Bill McKibben’s Rolling Stone Article about Global Warming Is an Outstanding Summary of One Perspective — but It (Understandably) Blames the Wrong People for the Crux of the Problem

© 2012 Peter Free

 

13 August 2012

 

 

Citation — to McKibben’s article

 

Bill McKibben, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math, Rolling Stone (02 August 2012)

 

 

If the underlying enemy is actually us, it is easier to blame more visibly greedy people

 

Environmental writer Bill McKibben targets oil, gas and coal energy companies as the fundamental cause of escalating global warming.

 

Let’s call them, “Big Energy.”

 

Big Energy’s oil, gas and coal in-ground wealth motivates them to spend millions opposing efforts to control carbon dioxide emissions.  By successfully falsifying the science-based discussion with expensive anti-environmental propaganda, Big Energy controls the future.  Which, from McKibben’s point of view, is going to be climatically disastrous.

 

What Mr. McKibben overlooks, in his otherwise correct finger-pointing, is that we consumers are the ones who want cheap energy.

 

In a society with as much ability to find the truth as ours has, people are only fooled, when they want to be.  “We” are the core culprits.  I have great difficulty seeing Big Energy executives and workers as being any more greedy and irresponsible than the rest of us are.

 

 

That criticism aside — McKibben’s article is one of the better ones about the potential seriousness of the climate situation

 

Bill McKibben’s genius lies in honing complex environmental issues into their core elements.

 

Here, his “Terrifying Math” title boils itself down to the following arithmetic:

 

He traces how the world settled on a 2 degree Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) rise in global temperature as the upper limit for human-caused climate change.

 

Then, he explains that the planet might just be able to cope with 565 more gigatons (565 x 109 tons) of carbon dioxide emissions, before we break this 2° Celsius barrier.

 

Last, he lists the proven totals of oil, gas, and coal reserves held by Big Energy in the ground at 2,795 gigatons of carbon — which, of course, is five times the permissible CO2 emission limit.

 

The implications of these three factors are obvious.  If we burn our proven fossil fuel reserves, we will blast our chosen warming limit to smithereens.

 

 

McKibben’s explanation of Big Energy’s anti-restriction propaganda is also sound

 

The 2,795 x 109 tons of in-ground fuel carbon are worth roughly $27 trilliion dollars.  No responsible corporation (under current law) is going to willingly write these off, by agreeing to lessen their value by voluntarily assenting to emission restrictions or added taxes.

 

Consequently, Big Energy spends millions of dollars buying politicians and propagandizing against climatic responsibility.

 

 

McKibben’s suggested solution? — Big Energy stock divesture — like the program that much of the world followed in regard to combatting South African apartheid

 

He writes:

 

Once, in recent corporate history, anger forced an industry to make basic changes. That was the campaign in the 1980s demanding divestment from companies doing business in South Africa.

 

It rose first on college campuses and then spread to municipal and state governments; 155 campuses eventually divested, and by the end of the decade, more than 80 cities, 25 states and 19 counties had taken some form of binding economic action against companies connected to the apartheid regime.

 

[T]he link for college students is even more obvious in this case. If their college's endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won't have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.

 

(The same logic applies to the world's largest investors, pension funds, which are also theoretically interested in the future – that's when their members will "enjoy their retirement.")

 

[A]ny campaign that weakens the fossil-fuel industry's political standing clearly increases the chances of retiring its special breaks.

 

© 2012 Bill McKibben, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math, Rolling Stone (02 August 2012) (paragraphs split)

 

 

But McKibben’s logic regarding stock divestiture misses the conflicting self-interest of those in a position to call for it

 

I suspect that McKibben’s divestiture idea puts wings on pigs:

 

Why would college students flirt with boosting the costs of their education by forcing universities to get rid of their most profitable stock holdings?

 

Why would future pensioners put themselves in potentially bad financial situations by asking their funds to sell stock that often outperforms competing portfolios?

 

In the absence of a societal movement toward “green-ness,” why would masses of people, who are already struggling with difficult finances, agree to raise the cost of fossil fuels?

 

I do not think that McKibben’s divestiture idea is going to work on a wide enough scale to be effective — unless we begin by persuading most of the public that carbon taxation is an economically and environmentally necessary step.

