Can we preserve a livable climate if we exploit any significant fraction of unconventional oil & gas resources?

The CEO of ExxonMobil, which has been a major funder of climate disinformers, says it will be “manageable” through adaptation.  Actual climate scientists disagree, as does the recent scientific literature.

CO2 emissions by fossil fuels [1 ppm CO2 ~ 2.12 GtC, where ppm is parts per million of CO2 in air and GtC is gigatons of carbon] via Hansen. Significantly exceeding 450 ppm risks several catastrophic, simultaneous, irreversible warming impacts. Hitting 700 to 1,000+ ppm — which is our current emissions path and the inevitable outcome of aggressively exploiting unconventional fuels — means 7+°F global warming and the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it.

Marty Hoffert — an energy expert and climate modeler — posted this blunt comment on a recent DotEarth piece about a report on potentially large unconventional oil resources:

However welcome the news may be to market economists — and I’m confident Exxon-Mobil and company are licking their chops over continuing our highly profitable to them fossil fuel energy infrastructure — it’s an unmitigated environmental disaster for climate change: “Game Over,” as Jim Hansen rightly says.

Shale gas, shale oil and tar sands don’t fundamentally change estimates of total fossil fuel resources; but these “unconventional” sources, now more cost-effective to extract as fuel for the bottomless pit of world energy demand, will make disastrous climate shifts from the CO2 greenhouse a near-certainly. Forget solar, wind and nuclear fission. They can’t compete costwise now with coal-fired electricity, and unconventional cheap hydrocarbons could become as cheap as coal on a dollars per Joule of energy basis.

The result will be a hothouse planetary climate as different from today’s as the middle Cretaceous a hundred million years ago was, when sea level was a hundred meters higher and both poles were de-glaciated; when dinosaurs roamed a verdant Antarctic continent. This will happen virtually instantaneously from a geological perspective as fossil fuel resources accumulated over hundreds of millions of years are burned in a hundred years or so and CO2 in the atmosphere rises as much as fourfold over pre-industrial values.

The best analogy I can think of is watching the rise of Hitler from an isolationist USA in the late thirties as the threshold for stopping him early enough to matter is passed and a holocaust of some as yet unknown horror becomes inevitable. Optimists might observe that Homo sapiens survived WWII and the subsequent cold war. But the coming inundation of coastal zones and cities along with massive species extinctions will likely be far worse. We will need to burn even more fossil fuel to “adapt” to this change by building seawalls and air conditioning, an option perhaps for rich countries, or mass migration inland and poleward for everyone else. Moreover, any attempts by our descendants to rebuild high tech civilization will be seriously hampered by the depleted state of both conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon fuels. Maybe they, unlike ourselves, will learn to go straight to solar and controlled fusion power, necessity being the mother of invention. More likely is a feudal agricultural economy in high latitude lands still fertile for crops and habitable in climate; or in the worst case scenario, hunter-gathering capable of supporting perhaps a million or so humans worldwide.

Many climate researchers breathed a sight of relief when Jim Lovelock backed off from nightmare scenarios with humans huddled in polar refugia against a greenhouse-induced waterworld. Too many accept the GOP denialist scam claiming human-induced global warming is a hoax to risk being perceived as alarmists, or worse. We didn’t sign on for this. We went into science and engineering, many of us, not only for the thrill of learning new by mastering objective nature, but to avoid the crazy subjectivity of human behavior. Give us labs and computers and some money and let us be geeks. We make mistakes, but we didn’t sign on for abuse. Thank you Ben Santer, Michael Mann, Jim Hansen, Ken Caldeira and all my other climate/energy colleagues for your courage to speak truth to crazy. The truth is that if we burn identified fossil fuel resources, particularly the so-called unconventional ones now making free marketeers dance with joy, it is only a matter of time before a transition to “hothouse Earth” occurs.

A technology optimist, I like to believe that some genetic evolution of the human genome can produce intelligent Homo superior better adapted to living in a high tech world wrought by scientific revolutions. I hope the spark of self-awareness survives, even if our particular experiment by nature doesn’t adapt and survive.

