should we ban the use of fossil fuels essay

Why are fossil fuels so hard to quit?

We understand today that humanity’s use of fossil fuels is severely damaging our environment. Fossil fuels cause local pollution where they are produced and used, and their ongoing use is causing lasting harm to the climate of our entire planet. Nonetheless, meaningfully changing our ways has been very difficult.

But suddenly, the COVID-19 pandemic brought trade, travel, and consumer spending to a near-standstill. With billions of people recently under stay-at-home orders and economic activity plunging worldwide, the demand for and price of oil have fallen further and faster than ever before. Needless to say, oil markets have been in turmoil and producers around the world are suffering.

Some pundits are now asking if this crisis could be the push the world needs to move away from oil. One asked: “ Could the coronavirus crisis be the beginning of the end for the oil industry? ” Another: “ Will the coronavirus kill the oil industry and help save the climate? ” Meanwhile, 2020 annual greenhouse gas emissions are  forecast to decline  between 4 – 7% as a result of the virus’ effects, and some of the world’s smoggiest cities are currently enjoying clear skies.

The idea that the pandemic could ultimately help save the planet misses crucial points. First and foremost, damaging the world’s economy is not the way to deal with climate change. And in terms of oil, what will take its place? We haven’t found a good substitute for oil, in terms of its availability and fitness for purpose. Although the supply is finite, oil is plentiful and the technology to extract it continues to improve, making it ever-more economic to produce and use. The same is also largely true for natural gas.

Climate change is real and we see its effects clearly now: In 2019 worldwide, 15 extreme weather events , exacerbated by climate change, caused more than $1 billion in damage each. Four of these events each caused more than $10 billion in damage. The large-scale use of fossil fuels tops the list of factors contributing to climate change. But the concentrated energy that they provide has proven hard to replace. Why?

A reporter raised that very question to me after a press Q&A that I did at a conference a few years ago. “We know that oil contributes to climate change and other environmental problems — why do we still use it? Why don’t we just quit already?,” he asked me.

Until that moment, I hadn’t thought enough about how my experience and background give me a clearer view than many on the promise and challenge of moving to a cleaner energy system. I have gained a wide-angle view of the energy industry as I’ve moved through my career, working in government and in consulting — for both oil and gas and clean energy clients — and then moving into the think tank world.

fossil fuel Generated from the decomposition of ancient plant and animal matter over millions of years. Coal, oil, and natural gas are fossil fuels.

To deal with the challenge of climate change, we must start by understanding the fossil fuel system — namely how energy is produced and used. Although fossil fuel companies are politically powerful, in the United States and around the world, their lobbying prowess is not the key reason that their fuels dominate the global energy system. Likewise, the transition to an all-renewable energy system is not a simple task. But the politics of blame are popular, as we’ve seen during the 2020 election campaign and in light of recent lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. There is plenty of blame to go around, from fossil fuel companies that for years denied the problem to policymakers reluctant to enact the policies needed to force real change. It has been easier for everyone to stick with the status quo.

The world needs technology and strong policy to move in a new direction. Throughout history, humanity’s energy use has moved toward more concentrated, convenient, and flexible forms of energy. Understanding the advantages of today’s energy sources and the history of past transitions can help us understand how to move toward low-carbon energy sources. With greater understanding of the climate challenge, we are making huge strides in developing the technology we need to move toward a low-carbon future. Still, understanding how we got here and why the modern world was built on fossil fuels is crucial to understanding where we go from here.

Our energy comes from the sun, one way or another

In the pre-industrial age, solar energy met all of humanity’s energy needs. Plants convert solar energy into biomass through the process of photosynthesis. People burned this biomass for heat and light. Plants provided food for people and animals, which, in turn, used their muscle power to do work. Even as humans learned to smelt metals and make glass, they fueled the process with charcoal made from wood. Apart from photosynthesis, humans made some use of wind and water power, also ultimately fueled by the sun. Temperature differences in the atmosphere brought about by sunlight drive the wind, and the cycle of rainfall and flowing water also gets its energy from sunlight. But the sun is at the center of this system, and people could only use the energy that the sun provided in real time, mostly from plants.

biomass Plant material, including leaves, stalks, and woody mass. Biomass can be burned directly or processed to create biofuels , like ethanol.

This balance between human energy use and sunlight sounds like utopia, but as the human population grew and became more urban, the bio-based energy system brought problems. In England, wood became scarce in the 1500s and 1600s, since it was not only used for fuel, but also for building material. London, for instance, grew from 60,000 people in 1534 to 530,000 in 1696, and the price of firewood and lumber rose faster than any other commodity. The once lush forests of England were denuded.

In 1900, roughly 50,000 horses pulled cabs and buses around the streets of London, not including carts to transport goods. As you can imagine, this created an enormous amount of waste. As Lee Jackson writes in his book “ Dirty Old London ,” by the 1890s London’s immense horse population generated roughly 1,000 tons of dung per day. All this manure also attracted flies, which spread disease. The transportation system was literally making people sick. The pre-fossil era was not the utopia we envision.

Fossil fuels opened new doors for humanity. They formed from the transformation of ancient plants through pressure, temperature, and tens to hundreds of millions of years, essentially storing the sun’s energy over time. The resulting fuels freed humanity from its reliance on photosynthesis and current biomass production as its primary energy source. Instead, fossil fuels allowed the use of more energy than today’s photosynthesis could provide, since they represent a stored form of solar energy.

First coal, then oil and natural gas allowed rapid growth in industrial processes, agriculture, and transportation. The world today is unrecognizable from that of the early 19th century, before fossil fuels came into wide use. Human health and welfare have improved markedly, and the global population has increased from 1 billion in 1800 to almost 8 billion today. The fossil fuel energy system is the lifeblood of the modern economy. Fossil fuels powered the industrial revolution, pulled millions out of poverty, and shaped the modern world.

How energy density and convenience drove fossil fuel growth

The first big energy transition was from wood and charcoal to coal, beginning in the iron industry in the early 1700s. By 1900, coal was the primary industrial fuel, taking over from biomass to make up half the world’s fuel use. Coal has three times the energy density by weight of dry wood and is widely distributed throughout the world. Coal became the preferred fuel for ships and locomotives, allowing them to dedicate less space to fuel storage.

Oil was the next major energy source to emerge. Americans date the beginning of the oil era to the first commercial U.S. oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859, but oil was used and sold in modern-day Azerbaijan and other areas centuries earlier. Oil entered the market as a replacement for whale oil for lighting, with gasoline produced as a by-product of kerosene production. However, oil found its true calling in the transportation sector. The oil era really took off with the introduction of the Ford Model-T in 1908 and the boom in personal transportation after World War II. Oil overtook coal to become the world’s largest energy source in 1964.

Oil resources are not as extensively distributed worldwide as coal, but oil has crucial advantages. Fuels produced from oil are nearly ideal for transportation. They are energy-dense, averaging twice the energy content of coal, by weight. But more importantly, they are liquid rather than solid, allowing the development of the internal combustion engine that drives transportation today.

Different fuels carry different amounts of energy per unit of weight.  Fossil fuels are more energy dense than other sources. 

Oil changed the course of history. For example, the British and American navies switched from coal to oil prior to World War I, allowing their ships to go further than coal-fired German ships before refueling. Oil also allowed greater speed at sea and could be moved to boilers by pipe instead of manpower, both clear advantages. During World War II, the United States produced nearly two-thirds of the world’s oil, and its steady supply was crucial to the Allied victory. The German army’s blitzkrieg strategy became impossible when fuel supplies could not keep up, and a lack of fuel took a toll on the Japanese navy.

Natural gas, a fossil fuel that occurs in gaseous form, can be found in underground deposits on its own, but is often present underground with oil. Gas produced with oil was often wasted in the early days of the oil industry, and an old industry saying was that looking for oil and finding gas instead was a quick way to get fired. In more recent times, natural gas has become valued for its clean, even combustion and its usefulness as a feedstock for industrial processes. Nonetheless, because it is in a gaseous form, it requires specific infrastructure to reach customers, and natural gas is still wasted in areas where that infrastructure doesn’t exist.

A final key development in world energy use was the emergence of electricity in the 20th century. Electricity is not an energy source like coal or oil, but a method for delivering and using energy. Electricity is very efficient, flexible, clean, and quiet at the point of use. Like oil, electricity’s first use was in lighting, but the development of the induction motor allowed electricity to be efficiently converted to mechanical energy, powering everything from industrial processes to household appliances and vehicles.

Over the 20th century, the energy system transformed from one in which fossil energy was used directly into one in which an important portion of fossil fuels are used to generate electricity. The proportion used in electricity generation varies by fuel. Because oil — an energy-dense liquid — is so fit-for-purpose in transport, little of it goes to electricity; in contrast, roughly 63% of coal produced worldwide is used to generate electricity. Methods of generating electricity that don’t rely on fossil fuels, like nuclear and hydroelectric generation, are also important parts of the system in many areas. However, fossil fuels are still the backbone of the electricity system, generating 64% of today’s global supply.

Fossil fuels still dominate global electricity generation.

In sum, the story of energy transitions through history has not just been about moving away from current solar flows and toward fossil fuels. It has also been a constant move toward fuels that are more energy-dense and convenient to use than the fuels they replaced. Greater energy density means that a smaller weight or volume of fuel is needed to do the job. Liquid fuels made from oil combine energy density with the ability to flow or be moved by pumps, an advantage that opened up new technologies, especially in transportation. And electricity is a very flexible way of consuming energy, useful for many applications.

Back to the future – the return of the solar era

Fossil fuels allowed us to move away from relying on today’s solar flows, instead using concentrated solar energy stored over millions of years. Before we could make efficient use of solar flows, this seemed like a great idea.

carbon dioxide Carbon dioxide is gas released when carbon-containing fuels (biomass or fossil fuels) are burned. Carbon dioxide is the most important gas contributing to climate change.

However, the advantages of fossil fuels come with a devastating downside. We now understand that the release of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) from burning fossil fuels is warming our planet faster than anything we have seen in the geological record. One of the greatest challenges facing humanity today is slowing this warming before it changes our world beyond recognition.

Now that there are almost eight billion of us, we clearly see the impact of rising CO 2 concentrations. Going back to the old days of relying mostly on biomass for our energy needs is clearly not a solution. Nonetheless, we need to find a way to get back to reliance on real-time solar flows (and perhaps nuclear energy) to meet our needs. There are so many more of us now, interacting via a vastly larger and more integrated global economy, and using much more energy. But we also have technologies today that are much more efficient than photosynthesis at transforming solar flows to useful energy.

Since 1900, global population and economic activity have skyrocketed, along with fossil fuel consumption.

Unfortunately, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the most consequential greenhouse gas, has steadily climbed at the same time, along with global average temperature. .

The earth gets plenty of energy from the sun for all of us, even for our modern energy-intensive lives. The amount of solar energy that reaches habitable land is more than 1,000 times the amount of fossil fuel energy extracted globally per year. The problem is that this energy is diffuse. The sun that warms your face is definitely providing energy, but you need to concentrate that energy to heat your home or move a vehicle.

renewable energy Renewable energy is from a source that is naturally replenished. (Ex: capturing wind using turbines or sunlight using solar cells does not change the amount of wind or sunlight that is available for future use.)

This is where modern technology comes in. Wind turbines and solar photovoltaic (PV) cells convert solar energy flows into electricity, in a process much more efficient than burning biomass, the pre-industrial way of capturing solar energy. Costs for wind and solar PV have been dropping rapidly and they are now mainstream, cost-effective technologies. Some existing forms of generating electricity, mainly nuclear and hydroelectricity, also don’t result in CO 2 emissions. Combining new renewables with these existing sources represents an opportunity to decarbonize — or eliminate CO 2 emissions from — the electricity sector. Electricity generation is an important source of emissions, responsible for 27% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2018.

