The Crisis Comes Ashore Why the oil spill could change everything.
* Al Gore
<http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-crisis-comes-ashore#> Al
Goreview bio <http://www.tnr.com/users/al-gore>
* The Crisis Comes Ashore
<http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-crisis-comes-ashore>
* Unbearable Whiteness
<http://www.tnr.com/article/environment-energy/unbearable-whiteness>
* The New Republic, May 8, 2010
"It is understandable that the administration
will be focused on the immediate crisis in the Gulf of Mexico.
But this is a consciousness-shifting event.
It is one of those clarifying moments that brings
a rare opportunity to take the longer view."
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The continuing undersea gusher of oil 50 miles off the shores of
Louisiana is not the only source of dangerous uncontrolled pollution
spewing into the environment. Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2
being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere
surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount
of oil spilling from the Macondo well every day.
Indeed, the average American coal-fired power generating plant gushes
more than three times as much global-warming pollution into the
atmosphere each dayand there are over 1,400 of them.
Just as the oil companies told us that deep-water drilling was safe,
they tell us that it's perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons
of CO2 into the air of the world every 24 hours. Even as the oil spill
continues to groweven as BP warns that the flow could increase
multi-fold, to 60,000 barrels per day, and that it may continue for
monthsthe head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard,
says, "Nothing has changed.
When we get back to the politics of energy, oil and natural gas are
essential to the economy and our way of life." His reaction reminds me
of the day Elvis Presley died. Upon hearing the tragic news,
Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, said, "This changes
nothing."
However, both the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the CO2 spill into
the global atmosphere are causing profound and harmful
changesdirectly and indirectly.
The oil is having a direct impact on fish, shellfish, turtles, seabirds,
coral reefs, marshes, and the entire web of life in the Gulf Coast.
The indirect effects include the loss of jobs in the fishing and tourism
industries; the destruction of the health, vitality, and rich culture of
communities in the region; imminent bankruptcies; vast environmental
damage expected to persist for decades; and the disruption of seafood
markets nationwide.
And, of course, the consequences of our ravenous consumption of oil are
even larger. Starting 40 years ago, when America's domestic oil
production peaked, our dependence on foreign oil has steadily grown.
We are now draining our economy of several hundred billion dollars a
year in order to purchase foreign oil in a global market dominated by
the huge reserves owned by sovereign states in the Persian Gulf. This
enormous and increasing transfer of wealth contributes heavily to our
trade and current-account deficits, and enriches regimes in the most
unstable region of the world, helping to finance both terrorism and
Iran's relentless effort to build a nuclear arsenal.
The profound risk to our national and economic security posed by the
prospect of the world's sudden loss of access to Persian Gulf oil
contributed greatly to the strategic miscalculations and public
deceptions that led to our costly invasion of Iraq, including the
reckless diversion of military and intelligence assets from Afghanistan
before our mission there was accomplished.
I am far from the only one who believes that it is not too much of a
stretch to link the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and northwestern
Pakistanand even last week's attempted bombing in Times
Squareto a long chain of events triggered in part by our decision
to allow ourselves to become so dependent on foreign oil.
Here at home, the illusion that we can meaningfully reduce our
dependence on foreign oil by taking extraordinary risks to develop deep
reserves in the Outer Continental Shelf is illuminated by the
illustration below. The addition to oil company profits may be
significant, but the benefits to our national security are trivial.
Meanwhile, our increasing appetite for coal is also creating
environmental and human catastrophes. The obscene practice known as
"mountaintop mining," for instance, is not only defacing the
landscape of Appalachia but also destroying streams throughout the
region and poisoning the drinking water of many communities.
[http://www.tnr.com/sites/default/files/oilconsumption_0.JPG]
The direct consequences of burning these vast and ever-growing amounts
of oil and coal are a buildup of heat in the atmosphere worldwide and
the increased acidity of the oceans. (Although the world has yet to
focus on ocean acidification, the problem is terrifying. Thirty million
of the 90 million tons of CO2 being spilled each day end up in the
oceans as carbonic acid, changing the pH level by more than at any time
in the last many millions of years, thus inflicting every form of life
in the ocean that makes a shell or a reef with a kind of
osteoporosisinterfering with their ability to transform calcium
carbonate into the hard structures upon which their life
dependsthat threatens the survival of many species of zooplankton
at the base of the ocean food chain.)
But rising global temperatures and increasing acidification in the ocean
are only the beginning. These processes have triggered a cascading set
of other impacts, which include:
* The melting of virtually all of the mountain glaciers in the
worldalready well underwaythreatening the supplies of fresh
water for drinking and agriculture in many parts of the world.
