Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
Autor: Antonio Donato Nobre | Publicado: 2012-08-09T17:38:00-07:00


                    

Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe - and that make clear who the real enemy is


By&nbsp;Bill McKibben

July 19, 2012 9:35 AM ET

&nbsp;

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in 
Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer,
 here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 
3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed 
the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th 
consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded 
the 20th-century average, the odds of which  occurring by simple chance 
were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars 
in the universe.
&nbsp;

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever 
recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much 
that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of 
any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it
 had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest 
downpour in the planet's history.


Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world's 
nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 
1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. 
Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even 
attend. It was "a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," 
the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much 
attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by 
multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience
 about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the 
intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can 
say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly –
 losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril 
that human civilization is in.


When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be 
ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the  seriousness of 
our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, 
an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by 
financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of  
environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through
 to the larger public. This analysis  upends most of the conventional  
political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand 
our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position 
with three simple numbers.


The First Number: 2° Celsius


If
 the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate 
conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight
 to slow a changing climate. The world's nations had gathered in the 
December gloom of the Danish capital for what a leading climate 
economist, Sir Nicholas Stern of Britain, called the "most important 
gathering since the Second World War, given what is at stake." As Danish
 energy minister Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the conference, 
declared at the time: "This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take 
years before we get a new and better one. If ever."


In the event, of course, we missed it. Copenhagen failed 
spectacularly. Neither China nor the United States, which between them 
are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, was prepared 
to offer dramatic concessions, and so the conference drifted aimlessly 
for two weeks until world leaders jetted in for the final day. Amid 
considerable chaos, President Obama took the lead in drafting a 
face-saving "Copenhagen Accord" that fooled very few. Its purely 
voluntary agreements committed no one to anything, and even if countries
 signaled their intentions to cut carbon emissions, there was no 
enforcement mechanism. "Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight," an angry 
Greenpeace official declared, "with the guilty men and women fleeing to 
the airport." Headline writers were equally brutal: COPENHAGEN: THE 
MUNICH OF OUR TIMES? asked one.


The accord did contain one important number, however. In Paragraph 1,
 it formally recognized "the scientific view that the increase in global
 temperature should be below two degrees Celsius." And in the very next 
paragraph, it declared that "we agree that deep cuts in global emissions
 are required... so as to hold the increase in global temperature below 
two degrees Celsius." By insisting on two degrees – about 3.6 degrees 
Fahrenheit – the accord ratified positions taken earlier in 2009 by the 
G8, and the so-called Major Economies Forum. It was as conventional as 
conventional wisdom gets. The number first gained prominence, in fact, 
at a 1995 climate conference chaired by Angela Merkel, then the German 
minister of the environment and now the center-right chancellor of the 
nation.


Some context: So far, we've raised the average temperature of the 
planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more 
damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the 
Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more  acidic, and since warm 
air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a
 shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.)
 Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that 
two degrees is far too lenient a target. "Any number much above one 
degree involves a gamble," writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading 
authority on hurricanes, "and the odds become less and less  favorable 
as the temperature goes up." Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank's chief
 biodiversity adviser, puts it like this: "If we're seeing what we're 
seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much." 
NASA scientist James Hansen,  the planet's most prominent climatologist,
 is even blunter: "The target that has been talked about in 
international negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a 
prescription for long-term disaster." At the Copenhagen summit, a 
spokesman for small island nations warned that many would not survive a 
two-degree rise: "Some countries will flat-out disappear." When 
delegates from developing nations were warned that two degrees would 
represent a "suicide pact" for drought-stricken Africa, many of them 
started chanting, "One degree, one Africa."

Despite such well-founded misgivings, political realism bested 
scientific data, and the world settled on the two-degree target – 
indeed, it's fair to say that it's the only thing about climate change 
the world has settled on. All told, 167 countries responsible for more 
than 87 percent of the world's carbon emissions have signed on to the 
Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two-degree target. Only a few dozen 
countries have rejected it, including Kuwait, Nicaragua and Venezuela. 
Even the United Arab Emirates, which makes most of its money exporting 
oil and gas, signed on. The official position of planet Earth at the 
moment is that we can't raise the temperature more than two degrees 
Celsius – it's become the bottomest of bottom lines. Two degrees.

The Second Number: 565 Gigatons


Scientists
 estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon 
dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable
 hope of staying below two degrees. ("Reasonable," in this case, means 
four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian 
roulette with a six-shooter.)


This idea of a global "carbon budget" emerged about a decade ago, as 
scientists began to calculate how much oil, coal and gas could still 
safely be burned. Since we've increased the Earth's temperature by 0.8 
degrees so far, we're currently less than halfway to the target. But, in
 fact, computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2
 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as 
previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere. That 
means we're already three-quarters of the way to the two-degree target.

How good are these numbers? No one is insisting that they're exact, 
but few dispute that they're generally right. The 565-gigaton figure was
 derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models 
that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the 
past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the 
latest climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of
 the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 
"Looking at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all," says Tom 
Wigley, an Australian climatologist at the National Center for 
Atmospheric Research. "There's maybe 40 models in the data set now, 
compared with 20 before. But so far the numbers are pretty much the 
same. We're just fine-tuning things. I don't think much has changed over
 the last decade." William Collins, a senior climate scientist at the 
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agrees. "I think the results of 
this round of simulations will be quite similar," he says. "We're not 
getting any free lunch from additional understanding of the climate 
system."


We're not getting any free lunch from the world's economies, either. 
With only a single year's lull in 2009 at the height of the financial 
crisis, we've continued to pour record amounts of carbon into the 
atmosphere, year after year. In late May, the International Energy 
Agency published its  latest figures – CO2 emissions last 
year rose to 31.6 gigatons, up 3.2 percent from the year before. America
 had a warm winter and converted more coal-fired power plants to natural
 gas, so its emissions fell slightly; China kept booming, so its  carbon
 output (which recently surpassed the U.S.) rose 9.3  percent; the 
Japanese shut down their fleet of nukes post-Fukushima, so their 
emissions edged up 2.4 percent. "There have been efforts to use more 
renewable energy and improve energy efficiency," said Corinne Le Quéré, 
who runs England's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. "But what
 this shows is that so far the effects have been marginal." In fact, 
study after study predicts that carbon emissions will keep growing by 
roughly three percent a year – and at that rate, we'll blow through our 
565-gigaton allowance in 16 years, around the time today's preschoolers 
will be graduating from high school. "The new data provide further 
evidence that the door to a two-degree trajectory is about to close," 
said Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist. In fact, he continued, 
"When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a 
temperature increase of about six degrees." That's almost 11 degrees 
Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.


So, new data in hand, everyone at the Rio conference renewed their 
ritual calls for serious international action to move us back to a 
two-degree trajectory. The charade will continue in November, when the 
next Conference of the Parties (COP) of the U.N. Framework Convention on
 Climate Change convenes in Qatar. This will be COP 18 – COP 1 was held 
in Berlin in 1995, and since then the process has accomplished 
essentially nothing. Even scientists, who are notoriously reluctant to 
speak out, are slowly overcoming their natural preference to simply 
provide data. "The message has been consistent for close to 30 years 
now," Collins says with a wry laugh, "and we have the instrumentation 
and the computer power required to present the evidence in detail. If we
 choose to continue on our present course of action, it should be done 
with a full evaluation of the evidence the scientific community has 
presented." He pauses, suddenly conscious of being on the record. "I 
should say, a fuller evaluation of the evidence."


So far, though, such calls have had little effect. We're in the same 
position we've been in for a quarter-century: scientific warning 
followed by political inaction. Among scientists speaking off the 
record, disgusted candor is the rule. One senior scientist told me, "You
 know those new cigarette packs, where governments make them put a 
picture of someone with a hole in their throats? Gas pumps should have 
something like that."


The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons


This
 number is the scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes 
the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was 
highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of 
London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a report 
in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks that climate 
change poses to their stock portfolios. The number describes the amount 
of carbon  already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves
 of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or 
Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it's the fossil 
fuel we're currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this 
new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher.

The Carbon Tracker Initiative – led by James Leaton, an 
environmentalist who served as an adviser at the accounting giant 
PricewaterhouseCoopers – combed through proprietary databases to figure 
out how much oil, gas and coal the world's major energy companies hold 
in reserve. The numbers aren't perfect – they don't fully reflect the 
recent surge in unconventional energy sources like shale gas, and they 
don't accurately reflect coal reserves, which are subject to less 
stringent reporting requirements than oil and gas. But for the biggest 
companies, the figures are quite exact: If you burned everything in the 
inventories of Russia's Lukoil and America's ExxonMobil, for instance, 
which lead the list of oil and gas companies, each would release more 
than 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.


Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big 
deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – 
equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get 
away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could 
have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might 
consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs
 the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to 
pour.

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as 
climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent 
of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we 
knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive 
intervention, it seems certain.


Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But 
it's already economically aboveground – it's figured into share prices, 
companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their 
budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why 
the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the 
regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, 
the holding that gives their companies their value. It's why they've 
worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in 
Canada's tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to 
frack the Appalachians.



If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the 
climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their 
companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at 
JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today's
 market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about 
$27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists 
and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion
 in assets. The numbers aren't exact, of course, but that carbon bubble 
makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won't necessarily 
burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will
 do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy 
fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that
 we know the numbers, it looks like you can't have both. Do the math: 
2,795 is five times 565. That's how the story ends.


So
 far, as I said at the start, environmental efforts to tackle global 
warming have failed. The planet's emissions of carbon dioxide continue 
to soar, especially as developing countries emulate (and supplant) the 
industries of the West. Even in rich countries, small reductions in 
emissions offer no sign of the real break with the status quo we'd need 
to upend the iron logic of these three numbers. Germany is one of the 
only big countries that has actually tried hard to change its energy 
mix; on one sunny Saturday in late May, that northern-latitude nation 
generated nearly half its power from solar panels within its borders. 
That's a small miracle – and it demonstrates that we have the technology
 to solve our problems. But we lack the will. So far, Germany's the 
exception; the rule is ever more carbon.


This record of failure means we know a lot about what strategies don't
 work. Green groups, for instance, have spent a lot of time trying to 
change individual lifestyles: the iconic twisty light bulb has been 
installed by the millions, but so have a new generation of 
energy-sucking flatscreen TVs. Most of us are fundamentally ambivalent 
about going green: We like cheap flights to warm places, and we're 
certainly not going to give them up if everyone else is still taking 
them. Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil 
fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement 
against yourself – it's as if the gay-rights movement had to be 
constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition 
movement from slaveholders.


People perceive – correctly – that their individual actions will not 
make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2; by 
2010, a poll found that "while recycling is widespread in America and 73
 percent of those polled are paying bills online in order to save 
paper," only four percent had reduced their utility use and only three 
percent had purchased hybrid cars. Given a hundred years, you could 
conceivably change lifestyles enough to matter – but time is precisely 
what we lack.


A more efficient method, of course, would be to work through the 
political system, and environmentalists have tried that, too, with the 
same limited success. They've patiently lobbied leaders, trying to 
convince them of our peril and assuming that politicians would heed the 
warnings. Sometimes it has seemed to work. Barack Obama, for instance, 
campaigned more aggressively about climate change than any president 
before him – the night he won the nomination, he told supporters that 
his election would mark the moment "the rise of the oceans began to slow
 and the planet began to heal." And he has achieved one significant 
change: a steady increase in the fuel efficiency mandated for 
automobiles. It's the kind of measure, adopted a quarter-century ago, 
that would have helped enormously. But in light of the numbers I've just
 described, it's obviously a very small start indeed.

At this point, effective action would require actually keeping most 
of the carbon the fossil-fuel industry wants to burn safely in the soil,
 not just changing slightly the speed at which it's burned. And there 
the president, apparently haunted by the still-echoing cry of "Drill, 
baby, drill," has gone out of his way to frack and mine. His secretary 
of interior, for instance, opened up a huge swath of the Powder River 
Basin in Wyoming for coal extraction: The total basin contains some 67.5
 gigatons worth of carbon (or more than 10 percent of the available 
atmospheric space). He's doing the same thing with Arctic and offshore 
drilling; in fact, as he explained on the stump in March, "You have my 
word that we will keep drilling everywhere we can... That's a commitment
 that I make." The next day, in a yard full of oil pipe in Cushing,  
Oklahoma, the president promised to work on wind and solar energy but, 
at the same time, to speed up fossil-fuel development: "Producing more 
oil and gas here at home has been, and will continue to be, a critical 
part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy." That is, he's committed to
 finding even more stock to add to the 2,795-gigaton inventory of 
unburned carbon.


Sometimes the irony is almost Borat-scale obvious: In early June, 
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled on a Norwegian research 
trawler to see firsthand the growing damage from climate change. "Many 
of the predictions about warming in the Arctic are being surpassed by 
the actual data," she said, describing the sight as "sobering." But the 
discussions she traveled to Scandinavia to have with other foreign 
ministers were mostly about how to make sure Western nations get their 
share of the estimated $9 trillion in oil (that's more than 90 billion 
barrels, or 37 gigatons of carbon) that will become accessible as the 
Arctic ice melts. Last month, the Obama administration indicated that it
 would give Shell permission to start drilling in sections of the 
Arctic.