However, unlike fossil fuels, wind and solar can only generate electricity when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. This is an engineering challenge, since the power grid operates in real time: Power is generated and consumed simultaneously, with generation varying to keep the system in balance.

greenhouse gas A gas that traps heat in the earth’s atmosphere, including carbon dioxide, methane, ozone, and nitrous oxides.

Engineering challenges beget engineering solutions, and a number of solutions can help. Power grids that cover a larger area are easier to balance, given that if it isn’t windy or sunny in one location, it may be somewhere else. Demand-response strategies can encourage customers with flexibility in their processes to use more power when renewable power is available and to cut back when it isn’t. Power storage technologies can save excess electricity to be used later. Hydroelectric dams can serve this function now, and declining costs will make batteries more economic for power storage on the grid. Storage solutions work well over a timeframe of hours — storing solar power to use in the evening, for example. But longer-term storage poses a greater challenge. Perhaps excess electricity can be used to create hydrogen or other fuels that can be stored and used at a later time. Finally, fossil fuel generation often fills in the gaps in renewable generation today, especially natural gas generation, which can be efficiently ramped up and down to meet demand.

Transforming solar energy flow into electricity is a clear place to start in creating a decarbonized energy system. A simple formula is to decarbonize the electricity sector and electrify all the energy uses we can. Many important processes can be electrified — especially stationary uses, like in buildings and many industrial processes. To deal with climate change, this formula is the low-hanging fruit.

The two parts of this formula must proceed together. A shiny new electric vehicle in the driveway signals your concern about the environment to your neighbors, but achieving its full potential benefit also requires a greener power system. For today’s power system in the United States, and nearly everywhere in the world, electric vehicles provide emissions benefits , but the extent of those benefits varies greatly by location. Achieving the full potential benefit of electric vehicles would require a grid that supplies all renewable or zero-carbon power, something that no area in the United States consistently achieves today.

Wind and solar power aren’t everything – the remaining challenges

“Electrify everything” is a great plan, so far as it goes, but not everything can be easily electrified. Certain qualities of fossil fuels are difficult to replicate, such as their energy density and their ability to provide very high heat. To decarbonize processes that rely on these qualities, you need low-carbon fuels that mimic the qualities of fossil fuels.

The energy density of fossil fuels is particularly important in the transportation sector. A vehicle needs to carry its fuel around as it travels, so the weight and volume of that fuel are key. Electric vehicles are a much-touted solution for replacing oil, but they are not perfect for all uses. Pound for pound, gasoline or diesel fuel contain about 40 times as much energy as a state-of-the-art battery. On the other hand, electric motors are much more efficient than internal combustion engines and electric vehicles are simpler mechanically, with many fewer moving parts. These advantages make up for some of the battery’s weight penalty, but an electric vehicle will still be heavier than a similar vehicle running on fossil fuel. For vehicles that carry light loads and can refuel often, like passenger cars, this penalty isn’t a big deal. But for aviation, maritime shipping, or long-haul trucking, where the vehicle must carry heavy loads for long distances without refueling, the difference in energy density between fossil fuels and batteries is a huge challenge, and electric vehicles just don’t meet the need.

WEIGHT OF FUEL

Gasoline carries much more energy per unit of weight than a battery. a gas-powered car with a 12.4-gallon tank carries 77.5 pounds of gasoline., a 77.5-pound battery, in contrast, would only carry an electric car 21 miles., an electric car with a range of 360 miles would need a 1,334 pound battery., weight of vehicle, despite the weight of the battery, other components of electric vehicles are lighter and simpler than their counterparts in a gasoline car. thus, the overall weight penalty for electric vehicles isn’t as severe as the weight penalty for the battery alone. .

Industrial processes that need very high heat — such as the production of steel, cement, and glass — pose another challenge. Steel blast furnaces operate at about 1,100° C, and cement kilns operate at about 1,400° C. These very high temperatures are hard to achieve without burning a fuel and are thus difficult to power with electricity.

Renewable electricity can’t solve the emissions problem for processes that can’t run on electricity. For these processes, the world needs zero-carbon fuels that mimic the properties of fossil fuels — energy-dense fuels that can be burned. A number of options exist, but they each have pros and cons and generally need more work to be commercially and environmentally viable.

Biofuels are a possibility, since the carbon released when the biofuel is burned is the same carbon taken up as the plant grew. However, the processing required to turn plants into usable fuels consumes energy, and this results in CO 2 emissions, meaning that biofuels are not zero-carbon unless the entire process runs on renewable or zero-carbon energy. For example, the corn ethanol blended into gasoline in the United States averages only 39% lower CO 2 emissions than the gasoline it replaces, given the emissions that occur from transporting the corn to processing facilities and converting it to fuel. Biofuels also compete for arable land with food production and conservation uses, such as for recreation or fish and wildlife, which gets more challenging as biofuel production increases. Fuels made from crop waste or municipal waste can be better, in terms of land use and carbon emissions, but supply of these wastes is limited and the technology needs improvement to be cost-effective.

Another pathway is to convert renewable electricity into a combustible fuel. Hydrogen can be produced by using renewable electricity to split water atoms into their hydrogen and oxygen components. The hydrogen could then be burned as a zero-carbon fuel, similar to the way natural gas is used today. Electricity, CO 2 , and hydrogen could be also combined to produce liquid fuels to replace diesel and jet fuel. However, when we split water atoms or create liquid fuels from scratch, the laws of thermodynamics are not in our favor. These processes use electricity to, in effect, run the combustion process backwards, and thus use large amounts of energy. Since these processes would use vast amounts of renewable power, they only make sense in applications where electricity cannot be used directly.

Carbon capture and storage or use is a final possibility for stationary applications like heavy industry. Fossil fuels would still be burned and create CO 2 , but it would be captured instead of released into the atmosphere. Processes under development envision removing CO 2 from ambient air. In either case, the CO 2 would then be injected deep underground or used in an industrial process.

The most common use for captured CO 2 today is in enhanced oil recovery, where pressurized CO 2 is injected into an oil reservoir to squeeze out more oil. The idea of capturing CO 2 and using it to produce more fossil fuel seems backwards — does that really reduce emissions overall? But studies show that the captured CO 2 stays in the oil reservoir permanently when it is injected in this way. And if enough CO 2 is injected during oil production, it might make up for the combustion emissions of the produced oil, or even result in overall negative emissions. This won’t be a panacea for all oil use, but could make oil use feasible in those applications, like aviation, where it is very hard to replace.

Carbon capture is today the cheapest way to deal with emissions from heavy industries that require combustion. It has the advantage that it can also capture CO 2 emissions that come from the process itself, rather than from fuel combustion, as occurs in cement production when limestone is heated to produce a component of cement with CO 2 as a by-product.

When considering how carbon capture might contribute to climate change mitigation, we have to remember that fossil fuels are not the ultimate cause of the problem — CO 2 emissions are. If maintaining some fossil fuel use with carbon capture is the easiest way to deal with certain sources of emissions, that’s still solving the fundamental problem.

Our biggest challenges are political

Science clearly tells us that we need to remake our energy system and eliminate CO 2 emissions. However, in addition to the engineering challenges, the nature of climate change makes it politically challenging to deal with as well. Minimizing the impact of climate change requires re-making a multi-trillion-dollar industry that lies at the center of the economy and people’s lives. Reducing humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels requires investments here and now that provide uncertain, long-term benefits. These decisions are particularly difficult for politicians, who tend to focus on policies with immediate, local benefits that voters can see. Last year The New York Times asked , for instance, “whether any climate policy is both big enough to matter and popular enough to happen.” Durable climate policy requires securing buy-in from a range of actors, including politicians from both parties, business leaders, and civil society. Their perspectives inevitably differ, and the lack of consensus — combined with very real efforts to exert pressure on the policymaking process — is a key reason that climate action is so politically difficult. (To try your hand at navigating the policy dilemmas, play our — admittedly simplified! — game below: “A president’s climate quandary.”)

In the United States and other parts of the wealthy world, current efforts focus on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from our energy-intensive lives. But the second part of today’s energy challenge is providing modern energy to the billion people in the developing world that don’t currently have it. You don’t hear as much about the second goal in the public discourse about climate change, but it’s crucial that developing countries follow a cleaner path than the developed world did. The need to provide both cleaner energy and more energy for developing countries magnifies the challenge, but a solution that leaves out the developing world is no solution at all.

Plentiful and inexpensive fossil fuels make transitioning away from them more difficult. Around 15 years ago, pundits were focused on “peak oil” — the idea that the world was running out of oil, or at least inexpensive oil, and that a reckoning was coming. Events of the past decade have proven that theory wrong. Instead of declining oil production and rising prices, we’ve seen the opposite, nowhere more than here in the United States. Technology has brought about a boom in oil production; geologists long knew the resources were there, but did not know how to make money producing them. There’s no reason to expect this trend to slow down anytime soon. In other words, running out of oil will not save us. The world will need to transition away from oil and other fossil fuels while they are abundant and inexpensive — not an easy task.

To achieve this technically and politically challenging transition, we need to avoid one-dimensional solutions. My own thoughts about how we need to deal with climate change have certainly evolved over time, as we understand the climate system better and as time passes with emissions still increasing. As an example, I used to be skeptical of the idea of carbon capture, either from industrial processes or directly from the air. The engineer in me just couldn’t see using such an energy-hungry process to capture emissions. I’ve changed my mind, with a greater understanding of processes that will be hard to decarbonize any other way.

The accumulation of CO 2 in the atmosphere is like putting air into a balloon. It’s a cumulative system: We’re continually adding to the total concentration of a substance that may last in the atmosphere for up to 200 years. We don’t know when the effects of warming will become overwhelming, but we do know that the system will become stretched and compromised — experiencing more negative effects — as the balloon fills. The cumulative nature of the climate system means that we need more stringent measures the longer that we wait. In other words: Sooner action is better. We need to take action now where it’s easiest, in the electricity and light vehicle sectors, and in making new buildings extremely energy efficient. Other sectors need more technology, like heavy transport and industry, or will take a long time, like improving our existing stock of buildings.

Those pushing to end fossil fuel production now are missing the point that fossil fuels will still be needed for some time in certain sectors. Eliminating unpopular energy sources or technologies, like nuclear or carbon capture, from the conversation is short-sighted. Renewable electricity generation alone won’t get us there — this is an all-technologies-on-deck problem. I fear that magical thinking and purity tests are taking hold in parts of the left end of the American political spectrum, while parts of the political right are guilty of outright denialism around the climate problem. In the face of such stark polarization, the focus on practical solutions can get lost — and practicality and ingenuity are the renewable resources humanity needs to meet the climate challenge.

Correction: An earlier version of a graphic in this piece mistakenly indicated that renewables comprise 0.6% of global electricity generation. It has been corrected to 9.3%.

About the Author

Samantha gross, related content.

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Acknowledgments.

Editorial: Jeff Ball, Bruce Jones, Anna Newbyu

Research: Historical summaries of energy transitions owe a debt of gratitude to Vaclav Smil, a prolific author on the topic and the grandfather of big-picture thinking on energy transitions.

Graphics and design: Ian McAllister, Rachel Slattery

Web development: Eric Abalahin, Abigail Kaunda, Rachel Slattery

Feature image: Egorov Artem/Shutterstock

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Community Voice

Should Fossil Fuels Be Taxed Or Banned?

By Henry Curtis

April 27, 2021 · 3 min read

About the Author

Henry Curtis

Fossil fuel giants ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, BP, Goldman Sachs, Ford and GM are for it.

Progressive nonprofits are on the opposing side: Greenpeace, Food & Water Watch, Sunrise Movement, Friends of the Earth, Indigenous Environmental Network, Climate Justice Alliance and Life of the Land.

In the middle are mainstream environmental groups who must choose sides: should fossil fuels be taxed or banned?

The fossil fuel industry is pushing the tax approach. Let us use up our trillions of dollars of untapped petroleum, and in exchange, we will pass on higher rates to consumers.

