And so are poetry, and archaeology, botany, anatomy, chess, landscape gardening, the curious details of languages, and, to their devotees, tennis, golf, nudism, fashion, myriad other of the enrichments of human life.
All those could become forgotten luxuries, if civilization goes into retreat because humanity in a world of climate extremes can attend to little but the struggle with desperate migrants from uninhabitable countries.
It’s beginning to look inevitable. The tipping point, beyond which global heating will become runaway because of its many feedback loops, can be avoided only if greenhouse gas emissions, caused by burning of fossil fuels, decline to net zero in a few decades. The nations have agreed to this. Instead, the fossil fuel companies intend to increase their extraction of oil, coal, and gas in the next few decades by enormous percentages.
I hope Americans are not protected by their media from understanding the mounting warnings of the scientists, the largest proportion of whom are American. Here are two days’ front pages from the Guardian.
What the top 20 oil firms are doing:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/revealed-20-firms-third-carbon-emissions
The list of those firms, with the figures for each (including CROs’ pay and largest oil spills):
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/what-we-know-top-20-global-polluters
Of the top 20, eight are public investor-owned companies, but twelve, including three of the largest five, are national – owned by governments that are mostly undemocratic and secretive:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/secretive-national-oil-companies-climate
What can we do about such gigantic government-owned companies as Saudi Aramco and Gazprom? Nothing. They have no shareholders, do not answer questions. They are the ones planning the largest increases of all.
We’ve known of the consequences of greenhouse gas emission since 1959. Oil companies’ own scientists have acknowledged it. At other times the companies have taken out full-page ads to insinuate doubt. (Look for the amusing 1990 story of the two Freds.)
The scale of the projected increase of fossil-fuel extraction to 2030 is scarcely believable – seven extra million barrels a day:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/10/oil-firms-barrels-markets
Companies claim to accept the Paris agreement, and invest in renewables or carbon capture amounts of money that seem huge but are typically around one percent of their spending. And they say they are not directly responsible for emissions. They are only meeting demand. Right. They are extracting the fuel from the ground. We, the consumers, are burning it.
It’s obvious that companies increase their output because the short-term profit of a few hundred people is more imperative to them than the future of the world. There is another reason why, just when they should be slowing extraction, they are enormously speeding it. There is a limited amount of these hydrocarbons in the ground. The time will come when further extraction has to be banned; what’s left must be kept there in reserve. No company wants to be left holding that reserve, unable to “harvest” it, while the others have extracted all they can. Hence the scramble.
Rational, on one time-scale. On another, insane. Criminal.
Richmond, California, is an example of local struggle against a polluting oil giant:
It will take many more Richmonds.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
I’m proud of my neighbors across the bay in Richmond.
Seems that the additional heat would be appreciated by the golfers, not to mention the nudists!
I sure asked for that one!
the climate change is fake
our president 🤮🤮🤮tells us so.
m