Almost every government with deposits of hydrocarbons straddles the 
same divide. Canada, for instance, is a liberal democracy renowned for 
its internationalism – no wonder, then, that it signed on to the Kyoto 
treaty, promising to cut its carbon emissions substantially by 2012. But
 the rising price of oil suddenly made the tar sands of Alberta 
economically attractive – and since, as NASA climatologist James Hansen 
pointed out in May, they contain as much as 240 gigatons of carbon (or 
almost half of the available space if we take the 565 limit seriously), 
that meant Canada's commitment to Kyoto was nonsense. In December, the 
Canadian government withdrew from the treaty before it faced fines for 
failing to meet its commitments.


The same kind of hypocrisy applies across the ideological board: In 
his speech to the Copenhagen conference, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez quoted 
Rosa Luxemburg, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and "Christ the Redeemer," 
insisting that "climate change is undoubtedly the most devastating 
environmental problem of this century." But the next spring, in the 
Simon Bolivar Hall of the state-run oil company, he signed an agreement 
with a consortium of international players to develop the vast Orinoco 
tar sands as "the most significant engine for a comprehensive 
development of the entire territory and Venezuelan population." The 
Orinoco deposits are larger than Alberta's – taken together, they'd fill
 up the whole available atmospheric space.


So:
 the paths we have tried to tackle global warming have so far produced 
only gradual, halting shifts. A rapid, transformative change would 
require building a movement, and movements require enemies. As John F. 
Kennedy put it, "The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull 
Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln." And enemies are what
 climate change has lacked.


But what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is 
that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to 
action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to
 view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue 
industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy 
Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization. "Lots of 
companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay 
terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to
 change those practices," says veteran  anti-corporate leader Naomi 
Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate crisis. "But these 
numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the 
planet is their business model. It's what they do."


According to the Carbon Tracker report, if Exxon burns its current 
reserves, it would use up more than seven percent of the available 
atmospheric space between us and the risk of two degrees. BP is just 
behind, followed by the Russian firm Gazprom, then Chevron, 
ConocoPhillips and Shell, each of which would fill between three and 
four percent. Taken together, just these six firms, of the 200 listed in
 the Carbon Tracker report, would use up more than a quarter of the 
remaining two-degree budget. Severstal, the Russian mining giant, leads 
the list of coal companies, followed by firms like BHP Billiton and 
Peabody. The numbers are simply staggering – this industry, and this 
industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of 
our planet, and they're planning to use it.

They're clearly cognizant of global warming – they employ some of the
 world's best scientists, after all, and they're bidding on all those 
oil leases made possible by the staggering melt of Arctic ice. And yet 
they relentlessly search for more hydrocarbons – in early March, Exxon 
CEO Rex Tillerson told Wall Street analysts that the company plans to 
spend $37 billion a year through 2016 (about $100 million a day) 
searching for yet more oil and gas.

There's not a more reckless man on the planet than Tillerson. Late 
last month, on the same day the Colorado fires reached their height, he 
told a New York audience that global warming is real, but dismissed it 
as an "engineering problem" that has "engineering solutions." Such as? 
"Changes to weather patterns that move crop-production areas around – 
we'll adapt to that." This in a week when Kentucky farmers were 
reporting that corn kernels were "aborting" in record heat, threatening a
 spike in global food prices. "The fear factor that people want to throw
 out there to say, 'We just have to stop this,' I do not accept," 
Tillerson said. Of course not – if he did accept it, he'd have to keep 
his reserves in the ground. Which would cost him money. It's not an 
engineering problem, in other words – it's a greed problem.


You could argue that this is simply in the nature of these companies –
 that having found a profitable vein, they're compelled to keep mining 
it, more like efficient automatons than people with free will. But as 
the Supreme Court has made clear, they are people of a sort. In fact, 
thanks to the size of its bankroll, the fossil-fuel industry has far 
more free will than the rest of us. These companies don't simply exist 
in a world whose hungers they fulfill – they help create the boundaries 
of that world.

