Wednesday, March 23, 2016
'Benign'
Fossil Fuels? McKibben Says There's No Such Thing.
'Far from being a bridge to the future,' McKibben
tells Common Dreams, 'natural gas turns out to have been a costly
detour.'
"If we're serious about doing anything
about climate change, we actually have to get off fossil fuels,"
environmentalist Bill McKibben told Common Dreams on Wednesday. (Photo: Elvert
Barnes/flickr/cc)
With a new piece in The Nation,
environmental leader Bill McKibben upends widely held assumptions not just
about President Barack Obama's climate legacy, but about the so-called "natural
gas revolution" that was once considered a "savior" in the fight
against global warming.
The author and 350.org co-founder points to
"an explosive paper" published last month in Geophysical
Research Letters, in which Harvard researchers "concluded
that the nation as a whole is leaking methane in massive quantities."
"Fossil fuels don’t come in good and bad
flavors."
—Bill McKibben
As Common Dreams reported at the time, the study showed that
methane emissions in the U.S. rose more than 30 percent over the 2002–2014
period, and that increase could account for 30–60 percent of the global growth
of atmospheric methane seen in the past decade.
This data, McKibben told Common
Dreams by phone on Wednesday, "changes, in profound ways, our own
conception about what we've being doing about climate change in the U.S.—and
the answer is, not much."
"Far from being a bridge to the
future," he said, "natural gas turns out to have been a costly
detour."
The leaks exposed by the Harvard researchers,
he writes at The Nation,
are big
enough to wipe out a large share of the gains from the Obama administration’s
work on climate change—all those closed coal mines and fuel-efficient
cars. In fact, it's even possible that America’s contribution to global
warming increased during the Obama years. The methane story is utterly at odds
with what we've been telling ourselves, not to mention what we've been telling
the rest of the planet. It undercuts the promises we made at the climate talks
in Paris. It's a disaster—and one that seems set to spread.
Furthermore, he continues, recently announced efforts to rein in
such leaks fail to address "the core problem, which is the rapid spread of
fracking."
In addition to polluting groundwater and
undercutting the market for renewables—two of the "nasty side
effects" he outlines in his piece—fracking "wipes out as much as
three-fifths of the greenhouse-gas reductions that the United States has been
claiming," McKibben writes.
All this belies what he described as "a
glib willingness to think of natural gas as benign or relatively benign."
In fact, McKibben asserts in his article,
if "we keep on fracking, it will be nearly impossible for the
United States to meet its promised goal of a 26 to 28 percent reduction in
greenhouse gases from 2005 levels by 2025."
In other words, he told Common Dreams,
this is "just one more of those cases where it's become clear that if
we're serious about doing anything about climate change, we actually have to
get off fossil fuels." But that will be difficult, McKibben writes,
given that "[w]e've become the planet's salesman for natural gas."
Even worse, he notes, "a key player in this scheme could become the next
president of the United States."
He explains:
When
Hillary Clinton took over the State Department, she set up a special arm, the
Bureau of Energy Resources, after close consultation with oil and gas
executives. This bureau, with 63 employees, was soon helping sponsor
conferences around the world. And much more: Diplomatic cables released by
WikiLeaks show that the secretary of state was essentially acting as a broker
for the shale-gas industry, twisting the arms of world leaders to make sure US
firms got to frack at will.
For these reasons, McKibben said Wednesday,
"It's high time for Hillary Clinton to match Bernie Sanders' commitment against
fracking."
"That's because fossil fuels are the
problem in global warming—and fossil fuels don’t come in good and bad
flavors," he concluded in his article. "Coal and oil and natural gas
have to be left in the ground. All of them."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email:
mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment