Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumClimate Change: The New Abolitionism
Before the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the Confederates announced their rebellion with lofty rhetoric about "violations of the Constitution of the United States" and "encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States." But the brute, bloody fact beneath those words was money. So much goddamn money.
The leaders of slave power were fighting a movement of dispossession. The abolitionists told them that the property they owned must be forfeited, that all the wealth stored in the limbs and wombs of their property would be taken from them. Zeroed out. Imagine a modern-day political movement that contended that mutual funds and 401(k)s, stocks and college savings accounts were evil institutions that must be eliminated completely, more or less overnight. This was the fear that approximately 400,000 Southern slaveholders faced on the eve of the Civil War.
In order to get a true sense of how much wealth the South held in bondage, it makes far more sense to look at slavery in terms of the percentage of total economic value it represented at the time. And by that metric, it was colossal. In 1860, slaves represented about 16 percent of the total household assets—that is, all the wealth—in the entire country, which in today's terms is a stunning $10 trillion.
In 2012, the writer and activist Bill McKibben published a heart-stopping essay in Rolling Stone titled "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math." The piece walks through a fairly straightforward bit of arithmetic that goes as follows. The scientific consensus is that human civilization cannot survive in any recognizable form a temperature increase this century more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Given the relationship between carbon emissions and global average temperatures, that means we can release about 565 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere by mid-century. Total. That's all we get to emit if we hope to keep inhabiting the planet in a manner that resembles current conditions.
Now here's the terrifying part. The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a consortium of financial analysts and environmentalists, set out to tally the amount of carbon contained in the proven fossil fuel reserves of the world's energy companies and major fossil fuel–producing countries. That is, the total amount of carbon we know is in the ground that we can, with present technology, extract, burn and put into the atmosphere. The number that the Carbon Tracker Initiative came up with is… 2,795 gigatons. Which means the total amount of known, proven extractable fossil fuel in the ground at this very moment is almost five times the amount we can safely burn.
Proceeding from this fact, McKibben leads us inexorably to the staggering conclusion that the work of the climate movement is to find a way to force the powers that be, from the government of Saudi Arabia to the board and shareholders of ExxonMobil, to leave 80 percent of the carbon they have claims on in the ground. That stuff you own, that property you're counting on and pricing into your stocks? You can't have it.
Given the fluctuations of fuel prices, it's a bit tricky to put an exact price tag on how much money all that unexcavated carbon would be worth, but one financial analyst puts the price at somewhere in the ballpark of $20 trillion. So in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet, we somehow need to convince or coerce the world's most profitable corporations and the nations that partner with them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth. Since all of these numbers are fairly complex estimates, let's just say, for the sake of argument, that we've overestimated the total amount of carbon and attendant cost by a factor of 2. Let's say that it's just $10 trillion.
The last time in American history that some powerful set of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth was in 1865—and then only after four years and more than 600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we've ever fought.
This is the impetus behind the FF industry's intransigent opposition to fixing the carbon problem. Hey, if someone was threatening to take away everything I thought I owned, I might get a tad testy too.
You know we're screwed, right?
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truebrit71
(20,805 posts)No way the Oiligarchs give up that much $$$$....
Funny, i read this over the weekend, and then watched last nights episode of 'Years of Living Dangerously', and the Greenland segment just depressed the hell out of me...Who gets to tell those folks that they shouldn't pull the oil out from under their feet as the glaciers melt? Not me...
nationalize the fed
(2,169 posts)About 85 percent of total primary energy supply in Iceland is derived from domestically produced renewable energy sources
Renewable energy provides almost 100 percent of electricity production, with about 75 percent coming from hydropower and 25 percent from geothermal power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Iceland
Icelandic New Energy
Icelandic New Energy Ltd (Íslensk NýOrka ehf) is a company that promotes the use of hydrogen fuel in Iceland founded in 1999 following a decision in 1998 by the Icelandic Parliament to convert vehicle and fishing fleets to hydrogen produced from renewable energy[1] by 2050.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_New_Energy
A hydrogen filling station in Reykjavík
http://icelandichydrogen.com/projects.htm
OnlinePoker
(5,717 posts)In 2011, only 5% or so was used for residential consumption. 71% was used for the aluminum industry.
http://www.nea.is/geothermal/electricity-generation/
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)And it's located in a very geologically active area with volcanoes, geysers, and so on. What works in Iceland won't scale to the US.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)One major, or even fundamental stumbling block that has always gotten in the way of dealing with this carbon problem (and in a wider sense the entire predicament of industrial civilization), is the human urge to monetize everything - ESPECIALLY RISK.
The idea that a large risk can be offset by a large amount of money - or conversely that the opportunity to amass great wealth justifies assuming enormous risks - has resulted in the commoditizing of risk. We seem to think that we can make risks - even big ones- disappear simply by throwing cash at them. To make matters worse, humans are notoriously poor judges of risk. We always overestimate the picayune risks while underestimating the real threats.
The result is that jobs almost always win out over the environment, and wealth wins out over ... well ... everything.
There is no way I can see to reverse this process, because money works so well for so many things - especially for fostering, directing and enabling growth. It is so deeply ingrained in human society that one might as well imagine living without food or water.
Our insoluble situation is another one of those thermodynamic and cybernetic one-way functions. We have built ourselves a devastatingly complex high-energy civilization that has no emergency exits, no fire doors, and no outside help we can call.
Now that we are at last face to face with a risk that can't be bought off, the hideous nature of our uncorrectable mistake is finally revealing itself, wisp by smoky wisp.
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)by adaptation.
Capitalist elites reckon they will be able to continue to rule the roost as they force reduced numbers of proletarians to inhabit ghastly artificial climate-controlled urban ghettoes under constant surveillence and threats of instant retribution, with special 'hazmat'-style clothing required before venturing outdoors...
LouisvilleDem
(303 posts)The man is so far from the mainstream scientific consensus quoting him damages efforts to do anything effective against climate change. Clearly the author of the piece himself is on the fringes. Take this quote:
"The scientific consensus is that human civilization cannot survive in any recognizable form a temperature increase this century more than 2 degrees Celsius."
I'd love to hear why he believes this is true. I'm sure there is a peer reviewed paper or two out there that claims this is true, but it in no way represents the "consensus" view of climate scientists. Just read IPCC AR5. Will climate change result in serious consequences for civilization? Of course it will. But to claim that what the IPCC says (which by definition is the 'consensus') is that "human civilization cannot survive in any recognizable form" is simply not accurate.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)350 is just blowing smoke up our asses.
350 ppm has been, gone, and ain't comin' back for tens of thousands of years.
But in this case, I think his point that we have far too much accessible carbon in the ground for safety is well taken, no matter what dispute you might have with his risk assessment of +2C. A back of the envelope calculation shows a rise of +8C if we burn it all. We know from the paleo record that is extinction territory for sure.
LouisvilleDem
(303 posts)The last 15 years has shown that the additional heat from GHG ends up in the deep ocean, not the atmosphere. That additional heat has caused the temperature of the ocean to rise a whopping 0.09 degrees. In other words, the ocean has the ability to absorb huge amounts of energy, and acts as a buffer to prevent the kind of large air temperature swings you are talking about. Of course, putting all that heat into the oceans has a whole other set of negatives...
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Nihil
(13,508 posts)... despite the insignificant objections of tiny places like Tuvalu, the Maldives and
anyone else naive enough to want their grandchildren to live in a stable, pleasant
habitat ...