If, as Carl Sagan speculated, technological civilizations are time bombs triggered by the inability of species evolved in technology-free environments to adapt to the technologies they themselves create, then we may be destined for self-destruction. Short lifetimes of technological civilizations is a reason for the absence of intelligent life in our Milky Way galaxy according to the Drake Equation for computing the number of contemporaneous technological civilizations in a galaxy. Too bad, if true, as we have now discovered that extrasolar planets sound other stars are a dime a dozen, and may discover potentially habitable “other Earths” soon with NASA’s Kepler Planet Finder.

Hear! Hear!

At least it would be an unconventional way for civilization to go, not with a bang or a whimper but the inevitable and widely predicted collapse of a self-destructive Ponzi scheme.

I tend to find the people who are most concerned about the climate situation are energy experts who understand a lot about climate science or climate scientists who have studied energy.

NASA’s James Hansen, who is in the second category, has made a similar point to Hoffert’s for a similar reason, though he believes 500 ppm is the cut-off for climaticide:

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by Brendan DeMelle, via DeSmogBlog

Documents obtained by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) show that bureaucrats within the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (NY DEC) granted the oil and gas industry premature access to highly controversial draft regulations for shale gas fracking in the state. New York placed a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for gas in order to evaluate the science on the risks posed to drinking water, air quality and the health of New York’s citizens and the environment.

The documents, obtained by EWG through New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the fracking industry received an unfair advantage thanks to DEC officials who provided detailed summaries of their proposed rules exclusively to oil and gas industry representatives. This allowed industry a six-week head start to lobby state officials to weaken the proposed standards before the public was granted access to the plan.

Of particular concern, a lobbyist for scandal-ridden gas giant Chesapeake Energy used the exclusive access to the draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) to attempt to weaken the proposed rules restricting discharges of radioactive wastewater.

Thomas West, a prominent oil and gas industry lobbyist representing Chesapeake and other industry clients, made “one last pitch” — in an email to DEC Deputy Commissioner and General Counsel Steven Russo — to “reduce or eliminate radionuclide testing” of fluids that could migrate from drilling sites during storms, according to the documents.

NY DEC has previously found concentrations of cancer-causing radioactive pollution at shale gas drilling sites that exceeded safe drinking water standards by hundreds of times or more, according to EWG’s report “Inside Track: Cuomo Team Gives Drillers Jump Start to Influence Fracking Rules.”

“This is like giving the drilling industry three laps around the track while everyone else was left waiting on the starting block,” said Thomas Cluderay, EWG assistant general counsel. “The public needs to know whether New York regulators compromised the integrity of the state’s drilling plan months ago, despite promises of keeping the process fair and transparent.”

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The U.S. coal industry is so deeply unpopular, it has now turned to its imaginary friends for help.

That’s according to a linguistic analysis of a recent petition opposing new regulation of toxic coal ash. The petition, which was sent to the White House by the coal industry last year, featured more than two thousand Chinese names. That raised the curiosity of the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP). So the organization commissioned an analysis of the signatories.

EIP says the analysis shows that hundreds of the names are complete fakes. When translated, many of the Chinese “people” supporting the coal industry’s petition have names like “Steamed Bun Little Sister” and “Come to China Donkey.” The translator who examined the signatures determined that “most of the Chinese names in the petition are not authentic, and … appear to be generated by a piece of software or a group of individuals.”

The analysis of “Citizens for Recycling First” shows that the only recycling this organization is doing is recycling names:

• Generated by software/small group of individuals. Based on the consistent wording and style of many of these names, they appear to be generated by a piece of software or a small group of individuals. While many of the first names might be real, they appear frequently with either the last name or one character altered. An illustration of a similar randomly combined list of Western names might look something like this:  George Jones, William Jones, James Jones, Henry Jones, Peter Jones, William Smith, Frank Smith, Jim Smith, Larry Smith, etc.

• Use of non-names. At least 80 of the names identified in Chinese characters in the petition refer to objects or descriptions that are not used as surnames in the Chinese language. These include: Popular food items: Steamed Bun, Older Sister, Steamed Bun Little Sister, Small Steamed Bun and Big Steamed Bun, etc.  Dozens of the names are simply names of animals in Mandarin, including:  Big Bear, Big Grey Wolf, Little Duck, Little White Rabbit and Yellow Tiger.

• Invitations to travel. Some of the names included in the petition are in fact invitations to visit China, such as: Come to China Big, Come to China Cat, Come to China China, Come to China Donkey, Come to China Little Girl, and so on.

