Creating an Ecological Society. Chris Williams
by as much as 18°F (10°C). When the study verified the potential for such warming Exxon curtailed the research and hid its findings.59 Meanwhile, the corporation poured tens of millions of dollars into the coffers and bank accounts of think tanks and climate change deniers—scientists and politicians who have essentially rejected the company’s own research findings and helped to delay political action against climate change by decades.
But as an investigation by Inside Climate News of internal documents and interviews reveals, Exxon was far from alone in suppressing this knowledge. The American Petroleum Institute, together with the nation’s largest oil companies, ran a task force to monitor and share climate research between 1979 and 1983, indicating that the oil industry as a whole was aware of its possible impact on the world’s climate far earlier than previously known. The group’s members included senior scientists and engineers from nearly every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company.60
Contrary to regularly made claims that President Obama is engaged in a “war on fossil fuels,” his administration could hardly have been friendlier to increased oil production, according to a 2016 Bloomberg News article:
U.S. oil production has surged 82 percent to near-record levels in the past seven years and natural gas is up by nearly one-quarter. Instead of shutting down the hydraulic fracturing process that has unlocked natural gas from dense rock formations, Obama has promoted the fuel as a stepping-stone to a greener, renewable future.
The administration has also permitted drilling in the Arctic Ocean over the objections of environmentalists and opened the door to a new generation of oil and gas drilling in Atlantic waters hugging the East Coast. [Obama] also signed, with reservations, a measure to lift a 40-year-old ban on the export of most U.S. crude.61
It was only in the final days of the Obama administration, when confronted with Donald Trump as successor, that the president signed an order prohibiting new oil and gas drilling in large areas of the continental shelf under government control in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. Congress, however, can reverse this order.
Then there are the proposed international trade deals, which completely subvert any hope that governments are serious about addressing the climate crisis. On the international front, the Obama administration was just as busy as his predecessor in promoting corporate interests. In the final year of his presidency Obama hoped to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Modeled on the environmentally and socially disastrous 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed into law by another Democrat, Bill Clinton, both deals incorporate language designed to protect against “loss of future profits.” Translation? “Under either trade pact, if a new air rule, for instance, creates disincentive for an international energy company to build a coal plant, it can sue the government for investment losses if the company can prove the policy was adopted after initial plans for the plant were made.”62 Both international trade deals appear to be dead in the water as a result of persistent organizing against them and in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president. International trade deals such as NAFTA have little to do with trade and lowering tariff barriers; they are primarily about allowing unhindered capital movement, protecting intellectual property rights, undermining workers’ ability to organize and fight for better conditions in the North and the South, and weakening environmental regulations, all of which facilitate corporate profit-taking.
Under these so-called free trade agreements, corporate interests always trump environmental protections. But it doesn’t merely end with corporations being able to sue governments; it includes limitations on how environmental issues will be addressed. As reported in the journal Nature Climate Change,
A number of unproven approaches to environmental policies underpin free trade agreements. Among them is the market-based approach to carbon pricing, such as an emissions trading scheme, often considered to be a dysfunctional alternative to stringent industrial standards or carbon taxes. Less direct than a carbon tax, market-based carbon pricing can also be easier to manipulate, as shown by previous experience in Europe.63
Taking into account the healthcare costs caused by pollution, the International Monetary Fund estimates subsidies for the production of fossil fuels at $5.3 trillion in 2015, or 6.5 percent of the global GDP.64 Contrast this with aid to developing countries: the United Nations has spent decades trying to get developed countries to push their contributions up to a mere 0.7 percent of their GDP, only to be continually rebuffed. In 2014, the United States donated $32 billion in overseas aid (much of it tied to the purchase of U.S. products or as loans rather than actual gifts), a miserly 0.19 percent of GDP.65
Are There “Green” Alternatives?
Just as we are told that there aren’t enough resources to feed everyone or lift people out of poverty, we are told that efficient renewable energy technologies don’t exist, or that they would be too expensive to build, or that wind and solar power are unreliable. A 2016 study by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows otherwise: the United States, which is responsible for 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, could “transition to a reliable, low-carbon, electrical generation and transmission system … with commercially available technology and within 15 years.”66
This would mean an almost 80 percent drop in carbon emissions from 1990 levels by the electricity-generating sector by 2030. This new electrical generation and transmission system would not even require storage because it would be regionally integrated. This is exactly the kind of change required for staying within 3.6°F (2°C) of average global warming. It could be done at less cost than continuing to use fossil fuels to produce electricity. Electrical production currently accounts for two-fifths of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
In a world heading rapidly toward irreversible and devastating climate change, not only are renewable sources of electricity the best option; they are the only option if we want reliable electricity. Why? Because thermoelectric power plants, which currently supply 98 percent of global electricity (whether using nuclear, fossil fuel, hydroelectric, or biomass fuel), need massive quantities of water to generate steam for cooling and to pump power for dams. One study estimates that because of lower water levels and warmer temperatures in many rivers, generating capacity could be reduced “by as much as 86% in thermoelectric and 74% in hydro-electric plants.”67
Once seen as an ultra-reliable source of “green” power for developing countries, hydroelectricity is showing itself to be anything but. Brazil, a country that produces 75 percent of its electricity from hydropower (for South America as a whole it’s 63 percent), suffered extensive blackouts in 2014 owing to a four-decades-long drought.68 Despite that, the shortsighted, profit-driven priorities of capital mean that Brazil is still building more mega-dams. These dams displace indigenous peoples from their cultural home and way of life and bury rain forests beneath newly created giant lakes; the lake beds—once rain forest, now a mass of rotting vegetation—contribute massive quantities of the climate-warming gas methane to the atmosphere. Despite massive and ongoing protests by workers, farmers, and indigenous groups, the Brazilian government is still attempting to build the ecologically and socially devastating Belo Monte Dam, the third biggest dam in the world.
According to researchers, the most vulnerable areas for shortfalls in electricity due to water reductions and warmer water are “the United States, southern South America, southern Africa, central and southern Europe, Southeast Asia and southern Australia … because declines in mean annual stream flow are projected combined with strong increases in water temperature under changing climate. This reduces the potential for both hydropower and thermoelectric power generation in these regions.”69
When rain forest is cut down for pastureland or other forms of development, buried under thousands of tons of water behind a dam, and people are displaced from their homes a vital ecosystem linkage is being broken—but it is not the only one. Tropical forests store 40 percent of all terrestrial carbon, and deforestation is a significant contributor (15 percent) to carbon emissions. Hardwood trees, with their thick trunks, giant size, and long lives, are the most significant contributors to that carbon storage mechanism.
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