Justice advocates note that economically challenged minority communities always seem to get all the undesirable infrastructure.

Instead of allowing these intrusive systems to remain in exchange for a monetary payment, they should be banned. We need to stop our addiction to oil.

The government likes taxes. They tax everything: taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, property and personal income raise money for the government to enable the funding of programs. Taxes on fossil fuel would provide another revenue stream for politicians to play with.

Extreme Weather

The COVID-19 pandemic is minor compared to the unfolding climate nightmare. A small increase in global temperature due to greenhouse gas emissions has triggered extreme weather events including intense hurricanes, rain bombs and flooding, and has led to massive coastal erosion.

Human misery is on the rise. Health impacts will overload the medical industry. Billions of climate migrants will cross borders seeking new homes. This can only be slowed down by banning the underlying culprit.

COVID-19 is minor compared to the climate nightmare.

Carbon taxes are all the rage today. They are the miracle golden key that will save us. But will they, or will a carbon tax just provide green money for politicians and greenwashing for corporations?

To date, global carbon emissions have generally been extremely low. A few countries have higher carbon taxes and that has led to unintended harm. The carbon tax has decreased fossil fuel use and replaced it with tree-based energy which emits high levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Due to the power and influence of the fossil fuel industry, tree-burning is considered carbon neutral. Burn something, ignore all emissions associated with the forest razing industry, and clear-cutting forests has become the new coal.

It’s dirtier, more polluting, yet politically defined to be carbon neutral, so the fossil fuel industry wants to burn down forests to save the planet.

Obviously one can’t have both. Greenhouse gas emissions, whether from fossil fuel or tree-burning must be halted. Fossil fuels must be eliminated as fast as possible.

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Denby Fawcett: Former Hawaii Congresswoman Launches First Book at Age 91

By Denby Fawcett · April 27, 2021 · 10 min read

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Henry Curtis has been executive director of Life of the Land since 1995, and has a BA in Economics from Queens College, City University of New York.

Latest Comments (0)

Excellent article, laying out the stakeholder issues. First and foremost, continuing to burn and pollute with fossil fuels is no longer an option, at any market price, as the global heating consequences have placed Hawaii and the world on is a climate trajectory leading to a tipping point of no return. We have, and are, heating up the planet into a new norm of CO2 levels in excess of 400 ppm - a point similar what climatologists and geologists describe as entering Earth's mid-Pliocene period, when, about three million years ago, global ice sheets melted and sea levels were estimated to be 40 - 65 feet higher than today. As the dominant species on Earth, we have a responsibility to ourselves and to all life on Earth not to destroy the livability of this one-of-a-kind planet.We are long past the time of ignorance and denial, or to be discussing higher taxes vs. sunsetting our dependency and use of fossil fuels which are destructive and energy obsolete.  It will be disruptive, but we have the means to transition quickly to a global clean energy economy, all that is needed is the will to do it, and to do it now!       

BeyondKona · 2 years ago

The soon-to-be-released and distributed free energy machines will change the course of human history. Until then, there is not too much that we can do.

Scotty_Poppins · 2 years ago

Don't be a part of the whining chorus - be part of the solution. Fossil fuels will only go away if we succeed in creating alternative ways to create, transport and store energy that are sustainable, affordable, highly scalable, and universally applicable. The technologies that we have today are a good start but they do not come anywhere close to fitting the bill. Start with your own family: encourage your children and grandchildren to study math, science and engineering; also teach them to identify, avoid and ignore the fluff and nonsense schools and colleges are filled with these days. Persistently lobby Congress to fund energy R&D at drastically higher levels to enable true innovation - this hasn't been done since the 1970s! Learn to identify and vocally oppose the myriads of scams that revolve around the so-called "Green Economy Agenda". Repeat after me: Fossil fuels cannot be banned or taxed out of existence. They can only be replaced with something better. No viable replacement technologies currently exist. Taxpayer money that should be directed toward energy R&D largely goes toward boondoggles and pork-barrel spending. We must fight to change this.

Chiquita · 2 years ago

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Data: Banning U.S. fossil fuel consumption wouldn’t stop climate change

July 7, 2023

More than 80% of our energy and nearly every product we rely on daily come from fossil fuels. But they’re killing the planet, right?

Data models used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), traditionally a champion for fighting climate change, project that even banning ALL U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would barely put a dent in the climate.

The IPCC claims that the world needs to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The problem is that developing countries need to increase their energy use (and therefore their emissions) over that time, and the effect of developed countries limiting their future emissions is minimal. For example, here is what the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas-Induced Climate Change ( MAGICC ) projects would happen if the United States banned fossil fuels by 2050, as many politicians are calling for.

What if the U.S. phased out fossil fuels by 2050?

Emission reductions

100% renewable electricity generation

Degrees Difference in 2100

Ban ALL fossil fuels (including cars)

Just below a tenth of a degree — so maybe 2050 isn’t soon enough. What about 2040?

What if the U.S. phased out fossil fuels by 2040?

The European Union also has plans to go “zero carbon” by 2050. This would have even less effect on the temperature, given that the EU collectively emits about a third less carbon dioxide than the U.S.

Those who want to ban our most affordable, reliable, abundant source of fuel might be surprised to know that banning fossil fuels and going 100% renewable — if it were even feasible — would have no meaningful impact on the temperature.

The best science indicates that our climate is is likely to remain moderate and manageable. The question remains whether imperceptibly slight warming is worth strangling our economy and quality of life.

Brent Bennett is Life:Powered's policy director. He holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from The University of Texas. His scientific background includes battery technology and energy storage systems.

Banning ALL #fossilfuels by 2050 would only cut #climatechange by 0.082°C. A tenth of a degree isn't worth limiting our #energy, economy, and quality of life.

Despite the apocalyptic headlines circulated in the media and by celebrities, the best science indicates that our #climate is likely to remain moderate and manageable., receive video updates, and the latest news straight to your inbox.

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It's unavoidable: we must ban fossil fuels to save our planet. Here's how we do it

Twice before, humanity has mitigated severe global environmental threats. In both cases we did this not with ‘cap and trade’ systems, taxes, or offsets, but with bans

T ime is running out to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and avoid catastrophic climate change. The 2018 special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “suggests a remaining budget of about 420 Gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2 for a two-thirds chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C.” The clock on this so-called remaining carbon budget started ticking at the beginning of 2018. Despite this stark warning, the world keeps emitting over 40 Gt of CO2 per year. In other words, the policy instruments that are currently being used across the globe to reduce CO2 emissions aren’t working. It is therefore time to ban fossil fuels.

Since we have already drawn down over 120 Gt of CO2 from this carbon budget, we have now less than 300 Gt left. Combining the proved fossil fuel reserves reported in British Petroleum’s Statistical Review of World Energy with CO2 emission factors from the IPCC yields 3,600 Gt of CO2 emissions. This means that we can only afford to burn one twelfth of the fossil fuels we have already found. And this does not account for any greenhouse gas emissions from the ongoing melting of permafrost. The Arctic region alone is estimated to have 1,500 Gt of carbon stored in its soils, some of which is already being converted to CO2 by microbes and released into the atmosphere.

Twice before we managed to mitigate a severe global environmental threat. In both cases we did this with the help of bans. Not with cap and trade systems, not with taxes, not with offsets, not with capture and sequestration, but with bans.

The first example is leaded gasoline. In 1923, General Motors and Standard Oil of New Jersey formed the Ethyl Corporation to manufacture and market a highly toxic substance called tetraethyl-lead (TEL) as antiknock. Medical and public health experts almost immediately warned of the risks of chronic lead exposure, yet the Ethyl Corporation insisted that irrefutable proof was required before any action be taken. By the 1960s, TEL was in virtually all US gasoline and was quickly expanding across the globe. It made some people very rich, many people sick, and caused catastrophic levels of lead pollution. It took over 60 years until leaded gasoline finally started to be phased out and banned all over the world. After the ban, lead levels in humans and the environment immediately started to plummet.

The second example is chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. In 1930, General Motors and DuPont formed the Kinetic Chemical Company to produce and market CFCs as refrigerants, aerosol propellants, and solvents under the brand name Freon. The large growth in refrigeration, air conditioning, and spray cans made Freon products a huge commercial success. However, in 1974, scientists showed that CFCs ended up in the stratosphere and thinned out its ozone layer, which protects humans, animals, and plants from excessive UV light exposure. While DuPont suggested that the scientific evidence was not enough to warrant dramatic CFC emission reductions, the public became increasingly worried about the growing stratospheric ozone depletion. The famous Montreal Protocol from 1987 laid out a global plan for phasing out and banning CFCs. The ozone layer is now slowly recovering.

Man-made climate change is a bigger threat than even global lead pollution and stratospheric ozone depletion. The IPCC urges us to bring global human-caused CO2 emissions to net zero as quickly as we can. A phase-out and ban of fossil fuels is the best way to get us there. We are running out of time for long deliberations about the right level of carbon tax or the best way to improve the effectiveness of cap and trade systems. It is time to ban fossil fuels.

One necessary condition for a ban is the existence of viable substitutes. In the case of lead in gasoline it turned out to be ethanol. Ironically and tragically, it was already well–known in the 1920s that ethanol was an effective antiknock. DuPont started to look for CFCs replacements fairly soon after their ozone depletion potential was discovered and had them in place by the time the Montreal protocol was signed. While in practice bans may allow for some exceptions, the stated goal of complete phase-out is important because it instigates the development of any missing substitutes.

The good news is that the substitutes for fossil fuels not only exist, but are also cost-competitive. Utility-scale solar and wind power is now officially the cheapest source of electricity, even without subsidies. The cost of battery storage has fallen by 90% over ten years and continues to decline. The lifetime cost of battery electric vehicles is already lower than that of internal combustion vehicles. Compared to gas furnaces, heat pumps frequently reduce the cost of heating. In other words, we already have cost-effective technologies to implement a fossil fuel phase-out and ban.

Partial fossil fuel bans are already happening and highly effective. Thirty US states have so-called renewable portfolio standards (RPS), which are essentially gradual phase-outs of fossil fuels in electricity generation. California’s Senate Bill 100 effectively bans fossil fuels from the California grid by 2045. In September 2020, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed an Executive Order that phases out gasoline-powered cars by 2035. Only four months later, Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, announced that the company would stop making internal combustion vehicles by the same year. The City of Santa Barbara in California is considering a building code amendment that would require new buildings to be all-electric, thus phasing out natural gas use in buildings.

These are important steps towards avoiding the worst effects of climate change, but the next one must be to ban fossil fuels overall. In fact, we can’t afford not to.

Roland Geyer is a professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California at Santa Barbara. His book The Business of Less: The Role of Companies and Households on a Planet in Peril will be published this fall

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Opinion: The consequences of banning fossil fuels

We hear that climate change is the cause of everything bad – wildfires in Australia, hurricanes in the UK, cliff erosion in the Great Lakes, locust plagues, an increase in rheumatoid arthritis. Everything.

And we hear there is only one way to stop it: Ban fossil fuels. Yesterday.

If not yesterday, for sure within 10 years. That’s the cutoff. After 2030, we are told, if the temperature trajectory isn’t reversed, the planet is doomed.  

For the moment, let’s accept that climate change is real. Let’s also accept that fossil fuels are a big contributor. The question then becomes what happens if we summarily ban fossil fuels. Cut them off completely by 2030.

First of all, that won’t happen. Oil and gas production are increasing around the world, with no signs of slowing. U.S. shale volume is projected to rise significantly, a 15% jump in 2020, and Russia and Saudi Arabia are ramping up production. New oil fields are being discovered and new pipeline are being approved. The world’s appetite for cheap natural gas and gasoline is not going away.

Second, even if we banned hydrocarbons in the U.S., there would be little global impact. While the U.S. has cut carbon emissions by 14% since 2007, the rest of the world is merrily polluting away. China, India, Japan and others are adding coal-fired power plants at a frantic pace. Even green Germany is hedging its bets with coal power.     