* The prospective disappearance of the North Polar Ice Cap, which for
most of the last three million years has covered an area roughly the
size of the continental United States. Approximately 25 percent30
percent of this ice cap (measured by the area that it used to cover) has
disappeared in the last 30 years during summer. The thickness of the
remaining ice has also sharply diminished.
* The melting of the two largest masses of ice on the planeton
top of Greenland and Antarctica (especially West Antarctica, where the
bottom of the ice rests under the sea atop submerged islands) is already
accelerating far beyond earlier estimatesthreatening catastrophic
increases in sea level worldwide.
* As the seas rise more rapidly, many millions of climate refugees
will be forced to flee from areas they have long called home. Indeed,
thousands have already been forced to move from low-lying island
nations. The government of the Maldives has included a new line item in
this year's budget for a fund to buy a new country. That option will
not be available to Bangladesh.
* Deeper and longer droughts in mid-continent regions, as soil
moisture evaporates more rapidly with higher temperatures.
* More and larger forest fires as drier vegetation becomes kindling
for lightningwhich, according to researchers at the University of
Tel Aviv, is also predicted to increase at the rate of 10 percent with
each additional degree of temperature.
* The migration of tropical diseases to temperate latitudes, as new
ecological niches invite the intrusion of viruses and bacteria and the
mosquitoes, ticks, and other "vectors" that carry these
diseases. This process is also already underway.
* An accelerated extinction rate which, according to E. O. Wilson and
other biologists, threatens to reach levels not seen since the dinosaurs
were wiped out 65 million years ago.
* The increased destructive power of tropical storms coming off the
ocean (hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoonsall different names for
the same phenomenon). Though the number of these storms is not predicted
to increase, their destructive power isdue to increases in wind
speeds and moisture content.
* Increased large downpours of both rain and snowwith a steady
shift from snow to rainresulting in an increased frequency of large
floods on every continent.
This last phenomenonlong understood by scientists to be one of the
most confidently predictable consequences of global warminghit home
for many of my neighbors last week when Nashville, the city where I
live, suffered what the Army Corps of Engineers described as "a
1,000 year rain event" that caused horrendous flooding, mostly in
neighborhoods that had no flood insurancebecause homeowners there
had been assured that they lived well outside the historic flood plain.
The tragic loss of many lives was accompanied by the ruination of
thousands of homes and property damages that Mayor Karl Dean estimated
at one and a half billion dollars.
Scientists are always careful in the way they describe the
cause-and-effect relationship between global warming and such events: It
is a mistake, they say, to attribute any single extreme weather event
only to global warming, because there is large natural variability in
weatherbut the odds of extremely large downpours, scientists
repeatedly insist, are steadily increasing with global warming, and such
events are predicted to become far more common with each passing decade
because when water evaporates from the warmer oceans, warmer air holds
more of it.
Average humidity worldwide has already increased by 4 percent since
1970, and each additional degree Fahrenheit increases it by another 3
percent-4 percent. The range of increases in global average temperature
during this century is estimated at between 2Ë Fahrenheit to
11.5Ë Fahrenheit. The high end of this range would be utterly
catastrophic, threatening the survival of civilization as we know it.
Even now, the hydrological cycle of the entire globe is being radically
altered. The timing and predictability of rainfall is changing in ways
that are already beginning to disrupt agricultureparticularly
subsistence agriculture in developing countries. Crop failures and food
insecurity are increasing ominously in many regions where farmers are no
longer able to rely on the clockwork intervals of rainy seasons and dry
seasons they learned from previous generations.
The record snowfalls last winter in the northeastern United States also
fit into the same pattern. Indeed, the Northeast has long been included
among the regions of the world predicted to experience the most dramatic
increases in precipitation.
Bizarre changes in precipitation patterns are now being observed in many
regions throughout the world. Last month, British scientists working
near the North Pole were astonished by an unprecedented April rainfall.
David Phillips, a senior climatologist in Canada, described the event as
"bizarre," adding, "This is up there among fish falling from
the sky or Niagara Falls running dry."
Temperatures inside the Arctic Circle are increasing far more rapidly
than in the rest of the world because the progressive melting of ice and
snow leads to a radical change in the amount of heat absorbed by the
surface of the uncovered tundra and Arctic Ocean. Incoming solar
radiation is no longer reflected by the ice and snow. Arctic researchers
from the University of Washington have documented the beginning of
significant releases of methane caused by the rapid thawing of
permafrost in Alaska and Siberia.
One important difference between the oil spill and the CO2 spill is that
petroleum is visible on the surface of the sea and carries a distinctive
odor now filling the nostrils of people on shore. Carbon dioxide, on the
other hand, is invisible, odorless, tasteless, and has no price tag. It
is all too easily put "out of sight and out of mind."
