Peak Oil May Worsen the Climate Crisis
It's hard to know whether we should be more worried that consuming oil is killing the planet or that there's way too little of this killer oil left.
Joe Romm of Climate Progress has an article that is getting a lot of attention in Salon, called "Peak Oil. Consider it Solved" (subscription required). His argument is that if we do what is required to address climate change—greatly increase fuel efficiency, including a switch to plug-in hybrid vehicles, and find alternative, abundant, and affordable low-carbon fuel sources, we will have slipped out of our chokehold of dependency on a finite fuel source.
At Climate Progress, he summarizes his worry-about-climate-first argument: "The bottom line is that if we solve the climate problem, we will solve the peak oil problem. If we don't solve the climate problem, peak oil will be a somewhat painful, but relatively short blip on the history of humanity compared to the extremely painful, multi-century tragedy our children and the next 50 generations after them will face."
But now comes the response from the peak-oil folks. Dave Cohen at Energy Bulletin argues the world is going to be in the grip of fuel shortages before the solutions that Romm talks about come to fruition. "Many climate activists have tunnel vision that prevents them from appreciating the real oil supply problems we have to solve right now," he writes. "Everything is viewed through the lens of climate change. This view is naive—we're about to get plowed under by the oil market fundamentals."
Although I believe we ought to keep our eye on the long-term climate problem, I fear it's quite likely that the short-term panic over fuel prices will lead us in some unhelpful directions on the environment. This USA Today story, although a couple years old, neatly summarizes how high heating oil prices have the potential to create more wood burning pollution. And not too long ago, we took a close look at the unconventional oil business being spurred by high oil prices and its unsavory implications for climate.
Tags: environment | oil
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Reader Comments
Coal Inevitable
I agree that many climate change experts have paid little attention to Peak Oil, but as pointed out, these two issues must be tied together. While we wait for clean, reliably, and scalable energies to be perfected, coal unfortunately will be the only one that can fill the gap from the old era of oil to the new era of CO2 friendly energies. Reasons: The United States and China have a lot of it, it’s mined and distributed in a similar fashion as oil, and it will fit into our current infrastructure of electrical power plants. We must pray that CO2 sequestering is perfected soon! Alas, all of this must happen under a total reinvention of how modern life is pursued. Almost every human activity will be curtailed on some level in order to meet the challenges of global warming and Peak Oil.
Must Stop Coal
The problem with climate change is that we first need some kind of disaster to knock Americans off of the status quo, but then we need to ensure that the direction we head doesn't cook the world for the foreseeable future. As James Schlesinger puts it, we have two modes, complacency and panic. As long as people are complacent, we will continue on the current path of high CO2 emissions. So we need something to switch us to panic mode, and Peak Oil could very well do that.
The second part of the problem is directing the needed change into low-emission technologies. Dr. Hansen of NASA seems to have come around partially to Prof. Warren Ruddiman's position on this; we don't have enough oil to cause the most damaging effects of climate change, but we probably do have enough coal. Ruddiman writes in his book "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum" that while climate change will be a significant problem, resource depletion - like peak oil - will be a bigger problem. What Dr. Hansen seems to be saying now is that the first goal should be to stop using more coal, and preferably reduce our coal consumption, until we have CO2 sequestering in place. His recent letters to Kevin Rudd in Australia are attempting to do just this with Australian coal exports.
So, as long-time environmentalist, I see peak oil as a good thing because it limits the amount of damage that we can do through oil consumption, and it knocks western nations off of their consumption equilibrium. That leaves the coal problem to deal with, but we have something of a head start on that issue. We have to keep the brakes on the coal train long enough for solar, wind, tidal, etc. power to solve the problems.
peak oil vs. global warming
This is a topic I've discussed with people in person at presentations I've given, as well as on my web site (http://www.grinzo.com/energy/), and I think it really is a case of "where you stand depends on where you sit." The long-time environmentalists are wedded to this notion that peak oil is really a good thing, because it will limit the amount of CO2 we can emit.
I agree with Dave Cohen, and I'm convinced this "peak oil is our friend" view is naive and dangerous. Global warming is indeed an extremely serious problem with the potential to trigger horrific consequences for nature and humanity--half a century or more from now. But there is a growing consensus that peak oil is very close, perhaps only four years, and it will make virtually everything we do exceedingly difficult. Food production, nearly 100% of our transportation, the manufacture of anything made from plastic, etc., are all tied to the price and availability of oil. Similarly, so will our ability to rebuild our economy to address global warming.
Even more troublesome, as the peak oil vise clamps down on our economy we'll be very tempted to do some very counterproductive things, like turn massive amounts of coal into liquid fuels without sequestering the CO2 emissions from the conversion process.
The future will be a lot of things, but "dull" isn't on the list.
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