The Politics of Climate Change (6 page)

A long way before such a cataclysmic happening materializes, and potentially in the very near future, there will begin ‘a chaotic climate transition' as one or more tipping points is passed. Disintegrating in sheets, beginning in West Antarctica, will exacerbate trends already present. The ‘storms of our grandchildren' will progressively intensify: ‘continued unfettered burning of . . . fossil fuels will cause the climate to pass tipping points, such that we hand our children and grandchildren a dynamic situation that is out of their control'.
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The British scientist James Lovelock is even more sombre. We have to understand, he says, that our existence as humanity depends on the living earth. Because of our burning of fossil fuels, the earth ‘is ever more at risk of changing to a barren state in which few of us can survive'.
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‘I am not a
willing Cassandra', he says, ‘and in the past have been publicly sceptical about doom stories', but he now thinks that, without major remedial action, climate change ‘may all but eliminate people from the earth'.
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We should not be taken in by the slowly rising temperature curve portrayed by the IPCC. Global warming – or, as he prefers to call it, global heating – he accepts with Pearce is non-linear and prone to producing sudden and dramatic change in the earth's ecosystems.

Far from driven by ‘alarmism', as the sceptics like to say, Lovelock agrees that the IPCC is essentially a conservative organization, precisely because of its bureaucratic character. Good science, he says, is manipulated so as to reduce its more dangerous and problematic implications. In contrast to Hansen, but reaching similar conclusions, Lovelock argues that we should mistrust models. We have plenty of evidence from direct measures of the warming of the oceans, the rising sea levels, the melting of the glaciers and of the Arctic ice-cap to be perfectly clear that humanly created climate change is accelerating.

Like the sceptics – but for completely different reasons – Lovelock is disparaging of attempts to establish international agreements to reduce carbon emissions. None of the technologies involved, with the partial exception of nuclear power – of which Lovelock is a great advocate – comes even close to being able to generate the energy on which our civilization depends. In all likelihood, Lovelock thinks, the advance of climate change will devastate large parts of the world and render them uninhabitable. The main reason will not be the ‘storms of our grandchildren', dramatic and devastating though these will be. Rather, the damage will be done by prolonged drought.

The combination of climate change, increasing population levels and other changes that are undermining global ecosystems will be lethal. Some parts of the world will remain habitable, such as the northern regions of Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia, and some islands, even in the tropics. But these will become like ‘continental oases' and ‘lifeboats', into which humanity will be compressed. We should do all we can to reduce carbon emissions, but concentrate mainly
on adaptation, to prepare those areas of the world likely to be least damaged by climate change ‘as the safe havens for a civilised humanity'.
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What are we to make of the contrasting assessments of the risks posed by climate change offered by the sceptics on the one hand and the radicals on the other? I believe that the overriding principle is that we should stay close to the science. As mentioned in the Introduction, there is a chance that the sceptics could be right – that climate change will be relatively harmless in its consequences, or will prove the result of natural causes. However, the scientific evidence that global warming is proceeding apace, and that it is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is very substantial and detailed.

Since they are not climate scientists, the majority of sceptics do not publish in peer-reviewed journals. As I have mentioned, most do not submit their own views and claims to anything like the same degree of intensive scrutiny and assessment of the evidence as do the scientists whose findings they attack. Scepticism is indeed an essential quality of science, and when so much hangs on the findings of a scientific body, those findings must be scrutinized intensively and in a continuous way. Even a scientific consensus could be flawed. Yet the ‘climate wars' have made virtually no impact at all on the evidence about climate change and its dangers, which remains as well founded and convincing as it did before the episode of the leaked emails and the discovery of the errors in the IPCC report.

I am not a scientist. It is up to the scientific community to assess the ideas of the radicals and decide how much weight to attach to them. The views of the radicals should count for more than those of the sceptics, since they themselves are practising scientists. As more detailed findings continue to come in, it should be possible to judge the validity of their major claims.

One should remember that global warming is no ordinary risk. It is an awesome prospect to acknowledge that, as collective humanity, we are on the verge of altering the world's climate, perhaps in a profound manner. Previous civilizations had an impact on their environment, but those civilizations were only regional, and that impact was trivial compared to what is happening today. No earlier civilization remotely intervened into nature to the degree to which we do every day, and on a global scale.

Oil, gas and coal, the three dominant energy sources in the world, are all fossil fuels, producing greenhouse gases on a large scale. The industrial revolution in its country of origin, Britain, was fuelled by coal – or, more accurately, by the scientific and technological discoveries which turned coal into a dynamic energy source. The changeover from burning wood – previously the prime energy source – was not easy, since it meant a transformation of habits. By the mid-seventeenth century, wood was running out as a source of fuel; but many initially detested the sooty coal that came to replace it and which, in the end, actually helped create a whole new way of life based on cities and machine production.

The turn to coal ushered in the world we now inhabit, in which the energy of the individual citizen or worker is of trivial importance compared to that produced from inanimate resources. As Richard Heinberg has observed in relation to the US:

If we were to add together the power of all the fuel-fed machines that we rely on to light and heat our homes, transport us, and otherwise keep us in the style to which we have become accustomed, and then compare that total with the amount of power that can be generated by the human body, we would find that each American has the equivalent of over 150 ‘energy slaves' working for us twenty-four hours a day.
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Oil has never replaced coal, but it began to mount a challenge to coal's dominance from the turn of the twentieth century onwards. For a while, in the early part of that century, the US was the biggest oil producer in the world and for a long period was largely self-sufficient in oil. During much of that time, the US was an anti-imperial power, with quite a different philosophy from the dominant imperial formation, the British Empire; for instance, the US opposed the Franco-British intervention in Suez in 1957, partly on strategic grounds, but also on moral ones. Of course, these roles were later reversed, as the US came to see the Middle East as more and more vital to its interests. Yet it is worth restating the obvious – the history of oil is the history of imperialism, in one guise or another.