• Appearance-obsessed fake names.  Thirteen names appearing in the petition include the first name of “Handsome”, including Handsome Six, Handsome Eight, Handsome Good Looking, Handsome Dragon and the Most Handsome Guy.

• Famous historical/literary figures. Another 30 of the Chinese names in the petition actually identify famous characters in Chinese politics, history or literature. These include: Dasheng Sun: The monkey king in the Journey to the West (a famous Chinese novel) and Shanbo Liang, who is the protagonist in a very well-known legend.

This follows revelations in May that the coal industry paid people $50 to wear pro-coal t-shirts at an Environmental Protection Agency hearing.

With coal consumption dropping precipitously in the U.S., the industry is looking for some friends to help prop it up. But when buying them didn’t work, it appears that making them up was the next best option.

By Jessica Goad, Daniel J. Weiss, and Michael Conathan

The House Republican “oil above all” agenda has a new home in the fiscal year 2013 appropriations bill for the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Today the House Appropriations Committee passed a spending bill that would slash funds to enforce pollution laws and protect public lands, oceans, and wildlife. It also contains a number of policy provisions that have nothing to do with spending that would block enforcement of existing environmental laws, threaten our health, and harm our lands.

Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA) raised grave concerns about the bill yesterday:

Literally, the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink depends on programs funded by this bill. Millions of Americans make their vacation plans based on their ability to enjoy the natural, scenic, recreational, and cultural resources whose protection is funded by this bill…. The deep funding cuts necessitated … as well as the various special interest riders and funding limitations that were included in the subcommittee bill, would cause real harm to the environment and to efforts to preserve America’s natural and cultural heritage.

The biggest issues revolve around the levels of funding that various agencies will be facing under this bill.  For example, it would slash EPA’s budget by nearly 20 percent, including a 10 percent cut to clean air and climate programs. Additionally, EPA would see a 9 percent cut in enforcement under this bill, which is like taking 1 of every 10 cops off the beat when it comes to enforcing air, water, and toxics safeguards. And state enforcement of pollution reduction laws in the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act will be more difficult, because 28 percent of this funding compared to 2012 will be slashed – more than $1 billion.

Critical conservation programs managed by the Department of Interior also face severe funding reductions. Most surprisingly, the popular Land and Water Conservation Fund Program that enjoys bipartisan support was cut by nearly 80 percent compared to the current year to only $66 million — the lowest levels in its nearly 50-year history.  This program does not require any new federal spending; rather, it uses receipts from offshore oil and gas development to fund repairs and other projects in our national parks, wildlife refuges, and local parks.

In addition to these crippling funding cuts, the bill includes a number of harmful policy riders that would block implementation and enforcement of existing laws and programs.  The bill would:

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In a very surprising outcome, Chief Justice John Roberts cast the fifth vote to save Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

The key aspect of the decision that I think is relevant to climate policy is how the 5 justices decided to uphold the centerpiece of the ACA, the individual mandate requiring people to buy health insurance:

The court rejected Obama administration’s commerce-clause argument, but ruled 5-4 that Congress nevertheless “has the power to impose” the individual mandate under its taxing authority. The provision “need not be read to do more than impose a tax,” the opinion said. “This is sufficient to sustain it.”

In short, complicated justification for mandate fails, but tax wins. Note that this is in spite of the fact that most constitutional scholars always considered the mandate itself constitutional. Justice Kennedy (!) wrote in the dissent: “In our view, the entire Act before us is invalid in its entirety.”

My guess is that people who write climate legislation will take away from this that a lengthy bill designing a complex system to control CO2 and other greenhouse gases will be challenged in the court by conservatives and might conceivably lose. But Congress has taxing authority and that isn’t going anywhere. Yes, I’m aware that the U.S. Appeals Court upheld EPA’s greenhouse gas emission rules. But the climate bill that was considered by Congress to controls GHGs was considerably different and more complicated than those rules. Again, I don’t think the bill actually was unconstitutional, only that you never know what the Roberts Supreme Court (or a future one) might decide.

Back in February, Climate Progress reported that “Bipartisan Support Grows for Carbon Price as Part of Debt Deal.” As I write a year ago, the only plausible scenario now for seriously addressing US greenhouse gas emissions in a way that would enable a global deal and give us some chance of averting catastrophic multiple, simultaneous climate impacts is for a serious carbon price to be part of the post-2012-election budget deal.