Third, bailing on fossil fuels would blow energy prices through the roof – that is, if we could install renewables fast enough to take up the slack. That would require covering over 20% of the earth’s land surface and much of its shoreline with inefficient solar farms and wind turbines. Even then, until massive batteries became sustainable, some gas- or coal-fired plants would be needed as backup for when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.

Fourth, if we stopped drilling for oil and gas, we would shut down the petrochemical industry. That means we could no longer make most drugs, nylon and polyester clothing, plastics of any sort, food packaging, synthetic rubber, paints, pipes, lubricants, over half of our auto parts. And on and on. Eventually we will be able to craft some of these things from renewables, but not anytime soon.

Fifth, carbon emissions would continue from other sources. Forest fires and volcanic eruptions spew huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Inefficient farming practices, manure breakdown, cattle flatulence and landfill leakage add more. Loss of trees through deforestation contributes up to 30% of atmospheric carbon dioxide. And human respiration – the mere act of breathing – is a major source of emissions. Experts say global population growth alone increases CO2 levels by 1-2% a year.

So if we stopped mining coal and capped U.S. oil and gas production tomorrow, we would not impact climate change one iota. Droughts would continue. Icecaps would melt. The oceans would keep on rising. 

What we would accomplish is kneecapping our economy and dismantling everyday life.

What’s the alternative? Be realistic about timing. Weaning ourselves from hydrocarbons will be a long and costly process. It won’t happen overnight, and it certainly won’t happen by zealots chanting slogans or politicians promising the impossible.

What can we do in the meantime? We can plan for climate change. Actively plan for increasing temperatures and ocean rise. We can double down on conserving energy. And we can trust American innovation to make renewables practical and cost-effective. Eventually.

A chemist and retired Pfizer executive, Dave Trecker serves on a number of local boards.

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In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things

By Bill McKibben

On the last day of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most dire report yet. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, had, he said, “seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this.” Setting aside diplomatic language, he described the document as “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” and added that “the world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.” Then, just a few hours later, at the opening of a rare emergency special session of the U.N. General Assembly, he catalogued the horrors of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine , and declared, “Enough is enough.” Citing Putin’s declaration of a nuclear alert , the war could, Guterres said, turn into an atomic conflict, “with potentially disastrous implications for us all.”

What unites these two crises is combustion. Burning fossil fuel has driven the temperature of the planet ever higher, melting most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic, bending the jet stream , and slowing the Gulf Stream. And selling fossil fuel has given Putin both the money to equip an army (oil and gas account for sixty per cent of Russia’s export earnings) and the power to intimidate Europe by threatening to turn off its supply. Fossil fuel has been the dominant factor on the planet for centuries, and so far nothing has been able to profoundly alter that. After Putin invaded, the American Petroleum Institute insisted that our best way out of the predicament was to pump more oil. The climate talks in Glasgow last fall, which John Kerry, the U.S. envoy, had called the “last best hope” for the Earth, provided mostly vague promises about going “net-zero by 2050”; it was a festival of obscurantism, euphemism, and greenwashing, which the young climate activist Greta Thunberg summed up as “blah, blah, blah.” Even people trying to pay attention can’t really keep track of what should be the most compelling battle in human history.

So let’s reframe the fight. Along with discussing carbon fees and green-energy tax credits, amid the momentary focus on disabling Russian banks and flattening the ruble, there’s a basic, underlying reality: the era of large-scale combustion has to come to a rapid close. If we understand that as the goal, we might be able to keep score, and be able to finally get somewhere. Last Tuesday, President Biden banned the importation of Russian oil. This year, we may need to compensate for that with American hydrocarbons, but, as a senior Administration official put it ,“the only way to eliminate Putin’s and every other producing country’s ability to use oil as an economic weapon is to reduce our dependency on oil.” As we are one of the largest oil-and-gas producers in the world, that is a remarkable statement. It’s a call for an end of fire.

We don’t know when or where humans started building fires; as with all things primordial there are disputes. But there is no question of the moment’s significance. Fire let us cook food, and cooked food delivers far more energy than raw; our brains grew even as our guts, with less processing work to do, shrank. Fire kept us warm, and human enterprise expanded to regions that were otherwise too cold. And, as we gathered around fires, we bonded in ways that set us on the path to forming societies. No wonder Darwin wrote that fire was “the greatest discovery ever made by man, excepting language.”

Darwin was writing in the years following the Industrial Revolution, as we learned how to turn coal into steam power, gas into light, and oil into locomotion, all by way of combustion. Our species depends on combustion; it made us human, and then it made us modern. But, having spent millennia learning to harness fire, and three centuries using it to fashion the world we know, we must spend the next years systematically eradicating it. Because, taken together, those blazes—the fires beneath the hoods of 1.4 billion vehicles and in the homes of billions more people, in giant power plants, and in the boilers of factories and the engines of airplanes ships—are more destructive than the most powerful volcanoes, dwarfing Krakatoa and Tambora. The smoke and smog from those engines and appliances directly kill nine million people a year, more deaths than those caused by war and terrorism, not to mention malaria and tuberculosis, together. (In 2020, fossil-fuel pollution killed three times as many people as COVID -19 did.) Those flames, of course, also spew invisible and odorless carbon dioxide at an unprecedented rate; that CO 2 is already rearranging the planet’s climate, threatening not only those of us who live on it now but all those who will come after us.

But here’s the good news, which makes this exercise more than merely rhetorical: rapid advances in clean-energy technology mean that all that destruction is no longer necessary. In the place of those fires we keep lit day and night, it’s possible for us to rely on the fact that there is a fire in the sky—a great ball of burning gas about ninety-three million miles away, whose energy can be collected in photovoltaic panels, and which differentially heats the Earth, driving winds whose energy can now be harnessed with great efficiency by turbines. The electricity they produce can warm and cool our homes, cook our food, and power our cars and bikes and buses. The sun burns, so we don’t need to.

Wind and solar power are not a replacement for everything, at least not yet. Three billion people still cook over fire daily, and will at least until sufficient electricity reaches them, and perhaps thereafter, since culture shifts slowly. Even then, flames will still burn—for birthday-cake candles, for barbecues, for joints (until you’ve figured out the dosing for edibles)—just as we still use bronze, though its age has long passed. And there are a few larger industries—intercontinental air travel, certain kinds of metallurgy such as steel production—that may require combustion, probably of hydrogen, for some time longer. But these are relatively small parts of the energy picture. And in time they, too, will likely be replaced by renewable electricity. (Electric-arc furnaces are already producing some kinds of steel, and Japanese researchers have just announced a battery so light that it might someday power passenger flights across oceans.) In fact, I can see only one sublime, long-term use for large-scale planned combustion, which I will get to. Mostly, our job as a species is clear: stop smoking.

As of 2022, this task is both possible and affordable. We have the technology necessary to move fast, and deploying it will save us money. Those are the first key ideas to internalize. They are new and counterintuitive, but a few people have been working to realize them for years, and their stories make clear the power of this moment.

When Mark Jacobson was growing up in northern California in the nineteen-seventies, he showed a gift for science, and also for tennis. He travelled for tournaments to Los Angeles and San Diego, where, he told me recently, he was shocked by how dirty the air was: “You’d get scratchy eyes, your throat would start hurting. You couldn’t see very far. I thought, Why should people live like this?” He eventually wound up at Stanford, first as an undergraduate and then, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, as a professor of civil and environmental engineering, by which time it was clear that visible air pollution was only part of the problem. It was understood that the unseen gas produced by combustion—carbon dioxide—posed an even more comprehensive threat.

To get at both problems, Jacobson analyzed data to see if an early-model wind turbine sold by General Electric could compete with coal. He worked out its capacity by calculating its efficiency at average wind speeds; a paper he wrote, published in the journal Science in 2001, showed that you “could get rid of sixty per cent of coal in the U.S. with a modest number of turbines.” It was, he said, “the shortest paper I’ve ever written—three-quarters of a page in the journal—and it got the most feedback, almost all from haters.” He ignored them; soon he had a graduate student mapping wind speeds around the world, and then he expanded his work to other sources of renewable energy. In 2009, he and Mark Delucchi, a research scientist at the University of California, published a paper suggesting that hydroelectric, wind, and solar energy could conceivably supply enough power to meet all the world’s energy needs. The conventional wisdom at the time was that renewables were unreliable, because the sun insists on setting each night and the wind can turn fickle. In 2015, Jacobson wrote a paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , showing that, on the contrary, wind and solar energy could keep the electric grid running. That paper won a prestigious prize from the editors of the journal, but it didn’t prevent more pushback—a team of twenty academics from around the country published a rebuttal, stating that “policy makers should treat with caution any visions of a rapid, reliable, and low-cost transition to entire energy systems that relies almost exclusively on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power.”

Time, however, is proving Jacobson correct: a few nations—including Iceland, Costa Rica, Namibia, and Norway—are already producing more than ninety per cent of their electricity from clean sources. When Jacobson began his work, wind turbines were small fans atop California ridgelines, whirligigs that looked more like toys than power sources. Now G.E. routinely erects windmills about three times as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and, in August, a Chinese firm announced a new model, whose blades will sweep an area the size of six soccer fields, with each turbine generating enough power for twenty thousand homes. (An added benefit: bigger turbines kill fewer birds than smaller ones, though, in any event, tall buildings, power lines, and cats are responsible for far more avian deaths.) In December, Jacobson’s Stanford team published an updated analysis , stating that we have ninety-five per cent of the technology required to produce a hundred per cent of America’s power needs from renewable energy by 2035, while keeping the electric grid secure and reliable.

Making clean technology affordable is the other half of the challenge, and here the news is similarly upbeat. In September, after almost fifteen years of work, a team of researchers at Oxford University released a paper that is currently under peer review but which, fifty years from now, people may look back on as a landmark step in addressing the climate crisis. The lead author of the report is Oxford’s Rupert Way; the research team was led by an American named Doyne (pronounced “ dough -en”) Farmer.

Farmer grew up in New Mexico, a precocious physicist and mathematician. His first venture, formed while he was a graduate student at U.C. Santa Cruz, was called Eudaemonic Enterprises, after Aristotle’s term for the condition of human flourishing. The goal was to beat roulette wheels. Farmer wore a shoe (now housed in a German museum) with a computer in its sole, and watched as a croupier tossed a ball into a wheel; noting the ball’s initial position and velocity, he tapped his toe to send the information to the computer, which performed quick calculations, giving him a chance to make a considered bet in the few seconds the casino allowed. This achievement led him to building algorithms to beat the stock market—a statistical-arbitrage technique that underpinned an enterprise he co-founded called the Prediction Company, which was eventually sold to the Swiss banking giant UBS. Happily, Farmer eventually turned his talents to something of greater social worth: developing a way to forecast rates of technological progress. The basis for this work was research published in 1936, when Theodore Wright, an executive at the Curtiss Aeroplane Company, had noted that every time the production of airplanes doubled, the cost of building them fell by twenty per cent. Farmer and his colleagues were intrigued by this “learning curve” (and its semiconductor-era variant, Moore’s Law ); if you could figure out which technologies fit on the curve, and which didn’t, you’d be able to forecast the future.

“It was about fifteen years ago,” Farmer told me, in December. “I was at the Santa Fe Institute, and the head of the National Renewable Energy Lab came down. He said, ‘You guys are complex-systems people. Help us think outside the box—what are we missing?’ I had a Transylvanian postdoctoral fellow at the time, and he started putting together a database—he had high-school kids working on it, kids from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, anyone. And, as we looked at it, we saw this point about the improvement trends being persistent over time.” The first practical application of solar electricity was on the Vanguard I satellite, in 1958—practical if you had the budget of the space program. Yet the cost had been falling steadily, as people improved each generation of the technology—not because of one particular breakthrough or a single visionary entrepreneur but because of constant incremental improvement. Every time the number of solar panels manufactured doubles, the price drops another thirty per cent, which means that it’s currently falling about ten per cent every year.

But—and here’s the key—not all technologies follow this curve. “We looked at the price of coal over a hundred and forty years,” Farmer said. “Mines are much more sophisticated, the technology for locating new deposits is much better. But prices have not come down.” A likely explanation is that we got to all the easy stuff first: oil once bubbled up out of the ground; now we have to drill deep beneath the ocean for it. Whatever the reason, by 2013, the cost of a kilowatt-hour of solar energy had fallen by more than ninety-nine per cent since it was first used on the Vanguard I. Meanwhile, the price of coal has remained about the same. It was cheap to start, but it hasn’t gotten cheaper.

The more data sets that Farmer’s team members included, the more robust numbers they got, and by the autumn of 2021 they were ready to publish their findings. They found that the price trajectories of fossil fuels and renewables are already crossing. Renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel, and becoming more so. So a “decisive transition” to renewable energy, they reported, would save the world twenty-six trillion dollars in energy costs in the coming decades.

This is precisely the opposite of how we have viewed energy transition. It has long been seen as an economically terrifying undertaking: if we had to transition to avoid calamity (and obviously we did), we should go as slowly as possible. Bill Gates, just last year, wrote a book, arguing that consumers would need to pay a “green premium” for clean energy because it would be more expensive. But Emily Grubert, a Georgia Tech engineer who now works for the Department of Energy, has recently shown that it could cost less to replace every coal plant in the country with renewables than to simply maintain the existing coal plants. You could call it a “green discount.”

The constant price drops mean, Farmer said, that we might still be able to move quickly enough to meet the target set in the 2016 Paris climate agreement of trying to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “One point five is going to suck,” he said. “But it sure beats three. We just need to put our money down and do it. So many people are pessimistic and despairing, and we need to turn that around.”

Numbers like Farmer’s make people who’ve been working in this field for years absolutely giddy. At COP 26, I retreated one day from Glasgow’s giant convention center to the relative quiet of the city’s university district for a pizza with a man named Kingsmill Bond. Bond is an Englishman and a former investment professional, and he looks the part: lean, in a bespoke suit, with a good haircut. His daughter, he said, was that day sitting her exams for Cambridge, the university he’d attended before a career at Citi and Deutsche Bank that had taken him to Hong Kong and Moscow. He’d quit some years ago, taking a cut in pay that he’s too modest to disclose. He’d worked first for the Carbon Tracker Initiative, in London, and now the Rocky Mountain Institute, based in Colorado, two groups working on energy transition.

He drew on a napkin excitedly, expounding on the numbers in the Oxford report. We would have to build out the electric grid to carry all the new power, and install millions of E.V. chargers, and so on, down a long list—amounting to maybe a trillion dollars in extra capital expenditure a year over the next two or three decades. But, in return, Bond said, we get an economic gift: “We save about two trillion dollars a year on fossil-fuel rents. Forever.” Fossil-fuel rent is what economists call the money that goes from consumers to those who control the hydrocarbon supply. Saudi Arabia can pull oil out of the ground for less than ten dollars a barrel and sell it at fifty or seventy-five dollars a barrel (or, during the emergency caused by Putin’s war, more than a hundred dollars); the difference is the rent they command. Bond insists that higher projections for the cost of the energy transition—a recent analysis from the consulting firm McKinsey predicted that it would cost trillions more than Farmer’s team did—ignore these rents, and also assume that, before long, renewable energy will veer from the steeply falling cost curve. Even if you’re pessimistic about how much it will cost to make the change, though, it’s clear that it would be far less expensive than not moving fast—that’s measured in hundreds of trillions of dollars but also in millions of lives and whatever value we place on maintaining an orderly civilization.

The new numbers turn the economic logic we’re used to upside down. A few years ago, at a petroleum-industry conference in Texas, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said something both terrible and true: that “no country would find a hundred and seventy-three billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.” He was referring to Alberta’s tar sands, where a third of Canada’s natural gas is used to heat the oil trapped in the soil sufficiently to get it to flow to the surface and separate it from the sand. Just extracting the oil would put Canada over its share of the carbon budget set in Paris, and actually burning it would heat the planet nearly half a degree Celsius and use up about a third of the total remaining budget. (And Canadians account for only about one half of one per cent of the world’s population.)

Even on purely economic terms, such logic makes less sense with each passing quarter. That’s especially true for the eighty per cent of people in the world who live in countries that must import fossil fuels—for them it’s all cost and no gain. Even for petrostates, however, the spreadsheet is increasingly difficult to rationalize. Bond supplied some numbers: Canada has fossil-fuel reserves totalling a hundred and sixty-seven petawatt hours, which is a lot. (A petawatt is a quadrillion watts.) But, he said, it has potential renewable energy from wind and solar power alone of seventy-one petawatt hours a year . A reasonable question to ask Trudeau would be: What kind of country finds a windfall like that and simply leaves it in the sky?

Making the energy transition won’t be easy, of course. Because we’ve been burning fuel to power our economies for more than two hundred years, we have in place long and robust supply chains and deep technical expertise geared to a combustion economy. “We’ve tried to think about possible infrastructure walls that might get in the way,” Farmer said. That’s a virtue of this kind of learning-curve analysis: if renewable energy has overcome obstacles in the past to keep dropping in price, it will probably be able to do so again. A few years ago, for instance, a number of reports said that the windmill business might crash because it was running short of the balsa wood used in turbine blades. But, within a year of the shortages emerging, many of the big windmill makers had started substituting a synthetic foam.

Now the focus is on minerals, such as cobalt, that are used in solar panels and batteries. Late last year, the Times published a long investigation of the success that China has had in cornering the world’s supply of the metal, which is found most abundantly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Brian Menell, the C.E.O. of TechMet, a supplier of cobalt and other specialty metals, told me, “We run the risk that in five years, the factories for E.V.s will be sitting half idle, because those companies—the Fords and General Motors and Teslas and VWs—will not be able to secure the feedstock to maintain the capacity they’re building now.” But the fact that the Fords and G.M.s are in the hunt means that the political weight for what Menell calls a “massive and coördinated effort by government and end users” is likely to develop. Humans are good at solving the kind of dilemmas represented by scarcity. A Ford spokesman told the Times that the company is learning to recycle cobalt and to develop substitutes, adding, “We do not see cobalt as a constraining issue.”

Harder to solve may be the human-rights challenges that come with new mining efforts, such as the use of so-called “artisanal” cobalt mining, in which impoverished workers pry the metal from the ground with spades, or the plan to build a lithium mine on a site in Nevada that is sacred to Indigenous peoples. But, as we work to tackle those problems, it’s worth remembering that a transition to renewable energy would, by some estimates, reduce the total global mining burden by as much as eighty per cent, because so much of what we dig up today is burned (and then we have to go dig up some more). You dig up lithium once, and put it to use for decades in a solar panel or battery. In fact, a switch to renewable energy will reduce the load on all kinds of systems. At the moment, roughly forty per cent of the cargo carried by ocean-going ships is coal, gas, oil, and wood pellets—a never-ending stream of vessels crammed full of stuff to burn. You need a ship to carry a wind turbine blade, too, if it’s coming from across the sea, but you only need it once. A solar panel or a windmill, once erected, stands for a quarter of a century or longer. The U.S. military is the world’s largest single consumer of fossil fuels, but seventy per cent of its logistical “lift capacity” is devoted solely to transporting the fossil fuels used to keep the military machine running.

Raw materials aren’t the only possible pinch point. We’re also short of some kinds of expertise. Saul Griffith is perhaps the world’s leading apostle of electrification. (His 2021 book is called “ Electrify .”) An Australian by birth, he has spent recent years in Silicon Valley, rallying entrepreneurs to the project of installing E.V. chargers, air-source heat pumps, induction cooktops, and the like. He can show that they save homeowners, landlords, and businesses money; he’s also worked out the numbers to show that banks can prosper by extending, in essence, mortgages for these improvements. But he told me that, to stay within the 1.5 degree Celsius range, “America is going to need a million more electricians this decade.” That’s not impossible . Working as an electrician is a good job, and community colleges and apprenticeship programs could train many more people to become one. But, as with the rest of the transition, it’s going to take leadership and coördination to make it happen.

Change on this scale would be difficult even if everyone was working in good faith, and not everyone is. So far, for instance, the climate provisions of the Build Back Better Act, which would help provide, among many other things, training for renewable-energy installers, have been blocked not just by the oil-dominated G.O.P. but by Joe Manchin , the Democrat who received more fossil-fuel donations in the past election cycle than anyone else in the Senate. The thirty-year history of the global-warming fight is largely a story of the efforts by the fossil-fuel industry to deny the need for change, or, more recently, to insist that it must come slowly.

The fossil-fuel industry wants to be able to keep burning something. That way, it can keep both its infrastructure and its business model usefully employed. It’s like an industry of rational pyromania. A decade or so ago, the thing it wanted to burn next was natural gas. Since it produces less carbon dioxide than coal does, it was billed as the “bridge fuel” that would get us to renewables. The logic seemed sound. But researchers, led by Bob Howarth, at Cornell University, found that producing large quantities of natural gas released large quantities of methane into the atmosphere. And methane (CH 4 ) is, like CO 2 , a potent heat-trapping gas, so it’s become clear that natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere—clear, that is, to everyone but the industry. The head of a big gas firm told a conference in Texas last week that he thought the domestic gas industry could be producing for the next hundred years.

Other parts of the industry want to go further back in time and burn wood; the European Union and the United States officially class “biomass burning” as carbon neutral. The city of Burlington, in my home state of Vermont, claims to source all its energy from renewables, but much of its electricity comes from a plant that burns trees. Again, the logic originally seemed sound: if you cut a tree, another grows in its place, and it will eventually soak up the carbon dioxide emitted from that burning the first tree. But, again, “eventually” is the problem . Burning wood is highly inefficient, and so it releases a huge pulse of carbon right now , when the world’s climate system is most vulnerable. Trees that grow back in a few generations’ time will come too late to save the ice caps. The world’s largest wood-burning plant is in England, run by a company called Drax; the plant used to burn coal, and it does scarcely less damage now than it did then. In January, news came that Enviva, a company based in Maryland that is the largest producer of wood pellets in the world, plans to double its output.

Or consider the huge sums of money in the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last year, which will support another technology called carbon capture. This involves fitting power plants with enough filters and pipes so that they can go on burning coal or gas, but capture the CO 2 that pours out of the smokestacks and pipe it safely away—into an old salt mine, perhaps. (Or, ironically, into a depleted oil well, where it may be used to push more crude to the surface.) So far, these carbon-capture schemes don’t really work—but, even if they did, why spend the money to outfit systems with pipes and filters when solar power is already cheaper than coal power? We will have to remove some of the carbon in the atmosphere, and new generations of direct-air-capture machines may someday play a role, if their cost drops quickly. (They use chemicals to filter carbon straight from the ambient air; think of them as artificial trees.) But using this technology to lengthen the lifespan of coal-fired power plants is just one more gift to a politically connected industry.

Increasingly, the fossil-fuel industry is turning toward hydrogen as an out. Hydrogen does burn cleanly, without contributing to global warming, but the industry likes hydrogen because one way to produce it is by burning natural gas. And, as Howarth and Jacobson demonstrated in a recent paper, even if you combine burning that gas with expensive carbon capture, the methane that leaks from the frack wells is enough to render the whole process ruinous environmentally, and it makes no sense economically without huge subsidies.