Left to our own devices, citizens might decide to regulate carbon and
 stop short of the brink; according to a recent poll, nearly two-thirds 
of Americans would back an international agreement that cut carbon 
emissions 90 percent by 2050. But we aren't left to our own devices. The
 Koch brothers, for instance, have a combined wealth of $50 billion, 
meaning they trail only Bill Gates on the list of richest Americans. 
They've made most of their money in hydrocarbons, they know any system 
to regulate carbon would cut those profits, and they reportedly plan to 
lavish as much as $200 million on this year's elections. In 2009, for 
the first time,  the U.S. Chamber of Commerce surpassed both the 
Republican and Democratic National Committees on political spending; the
 following year, more than 90 percent of the Chamber's cash went to GOP 
candidates, many of whom deny the existence of global warming. Not long 
ago, the Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA urging the agency not 
to regulate carbon – should the world's scientists turn out to be right 
and the planet heats up, the Chamber advised, "populations can 
acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological 
and technological adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we 
change our physiology seems right up there.


Environmentalists, understandably, have been loath to make the 
fossil-fuel industry their enemy, respecting its political power and 
hoping instead to convince these giants that they should turn away from 
coal, oil and gas and transform themselves more broadly into "energy 
companies." Sometimes that strategy appeared to be working – emphasis on
 appeared. Around the turn of the century, for instance, BP made a brief
 attempt to restyle itself as "Beyond Petroleum," adapting a logo that 
looked like the sun and sticking solar panels on some of its gas 
stations. But its investments in alternative energy were never more than
 a tiny fraction of its budget for hydrocarbon exploration, and after a 
few years, many of those were wound down as new CEOs insisted on 
returning to the company's "core business." In December, BP finally 
closed its solar division. Shell shut down its solar and wind efforts in
 2009. The five biggest oil companies have made more than $1 trillion in
 profits since the millennium – there's simply too much money to be made
 on oil and gas and coal to go chasing after zephyrs and sunbeams.


Much of that profit stems from a single historical accident: Alone 
among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main 
waste, carbon dioxide, for free. Nobody else gets that break – if you 
own a restaurant, you have to pay someone to cart away your trash, since
 piling it in the street would breed rats. But the fossil-fuel industry 
is different, and for sound historical reasons: Until a quarter-century 
ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous. But now that we 
understand that carbon is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, 
its price becomes the central issue.


If you put a price on carbon, through a direct tax or other methods, 
it would enlist markets in the fight against global warming. Once Exxon 
has to pay for the damage its carbon is doing to the atmosphere, the 
price of its products would rise. Consumers would get a strong signal to
 use less fossil fuel – every time they stopped at the pump, they'd be 
reminded that you don't need a semimilitary vehicle to go to the grocery
 store. The economic playing field would now be a level one for 
nonpolluting energy sources. And you could do it all without bankrupting
 citizens – a so-called "fee-and-dividend" scheme would put a hefty tax 
on coal and gas and oil, then simply divide up the proceeds, sending 
everyone in the country a check each month for their share of the added 
costs of carbon. By switching to cleaner energy sources, most people 
would actually come out ahead.


There's only one problem: Putting a price on carbon would reduce the 
profitability of the fossil-fuel industry. After all, the answer to the 
question "How high should the price of carbon be?" is "High enough to 
keep those carbon reserves that would take us past two degrees safely in
 the ground." The higher the price on carbon, the more of those reserves
 would be worthless. The fight, in the end, is about whether the 
industry will succeed in its fight to keep its special pollution break 
alive past the point of climate catastrophe, or whether, in the 
economists' parlance, we'll make them internalize those externalities.


It's
 not clear, of course, that the power of the fossil-fuel industry can be
 broken. The U.K. analysts who wrote the Carbon Tracker report and drew 
attention to these numbers had a relatively modest goal – they simply 
wanted to remind investors that climate change poses a very real risk to
 the stock prices of energy companies. Say something so big finally 
happens (a giant hurricane swamps Manhattan, a megadrought wipes out 
Midwest agriculture) that even the political power of the industry is 
inadequate to restrain legislators, who manage to regulate carbon. 
Suddenly those Chevron reserves would be a lot less valuable, and the 
stock would tank. Given that risk, the Carbon Tracker report warned 
investors to lessen their exposure, hedge it with some big plays in 
alternative energy.


