[NYTr] Monbiot: The real answer to climate change - leave fossil fuels in the ground

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Guardian  - Dec 11, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2225387,00.html

The real answer to climate change is to leave fossil fuels in the ground

All the talk in Bali about cutting carbon means nothing while ever more
oil and coal is being extracted and burned 

By George Monbiot

Ladies and gentlemen, I have the answer! Incredible as it might seem, I
have stumbled across the single technology which will save us from
runaway climate change! From the goodness of my heart, I offer it to
you for free. No patents, no small print, no hidden clauses. Already
this technology, a radical new kind of carbon capture and storage, is
causing a stir among scientists. It is cheap, it is efficient and it
can be deployed straight away. It is called ... leaving fossil fuels in
the ground.

On a filthy day last week, as governments gathered in Bali to
prevaricate about climate change, a group of us tried to put this
policy into effect. We swarmed into the opencast coal mine being dug at
Ffos-y-fran in South Wales and occupied the excavators, shutting down
the works for the day. We were motivated by a fact which the wise heads
in Bali have somehow missed: if fossil fuels are extracted, they will
be used.

Most of the governments of the rich world now exhort their citizens to
use less carbon. They encourage us to change our lightbulbs, insulate
our lofts, turn our televisions off at the wall. In other words, they
have a demand-side policy for tackling climate change. But as far as I
can determine, not one of them has a supply-side policy. None seeks to
reduce the supply of fossil fuel. So the demand-side policy will fail.
Every barrel of oil and tonne of coal that comes to the surface will be
burned.

Or perhaps I should say that they do have a supply-side policy: to
extract as much as they can. Since 2000, the UK government has given
coal firms #220m to help them open new mines or to keep existing mines
working. According to the energy white paper, the government intends to
"maximise economic recovery ... from remaining coal reserves".

The pit at Ffos-y-fran received planning permission after two ministers
in the Westminster government jumped up and down on Rhodri Morgan, the
first minister of the Welsh assembly. Stephen Timms at the department
of trade and industry listed the benefits of the scheme and demanded
that the application "is resolved with the minimum of further delay".
His successor, Mike O'Brien, warned of dire consequences if the pit was
not granted permission. The coal extracted from Ffos-y-fran alone will
produce 29.5m tonnes of carbon dioxide: equivalent, according to the
latest figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to
the sustainable emissions of 55 million people for one year.

Last year British planning authorities considered 12 new applications
for opencast coal mines. They approved all but two of them. Two weeks
ago, Hazel Blears, the secretary of state in charge of planning,
overruled Northumberland county council to grant permission for an
opencast mine at Shotton, on the grounds that the scheme - which will
produce 9.3m tonnes of CO2 - is "environmentally acceptable".

The British government also has a policy of "maximising the UK's
existing oil and gas reserves". To promote new production, it has
granted companies a 90% discount on the licence fees they pay for
prospecting the continental shelf. It hopes the prospecting companies
will open a new frontier in the seas to the west of the Shetland Isles.
The government also has two schemes for "forcing unworked blocks back
into play". If oil companies don't use their licences to the full, it
revokes them and hands them to someone else. In other words, it is
prepared to be ruthlessly interventionist when promoting climate
change, but not when preventing it: no minister talks of "forcing"
companies to reduce their emissions. Ministers hope the industry will
extract up to 28bn barrels of oil and gas from the continental shelf.

Last week the government announced a new tax break for companies
working in the North Sea. The Treasury minister, Angela Eagle,
explained that its purpose is "to make sure we are not leaving any oil
in the ground that could be recovered". The government's climate change
policy works like this: extract every last drop of fossil fuel then
pray to God that no one uses it.

The same wishful thinking is applied worldwide. The International Energy
Agency's new outlook report warns that "urgent action is needed" to cut
carbon emissions. The action it recommends is investing $22 trillion in
new energy infrastructure, most of which will be spent on extracting,
transporting and burning fossil fuels.

Aha, you say, but what about carbon capture and storage? When
governments use this term, they mean catching and burying the carbon
dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels. It is feasible, but there are
three problems. The first is that fossil fuels are being extracted and
burned today, and scarcely any carbon capture schemes yet exist. The
second is that the technology works only for power stations and large
industrial processes: there is no plausible means of dealing with cars,
planes and heating systems. The third, as Alistair Darling, then in
charge of energy, admitted in the Commons in May, is that the
technologies required for commercial carbon capture "might never become
available". (The government is prepared to admit this when making the
case, as he was, for nuclear power, but not when making it for coal).

Almost every week I receive an email from someone asking what the heck
I am talking about. Don't I realise that peak oil will solve this
problem for us? Fossil fuels will run out, we'll go back to living in
caves and no one will need to worry about climate change again. These
correspondents make the mistake of conflating conventional oil supplies
with all fossil fuels. Yes, at some point the production of petroleum
will peak then go into decline. I don't know when this will happen, and
I urge environmentalists to remember that while we have been proved
right about most things we have been consistently wrong about the dates
for mineral exhaustion. But before oil peaks, demand is likely to
outstrip supply and the price will soar. The result is that the oil
firms will have an even greater incentive to extract the stuff.

Already, encouraged by recent prices, the pollutocrats are pouring
billions into unconventional oil. Last week BP announced a huge
investment in Canadian tar sands. Oil produced from tar sands creates
even more carbon emissions than petroleum extraction. There's enough
tar and kerogen in North America to cook the planet several times over.

If that runs out, they switch to coal, of which there is hundreds of
years' supply. Sasol, the South African company founded during the
apartheid period
- when supplies of oil were blocked - to turn coal into liquid transport
fuel, is conducting feasibility studies for new plants in India, China
and the US. Neither geology nor market forces is going to save us from
climate change.

When you review the plans for fossil fuel extraction, the horrible truth
dawns that every carbon-cutting programme is a con. Without supply-side
policies, runaway climate change is inevitable, however hard we try to
cut demand. The talks in Bali will be meaningless unless they produce a
programme for leaving fossil fuels in the ground.