 

 

Not so minor quibbles with climate alarmists’ logic and tone

 

Reading Mr. McKibben’s essay, one can be forgiven for thinking that we are definitively and disastrously en route to planetary “nasty-fi-cation.”

 

However, careful readers of McKibben’s essay will notice that he introduces no substantial evidence regarding the balance of global effects of a 2° Celsius warming.   At most, he says that the 0.8° Celsius warming (that we have already undergone) is having such emphatically negative effects that a 2° ceiling seems too much.

 

As a rational person, living in the drought-stricken southwestern United States, I will not quarrel with McKibben’s sense of urgency as it applies to my home region.  But the scientific part of me questions the certainty that climate alarmists project, whenever they write or say anything.

 

In scientific truth, the local and regional consequences of climate warming are more uncertain than we recognize.  The global distribution and balance of “bad” and “good” effects are mostly still unknown.

 

From a statistical point of view, there is (for example) no legitimate reason to think that 2012 might not been a slightly worse than average year — even for the warmed world that we are anticipating.

 

 

Thought experiments

 

First, let us accept three historically proven, and currently indicative, geopolitical realities:

 

Wealthy humanity has proven multiple times that it does not care about flooding in Bangladesh or low-lying Pacific Ocean islands.

 

“We” don’t care about unspeakable disease burdens in Africa, or anywhere else.

 

And we emphatically are not especially concerned about polar bears and the thousands of other species that rapid planetary warming is almost certainly going to kill off.

 

With these realities in mind, let’s examine the two near certainties that we are already experiencing:

 

(i) increasingly violent weather

 

and

 

(ii) inordinately large swings in temperature and moisture.

 

Both of these are, presumably, the result of increased heat energy in the atmosphere.

 

 

Will increasingly violent weather be all bad? — Probably not

 

In regard to “energetic” weather, just because weather becomes more violent does not mean that it constitutes an economic negative.  Rebuilding squashed or flooded cities is a plus for the construction industry, as well as its ancillary contributors.

 

Callously (but truthfully) speaking, humanity has a historically demonstrated penchant for not taking human deaths especially seriously.  The prospect of even millions of deaths in the future is not going to motivate governments or national publics to deprive themselves of sybaritic comforts today.

 

 

Are increasingly erratic, wide swings in temperature and moisture all bad? — Maybe not

 

In regard to wild swings in temperature and moisture, the same economic pluses might apply.  People will have to buy the equipment necessary to insulate themselves the effects of both.  In 2010 and 2011, for example, I noticed that tornado shelter sales in Oklahoma jumped significantly after those years’ unusual supply of twisters.  The effects of tornadic destruction were negatives for some people and boons for others.

 

Similarly, we are not so fragile that we will automatically disappear just because the high today is 130° Fahrenheit instead of 112.  Nor are we so un-adaptable that we cannot cope with living in boats, in flooded swamps, nine months a year.

 

Agriculture, my most serious concern, will probably move to locations where it easier to undertake.  If millions of people die for lack of food, what is really new?  Famines move humanity to action only for so long as the facing of starving children are on television.  And the “green revolution” (in agriculture) made billions of dollars for the corporations that undertook it.

 

 

In sum, the real climate conundrum is how much discomfort the developed world wants to take on

 

Properly framed, the global warming argument is about our willingness to subject ourselves to the many, still unforeseeable, local and regional consequences of baseline climate change.

 

That is where (a) legitimate uncertainty regarding predicting the future and (b) our present day attachment to comfort, reinforce each other.

 

In my global warming view, “Ain’t nobody gonna do nothin’ significant enough to matter.”

 

 

The moral? — Human beings are poor at planning for certainty, and hopeless at planning for poorly envisioned uncertainty

 

Humanity is not going to proactively deal with climate change.  Our present moment self-interest and our inability to imagine a genuinely hostile future collude to keep us mired in non-action.

 

Though my heart is with the climate alarmists, I am near positive that humanity is going to witness itself having to cope with whatever our profligate impact on the planet mischiefs up.

 

We will almost certainly be rolling with the punches, not throwing any of our own.