WORLDFIRE - Chapter 12, Part II

Zero Emissions & Beyond

Paris Pump Fake

So what happened in Paris? In the words of Guardian columnist George Monbiot: “By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.” James Hansen minced no words in condemning the Paris climate accord, telling The Guardian: “It’s a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises.” By promises, Hansen is referring to the toothless accord being nonbinding and unenforceable. But you wouldn’t know it from the corporate media spin that touted it as a historic achievement.

The Paris climate negotiations were President Obama’s last real chance to do something heroic to give our children and grandchildren a fighting chance of stabilizing the climate. But instead of pushing for what was needed–zero emissions–Obama dismissed Pope Francis’ warning that humanity is teetering “on the edge of suicide” and served up the weak tea of 26-28% carbon cuts as the U.S. goal in Paris. He asked us to believe our children will be safe if we will but voluntarily commit ourselves to the politically driven target of 2°C, despite knowing that 2°C is not safe for our kids. He did this despite his senior aide, John Podesta, admitting that Obama’s policies would miss even that target: “Maybe it gets you on a trajectory to three degrees,” Podesta told writer Mark Hertsgaard for Harper’s in 2014, “but it doesn’t get you to two degrees.” At least Podesta was honest.

You wouldn’t know it through their actions, but the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change actually has as its stated goal the “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [human caused] interference with the climate system.” But instead of pursuing this goal by honestly declaring that humans are already dangerously interfering with the climate system at current levels of carbon pollution, 195 nations in Paris merely agreed to voluntary measures to keep global temperature rise below 2°C and to try to limit global heating to 1.5°C, mostly by relying on so-called “geoengineering” and unproven-at-scale, energy intensive, and prohibitively expensive technological schemes like carbon capture and storage and direct air capture.

The problem with the Paris accord is not just that it was “worthless words.” It’s also about what worthwhile words were missing. As climate truth-teller David Spratt was quick to remind people, there were no references in the international agreement to “coal,” “oil,” “fracking,” “shale oil,” “fossil fuel,” “carbon dioxide,” “zero,” “ban,” “prohibit” or “stop.” In fact, the accord assumes that the nations of the world will continue using fossil fuels up to the year 2100. In other words, the UN-sponsored talks were about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

In a May 2015 interview with ABC Radio, James Hansen laid out why “2 degrees is actually a prescription for disaster. That’s actually well understood by the scientific community… That number was chosen because it was convenient… thought that, well, that’ll give us a few decades, so we can set targets for the middle of the century. Actually, what the science tells us is that we have an emergency. This is actually a global crisis and the science for that is crystal clear. It’s not obvious to the public because the climate system responds slowly. The ocean is four kilometers deep. These ice sheets are three kilometers thick. They only respond over timescales of decades to centuries, but once the processes are started, you know, it’s gonna be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to stop them.” So when Hansen and a team of researchers published a study predicting 2°C of global heating could raise sea levels “several meters” from “large-scale ice sheet disintegration,” resulting in “losing functionality of all coastal cities,” the study made waves.

In 2023, a first-of-its-kind study tabulated how many humans are expected to die at 2°C of global heating. Not shying away from ethical and moral considerations, the researchers concluded that “mainly richer humans will be responsible for killing roughly 1 billion mainly poorer humans through anthropogenic global warming, which is comparable with involuntary or negligent manslaughter.” 1 billion lives! Even if 2 degrees was a moral target, which we have clearly established it is not, other climate researchers give this 2°C threshold only a 5 percent chance of not being breached under the Paris accord, with the more likely range of heating being a catastrophic 2°C-4.9°C (3.6°F-8.8°F) by 2100. That’s a paltry 1 in 20 chance of success, if you define 2°C as success (it’s not). A World Meterological Association report similarly suggests that we are on track for up to 5°C of heating by century’s end. Absent a code red climate emergency response by the global community, the safer 1.5°C target is unsurprisingly seen as even more unrealistic and implausible by top climate authorities. Even the UN admitted in 2022 that “the international community is falling far short of the Paris goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place. Only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster.” 