"The regular process of economic evolution is that businesses are 
left with stranded assets all the time," says Nick Robins, who runs 
HSBC's Climate Change Centre. "Think of film cameras, or typewriters. 
The question is not whether this will happen. It will. Pension systems 
have been hit by the dot-com and credit crunch. They'll be hit by this."
 Still, it hasn't been easy to convince investors, who have shared in 
the oil industry's record profits. "The reason you get bubbles," sighs 
Leaton, "is that everyone thinks they're the best analyst – that they'll
 go to the edge of the cliff and then jump back when everyone else goes 
over."


So pure self-interest probably won't spark a transformative challenge
 to fossil fuel. But moral outrage just might – and that's the real 
meaning of this new math. It could, plausibly, give rise to a real 
movement.


Once, in recent corporate history, anger forced an industry to make 
basic changes. That was the campaign in the 1980s demanding divestment 
from companies doing business in South Africa. It rose first on college 
campuses and then spread to municipal and state governments; 155 
campuses eventually divested, and by the end of the decade, more than 80
 cities, 25 states and 19 counties had taken some form of binding 
economic action against companies connected to the apartheid regime. 
"The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of 
the past century," as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, "but we would not 
have succeeded without the help of international pressure," especially 
from "the divestment movement of the 1980s."

The fossil-fuel industry is obviously a tougher opponent, and even if
 you could force the hand of particular companies, you'd still have to 
figure out a strategy for dealing with all the sovereign nations that, 
in effect, act as fossil-fuel companies. But the link for college 
students is even more obvious in this case. If their college's endowment
 portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being 
subsidized by investments that guarantee they won't have much of a 
planet on which to make use of their degree. (The same logic applies to 
the world's largest investors, pension funds, which are also 
theoretically interested in the future – that's when their members will 
"enjoy their retirement.") "Given the severity of the climate crisis, a 
comparable demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that 
are destroying the planet would not only be appropriate but effective," 
says Bob Massie, a former anti-apartheid activist who helped found the 
Investor Network on Climate Risk. "The message is simple: We have had 
enough. We must sever the ties with those who profit from climate change
 – now."


Movements rarely have predictable outcomes. But any campaign that 
weakens the fossil-fuel industry's political standing clearly increases 
the chances of retiring its special breaks. Consider President Obama's 
signal achievement in the climate fight, the large increase he won in 
mileage requirements for cars. Scientists, environmentalists and 
engineers had advocated such policies for decades, but until Detroit 
came under severe financial pressure, it was politically powerful enough
 to fend them off. If people come to understand the cold, mathematical 
truth – that the fossil-fuel industry is systematically undermining the 
planet's physical systems – it might weaken it enough to matter 
politically. Exxon and their ilk might drop their opposition to a 
fee-and-dividend solution; they might even decide to become true energy 
companies, this time for real.


Even if such a campaign is possible, however, we may have waited too 
long to start it. To make a real difference – to keep us under a 
temperature increase of two degrees – you'd need to change carbon 
pricing in Washington, and then use that victory to leverage similar 
shifts around the world. At this point, what happens in the U.S. is most
 important for how it will influence China and India, where emissions 
are growing fastest. (In early June, researchers concluded that China 
has probably under-reported its emissions by up to 20 percent.) The 
three numbers I've described are daunting – they may define an 
essentially impossible future. But at least they provide intellectual 
clarity about the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. We know how
 much we can burn, and we know who's planning to burn more. Climate 
change operates on a geological scale and time frame, but it's not an 
impersonal force of nature; the more carefully you do the math, the more
 thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have 
met the enemy and they is Shell.


Meanwhile the tide of numbers continues. The week after the Rio 
conference limped to its conclusion, Arctic sea ice hit the lowest level
 ever recorded for that date. Last month, on a single weekend, Tropical 
Storm Debby dumped more than 20 inches of rain on Florida – the earliest
 the season's fourth-named cyclone has ever arrived. At the same time, 
the largest fire in New Mexico history burned on, and the most 
destructive fire in Colorado's annals claimed 346 homes in Colorado 
Springs – breaking a record set the week before in Fort Collins. This 
month, scientists issued a new study concluding that global warming has 
dramatically increased the likelihood of severe heat and drought – days 
after a heat wave across the Plains and Midwest broke records that had 
stood since the Dust Bowl, threatening this year's harvest. You want a 
big number? In the course of this month, a quadrillion kernels of corn 
need to pollinate across the grain belt, something they can't do if 
temperatures remain off the charts. Just like us, our crops are adapted 
to the Holocene, the 11,000-year period of climatic stability we're now 
leaving... in the dust.


This story is from the August 2nd, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone. 



Read more: RollingStone Politics