global coal business, who also happens to be Chairman of the World Coal Association, is absolutely stoked.
"The Project highlights the important role Australia is playing in developing innovative, practicable and scientifically sound solutions" he said in a press release. Though when you think about it there's nothing particularly innovative, practical or scientifically sound about spending millions of dollars trying to bury carbon dioxide underground.
Regardless of the wider context, spending tens of millions of dollars on an unproven technology would be a very silly thing to do. But in the face of massive funding cuts to the CSIRO and environment programs more generally, it's particularly dumb and reckless. We know how to reduce emissions: we need to invest in renewable energy. Australia is the sunniest country on Earth but solar power only makes up 2.4 percent of our energy mix.
This latest announcement makes the government's priorities perfectly clear. Despite all of Malcolm Turnbull's talk about innovation and creating jobs in new industries, he's choosing to cut the CSIRO, the organisation that gave us Wi-Fi, in order to fund an old industry like coal. The rest of the world is making the switch to renewables. We desperately need to catch up before we get left behind, and we can't do that if we're paying companies like Glencore and Shell to literally bury our emissions underground.

Links

• $23.7 million for carbon capture and storage
• Back to basics on coal's role in climate change
• A global shift to 100% renewables is not just cleaner – it's about equality
• Carbon capture and storage: Trouble in store
• Clean Energy Australia Report