Another vocal critic of the Paris accord is one of the world’s most outspoken climate experts, Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director of the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Democracy Now! interviewed Anderson during the talks in Paris: “[W]hen you add up all of the commitments that the countries are making in terms of their reductions in emissions, then actually it’s far, far above that [2 degrees], nearer 3 or 4 degrees C temperature rise, which is a huge increase. That’s a global average... most of the globe is covered in water, so on land that’s an average of, if we carry on like we’re going now, 4, 5, possibly even as high as 6 degrees C temperature rise.” You won’t learn this stuff watching the corporate news networks. In that same interview, Anderson also implicated scientists in our delusional response to the climate crisis, explaining that “what we [scientists] are afraid of doing is putting forward analysis that questions the sort of economic paradigm, the economic way that we run society today… So the whole setup, not just the scientists, the research community around it that funds the research, the journalists, events like this, we’re all being – we’re all deliberately being slightly sort of self-delusional. We all know the situation is much more severe than we’re prepared to voice openly. And we all know this. So it is a–this is a collective sort of facade, a mask that we have.” As far back as 2010, Anderson warned that “while the rhetoric of policy is to reduce emissions in line with avoiding dangerous climate change, most policy advice is to accept a high probability of extremely dangerous climate change rather than propose radical and immediate emission reductions.” Now please ask yourself, if you had a reckless friend who day in and day out urged you to engage in extremely dangerous activities that had a high probability of killing you, how long would you keep hanging out with that friend? Yet we listen to government officials every day whose policies are putting all of us in mortal danger.

A 2018 analysis conducted by Climate Action Tracker also found “[i]f all governments achieved their Paris Agreement commitments,” the world would still likely heat up to 3.0°C, “twice the 1.5°C limit they agreed in Paris.” Buttressing this finding was a 2021 anonymous survey of nearly 100 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report authors that found 60% of them view at least 3°C of global heating as likely by century’s end. That’s 3°C, not 2°C or 1.5°C. So don’t buy all the good news spin around the Paris climate accord. Putting a human face on that extreme heat, a 2019 study concluded that “nearly 5,800 people are expected to die each year in New York City… more than 2,500 are forecast to die annually in Los Angeles and more than 2,300 lives will be lost annually in Miami” from a 3°C global temperature rise. As things currently stand, the Biden White House reports that an estimated 4,200 Americans are already dying each year from heat-related causes “attributed to human-caused climate change.”

Mired in the swamp of the dinosaur economy, the world’s governments are fiddling while the world burns. Instead of addressing the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground, the Paris accord assumed we will keep burning them and put the pollution in the ground. The accord leans heavily on the pink unicorn of carbon capture and storage (CCS), which the coal industry brands as “clean coal.” But no pink unicorns are riding to our rescue. Nor can coal be cleaned. I don’t deny that cost-prohibitive and unproven-at-scale CCS schemes exist for capturing a pathetically small amount of pollution from smokestacks and pumping it underground, but it makes no sense for an industry to talk about pulling tiny amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air at the same time that it is pouring massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the air and when no one knows how much of the separated gas would even stay underground. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study explains why: “[A]s carbon dioxide works its way underground, only a small fraction of the gas turns to rock. The remainder of the gas stays in a more tenuous form.” MIT researcher Yossi Cohen elaborates: “If it turns into rock, it’s stable and will remain there permanently. However, if it stays in its gaseous or liquid phase, it remains mobile and it can possibly return back to the atmosphere.” Leakage of this injected carbon dioxide could offset any potential climate benefits. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, CCS would capture only a tiny fraction of industry’s carbon pollution, most of which they would then use to pump even more oil out of depleted oil wells to then burn! Currently, almost three-fourths of the minuscule amount of CO2 captured annually by the fossil fuel industry is used for this purpose.

But that’s not all. Because CCS plants would use 10-40 percent more energy (and 90 percent more cooling water) than a standard coal plant, more coal would ironically have to be mined, shipped, and burned to operate a CCS “clean coal” plant. The dramatically higher costs of operating a CCS coal plant would then be passed on to consumers in the form of higher electricity bills. Then there is the issue of safety. In 1986, a gas cloud of carbon dioxide erupted in Lake Nyos in Cameroon, asphyxiating more than 1,700 people while they slept.

