The essay below also appears today in the North Royalton edition of The Post.
We cannot sanely burn the carbon reserves—oil, natural gas and coal—now on the corporate books. What is this bizarre reality where we waste hundreds of millions of dollars searching for more? One driven by greed so strong that the people responsible feel no shame in boldly lying to protect their wealth.
We’ve seen this all before.
My grandfather, a man who husbanded his small family through the Great Depression in the hills of West Virginia, was a saver. He saved bits of wire and machine parts and hardware and the foil from his packs of unfiltered Camels because he never knew when a need would arise. He also saved nearly 50 years’ worth of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines. His family prospered. He died of smoking-related complications when I was eighteen. He acquired the cigarette habit nearly a century ago in the Army during the first World War.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s I spent many a happy hour reading and learning from those magazines. There were lots of ads, of course, but the ones I recall now were for cigarettes, specifically those trumpeting the health benefits of smoking and the now infamous “T-Zone.”
I am of a generation just barely old enough to remember when cigarettes were aggressively advertised on television and the early days of warnings from the Surgeon General. My grandfather continued to smoke despite those warnings. My father also smoked, unfiltered Pall Malls, but he quit sometime in the mid-’70s, about the same time that I joined the Navy and began to smoke three packs a day of filtered Marlboros. (I also finally quit, on 5 December 1981, but who’s counting?)
What does smoking have to do with burning oil, natural gas and coal? Both were known to be life-threatening for more than half a century before we woke up and realized that we were being fooled by the concerted and deliberate institutional lies of the people profiting from our suicidal consumption of their products. The science behind the hazards of smoking was solid, yet tobacco companies convinced us that a controversy existed where there was none. So too, have carbon-extraction corporations convinced many that radical liberal rants about melting ice and the loss of a few worthless polar bears were beneath contempt. Yet the science is indisputable.
The edge of the climate change cliff is marked by an average global rise in temperature of just 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). What happens when we burn enough fossil fuels to load our common atmosphere with the carbon dioxide sufficient to send us across that bright line and over the cliff? Extreme weather events deemed once-in-a-century or even once-in-a-millennium (like the recent flooding in South Carolina), become horribly regular. Weather patterns shifted by melting polar ice and diverted ocean currents deprive some farmers of rain and deluge the fields of others, washing away seed and fertile soil and leading to global famines not even the Prince of Egypt could avert. Our coastal cities like New York, Miami, New Orleans, San Diego, Seattle and Honolulu disappear under rising sea levels. In the extreme, communities like North Royalton battle to protect their access to the potable water of the Great Lakes from waves of refugees that will make the current flood of displaced peoples in Europe, or our own immigration “crisis,” look like beneficial tourism.
There are at present $10 trillion (yes, trillion) in known, but yet untapped, carbon reserves sufficient to generate 2,795 gigatons (a gigaton equals one billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide. We will plummet over that 2-degree precipice if we burn even a fifth of that reserve, equal to only 565 gigatons, over the next 34 years. The odds of me being around in 2050 are slim. My nieces and nephews, however, may ring in that mid-century new year. I want them to do so knowing that my generation made the right choices. That we acted responsibly, and not like petulant and addled addicts, to ensure that they need not fear for themselves and the future of their families.
No miracles, science or otherwise, can save us from the truth that the fossil fuel age is destroying our world. Only our courage and resolve in the face of our shared complacency will suffice. In the 19th century abolitionists ended slavery. New Abolitionists can end the fossil fuel age.
If we are to step back from the cliff, the transition must start now.
You can find much more in my Electronic Chapbook notes on Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate and The Guardian’s Keep Carbon In The Ground campaign.
