CLIMATE CRISIS
Kicking the (Oil) Can Down the Road
Will end with us kicking the bucket
I’m a serial procrastinator. My car’s air conditioning needs regassing and I’ve known this for months. It was something I would see to next week, and then the next and the next after that.
Now it’s summer, the heat waves are coming one after another and I’m roasting alive during my daily commute. I have no one to blame but myself.
But this isn’t a critical issue. Luckily it doesn’t take me much longer than half an hour to get to work, 45 minutes at most if the traffic is bad. It gets hot, but I can survive it. On the other hand global warming, as we used to call it back in the day, is a very, very serious thing. It’s literally a matter of survival. And we’ve been procrastinating for almost a century.
It might seem like an exaggeration, since most people don’t know about the American scientist Eunice Foote and her revolutionary discovery:
“An atmosphere of that gas [carbon dioxide] would give to our earth a high temperature, and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature . . . must have necessarily resulted.”
That article was published in the American Journal of Science and Arts on November, 1856.
Would anyone expect the U.S. government to connect the dots and come to the conclusion that burning oil would be dangerous to the planet? No. It would be a huge leap at the time. Not to mention that Eunice was a female scientist in an age when science was male-dominated. Not that anything changed when, three years later, John Tyndall would make extensive measurements and independently come to a similar conclusion. Svante Arrhenius in 1896 was the first to hypothesize what would happen if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled. The recorded concentration of atmospheric CO2 at the time was 294.8 ppm. We are currently at around 423 ppm and rising alarmingly fast.
Nils Gustaf Ekholm, a friend and colleague of Arrhenius, was the first to seriously discuss the idea of anthropogenic climate change. He called this the “greenhouse effect”. He furthermore explained that with the then rates of CO2 emissions, the theorized doubling of atmospheric CO2 would inevitably happen.
He just didn’t know how fast.
So, in 1901 we knew about the greenhouse effect and its potential consequences. Ekholm just thought we could use this mechanism to prevent another possible Ice Age, which was a real concern for climatologists at the time. After all, it was known that humanity had faced an Ice Age during its short time on this planet and it was considered a challenge for its survival. By contrast, the little known Eemian period, the time of higher atmospheric CO2 concentration that Eunice hypothesized about, was so hot that there were thick forests all the way into the Arctic Circle. It must have been a good time for us, and food must have been plentiful, right? That’s why some climate deniers will bring this up (in very vague terms) during any discussion about the “climate panic”. “It used to be a lot warmer and people still survived, you know!”
There is one small problem, though.
Our ancestors at the time lived as hunter-gatherers, constantly on the move. There was no systematic agriculture, no crops, no irrigation, no harvests. There were no cities, no infrastructure to get damaged, no buildings of any kind.
The human population was just a tiny fraction of what it is today.
Sea level was about 6–9 metres higher than current levels. That would be enough to cover the first few floors of most buildings. So, my answer to those who dismiss a “little warmth” as a good thing is: think again. Humankind could survive this, but a population of 8 billion living in cities? Not a chance. Some research indicates that living conditions might actually have been much more difficult that we thought. Apparently, there were no humans during the Eemian period in northern Europe, although findings indicate large biomass concentrations. There was a lot of plant matter, but it either didn’t attract enough animals or it wasn’t of much nutritional value to humans.
In a world where similar temperatures occur again, our civilization, as we know it, has zero chance of survival. And we’re steadily marching towards that future. This course was already known in 1901, when Ekholm described the greenhouse effect and expressed the certainty that atmospheric CO2 was going to double.
I’m sure that Ekholm didn’t realize the danger, as he thought that the planet was going into a cooling period, nor could he have foreseen how the rates of CO2 production of his time would skyrocket during the next decades.
He must have thought that it would take centuries. And it would have, if our fossil fuel consumption hadn’t increased exponentially. It seems that our brains, for all our intelligence and ingenuity, lack the ability to fully understand exponential increases.
Not that Ekholm is to blame. After all, he couldn’t know about the invention of plastics that would make oil use ubiquitous. Bakelite would be patented in 1907, but it was just the first of a myriad other types. Despite these advances, people in the following decades still refused to see that our dependence on fossil fuels, especially oil, was growing dangerously and so did our consumption.
You can still find sources that cite unrealistic estimates about the remaining fossil fuel reserves. During the ’80s and ’90s, this was extremely common. Experts were trying to convince us that oil would last for centuries. These estimates didn’t take the rate of consumption growth into account.