There is another way to produce hydrogen, and, in time, it will almost certainly fuel the last big artificial fires on our planet. Through electrolysis, hydrogen can be separated from oxygen in water. And if the electricity used in the process is renewably produced then this “green hydrogen” would allow countries such as Japan, Singapore, and Korea, which may struggle to find enough space in their landscapes for renewable-energy generation, to power their grids. The Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest, the founder of the Fortescue Metals Group, is proposing to use solar power to produce green hydrogen that he can then ship to those countries. In January, Mukesh Ambani, the head of Reliance Industries and the richest man in India, announced plans to spend seventy-five billion dollars on the technology. Airbus recently predicted that green hydrogen could fuel its long-haul planes by 2035. And the good news—though Doyne Farmer cautions that the data sets are still pretty scanty—is that the electrolyzers which use solar energy to produce hydrogen seem to be on the same downward cost curve as solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries.

The fossil-fuel industry can be relied on to fight these shifts. Last autumn, a utility company in Oklahoma announced that it would charge fourteen hundred dollars to disconnect residential gas lines and move home stoves and furnaces to electricity. Within days, other utilities followed suit. That’s why the climate movement is increasingly taking on the banks that make loans for the expansion of fossil-fuel infrastructure. Last year, the International Energy Agency said that such expansion needed to end immediately if we are to meet the Paris targets, yet the world’s biggest banks, while making noises about “net zero by 2050,” continue to lend to new pipelines and wells. The issue came to the fore earlier this year, when Joe Biden nominated Sarah Bloom Raskin to the position of vice-chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve. “There is opportunity in pre-emptive, early and bold actions by federal economic policy makers looking to avoid catastrophe,” Raskin wrote in 2020. And it’s why certain lawmakers mobilized to stop her nomination . Senator Patrick Toomey, of Pennsylvania, who was the Senate’s sixth-biggest recipient of oil-and-gas contributions during his last campaign, in 2016 (he is not running for reëlection this year), said that Raskin “has specifically called for the Fed to pressure banks to choke off credit to traditional energy companies.” She’s tried, in other words, to extinguish the flames a little—and on Monday, for her pains, Manchin effectively derailed her nomination, saying that he would vote against her, because she “failed to satisfactorily address my concerns about the critical importance of financing an all-of-the-above energy policy.” On Tuesday, she withdrew her nomination .

The shift away from combustion is large and novel enough that it bumps up against everyone’s prior assumptions—environmentalists’, too. The fight against nuclear power, for example, was an early mainstay of the green movement, because it was easy to see that if something went wrong it could go badly wrong. I applauded, more than a decade ago, when the Vermont legislature voted to close the state’s old nuclear plant at the end of its working life, but I wouldn’t today. Indeed, for some years I’ve argued that existing nuclear reactors that can still be run with any margin of safety probably should be, as we’re making the transition—the spent fuel they produce is an evil inheritance for our descendants, but it’s not as dangerous as an overheated Earth, even if the scenes of Russian troops shelling nuclear plants added to the sense of horror enveloping the planet these past weeks. Yet the rapidly falling cost of renewables also indicates why new nuclear plants will have a hard time finding backers; it’s evaporating nuclear power’s one big advantage—that it’s always on. Farmer’s Oxford team ran the numbers. “If the cost of coal is flat, and the cost of solar is plummeting, nuclear is the rare technology whose cost is going up,” he said. Advocates will argue that this is because safety fears have driven up the cost of construction. “But the only place on Earth where you can find the cost of nuclear coming down is Korea,” Farmer said. “Even there, the rate of decline is one per cent a year. Compared to ten per cent for renewables, that’s not enough to matter.”

Accepting nuclear power for a while longer is not the only place environmentalists will need to bend. A reason I supported shutting down Vermont’s nuclear plant was because campaigners had promised that its output would be replaced with renewable energy. In the years that followed, though, advocates of scenery, wildlife, and forests managed to put the state’s mountaintops off limits to wind turbines. More recently, the state’s public-utility commission blocked construction of an eight-acre solar farm on aesthetic grounds. Those of us who live in and love rural areas have to accept that some of that landscape will be needed to produce energy. Not all of it, or even most of it—Jacobson’s latest numbers show that renewable power actually uses less land than fossil fuels, which require drilling fifty thousand new holes every year in North America alone. But we do need to see our landscape differently—as Ezra Klein wrote this week in the Times , “to conserve anything close to the climate we’ve had, we need to build as we’ve never built before.”

Corn fields, for instance, are a classic American sight, but they’re also just solar-energy collectors of another sort. (And ones requiring annual applications of nitrogen, which eventually washes into lakes and rivers, causing big algae blooms.) More than half the corn grown in Iowa actually ends up as ethanol in the tanks of cars and trucks—in other words, those fields are already growing fuel, just inefficiently. Because solar panels are far more efficient than photosynthesis, and because E.V.s are far more efficient than cars with gas engines, Jacobson’s data show that, by switching from ethanol to solar, you could produce eighty times the amount of automobile mileage using an equivalent area of land. And the transition could bring some advantages: the market for electrons is predictable, so solar panels can provide a fairly stable income for farmers, some of whom are learning to grow shade-tolerant crops or to graze animals around and beneath them.

Another concession will strike many environmentalists more deeply even than accepting a degraded landscape, and that’s the notion that reckoning with the climate crisis would force wholesale changes in the way that people live their lives. Remember, the long-held assumption was that renewable energy was going to be expensive and limited in supply. So, it was thought, this would move us in the direction of simpler, less energy-intensive ways of life, something that many of us welcomed, in part because there are deep environmental challenges that go beyond carbon and climate. Cheap new energy technologies may let us evade some of those more profound changes. Whenever I write about the rise of E.V.s, Twitter responds that we’d be better off riding bikes and electric buses. In many ways we would be, and some cities are thankfully starting to build extensive bike paths and rapid-transit lanes for electric buses. But, as of 2017, just two per cent of passenger miles in this country come from public transportation. Bike commuting has doubled in the past two decades—to about one per cent of the total. We could (and should) quintuple the number of people riding bikes and buses, and even then we’d still need to replace tens of millions of cars with E.V.s to meet the targets in the time the scientists have set to meet them. That time is the crucial variable. As hard as it will be to rewire the planet’s energy system by decade’s end, I think it would be harder—impossible, in fact—to sufficiently rewire social expectations, consumer preferences, and settlement patterns in that short stretch.

So one way to look at the work that must be done with the tools we have at hand is as triage. If we do it quickly, we will open up more possibilities for the generations to come. Just one example: Farmer says that it’s possible to see the cost of nuclear-fusion reactors, as opposed to the current fission reactors, starting to come steeply down the cost curve—and to imagine that a within a generation or two people may be taking solar panels off farm fields, because fusion (which is essentially the physics of the sun brought to Earth) may be providing all the power we need. If we make it through the bottleneck of the next decade, much may be possible.

There is one ethical element of the energy transition that we can’t set aside: the climate crisis is deeply unfair—by and large, the less you did to cause it, the harder and faster it hits you—but in the course of trying to fix it we do have an opportunity to also remedy some of that unfairness. For Americans, the best part of the Build Back Better bill may be that it tries to target significant parts of its aid to communities hardest hit by poverty and environmental damage, a residue of the Green New Deal that is its parent. And advocates are already pressing to insure that at least some of the new technology is owned by local communities—by churches and local development agencies, not by the solar-era equivalents of Koch Industries or Exxon.

Advocates are also calling for some of the first investments in green transformations to happen in public-housing projects, on reservations, and in public schools serving low-income students. There can be some impatience from environmentalists who worry that such considerations might slow down the transition. But, as Naomi Klein recently told me, “The hard truth is that environmentalists can’t win the emission-reduction fight on our own. Winning will take sweeping alliances beyond the self-identified green bubble—with trade unions, housing-rights advocates, racial-justice organizers, teachers, transit workers, nurses, artists, and more. But, to build that kind of coalition, climate action needs to hold out the promise of making daily life better for the people who are most neglected right away—not far off in the future. Green, affordable homes and water that is safe to drink is something people will fight for a hell of a lot harder than carbon pricing.”

These are principles that must apply around the world, for basic fairness and because solving the climate crisis in just the U.S. would be the most pyrrhic of victories. (They don’t call it “global warming” for nothing.) In Glasgow, I sat down with Mohamed Nasheed, the former President of the Maldives and the current speaker of the People’s Majlis, the nation’s legislative body. He has been at the forefront of climate action for decades, because the highest land in his country, an archipelago that stretches across the equator in the Indian Ocean, is just a few metres above sea level. At COP 26, he was representing the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a consortium of fifty-five of the nations with the most to lose as temperatures rise. As he noted, poor countries have gone deeply into debt trying to deal with the effects of climate change. If they need to move an airport or shore up seawalls, or recover from a devastating hurricane or record rainfall, borrowing may be their only recourse. And borrowing gets harder, in part, because the climate risks mean that lenders demand more. The climate premium on loans may approach ten per cent, Nasheed said; some nations are already spending twenty per cent of their budgets just paying interest. He suggested that it might be time for a debt strike by poor nations.

The rapid fall in renewable-energy prices makes it more possible to imagine the rest of the world chipping in. So far, though, the rich countries haven’t even come up with the climate funds they promised the Global South more than a decade ago, much less any compensation for the ongoing damage that they have done the most to cause. (All of sub-Saharan Africa is responsible for less than two per cent of the carbon emissions currently heating the earth; the United States is responsible for twenty-five per cent.)

Tom Athanasiou’s Berkeley-based organization EcoEquity, as part of the Climate Equity Reference Project, has done the most detailed analyses of who owes what in the climate fight. He found that the U.S. would have to cut its emissions a hundred and seventy-five per cent to make up for the damage it’s already caused—a statistical impossibility. Therefore, the only way it can meet that burden is to help the rest of the world transition to clean energy, and to help bear the costs that global warming has already produced. As Athanasiou put it, “The pressing work of decarbonization is only going to be embraced by the people of the Global South if it comes as part of a package that includes adaptation aid and disaster relief.”

I said at the start that there is one sublime exception to the rule that we should be dousing fires, and that is the use of flame to control flame, and to manage land—a skill developed over many millennia by the original inhabitants of much of the world. Of all the fires burning on Earth, none are more terrifying than the conflagrations that light the arid West, the Mediterranean, the eucalyptus forests of Australia, and the boreal woods of Siberia and the Canadian north. By last summer, blazes in Oregon and Washington and British Columbia were fouling the air across the continent in New York and New England. Smoke from fires in the Russian far north choked the sky above the North Pole. For people in these regions, fire has become a scary psychological companion during the hot and dry months—and those months stretch out longer each year. The San Francisco Chronicle recently asked whether parts of California, once the nation’s idyll, were now effectively uninhabitable. In Siberia, even last winter’s icy cold was not enough to blot out the blazes; researchers reported “zombie fires” smoking and smoldering beneath feet of snow. There’s no question that the climate crisis is driving these great blazes—and also being driven by them, since they put huge clouds of carbon into the air.

There’s also little question, at least in the West, that the fires, though sparked by our new climate, feed on an accumulation of fuel left there by a century of a strict policy which treated any fire as a threat to be extinguished immediately. That policy ignored millennia of Indigenous experience using fire as a tool, an experience now suddenly in great demand. Indigenous people around the world have been at the forefront of the climate movement, and they have often been skilled early adopters of renewable energy. But they have also, in the past, been able to use fire to fight fire: to burn when the risk is low, in an effort to manage landscapes for safety and for productivity.

Frank Lake, a descendant of the Karuk tribe indigenous to what is now northern California, works as a research ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service, and he is helping to recover this old and useful technology. He described a controlled burn in the autumn of 2015 near his house on the Klamath River. “I have legacy acorn trees on my property,” he said—meaning the great oaks that provided food for tribal people in ages past—but those trees were hemmed in by fast-growing shrubs. “So we had twenty-something fire personnel there that day, and they had their equipment, and they laid hose. And I gave the operational briefing. I said, ‘We’re going to be burning today to reduce hazardous fuels. And also so we can gather acorns more easily, without the undergrowth, and the pests attacking the trees.’ My wife was there and my five-year-old son and my three-year-old daughter. And I lit a branch from a lightning-struck sugar pine—it conveys its medicine from the lightning—and with that I lit everyone’s drip torches, and then they went to work burning. My son got to walk hand-in-hand down the fire line with the burn boss.”