I wouldn’t want to live anywhere near a carbon capture and storage site. Not even an army of monitors patrolling 24/7 for leaks could ensure the safety of such facilities. What if an earthquake strikes? What if pumping that carbon dioxide underground causes that earthquake? Similar to nuke plants, who do you think lawmakers would saddle with the liability risks for all that buried carbon pollution? U.S. taxpayers, of course. But here’s the kicker: CCS would require a ridiculously immense new infrastructure, including a new national pipeline network to carry all that captured and compressed gas from smokestacks to carbon storage sites, pipelines that have already started exploding. One recent pipeline explosion in Satartia, Mississippi sent more than 45 people to the hospital. Some who were found unconscious and foaming at the mouth nearly died from the mass poisoning. Further endangering lives is the fact that oxygen displacement by a carbon dioxide explosion can disable gas- and diesel-powered vehicles used by first responders to rescue people. More than 5,000 miles of these idiotic pipelines have already been built in the U.S., with 60,000 miles envisioned. We need to put the kibosh on this before it gets out of control, like fracking did. The idea of capturing CO2 and transporting it through pipelines mostly to be used to extract more oil to then be burned to further fry the planet is beyond absurd. CCS is nothing more than a perilous pipe dream designed to keep the dinosaur economy alive and kicking. This is why the Paris accord leans so heavily on CCS and direct air capture schemes for achieving its emission reduction goals. Instead of embracing the obvious solution of keeping fossil fuels in the ground, and investing in biological carbon drawdown solutions that are proven to actually work, the governments of the world just assume that the polluters will get to keep on polluting.

Look around. Changes to the climate are already dangerous at a little over 1°C temperature rise. A 1.5°C rise is more dangerous than that and 2°C is more dangerous still. Climate scientist Michael Mann warned us as far back as 2016 that “we have no carbon budget left for the 1.5°C target and the opportunity for holding to 2°C is rapidly fading unless the world starts cutting emissions hard right now.” He said that in 2016. Even if the nations of the world were to rally to limit global heating to between 1.5°C and 2°C, self-reinforcing climate feedback loops have the potential to spiral out of humanity’s control. A 2018 study by researchers showed how governments have mostly failed to factor carbon release from permafrost thaw into their heating projections, bringing the world “closer to exceeding the budget for the long-term target of the Paris Agreement than previously thought.” Another study projects a global temperature rise of between 0.08°C and 0.5°C by 2100 from the thawing permafrost alone. Until recently, even the IPCC glossed over the permafrost methane threat by failing to factor in the effects of permafrost carbon feedbacks. Yet another permafrost alarm bell went off when a 2019 report warned that permafrost thaw could awaken the “sleeping giant” of permafrost collapse. “We are watching this sleeping giant wake up right in front of our eyes," declared report author Merritt Turetsky. "It is happening faster than anyone predicted.”

In 2022, a comprehensive reassessment of climate tipping points concluded that six climate tipping points are now likely within the Paris accord range of 1.5°-2°C of heating, including the “collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, die-off of low-latitude coral reefs, and widespread abrupt permafrost thaw.” At this point, the window has probably closed for limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C, even though doing so could have prevented up to 153 million air pollution-related deaths. Think about that. 153,000,000 human lives could have been saved had the nations of the world taken this global threat more seriously.

But it is not just scientists sounding the alarm. As far back as 2012, the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) issued a candid report titled, “Too late for two degrees?” In it, the auditing firm bluntly declared: “Governments’ ambitions to limit warming to 2°C appear highly unrealistic.” In the Foreword to the report, Leo Johnson, PwC’s Partner for Sustainability and Climate Change, wrote: “Business leaders have been asking for clarity in political ambition on climate change. Now one thing is clear: businesses, governments and communities across the world need to plan for a warming world – not just 2°C, but 4°C, or even 6°C.” The report’s conclusion? “The only way to avoid the pessimistic scenarios will be radical transformations in the ways the global economy currently functions,” including the rapid rise of renewables, a steep drop in fossil fuel use, and ending deforestation.

For all my criticisms of the International Energy Agency (IEA) for understating the promise of renewables, I appreciated the honesty of its executive director, Maria van der Hoeven, when she warned the world in a 2012 op-ed that “under current policies we estimate energy use and CO2 emissions will increase by a third by 2020, and almost double by 2050. This would probably send global temperatures at least 6C higher within this century.” In 2018, the IEA went so far as to warn that the world can build no more fossil fuel infrastructure without breaching the Paris accord 2°C threshold. The group’s head, Fatih Birol, was explicit: “We have no room to build anything that emits CO2 emissions.” In 2021, the IEA further recommended that we stop investing in exploration for oil, gas, and coal. In the words of Birol: “If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now – from this year.”

In 2018, the UK’s National Oceanography Centre put the impact of temperature rise into dollars and cents when it warned that flooding alone from sea level rise “could cost $14 trillion worldwide annually by 2100” if the world misses the 2°C target. In 2019, the risk management firm Moody’s Analytics issued an analysis warning that the “global economic damage is estimated to be $54 trillion in 2100 under a warming scenario of 1.5°C and $69 trillion under a warming scenario of 2°C.” That’s economic damage in the range of $54,000,000,000,000 to $69,000,000,000,000.

