The stakes
by David Atkins
James Hansen has another reminder for the world:
GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”
If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.
Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.
That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.
If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.
Under the current international system, every country is going to exploit every last drop of oil and burn it so long as it’s economically advantageous to do so. The Middle East, and much of Africa and South America will become war zones as nation-states battle it out for control of the resources–or at the very least to ensure that the production continues on world markets for the benefit of multinational corporations. Terrorism will increase with increasingly devastating tactics. The climate will spin out of control and humanity will find itself in a dark age if it survives at all. Most of the species on earth will die. Irrationality will rise and nuclear war is a possibility.
Oh, and don’t forget that during the brief period humanity has left still thinking it’s in control, labor arbitrage will continue, the plutocrats will get richer, and multinational corporations will continue their ascendancy over nation-states, anyway.
Or…the world could choose an alternate path that’s actually sane. But that would be radical.
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