There’s Nothing “Unrealistic” About Real Climate Action
Rather than tackle climate change head-on, Obama administration officials continue to attack “Keep It in the Ground” movement
I’ve been in D.C. for a long time, so I’m used to hearing politicians and Beltway insiders say ridiculous things.
But recent news that one of President Obama’s top science advisers, John Holdren, brushed off the growing “Keep It in the Ground” movement — which aims to spur real action in the face of the rapidly expanding climate crisis — as “unrealistic” was a doozy.
I wouldn’t blink twice if this came out of the mouth of a Big Oil spokesman, but a top scientist in the Obama administration? Seriously?
There’s absolutely no doubt that we’re running out of time to take the kind of action that’s needed to truly curb the climate crisis and avoid some of its worst effects, including rising seas inundating our coastal communities, deadly heat waves, food shortages and humanitarian crises as people flee climate-ravaged regions of the world.
World leaders, including the United States, gathered in Paris last year and agreed to take significant steps to rein in climate change and keep the world’s global temperatures “well-below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit warming increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Unfortunately, the voluntary pledges by individual countries, including the U.S., are not enough to reach those targets.
The United States needs to take significant additional steps to align its climate goals with its energy policies. And that should start with a ban on new fossil fuel leases on America’s public lands and oceans — lands that are owned by all of us and have become a significant contributor to the climate crisis.
Holdren, like Interior Secretary Sally Jewell before him, has conflated the request to end new federal fossil fuel leasing — a process that locks in fossil fuel extraction and investment for decades — as a demand to immediately end fossil fuel production and consumption. By responding to a demand nobody has made, the administration leaves the public empty-handed when seeking an honest and substantive policy response to the request of ending new federal fossil fuel leasing.
Holdren also seems to think that we have another 30 to 40 years before we need to take serious action and that we can afford to lock in decades more of carbon pollution based on fracked gas and gas pipelines because he thinks it’s less polluting than coal. Well, that’s simply not true — we don’t have 30 to 40 years to wait before we make sharp reductions in greenhouse gas pollution. And when you properly account for the methane emissions of gas production and pipeline transmission it can be even worse for the climate than burning coal.
A study commissioned last year by the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth revealed that a ban on new fossil fuel leasing on federal lands and oceans would keep up to 450 billion tons of carbon pollution from entering the atmosphere. That’s the annual pollution equivalent of more than 118,000 coal-fired power plants. Another recent study revealed that oil, gas and coal already leased to the fossil fuel industry would last between 25 and 40 years, far beyond the point the world will exceed the carbon pollution limits set out in the Paris agreement.
Last week the Center led more than 250 climate, community and tribal organizations in filing a landmark legal petition calling on the Obama administration to halt all new leasing on federal lands for oil, gas, tar sands and oil shale.
Our petition is the natural outgrowth of a growing grassroots movement in the United States — regular, everyday people who see the unfolding climate disaster and want something done. Thousands of people are showing up to protest fossil fuel lease sales around the country, from the Gulf Coast to Colorado to Washington, D.C. They understand the time for action is now, and we need something big enough to make a real impact on our climate future.
John Holdren can call it “unrealistic” if he likes, but the “Keep It in the Ground” movement is the best, most real option on the table right now to truly start handling this crisis. President Obama can implement this ban immediately, without waiting for Congress. Unfortunately, though, his administration has yet to propose nearly enough of the kind of major changes that are needed to address a problem of this magnitude.
Want to know what’s “unrealistic?” Relying on hope — rather than change — to get us out of this mess.
Randi Spivak is public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