For another sobering business perspective, consider the viewpoint of former international oil, gas, and coal executive and former chair of the Australian Coal Association, Ian Dunlop, who calls the international debate around climate policy “Orwellian.” In a scorching 2017 piece in The Guardian, Dunlop wrote: “International agreements talk of limiting global warming to 1.5-2°C, but in reality they set the world on a path of 3-5°C. Goals are reaffirmed, only to be abandoned. Coal, by definition, is ‘clean.’ Just 1°C of warming is already dangerous, but this cannot be said. The planetary future is hostage to myopic, national self-interest.” Dunlop continued: “Action is delayed on the assumption that as yet unproven technologies will save the day, decades hence. The risks are existential, but it is ‘alarmist’ to say so. A one-in-two chance of missing a goal is normalised as reasonable. Climate policymaking for years now has been cognitively dissonant, ‘a flagrant violation of reality’ …Discussion of what would be safe - less warming that we presently experience - is non-existent. And so we have a policy failure of epic proportions.” All of this from the former head of a national coal association.

So what would these projected higher levels of global heating look like on the ground? Here is how Kevin Anderson describes it: “For humanity it’s a matter of life or death... we will not make all human beings extinct, as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 degrees. If you have got a population of 9 billion by 2050 and you hit 4 degrees, 5 degrees or 6 degrees, you might have half a billion people surviving.” In a TEDx Talk, climate blogger David Roberts had an even more succinct description for a 4°C temperature rise: “Hell on Earth.”

So the Paris accord was hardly the long ball the mainstream media portrayed it to be. It was really a pump fake. I know that none of what I have shared is easy news to bear. Researching and writing it was painful for me to share. Maybe none of it is even news to you, but I share it because we are out of time. We must commit ourselves to a crash course of action and begin. There are times when I think back to the first day of my trek, and the breakdown that threatened to end my journey almost before it started. I could have thrown up my hands and ended my journey right there. I could have succumbed to despair. It was already way late in the year to be launching a cross-country ride. With winter coming, I would have been forgiven for giving up and trying again in the spring. But delay was never an option for me. Remember, I was a desperate man. So I pushed on, trusting that forces greater than me would come to my aid. And they did. We are now collectively experiencing a different kind of breakdown–climate breakdown–and we don’t have the luxury of despair. We have to steel ourselves and forge a path forward. We have to start believing in each other again. We have to work with the awesome power of Mother Nature, not against her. We have to find our way–and do it soon–to a zero emissions America, and world.

The GOOD NEWS many have not yet heard is that the scientific community no longer subscribes to the view that 30-40 years of temperature rise is locked into the climate system no matter what we do. For the longest time, that was the scientific consensus, but the science has since evolved. Subsequent research now shows that temperatures could stop rising as quickly as three to five years after emissions drop to zero. This is huge cause for hope, but only if we get to zero emissions quickly.

Given that our existing economy is built almost entirely on fossil fuels, transitioning to a zero emissions economy is obviously going to involve the use of fossil fuels as we make the transition to renewables, but not all fossil fuel use is equal. The Post Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg has put forth a thoughtful proposition for how to equitably allocate these precious limited resources: “We may be entering a period of fossil fuel triage. Rather than allocating fossil fuels simply on a market basis (those who pay for them get them), it may be fairer, especially to lower-income citizens, for government (with wartime powers) to allocate fuels purposefully based on the strategic importance of the societal sectors that depend on them, and on the relative ease and timeliness of transitioning those sectors to renewable substitutes. Agriculture, for example, might be deemed the highest priority for continued fossil fuel allocations, with commercial air travel assuming a far lower priority.” These are the kinds of challenging conversations we need to start having as a nation.

One of my most prized personal possessions, before it burned in the Marshall Fire climate disaster, was a War Ration Book with stamps for essential goods issued to my Mom when she was five years old. I can imagine a modern-day fossil fuel rationing system today–similar to how goods were rationed during World War II–to ensure that everyone has enough while we make the transition to a zero emissions America. Just as we could not have won World War II without the Greatest Generation making some sacrifices, nor can we restore a safe climate without the Next Greatest Generation making some sacrifices. But as I hope I have convincingly demonstrated to you by now, the benefits of brave action far outweigh the costs of cowardly inaction.

NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.