Lake’s work at the Forest Service involves helping tribes burn again. It’s not always easy; some have been so decimated by the colonial experience that they’ve lost their traditions. “Maybe they have two or three generations that haven’t been allowed to burn,” he said. There are important pockets of residual knowledge, often among elders, but they can be reluctant to share that knowledge with others, Lake told me, “fearful that it will be co-opted and that they’ll be kept out of the leadership and decision-making.” But, for half a decade, the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network—organized by various tribes, the Nature Conservancy, and government agencies, including the Forest Service—has slowly been expanding across the country. There are outposts in Oregon, Minnesota, New Mexico, and in other parts of the world. Lake has travelled to Australia to learn from aboriginal practitioners. “It’s family-based burning. The kids get a Bic lighter and burn a little patch of eucalyptus. The teen-agers a bigger area, adults much bigger swaths. I just saw it all unfold.” As that knowledge and confidence is recovered, it’s possible to imagine a world in which we’ve turned off most of the man-made fires, and Indigenous people teach the rest of us to use fire as the important force it was when we first discovered it.

Amy Cardinal Christianson, who works for the Canadian equivalent of the Forest Service, is a member of the Métis Nation. Her family kept trapping lines near Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta, but left them for the city because the development of the vast tar-sands complex overwhelmed the landscape. (That’s the hundred and seventy-three billion barrels that Justin Trudeau says no country would leave in the ground—a pool of carbon so vast the climate scientist James Hansen said that pumping it from the ground would mean “game over for the climate.”) The industrial fires it stoked have helped heat the Earth, and one result was a truly terrifying forest fire that overtook Fort McMurray in 2016, after a stretch of unseasonably high temperatures. The blaze forced the evacuation of eighty-eight thousand people, and became the costliest disaster in Canadian history.

“What we’re seeing now is bad fire,” Christianson said. “When we talk about returning fire to the landscape, we’re talking about good fire. I heard an elder describe it once as fire you could walk next to, fire of a low intensity.” Fire that builds a mosaic of landscapes that, in turn, act as natural firebreaks against devastating blazes; fire that opens meadows where wildlife can flourish. “Fire is a kind of medicine for the land. And it lets you carry out your culture—like, why you are in the world, basically.”

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By Elizabeth Kolbert

By Joshua Yaffa

By M. R. O’Connor

News from the Columbia Climate School

Opinion: All Fossil Fuel Advertisements Should Be Banned

Alexandra Grant-Hudd

I think we should ban all fossil fuel advertisements, plain and simple. I know it sounds extreme, but it’s imperative for the future of our planet.

On October 28, 2021 , ExxonMobil, BP America, Chevron, Shell Oil, American Petroleum Institute, and the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce testified in front of Congress to address Big Oil’s intentional and calculated spread of climate change misinformation . Executives were directly asked if their company had ever approved of a climate change disinformation campaign. Despite being under oath, each executive, one after another, claimed they had not — a bold-faced lie.

More than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific articles conclude: climate change is caused by humans, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal. But what’s worse is that fossil fuel companies have known and downplayed for decades the impact of fossil fuel burning on the environment, much like how the tobacco industry denied the connection between smoking and cancer.

In 2015, a series of internal documents known as “the Climate Deception Dossiers” were published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, revealing that as early as 1981, fossil fuel companies knew their products were contributing to global warming. These documents shed light on how Big Oil denied this truth and promoted doubt: paying scientists to publish research and speak out in opposition to climate scientists, and utilizing misleading advertising to deceive the wider public.

These tactics were hugely successful. To date, there is no comprehensive U.S federal policy to address climate change, and the fossil fuel industry continues its deception.

But Big Oil is smart. Today, instead of encouraging doubt that climate change is happening, a sentiment that the majority of Americans disagree with, they have shifted their marketing towards something more nuanced: greenwashing.

Greenwashing is an advertising tactic that misleads the public into perceiving a company as environmentally friendly when in actuality they aren’t. And the fossil fuel industry is a huge culprit. Between 2008 and 2017, oil companies forked out $1.4 billion on advertisements, two thirds of which implemented greenwashing tactics like promoting wind and solar. Yet, only 1.3 percent of their combined 2018 budget was spent on renewable energy sources.

The consequences of greenwashing, like those of denial and doubt, are dire: shifting blame away from fossil fuel companies and delaying needed climate action. Laurence Tubiana , European Climate Foundation CEO and author of the Paris Climate Agreement affirms, “Greenwashing is the new climate denial.”

We cannot trust Big Oil companies to represent themselves truthfully, because they never have, and certainty aren’t now. A complete ban on fossil fuel advertising is the solution. And we know it can work because it has before — with the tobacco industry.

Cigarette usage in the United States peaked in 1954, with 45% of Americans smoking at least once a week. That same year, a British Medical Journal article confirmed the link between smoking and lung cancer. And after a landmark 1964 surgeon general’s report solidified this, laws were passed enforcing health warnings on tobacco products. But these limited regulations had little impact on tobacco usage, largely because the tobacco industry worked hard and fast to market doubt on the very scientific consensus that supported these actions.

It wasn’t until the 1971 ban on television and radio cigarette advertisements went into effect that a marked decline in cigarette usage was reported amongst Americans.

But again, the tobacco industry responded swiftly by transitioning much of its advertising to print and prioritizing enticing youth and women into tobacco usage. Thankfully, the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between the four largest U.S tobacco companies and 46 states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories nipped this in the bud, prohibiting tobacco advertising in cartoons, public transit, billboards, as well as targeted marketing to minors.

Today, only 16% of Americans report smoking at least once a week. And  research confirms that advertising bans — paired with cigarette taxes, public smoking bans, and anti-tobacco campaigns — played a concrete role in the declining trend of tobacco consumption over the last 70 years.

Clearly, advertising bans worked for regulating tobacco, and they can work for fossil fuels as well — they just have to be comprehensive. Limited bans or health warnings leave too much room for industry to reallocate their marketing funds into alternative paths of persuasion. We cannot allow the fossil fuel industry any additional chances to adapt to lackluster regulations. This is why banning all fossil fuel advertisements is key.

Despite campaigns of doubt, the key to the success of tobacco advertising bans rested simply on the truth: that smoking posed a public health crisis for Americans. When it comes to Big Oil, scientific consensus confirms an even more powerful truth: climate change will cause an estimated 250,000 additional deaths per year, and force more than 100 million people into extreme poverty by 2030.

The fossil fuel industry is largely responsible for those deaths and human suffering, as 70% of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions — the main driver of climate change — are produced by the industry and its products. Greenwashed advertisements muster public sympathy for the fossil fuel industry, making it seem as if they are doing much more than they really are to protect our planet. This threatens desperately needed climate action by softening public opposition to the very activities that are causing a warming planet.

At the end of the October 28 hearing on fossil fuel misinformation, it was announced that subpoenas will be issued for a range of internal documents that the fossil fuel organizations in attendance originally refused to provide. Such documents are likely to shed even further light on Big Oil’s lies.

And as more information trickles out of these hearings, we as a society gain increasing power, momentum, and truth to finally put a stop to deceit, and ensure the future health of people and planet. The first step: a comprehensive fossil fuel advertising ban.

Alexandra Grant-Hudd is a student in Columbia Climate School’s master’s program in Climate and Society .

Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Columbia Climate School, Earth Institute or Columbia University.

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Viterbi Conversations in Ethics

The Ethical Case for Fossil Fuels

A growing number of industrialized countries are questioning the ethical use of fossil fuels, considering climate change is primarily due to greenhouse gas emissions. Many leaders are removing subsidies for fossil fuel companies, pushing against offshore drilling, and divesting from fossil fuel projects like pipelines and refineries. While this may seem like the right thing to do, many economically developed nations tend to forget about the rest of the world. Countries in the developing world rely on fossil fuels to generate economic growth. If these more economically developed countries fail to take the needs of the developing world into consideration, large swaths of the globe will fall into poverty. Clearlysuch an approach is not ethical. Developed countries must continue to develop renewable energy worldwide while simultaneously investing in fossil fuel projects abroad as the necessary infrastructure for renewable energy systems are designed, tested, and constructed – only then can the world move on from fossil fuels in a safe, effective, and ethical way.

Introduction

In the United States and other developed nations, there is a tendency to prescribe solutions to problems facing humanity without considering the impacts such rules will have on the developing world. Nearly three decades ago, the global poverty rate – the portion of people living on less than $1.90 per day – stood at 36%. After many investments in the developing world from wealthier countries, the global poverty rate has dropped to 10% [1]. As investments in fossil fuel technologies are curbed to slow the rate of global climate change, those living in the developing world will be hurt the most. As a result, a new system must be created: one where the world continues to create technologies for a post-fossil fuel world while continuing to foster economic growth in the developing world by investing in fossil fuel technology. 

The term fossil fuel comes from the three types of fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas – derived from the fossilized remains of prehistoric plants and animals. After millions of years underground being crushed at high pressures, the properties of the dead organic matter change, essentially becoming fossilized sunlight. Due to the high carbon content, these fossil fuels are all materials with extremely high energy density. To release that energy, fossil fuels must be burned, releasing gaseous carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), water vapor (H 2 O), and a large amount of heat. 

Consequences of Non-Renewables

Burning fossil fuels has global consequences. The average global surface temperature has been steadily increasing since the 1880s, coinciding with the start of the Industrial Revolution. Since record keeping began in 1960, the concentration of CO 2 in the atmosphere increased from 318ppm (parts per million) to 412.5ppm in 2021, according to data collected by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) [1]. Scientists understand that as fossil fuel use increased, the emission of gaseous CO 2 began warming the atmosphere via a greenhouse effect. To curb emissions, renewable energy sources have been developed to provide electricity without any CO 2 emissions. 

Fossil fuels are used in all aspects of modern life across the globe. A vast majority of the cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world consume fossil fuels. Most of the electricity that powers the world comes from coal-fired power plants. In the United States, 81% of the total energy produced comes from burning coal, oil, or natural gas. Oil-derived products appear in cosmetics, plastics, car tires, medicine, and more. The world heavily relies on fossil fuels to pursue a high quality of life. As the calls to divest from the fossil fuel industry increase, the world must not forget about the billions of people who rely on fossil fuels daily. The impact of such broad policies on the developing world must be taken into consideration.  

The developed world accounts for an outsized proportion of CO 2 emissions. The United States accounts for creating around a quarter (25%) of the total CO 2 emissions generated globally per year [2]. However, the entire continent of Africa – home to around 1.4 billion people – only generates 3% of total global CO 2 emissions [3]. Therefore, the United States and other nations responsible for the bulk of CO 2 emissions must lead the way in curbing carbon emissions.

Fossil Fuel Perceptions

In many developed nations, the public looks upon fossil fuels as a dirty source. Polling conducted by Pew Research found that 57% of Americans oppose the use of coal compared to 9% who oppose expanding solar power [4]. The disdain for the fossil fuel industry leads to policy that pushes against fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy sources. 

The economically developed world has the financial freedom and technological capacity to create massive infrastructure projects aimed towards converting from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. The United States can spend billions of dollars investing in a wind farm while many countries in the developing world would never be able to afford such an endeavor. The Alta Wind Energy Center located in the Tehachapi Mountains near Mojave, California, operates 600 individual wind towers, creating just over 3200 gigawatts per hour (GW-h) of electricity annually. In total, the entire project cost almost $3 billion [5]. Worrying about the consequences of climate change is a luxury that only wealthier countries can afford.

