Fossil fuels threaten our future
Whyte is professor emeritus of political and international studies and a policy fellow at the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy.
The debate over responding to climate change has attracted a high level of emotionalism.
The non-emotional and scientific assessments of climate change, though, are clear: Global warming is already seriously damaging life on Earth, it will inflict many painful and possibly impossible adaptations on human populations and there now seems to be no chance that we shall stop temperature increases at 2 C — the upper limit that scientists have identified for avoiding unbearable effects.
The recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is unequivocal in predicting our dire future.
The cause of warming is also well understood. The burning by humans of fossil fuels and the human destruction of the Earth’s carbon-consuming vegetation have created a carbon dioxide blanket in the planet’s atmosphere that is slowing the return of solar radiation to space. This means that more of the heat from the sun is staying close to the Earth’s surface warming everything — land, ocean and atmosphere — to temperatures that our ecological, meteorological, agricultural and social systems cannot withstand.
Scientific assessments of geo-engineering strategies — dumping carbon dioxide-consuming chemicals into the oceans and seeding the atmosphere with particles to reduce solar radiation — are just plain speculative, scary and laden with unintended consequences.
Finally, we know that to slow and then stop the warming trend we must put less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This simply means that we must burn less carbon-based energy. When scientists prescribe less burning of carbon, they mean much less — the most recent calculation is that over two-thirds of known reserves of oil, gas and coal must stay in the ground.
If humans plan to survive on this planet in anything remotely like the current scale of population and in something like the current condition of human wellbeing, we will stop extracting and burning most carbon fuels and take four other related steps: impose a significant carbon price; change social structures to reduce energy demand; adopt radical social changes to conserve energy; and invest heavily in the scientific development of non-carbon energy and in infrastructure that will make it accessible.
That there is a strong emotional response to these propositions is not surprising. They translate into the loss that we find most difficult — the loss of the familiar.
Our cities will function differently, our living habits will change, capital wealth tied up in the world’s fossil fuel deposits will disappear, the reliable return on petroleum investments (at least until recently) will evaporate and job markets will become even more disrupted.
All this requires state activism at a time when many think that private markets best serve our needs.
But our intellectual tradition equips us to understand the need for these changes. The western world (what we once called the developed world) has benefited from the Enlightenment — the intellectual revolution that changed the way we exercise humanity’s greatest strengths — its drive to acquire knowledge and the insatiable search to know more.
The revolution was as simple as it is profound. It was based on the idea that we can know things by careful observation, hard-thinking about what forces — human and natural — have caused these things to occur and through the critical testing of hypotheses.
These have been the core of science, but also social science, political design, psychology, history and much else. We have benefited hugely from this in terms of health, productivity, global intellectual sharing, political stability, economics and social development.
The lessons of the Enlightenment govern much of our lives and most would resist going back to basing the knowledge we use to govern our lives on superstition, revelation or political and religious authority. But that does not mean that familiar cultural contexts or psychological needs have disappeared.
We have a tendency to cling hopefully to what we know, especially when new realizations compel us to alter our satisfying and comfortable ways. Perhaps it is this that has stopped us from understanding what the relentless burning of fossil fuels means to our future.
But we are also trapped by human arrogance — the belief that humankind is a force greater than nature.
In the sonnet Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley describes the inevitable fate for the belief that human might can overcome any need to accept our humble and dependent place in the grandeur of creation — any duty to accept the responsibility of stewardship:
“Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
What stretches far away — or not so far away — for us?