This is what exponential growth looks like. Especially the part from 1950 to 1973. Then various things got in the way, such as the 1973 oil crisis. The graph becomes a perfect curve again in the ten years from 1998 to 2008, and I suspect that would be due to the spectacular rise of China. There’s a drop at the time of the 2008 crisis, then the charge resumes, due mostly to the unstoppable growth of the far-eastern dragon. And do you see that tiny dent in 2020? That’s the much vaunted drop in fossil fuel use during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown. When that was over, it was once again business as usual.
That brief interlude in 2020 was an opportunity to begin reducing global consumption, but it was lost. This flies in the face of our stated need to reach net zero by 2050, a goal that we know isn’t going to be enough. It’s like our boat is sinking, we know it’s sinking, and yet we refuse to pump the water out, feeling that we’ll start doing that when we’re ready. We still think we have time.
The COVID-19 lockdown was far from the only missed opportunity. It wasn’t even the best opportunity. In fact, the further back we go, the easier it would have been to transition to a “greener” economy. The necessary measures would have been much less drastic and, thus, attainable.
In the ’70s, there was a golden opportunity in the midst of the oil crisis to start weaning ourselves from fossil fuels. Awareness of global warming was growing, yet the fossil fuel giants did everything in their power to suppress the evidence they already had in their hands.
It’s not simple to give one single reason for this crime. Greed was most certainly a big part of it, as the fossil fuel companies knew that the global economy revolved around them. How do you let go of your business when you know that what you’re selling is considered literally indispensable? Furthermore, green solutions weren’t as well developed as they are today. However, to paraphrase Plato, our need would have been the real creator of solutions.
If we had decided half a century ago that we really needed to do something to avert what is happening today, we wouldn’t be in such dire straits right now.
There were factors other than greed at play that led to us kicking the proverbial can down the road. I’m sure that anyone in the inner circle of power (corporate or governmental) who had qualms about all this could appease their conscience by betting on the future prospects of science. “We’ll find a way, we always do!” Ironically, we ignored the cold, hard facts that science provided us with, in favour of some imagined future technology that would solve our problems.
Wishful thinking, however, has never been known to solve anything. Sure enough, the Green Revolution that began in the 1940s as an experiment, and by the 1970s had saved millions from starvation was hailed as a true miracle. It was a combination of advances in chemistry, genetic research and the mechanization of agriculture on a massive scale that saved millions of lives. It made us believe that we could do anything. And then we even got to the Moon!
How could anyone not believe in science?
Unfortunately, the Green Revolution not only greatly increased our dependence on fossil fuels, but also allowed the global population to skyrocket. World population in 1951 was 2.5 billion. By 1987 it would have doubled. This took a mere 37 years, just a bit longer than a human generation. To put things in perspective, it took nearly seven centuries for the population to double from 0.25 billion (in the early 9th century) to 0.5 billion in the middle of the 16th century (Source).
Although most of this growth was achieved in less developed areas of the world, those people too would gradually start enjoying better living conditions, which, by default, led to an increase of resource consumption. This trend would increase, even as the rate of population growth eventually fell. It turns out that standard/cost of living is inversely proportional with the rate of population growth.
Among other things, such as rampant consumerism, we are now reaping the “rewards” of the unchecked population growth that took place in the previous century.
Either because we didn’t want to reign in our, in effect, cancerous growth (in terms of both population increase and resource consumption) or because we chose to believe in some future, magical solution, we let the situation spiral out of all control. The biosphere is suffering, the climate is turning hostile against all life and soon our food production is going to suffer greatly.
Thus, we have now found ourselves in the unpleasant position of having to exercise degrowth, a planned and deliberate reduction of our standard of living (mainly in terms of energy consumption). The alternative is unthinkable: a drastic, uncontrolled reduction of the global population due to famine, natural disasters, war and disease.
It sounds apocalyptic, but it’s not hypothetical. It will inevitably happen if rapid actions are not taken.
Precisely because a gradual transition to a new model didn’t materialize when it should have, we are now faced with impossible choices. How could any politician convince people that they should make do with less, when we have been raised in a world promising comfort and abundance? Even if a politician willing to tell the truth could be found, they’d be buried in any election.
No one wants to hear the truth. People will follow anyone that promises they can make things “great again”. Only, there is no such thing. It’s a lie and invariably leads to disaster. Hitler in the 1930s took advantage of an impoverished and defeated Germany, promising greatness, destiny, superiority and lebensraum (living space). He delivered death and devastation on a massive scale. In the coming years there will be many demagogues who will try to peddle their snake oil of greatness, promising to keep the global crisis out of their respective countries.
But there are no magical solutions, technological or political. All we have is tools and weapons and it’s up to us to use the former while there is still time before we turn to the latter.
We can no longer procrastinate.
