Can we say no to fossil fuels, and if so, how?
Managing climate change touches on almost everything that human beings do, from driving to powering our homes, from building to planting. Humanity has never had to deal with a problem of this scope before, and finding ways to come together and coordinate our efforts to solve it is not easy.
The main international framework governing climate change management, the Paris Agreement of 2015, does not include specific steps on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions - it doesn’t even set emissions targets. Instead, it leaves it up to signatory countries to find ways to limit the global average temperature increase to 1.5° C.
This leaves a lot of questions about what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it. Do we focus on incentivizing the rapid development and deployment of renewable energy? Implement carbon taxes to more accurately reflect the social costs of carbon? Prioritize reducing energy consumption by taking steps like funding mass transit?
One thing we do know is that sooner or later, we are going to have to stop using so much oil, gas, and coal - and hopefully sooner. The IPCC warns that limiting global warming to 1.5° C will require greenhouse gas emissions to peak “before 2025 at the latest, and be reduced by 43 per cent by 2030,” and fossil fuels are by far the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
This gets us to one of the thorny problems posed by conservation - simply put, how do we say no to exploiting a valuable, familiar, and abundant resource? In a sense, this is the problem we’re trying to solve.
To get a sense of the scope of this problem, Worldometer puts the volume of proven oil reserves in 2022 at 1.65 trillion barrels. And according to Vaclav Smil:
There is no shortage of fossil fuel resources in the Earth’s crust, no danger of imminently running out of coal and hydrocarbons: at the 2020 level of production, coal reserves would last for about 120 years, oil and gas reserves for about 50 years, and continued exploration would transfer more of them from the resource to the reserve (technically and economically viable) category. (How the World Really Works, p. 37)
That is a heck of a lot of fuel to leave in the ground - and not just Germany, the United States, and China, but everyone, everywhere, forever. Because CO2 emissions remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, slowing the pace of emissions will not reduce the impact - it will only slow it down.
“What about carbon capture?” you might ask. “Can’t we continue burning fossil fuels, and then capture and sequester carbon dioxide under the ground?” For now at least, the short answer is no. In its current form, carbon capture is expensive and ineffective, and is mostly used to simply extract more oil. (For more information, “Further Reading” below.)
If there is currently no safe way to use fossil fuels, how much do we have to leave unexploited, exactly? One answer to that question was proposed by Daniel Welsby et al. in their paper Unextractable fossil fuels in a 1.5°C world, published in Nature in 2021. The authors found that in order to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 °C, we would have to leave nearly 60% of oil and natural gas, and 90% of coal unextracted.
And it’s not just the value of the fuels themselves we’ll have to write down - there’s also the question of the assets that must be stranded in the transition to renewables. This describes the lost value of assets that are retired before the end of their lifecycle, because we no longer need the supertankers or blast furnaces, or what have you.
As you can imagine, here, too, we’re talking about enormous sums of money. In this recent paper, an MIT team estimated the total value of assets that would be stranded by limiting fossil fuel exploitation to the levels described by the Nature study mentioned above. Depending on the scenario, they found that meeting the Paris Agreement target could lead to between $21.5 trillion to $30.6 trillion USD worth of stranded assets, depending on which scenario they ran.
I think it helps to frame the magnitude of the problem we’re trying to deal with by putting some of these numbers into perspective. And we are not just talking about the oil fat cats here - we also have to ask the Democratic Republic of Congo not to auction oil leases in their rainforest basin, for example.
Some conservationists make strong ethical arguments that people in advanced economies don’t have a moral right to ask people in the developing world to limit growth, which would potentially leave billions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa and India in poverty and hardship. For example, Bill Gates represents this view in his climate change primer, arguing:
It would be immoral and impractical to try to stop people who are lower on the economic ladder from climbing up. We can’t expect poor people to stay poor because rich countries emitted too many greenhouse gases, and even if we wanted to, there would be no way to accomplish it. Instead, we need to make it possible for low-income people to climb the ladder without making climate change worse.
(How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, pp. 42-1)
In this book, Gates focuses almost entirely on investing in new technologies, and scarcely mentioning reducing, reusing, or recycling. He can be pretty cagey about his personal political and philosophical views, but I do wonder if this perspective doesn’t reflect a practical recognition that there is no obvious example from history of a time when people simply stopped exploiting a useful, valuable resource on this scale. If we are simply unable to do so, then our only option is to displace fossil fuels with less damaging alternatives.