It is still safe to say that this is not a high-probability outcome, but it is non-zero.

by Shuana Theel, via Media Matters

Carbon dioxide emissions are not just warming up our atmosphere, they’re also changing the chemistry of our oceans. This phenomenon is known as ocean acidification, or sometimes as global warming’s “evil twin” or the “osteoporosis of the sea.” Scientists have warned that it poses a serious threat to ocean life. Yet major American news outlets covered the Kardashians over 40 times more often than ocean acidification over the past year and a half.

Rising carbon dioxide emissions have caused the oceans to become around 30 percent more acidic since the Industrial Revolution, and if we do not lower the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, the ocean surface could be up to 150 percent more acidic by 2100. At that level, the shells of some plankton would dissolve, large parts of the ocean would become inhospitable to coral reef growth, and the rapidity of the change could threaten much of the marine food web. According to the National Research Council, the chemical changes are taking place “at an unprecedented rate and magnitude” and are “practically irreversible on a time scale of centuries.”

Despite a boom of recent scientific research documenting this threat, there has been a blackout on the topic at most media outlets. Since the end of 2010, ABC, NBC, and Fox News have completely ignored ocean acidification, and the Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, CNN, and CBS have barely mentioned it at all.

While most coverage described the basic scientific phenomenon or listed ocean acidification as a serious environmental challenge, the Wall Street Journal dismissed the problem. All three mentions of ocean acidification from the Journal were from columns that downplayed the threat — there was not a single straight news article interviewing scientists. One of those columns was a full article devoted to distorting and cherry-picking the science on ocean acidification. The Journal also published a letter to the editor (not counted in this study) from the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner who summarily dismissed ocean acidification as “the latest nominee to supplant troubled CO2-warming theory.” But the threat is nothing to shake off.

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Speaking in Dubuque, Iowa yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden lashed out at Mitt Romney for his willingness to kill a key tax credit for the wind industry — a sector that supports more than 7,000 jobs in the state.

With energy now a top issue in the presidential campaign, the Administration is starting to use Romney’s disdain for renewables against him in states like Iowa, where wind accounts for 20 percent of electricity and supports hundreds of businesses.

“We are importing less oil than [at] any time in the last 16 years,” Biden said. “But we think you got to bet on it all … You had our good friend Mitt Romney saying he dismissed wind and solar by saying they’re ‘two of the most ballyhooed forms of alternative energy.’ Tell that to the 7,000 workers manufacturing wind power here in Iowa.”

President Obama was in Iowa last month touting the economic impact of the wind industry and urging Congress to extend the production tax credit set to expire at the end of this year. According to a study from Navigant Consulting, around 37,000 American jobs could be at risk if the tax credit expires.

The Obama Administration is doing everything it can to counter attacks from Romney and other Republicans on energy — pushing offshore oil drilling in the Arctic, approving the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, and using its climate and energy chief to “woo” the oil and gas lobby.

However, until recently, the Administration said very little about tax credits for renewable energy, leaving the issue in the halls of Congress. But with strong bi-partisan support for wind in the Midwest, a more aggressive messaging strategy on the economic consequences of allowing the tax credit to expire could give the Administration an advantage. It seems to be just now grasping this.

David Roberts of Grist recently explained the significance:

Despite support from Iowa Republicans for wind (and despite that turbine photo-op), Mitt Romney has expressed only contempt for the industry. He would end federal support for solar and wind alike, technologies that, he has said, “make little sense for the consuming public but great sense only for the companies reaping profits from taxpayer subsidies.” (Y’know, like Iowa’s own TPI Composites, the 700 people it employs, and the town it saved.)

The fact is, if Republicans win Congress and Romney becomes president, all federal support for clean energy will dry up and Newton, along with other Midwestern towns that have been revitalized by wind, will suffer yet another devastating blow. I wonder if Iowa voters — sitting in one of 2012′s most important swing states — were thinking about that when Romney came to the state recently to lecture about the deficit.

Federal incentives for the industry has broad support from the public too. A recent poll showed that 64 percent of Americans support an extension of the production tax credit for wind and other renewable energy technologies.

by Max Frankel

Yesterday morning, as high temperatures and drought in the Midwest intensified, the Farm Foundation held a forum to discuss the impact of long term drought on agriculture. Remarkably, until I asked a question about it, the topic of climate change did not come up.