Britain's oil derived mostly from its colonies in the Middle East, where it set the conditions of the relationship. The Anglo-Iranian oil company (later to become BP, aka ‘Bloody Persians', ‘British Petroleum' or, under the leadership of CEO John Browne more recently, ‘Beyond Petroleum') was set up under a one-sided arrangement of ‘concessions' – a system adopted also by US corporations. The country that needed the oil provided the expertise and technology to locate and extract it; the one that owned the oil was paid in terms of the volume extracted. The colonial or ex-colonial countries thus became ‘rentier' states – income flowed into them without corresponding processes of economic development. Even within the oil industry itself, expertise was rarely shared with the host nations. These phenomena are at the origins of the much-discussed ‘curse of oil' that afflicts so many oil-based states around the world, and to which I will return in the concluding chapter. The often vast wealth generated by the presence of oil and other mineral resources either is transported abroad, or ends up in the hands of local elites. It is not accidental that oil and gas resources are so widely concentrated in countries which are authoritarian and corrupt.

OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, was set up by the producing nations to act as a counter-balance to the influence of the oil corporations. It was followed over the years by the widespread and progressive takeover of oil assets by state-owned companies in those nations. OPEC was founded in 1960 and for some while there
were no major shocks affecting energy prices or world supply. However, the leaders of OPEC were outraged by the support given by the US and other Western countries to Israel in the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. Oil exports to the US, Britain and some other states were blocked, while OPEC raised the price of oil by 70 per cent, precipitating economic recession in the industrial countries.

I mention these well-known episodes because they bring home how close the connections at some points between international politics and energy security are (and will continue to be); and also because they serve as a reminder that whether or not the oil will flow does not depend upon the assessment of resources alone, but on how those resources intersect with geopolitics.

French emissions of greenhouse gases are markedly lower today than they might otherwise have been because, following the oil crisis provoked by OPEC's actions, France took the decision to become more independent of world energy markets and invested heavily in nuclear power. Japan also took note and introduced policies to regulate energy use and promote energy conservation. Today it is among the most energy-efficient of the industrial countries and is in the vanguard of clean energy technology, for instance in the car industry. Its emissions are relatively high, however, because of its dependence upon coal for electricity production. Sweden instituted a range of energy-saving policies and started to reduce its oil dependency, a process that is still continuing. Far more waste is currently recycled in Japan and Sweden than in most other industrial countries. Having no indigenous resources of its own in the 1970s, Denmark took fright and initiated measures to transfer parts of its electricity production to renewable energy sources, particularly wind power. At the same time, Brazil made the decision to invest in biofuels and now has a higher proportion of motor transport running off them than any other country, although the environmental benefits are dubious because of the deforestation involved.

The US was also obliged to react. Its responses included considering plans to invade Saudi Arabia, but also, more realistically, introducing measures to conserve energy, in the shape of the Energy Policy Conservation Act.
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It was a
significant intervention, because it showed that the wasteful energy habits of US consumers could be curbed if the impetus was strong enough. The aim of one section of the Act was to double the energy efficiency of new cars within 10 years. The target wasn't reached, but major improvements were nevertheless achieved. However, as the sense of crisis receded, fuel consumption rose again, soon to become higher per mile travelled than it had been before.

The debate about the limits of the world's fossil fuel resources is of great consequence for climate change policy. In 1956 the American geologist Marion King Hubbert made the now famous prediction that indigenous oil production in the US would peak in 1970 – a prediction that was widely rejected early on, but which turned out to be valid, even though the actual level of oil production was still going up in 1970. Peak oil calculations depend upon assessments of what in the oil industry is known as the ‘ultimate reserves' a given country or oilfield has. It does not refer to how much oil exists, but to how much can ever be extracted – usually a much smaller amount.
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The controversies surrounding peak oil are as intense as those concerned with global warming, and the two debates in fact closely resemble one another. There are those who believe that there is plenty of oil and gas to go round. They do not accept that we should be worried about future sources of supply. In their view there are sufficient resources to last for a long while, even given the rising levels of economic growth of the large developing countries and even given the growing world population. David Howell and Carol Nakhle, for example, argue that there is enough of the ‘known, relatively easy-to-extract stuff' to last for at least another 40 years. More reserves, they continue, are certain to be found. Under the melting ice of the Arctic, ‘billions of tonnes of oil and billions of cubic metres of gas lie waiting'. New oilfields are available for exploration in Alaska, off the coast of Africa and
offshore in Brazil. Even in the much-explored Middle East, a possible further cornucopia awaits.
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Such authors are the functional equivalents of the climate change sceptics – they are saying, ‘Crisis, what crisis?' Mainstream opinion is less sanguine, or at least has become so over the past few years, and is represented by the bulk of industry analysts and the official publications of the major oil countries. It holds that there may be enough oil (and even more gas) to continue to expand levels of production for some while. However, no one knows, almost by definition, how much there is in as yet unexplored fields or what the difficulties of recovering it may be. The International Energy Agency (IEA), set up to monitor oil production after the 1970s oil embargo, predicted in 2007 that there will be no peak in oil production before 2030.
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