The World Meteorological Organization has declared 2023 “the warmest year on record, by a huge margin.” Annual global carbon emissions also hit a new high, surpassing the previous record set in 2022. We have to act now before critical thresholds or tipping points are crossed, and that means rapidly phasing out the use of fossil fuels.
And yet, the US government continues to green-light the exploration, production, and use of fossil fuels, even while simultaneously voicing support for an international agreement to phase out fossil fuels at the recently completed COP28 in Dubai. What gives? And what can we do about it?
The green light
The US is the largest producer of oil and gas in the world. It is also the world’s largest gas exporter, with exports doubling over the last four years. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), considered the most important environmental legislation ever passed by the US Congress, includes a number of significant climate and clean energy provisions but tellingly, none that require phasing out fossil fuel exploration and use. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth.
The IRA actually gives the green light to three major federal oil and gas offshore lease sales that the Biden administration had previously canceled, and reinstated a fourth that had been denied by a federal court order. It also requires the government to offer millions of acres of oil and gas leases on public lands and federal waters before it can auction any acreage for wind and solar farms. As an AP News article notes, “The measure's importance was underscored by Chevron executives during a recent earnings call, where they predicted continued growth in the Gulf and tied that directly to being able ‘to lease and acquire additional acreage.’"
So, how does the US government reconcile its national policies with its COP28 position? The answer is that it is talking about the eventual phasing out of “unabated fossil fuels.” As a Carbon Brief report explains:
“Unabated” refers to the burning of fossil fuels where resulting carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions are released directly into the atmosphere, adding to global warming.
Conversely, “abated” refers to the burning of coal, oil and gas combined with the capture and permanent storage of some proportion of the resulting greenhouse gases. This proportion is a key detail as there is no agreed definition of what “abated” means.
It is easy to see why the government appears willing to support, further down the road, this position: the development of a somewhat workable process of carbon capture and storage (CCS) would allow the continued use of fossil fuels and maintenance of our existing economic system, thus avoiding any clash with the business community.
While many government leaders celebrate CCS as a new, cutting-edge technology that holds the key to a high-growth carbon free future, the actual technology is far from new. It was first developed and used in the 1970s to boost oil production. Carbon was captured as a byproduct of the operation of gas processing plants and then pumped into old oil wells to force the remaining oil to the surface, a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). This remains its primary use, with approximately 80 percent of the carbon captured globally used for EOR.
Perhaps not surprisingly, only a small percentage of the carbon dioxide emitted from gas processing plants is actually captured. Moreover, little to no effort has been made to keep the captured carbon pumped into the ground from escaping back into the atmosphere. Thus, to this point, the technology is far from the hoped for silver bullet.
In fact, there are currently only 42 operational commercial projects using CCS in the world. Their total storage capacity amounts to only 49 million metric tons or 0.13% of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. Moreover, only 12 of these projects are designed to permanently store carbon dioxide without making use of it for EOR. It remains to be seen if any will prove profitable; several have already been paused for financial reasons. No wonder the International Energy Agency warns against “excessive expectations and reliance” on carbon capture as a solution to our climate crisis.
But of course, the fossil fuel industry sees support for the continued use of abated fossil fuels, even with low levels of carbon capture, differently. As Occidental Petroleum’s chief executive noted, while speaking at an industry conference, this “gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”
What’s going on?
Capitalism is based on the privileging of property rights over most other rights, in particular the right of corporations and other businesses to employ their assets as they see fit in pursuit of profits. Because efforts to limit those rights have the potential to trigger a disrupting business strike, government policy-makers have generally viewed the development of markets as the best way to encourage a climate-favorable economic transition. That is a major reason why the IRA includes generous tax incentives to encourage corporate development and use of CCS technology. However, experience has shown that there are real limits to what markets can achieve, especially when it comes to the threat of climate change.
But what about the business community? What explains its resistance to meaningful action to combat global warming? We know, thanks to a series of investigations, that leading fossil fuel companies have been aware of the problem of global warming and concerned about their role in driving it for more than four decades. Thus, it seems safe to dismiss ignorance as a reason for that resistance, even if it took somewhat longer for those in other sectors to acknowledge the problem.
A far more likely explanation is that they just don’t see it as a serious threat to their own personal lives or business pursuits. And for good reason: to this point, it is the people in the Global South that are suffering the most from the worsening climate crisis. Of course, Americans have not been spared. But, as a US Environmental Protection Agency report points out, “the most severe harms from climate change fall disproportionately upon underserved communities who are least able to prepare for, and recover from, heat waves, poor air quality, flooding, and other impacts.”
Another factor, and no doubt an important one: Business leaders have every reason to believe that if and when the costs of global warming become a significant political problem, the government will open the public purse still wider to compensate them for any changes that might prove necessary in their business practices. In the meantime, “steady as you go” ensures big profits.
In sum, it appears that our business leaders are more than willing to gamble with our lives. Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for a long time, between 300 to 1,000 years. And it can take years or even decades for us to experience the heat-trapping consequences from higher emission levels. This means that we do not have the luxury of waiting until sometime in the future to take meaningful climate action. As the New York Times explains, “Every 10th of a degree of global warming represents extra thermodynamic fuel that intensifies heat waves and storms, adds to rising seas and hastens the melting of glaciers and ice sheets.”
What to do?
A starting point is to work in our communities to help people better understand the ways in which the logic of capitalism is both driving the climate crisis and blocking meaningful responses to it. We also need to continue our organizing work, for strong unions; expanded and affordable public transportation; universal health care; the retrofitting of existing homes, offices, and factories; safe and affordable public housing; and, of course, the rapid phasing out of fossil fuel use. However, for reasons highlighted above, there are limits to what we can hope to achieve as long as our political economy remains as is. Thus, we also have to find ways to strengthen connections between our many efforts at social change to help spur a larger popular movement, one with the capacity and vision to fight for an economy that is able to provide a sustainable, egalitarian, and humane way of life for us and for others.
The creation of such a new economy will involve, by necessity, a lot of moving parts that have to be managed and coordinated. Some goods and services, and in some cases entire industries, especially those dependent on fossil fuels, will have to be dramatically downsized. We will have to develop mechanisms for humanely and efficiently repurposing newly created surplus facilities and released workers. At the same time many existing industries will have to be restructured and new ones rapidly built. And we will need to create a variety of agencies to determine investment priorities and ownership arrangements, decide where to locate new facilities, develop appropriate programs for worker training and education, and ensure that the materials required for the new activity are produced in sufficient quantities and made available at the appropriate time.
As difficult as this sounds, we do have historical experience to draw upon: the experience of World War II. Then, the U.S. government, facing remarkably similar challenges to the ones we are likely to confront, successfully converted the U.S. economy from civilian to military production in only three years, all the while managing relations with a reluctant capitalist class. It was government planning and direction of economic activity, anchored by a dramatic increase in public investment and ownership of critical enterprises, that made that conversion possible.
While that experience does not provide a readymade blueprint for the transformation we seek, there is much we can learn from studying it. Perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates the feasibility of achieving a rapid, ecologically responsive conversion of our economy if we are willing to challenge the corporate dominated logic of our existing economy.
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