Because the impacts of global warming are distributed globally, they
often masquerade as an abstraction. And because the length of time
between causes and consequences is longer than we are used to dealing
with, we are vulnerable to the illusion that we have the luxury of time
before we begin to respond.
But neither assumption is correct. Most of the heat trapped by
greenhouse gases is stored in the oceans and reemerges over time into
the atmosphere. As a result, we are capable-through inactionof
making truly disastrous consequences inevitable long before the worst
impacts are manifested. Our perception of the dangers of the climate
crisis therefore relies on our ability to understand and trust the
conclusions reached by the most elaborate and impressive scientific
assessment in the history of our civilization.
In other words, rather than relying on visceral responses, we have to
draw upon our capacity for reasoning, communicating clearly with one
another, forming a global consensus on the basis of science, and making
a choice in favor of preventive action on a global scale.
During the last 22 years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
has produced four massive studies warning the world of the looming
catastrophe that is being caused by the massive dumping of
global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, this process has been vulnerable to disruption and
paralysis by a cynical and lavishly funded disinformation campaign. A
number of large carbon polluters, whose business plans rely on their
continued ability to freely dump their gaseous waste products into the
global atmospheric commonsas if it is an open sewerhave chosen
to pursue a determined and highly organized campaign aimed at
undermining public confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the
global scientific community.
They have attacked the scientific community by financing pseudo-studies
aimed at creating public doubt about peer-reviewed science. They have
also manipulated the political and regulatory process with outsized
campaign contributions and legions of lobbyists (there are now four
anti-climate lobbyists for every single member of the House and Senate).
This epic public contest between the broad public interest and a small
but powerful special interest has taken place during a time when
American democracy has grown sclerotic. The role of money in our
politics has exploded to a dangerous level.
Our democratic conversation is now dominated by expensive 30-second
television commercials, which consume two-thirds of the campaign budgets
of candidates in both political parties. The only reliable source of
such large sums of campaign cash is business lobbies. Most members of
the House and Senate facing competitive election contests are forced to
spend several hours each day asking special interests for money to
finance their campaigns.
Instead of participating in committee hearings, floor debates, and
Burkean reflection on the impact of the questions being considered, they
spend their time as supplicants. Though many struggle to resist the
influence their donors intend to have on their decision-making process,
all too frequently human nature takes its course.
Their constituents now spend an average of five hours per day watching
televisionwhich is, of course, why campaigns in both political
parties spend most of their money on TV advertising.
Viewers also absorb political messages from the same special interests
that are wining and dining and contributing to their elected officials.
The largest carbon polluters have, for the last 17 years, sought to
manipulate public opinion with a massive and continuing propaganda
campaign, using TV advertisements and all other forms of mass
persuasion.
It is a game plan spelled out in one of their internal documents, which
was leaked to an enterprising reporter, that stated: "reposition
global warming as theory rather than fact." In other words, they
have mimicked the strategy pioneered by the tobacco industry, which
undermined the scientific consensus linking the smoking of cigarettes
with diseases of the lung and heartsuccessfully delaying
appropriate health measures for almost 40 years after the landmark
surgeon general's report of 1964.
Meanwhile, many other countriesincluding Chinahave developed
national strategies for leading the historic shift from oil and coal to
renewable forms of energy, higher levels of efficiency, smart grids and
fast trains, sustainable agriculture and forestry.
Here in the United States, the House of Representatives has passed a
meaningful plan to move America in the same direction and reestablish
our capacity to provide leadership in the world community on the most
important issue facing the world today. The Senate, however, has
struggled for the last 17 months to find enough votes to take up its own
version of the same legislative plan.
The unpleasant reality now spilling onto the shores of the Gulf Coast is
creating public outrage and may also be generating a new opportunity to
pass legislation, just as the oil spill 20 years ago from the Exxon
Valdez created public momentum sufficient to overcome the
anti-environment special interests. There is new hope that by the time
the gusher from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is capped, so will
carbon emissions from the burning of oil and coal.
It is understandable that the administration will be focused on the
immediate crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. But this is a
consciousness-shifting event. It is one of those clarifying moments that
brings a rare opportunity to take the longer view.
Unless we change our present course soon, the future of human
civilization will be in dire jeopardy. Just as we feel a sense of
urgency in demanding that this ongoing oil spill be stopped, we should
feel an even greater sense of urgency in demanding that the much larger
and more dangerous ongoing emissions of global warming pollution must
also be stopped to make the world safe from the climate crisis that is
building all around us.
Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, is chairman of the
Alliance for Climate Protection.
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-crisis-comes-ashore
