The Great Carbon Bubble: Why The Fossil Fuel Industry Fights (Science) So Hard

As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free 40 years later, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record.”

In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, 2011 shows the greatest weather extremes in history -- 56% of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” We suffered 14 weather disasters in 2011, each causing $1 billion or more in damage. (The old record was nine.) In the face of such data you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to deny there’s a problem.

Most media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening or denies it outright. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40% over the last two years. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The most telling evidence of the bias of the WSJ is the fact that 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay, offered it to the WSJ, and were turned down.

It’s no secret where this denial comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. Of the 16 authors of the WSJ article, 5 had had ties to Exxon. The question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced. Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.

Part of it’s simple enough: ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money. Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology. As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.

Many scientists have pointed to a 2 degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with. If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons -- 5x more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.

Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela). This sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be. It’s why you’ll do anything -- including fund an endless campaigns of lies -- to avoid coming to terms with its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead. The energy-industrial elite are denying that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain -- pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if you think banks are too big to fail, consider the climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the bailout that would face us when that bubble finally bursts.

Unfortunately, it won’t burst by itself -- not in time, anyway. The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded lies and their record campaign contributions, are leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt -- and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil reported 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in '08 at $45 billion.

Telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing. That’s why the fight is so pitched. That’s why those of us battling for the future need to raise our game. And it’s why that view from the satellites, however beautiful from a distance, is likely to become ever harder to recognize as our home planet.

Bill McKibben, founder of grassroots climate campaign 350.org which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since '09, is the author of a dozen books about the environment. Time Magazine called him 'the planet's best green journalist' and Boston Globe said in 2010 that he is 'probably the country's most important environmentalist.' 

"Blue Marble" 1972 image/2012 image courtesy of NASA