You might find a foil to this perspective in Gates’s friend Vaclav Smil, who recently wrote a mammoth book on growth in all of its forms, and who has stated that he wrote it to demonstrate that we cannot simply push for unlimited growth forever. Either we will limit our own growth, or eventually the biosphere will do it for us.
In a 2019 interview with The Guardian, Smil said:
Without a biosphere in a good shape, there is no life on the planet. It’s very simple. That’s all you need to know. The economists will tell you we can decouple growth from material consumption, but that is total nonsense. The options are quite clear from the historical evidence. If you don’t manage decline, then you succumb to it and you are gone. The best hope is that you find some way to manage it.
However, Smil is overtly skeptical that meaningful change will come from international agreements. After reviewing the lack of progress made by international bureaucracies, he notes:
[S]o far, the only effective, substantial moves toward decarbonization have not come from any determined, deliberate, targeted policies. Rather, they have been by-products of general technical advances (higher conversion efficiencies, more nuclear and hydro generation, less wasteful processing and manufacturing procedures) and of ongoing production and management shifts (switching from coal to natural gas; more common, less energy-intensive, material recycling) whose initiation and progress had nothing to do with any quest for reduced greenhouse gas emissions. (How the World Really Works, pg. 183)
However you come down on this issue, it’s very likely that moving off fossil fuels will require coming up with solutions that are not just safer, but cheaper. It’s either that, or we will have to effect a global change of perspective that the last fifty years of public discourse on conservation have not even begun to establish.
Now for some good news: we do have indications that on that front, at least, we’re heading in the right direction. Renewable energy is now cheaper than any other available form, and a recent Oxford University study found that a rapid switch to renewables by 2050 could save the world as much as $12 trillion USD by lowering fuel costs. But, given the magnitude of the economic interests at stake, we cannot underestimate the political and institutional inertia that will be invested in preserving the status quo.
Further Reading:
The Carbon Capture Crux - a summary of the IEEFA’s recent report on carbon capture, which found that, after billions spent in government subsidies, the few existing carbon capture facilities that actually work are very expensive, and more than 70% of sequestered carbon dioxide is literally used to drive more oil to the surface of the Earth for exploitation.
Every Dollar Spent on This Climate Technology is a Waste - New York Times (paywalled). An op-ed by Charles Harvey and Kurt House, who founded the first privately-funded carbon capture company in the US 14 years ago, only to abandon it when it became clear that investing in renewable energy is a much better investment.
Call to Action: Subscribe to at least one source of reliable information on climate change
This week’s practical suggestion is a reminder that there’s a lot going on in the world of climate change. A lot of wheels are in motion, and new discoveries are being made all the time.
To help stay informed, I suggest taking a moment to find at least one source of information that you trust, and subscribe to a regular newsletter or social media channel. It could be a climatologist on Twitter, or the Facebook page of the IPCC. There are tons of good newsletters out there - Inside Climate News has several, for example. David Wallace-Wells has a good New York Times column/weekly newsletter, Elizabeth Kolbert sometimes Tweets. Pick one, and keep an eye on it.
Reading Roundup
Europe Is Sacrificing Its Ancient Forests for Energy - New York Times (paywalled). Centuries-old trees are being cut down in protected old-growth forests in the EU, essentially for firewood. This is a case of well-intentioned incentives gone wrong - wood pellets are subsidized by the EU, but the expectation was they would be made of waste wood and sawdust.
World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds - The Guardian. Good coverage of an important study in Science reviewing research on a number of potential climate “tipping points,” where processes would start and become self-perpetuating, such that they’d be impossible to stop, even if emissions dropped to zero. For example, as the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, its surface area becomes smaller, so it reflects less sunlight back into space during the summer, which makes it a bit warmer, which makes it melt more. At a certain point, the process will lock into a feedback loop that can’t stop, leading to the whole thing melting, which would cause the sea level to rise by nearly a foot. In this study, the authors found that with a 1.5° C temperature increase, five such scenarios are likely to occur, including the Greenland Ice Sheet scenario.
Mega-Drought in the American Southwest - The Guardian. A seven-article series on the colossal drought currently affecting the United States.