The panel was made up of Matthew Rosencrans, a member of the drought monitoring staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; David Anderson, a professor in the Agricultural Economics department at Texas A&M; Jay Armstrong, a farmer and seed salesmen from northern Kansas who sits on the boards of numerous agricultural organizations; and Kitty Smith, an economist and policy expert with the American Farmland Trust. The question and answer period was moderated by former Congressmen Charlie Stenholm (D-TX).

The participants went through their presentations about drought data collection, the effects of drought, and long-term drought planning without once mentioning climate change. When I asked about it, I was not received warmly.

“They call it weather,” said Mr. Armstrong.

Though he admitted to seeing some increased volatility in the weather, he accused the media of overstating the problem, talking “about what used to be a forest and is now a desert” and not putting enough emphasis on “what used to be a desert and is now a forest.” (Mr. Armstrong should talk to Dr. Craig Allen, who thinks that “rising temperature is going to drive our forests off the mountains.”)

Congressman Stenholm didn’t seem too pleased with my question, judging by his disapproving stare.

Mr. Anderson, the economist from Texas, described the devastating effects of last year’s Southwestern drought. Anderson estimated the economic losses in the agriculture sector from that drought to be in the billions; almost $4.5 billion in corn, wheat, hay, and cotton and more than $3 billion in livestock.

And as that drought unfolded, leading climate scientists warned about the influence of anthropogenic climate change on the intensifying crisis.

Texas A&M, climate scientist Andrew Dessler said last August that “there is absolutely no way you can conclude that climate change is not playing a role here. I’m quite surprised that anyone would even suggest that.”  Texas climatologist Katherine Hayhoe also recently explained that “our natural variability is now occurring on top of, and interacting with, background conditions that have already been altered by long-term climate change.”

In addition, NASA climatologists, including James Hansen, released peer-reviewed research concluding that the Texas heat wave was “a consequence of global warming because their likelihood was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming.” The future is even more worrisome — see “James Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now.

Today, the Midwest and Great Plains region is entering a severe drought. As temperatures continue to rise and rainfall is nowhere on the horizon, the threat to crops intensifies:

“Yesterday, USDA released its weekly crop condition report and the areas of declining production predictably match the areas of drought.  In particular, Illinois and Indiana, two large Midwest grain producing states that were challenged by poor planting conditions in the early spring, now face increased lack of moisture.”

Ironically, the frequency of extreme rainstorms in the Midwest that damage crops and cause flash flooding have doubled in the last 50 years, according to a survey of rainfall data by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization.

The increasingly dire influence of human-induced climate change on the agricultural sector has encouraged some to speak up. In April, the former president of the American Corn Grower’s Association said that farmers are “at the front lines of global warming — it’s a grave threat to rural livelihoods and quality of life. That’s why I support EPA policies to cut global warming pollution from automobiles and power plants.”

In spite of the mounting evidence and concern within the agricultural sector, it is astonishing that no one discussed climate change in a forum called “How Drought Reshapes Agriculture and Food Systems.”

Max Frankel is a senior at Vassar College and an intern at the Center For American Progress.

Related posts:

• With No End in Sight for Texas Drought, ABC News Explains: “Every Farmer in the World Will Be Affected by Climate Change”
• Warming-Enhanced Texas Drought Is Once in “500 or 1,000 Years … Basically Off the Charts,” Says State Climatologist

A round-up of the top climate and energy news.

Sea ice in the Arctic has melted faster this year than ever recorded before, according to the US government’s National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC). [Guardian]

Satellite observations show the extent of the floating ice that melts and refreezes every year was 318,000 square miles less last week than the same day period in 2007, the year of record low extent, and the lowest observed at this time of year since records began in 1979. Separate observations by University of Washington researchers suggest that the volume of Arctic sea ice is also the smallest ever calculated for this time of year.

Scientists cautioned that it is still early in the “melt season”, but said that the latest observations suggest that the Arctic sea ice cover is continuing to shrink and thin and the pattern of record annual melts seen since 2000 is now well established. Last year saw the second greatest sea ice melt on record, 36% below the average minimum from 1979-2000.

Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday lashed out at Mitt Romney in Iowa for the second straight day, this time taking issue with the Republican’s reluctance to embrace tax credits for wind and solar energy. [National Journal]

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