In the rest of the world, fossil fuels are seen as necessary for economic advancement. Formerly, people used wood to cook, to provide heat, and for light where electricity was non-existent. As the use of fossil fuels has increased throughout the world, the rate of deforestation has decreased, keeping the forests of the world more intact [6]. Saving the forests provides a larger carbon sink to offset the carbon generated by human activities. Furthermore, burning fossil fuels for cooking and heating is more efficient than burning wood. The burning of biomass – the technical name for organic matter used as fuel – releases more CO 2 into the atmosphere than coal and other fossil fuels [7]. Per pound, wood releases 50% more CO 2 than the same amount of coal [8]. In sub-Saharan Africa, 81% of households rely on woodburning stoves for energy [9].  Biomass burning for fuel throughout Africa and Asia accounts for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions [9]. Developing countries that are highly dependent on biomass for energy use will see less pollution by black carbon (fine particulate matter emitted due to incomplete combustion) through an increased use of fossil fuels.

Fuel Investments Abroad

More developed nations must fight for the rights of individuals living in the developing world who cannot fight for themselves. The World Bank along with the European Union announced in early 2021 that no country in the EU would finance any fossil fuel investment. The announcement immediately halted any funding for overseas fossil fuel projects, primarily in developing countries. In total, over $11 trillion dollars has been diverted from countries around the world [10]. This has robbed the developing world of significant funding that could have been used to invest in energy production, infrastructure development, and job creation. At the most recent United Nations annual climate change conference (COP26), 34 countries, including the United States, agreed to stop financing international fossil fuel projects. Such action only exacerbates the economic disparities between the developed and developing worlds by continuing to funnel money away from fossil fuel investments. 

Most of the now-defunded projects were sprinkled across resource-rich countries in South America, Asia, and Africa. The United States Export Import Bank (EXIM) provides loans to projects across the world for the sole purpose of providing U.S. manufactured goods to projects, creating domestic jobs, and supporting domestic businesses. The EXIM provides billions of dollars to projects annually including fossil fuel projects in the developing world. Under the new rules proposed by COP26, the EXIM will no longer fund fossil fuel projects. As a result, fossil fuel projects like the Area 1 Mozambique LNG facility – a liquified natural gas refinery located in Mozambique – will no longer receive funding. Previously, the EXIM promised up to $1.5 billion for the project which is expected to cost $20 billion in total and begin production in 2024 [11]. The project has been halted indefinitely due to the economic impacts of COVID-19 and threats posed by Islamic extremist insurgency in the area. These external pressures, coupled with the broken promises of future investment, leave Mozambique with 65 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This gas could have been used to power growing cities in Western Africa, but instead lies untouched and sacrifices thousands of potential jobs in the Mozambique energy industry [11].

The African continent contains some of the largest natural gas fields in the world. Natural gas burns cleaner than coal and oil, generating about half as much CO 2 . Theoretically, if the continent suddenly tripled their electricity consumption overnight, with all new consumption coming from natural gas plants, the global carbon emissions would only increase by 0.62% [12]. Why should the world curtail investments that better the lives of hundreds of millions of people for the sake of a small fraction of global pollution? The developed world, primarily the United States, European Union, India, Russia, and China – the countries that create the most CO 2 pollution – should focus on curtailing pollution at home rather than abroad. If each of the aforementioned countries cut emissions levels by only 1%, global CO 2 emissions would fall by 0.57%. The countries that are focused on stopping fossil fuel development abroad must focus instead on bringing their own levels of emissions down. Doing so would support the fight against climate change more effectively than curtailing fossil fuel production and consumption in the developing world. 

The problem is that the world can eliminate fossil fuel use and harm current generations or continue the use of fossil fuels and potentially harm future generations. Wealthy nations can switch to using renewable energy technologies to create electricity and drive electric cars. However, in the rest of the world, those items are luxuries that cannot be supported by existing infrastructure. In Haiti, there is no way for the “tap tap” trucks – the Haitian version of a yellow cab – to switch to electric cars when only 40% of the country has access to electricity [13]. Such facts must be considered when divesting from fossil fuel investments that would otherwise benefit the lives of those living in the developing world.

Ethical Issue in Divesting

The fossil fuel dilemma first must be analyzed using environmental ethics. Environmental ethics state that nature (animals, plants, landscapes, etc.) must be given the same rights as human beings. The environmental ethics approach considers the interests of the following two parties: all creatures (people, animals, and nature) that live on Earth today and all the creatures that live on Earth in the future. 

If the world continues to consume fossil fuels unabated, the atmosphere will become filled with greenhouse gasses. The increased concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere will result in numerous adverse effects on the planet. Primarily, the planet will lose biodiversity. As biodiversity in nature decreases, unique plants and animals will be lost to extinction. Furthermore, increased greenhouse gasses cause an increase in intensity of natural disasters such as fires, hurricanes, and flooding, all of which will damage the natural environment. 

The melting glaciers contributing to sea level rise put all humans at risk. Increasing global temperatures are altering weather patterns, creating stronger storms that occur more frequently. The World Health Organization expects an additional 250,000 people per year to die because of storms, food shortages, and extreme weather events due to climate change between now and 2050 [14]. In light of the consequences, the solution does not appear to be obvious. Should the world prioritize the lives of future people impacted by climate change, or prioritize the quality of life for billions of people in the developing world today? The environmental ethics approach does not lead to a clear solution. 

Considering the extreme example, what happens to the global climate if all fossil fuel use is immediately stopped? All the CO 2 already in the atmosphere will remain there until natural processes, such as photosynthesis from plants and algae, remove it from the air. This is a process that takes thousands of years. A pplying the brakes while driving a car, the vehicle does not immediately stop. Climate behaves similarly. It takes forty years for the effects of human actions to impact the climate, dubbed the “40-year lag” by climate scientists [15]. If humanity stopped all greenhouse emitting activities in twenty years, a more realistic target, sixty years would elapse before the benefits of the actions were realized. Since few countries run on 100 percent renewable energy, the lives of people all over the world would be affected for four decades after the cessation. This could put social progress and civil rights at risk and increase the threat of global unrest. 

Utilitarianism determines the moral or right decision based upon which outcome creates the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. The same two groups will be analyzed, the creatures of today and the creatures of the future. If fossil fuels continue to be used, the global climate will face consequences, adversely impacting the people of the future. On the other hand, if all fossil fuel use is curtailed in a short time frame, only some people will thrive while the rest will struggle due to wealth and resource inequality. Neither result leads to the overall happiness of either population; therefore, the approach does not lead to a clear answer and another ethical framework must be utilized to bring a possible answer into focus. 

The common good ethical framework seeks to create conditions that are overall advantageous to both groups provided that some sacrifices are made for the sake of betterment in the larger community. Using the common good approach, the following question can be addressed: How can humanity today balance the needs of the developing world and the needs of posterity? For the people living in the developed world today, the push to eliminate fossil fuels, while justly motivated, must be balanced against the right of those living in the developing world to create better lives by progressing out of poverty.  Under the common good approach, the best solution would be a scenario in which the use of fossil fuels in wealthy countries will be curtailed significantly, primarily because wealthier countries produce an outsized share of CO 2 emissions. At the same time, the developing world could continue to use fossil fuels to maintain and improve their quality of life.

Looking Forward

The world must be careful as a future without fossil fuels begins to become a reality. In the developed world, investments must be made towards creating a better system for replacing fossil fuels domestically. Since fewer CO 2 emissions come from the developing world, more economically developed nations must continue to invest in fossil fuel technologies to ensure that the developing world can prosper economically. Global emissions from developed countries can be limited by constructing new nuclear power plants, wind farms, and solar fields. Simultaneously, investments in renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure within developing countries can allow those plans to come to fruition. When the developing world can rise out of the cycle of systemic poverty, the world can completely divest from fossil fuels in a safe way that will not harm the livelihoods of billions.

By Benjamin Martin, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California

About the Author

At the time of writing this paper, Benjamin was a junior studying Mechanical Engineering. Outside of the classroom, Benjamin could be found working with the Rocket Propulsion Lab and researching metallic glasses under Dr. Paulo Branicio. After USC, Benjamin plans on pursuing a career in the aerospace industry.

[1] R. Lindsey, “Climate change: Atmospheric carbon dioxide,” climate.gov , Oct. 7, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide . [Accessed: Dec. 11, 2021]. 

[2] “Americans’ opinion on renewables and other energy sources,” Pew Research Center , Dec. 30, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2016/10/04/public-opinion-on-renewables-and-other-energy-sources/ . [Accessed: Dec. 11, 2021]. 

[3] “Ending Poverty,” United Nations . [Online]. Available: https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/ending-poverty . [Accessed: Oct. 26, 2021]. 

[4] H. Ritchie, “Who has contributed most to Global CO2 emissions?” Our World in Data , Oct. 1, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2 . [Accessed: Nov. 9, 2021]. 

[5] T. Moss and J. Kincer, “What happens to global emissions if Africa triples down on natural gas for power?” Energy For Growth , Sep. 11, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.energyforgrowth.org/blog/what-happens-to-global-emissions-if-africa-triples-down-on-natural-gas-for-power/ . [Accessed: Nov. 9, 2021]. 

[6] “Alta Wind Energy Center (AWEC), California,” Power Technology , Oct. 20, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.power-technology.com/projects/alta-wind-energy-center-awec-california/ . [Accessed: Oct. 26, 2021]. 

[7] H. Ritchie and M. Roser, “Deforestation and forest loss,” Our World in Data , Feb. 9, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation . [Accessed: Oct. 26, 2021]. 

[8] M. S. Booth, “Trees, Trash, and Toxics: How biomass energy has become the new coal,” Partnership for Policy Integrity , Apr. 2, 2014. [Online]. Available: https://www.pfpi.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/PFPI-Biomass-is-the-New-Coal-April-2-2014.pdf . [Accessed: Dec. 11, 2021]. 

[9] M. Araya, Ed., “Wood-Based Biomass Energy Development for Sub-Saharan Africa,” Open Knowledge Repository , Sept., 2011. [Online]. Available: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/26149/NonAsciiFileName0.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y . [Accessed: Dec. 11, 2021]. 

[10] S. Edberg, “Burning Wood is Worse than Coal for the Environment ,” Climate Interactive , May 8, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.climateinteractive.org/media-coverage/new-york-times-op-ed-burning-wood-is-worse-than-coal-for-the-climate/ . [Accessed: Oct. 26, 2021]. 

[11] S. Andreasson, “Fossil fuel divestment will increase carbon emissions, not lower them – here’s why,” The Conversation , Aug. 6, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://theconversation.com/fossil-fuel-divestment-will-increase-carbon-emissions-not-lower-them-heres-why-126392 . [Accessed: Oct. 26, 2021]. 

[12] D. Ayemba, “Mozambique LNG project timeline and All you need to know,” Construction Review Online , Sept. 26, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://constructionreviewonline.com/project-timelines/mozambique-lng-project-timeline-and-all-you-need-to-know/ . [Accessed: Nov. 7, 2021]. 

[13] “Haiti – Energy,” Privacy Shield . [Online]. Available: https://www.privacyshield.gov/article?id=Haiti-Energy#:~:text=In%20Haiti%2C%20about%2040%20percent,15%20percent%20in%20rural%20areas . [Accessed: Oct. 26, 2021]. 

[14] “Climate change and health,” World Health Organization , Oct. 30, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health . [Accessed: Nov. 10, 2021]. 

[15] “The time lag of climate change,” Earth.org . [Online]. Available: https://earth.org/data_visualization/the-time-lag-of-climate-change/ . [Accessed: Oct. 26, 2021].

Links for Further Reading

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/34011/9781464813405.pdf

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/africa/2021-08-31/divestment-delusion

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• 20 April 2021

Blanket bans on fossil-fuel funds will entrench poverty

• Vijaya Ramachandran 0

Vijaya Ramachandran is the director for energy and development at the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, California.

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Last week, seven European countries pledged to stop important support for fossil-fuel projects abroad. They join the United States and other European countries in stopping funding for energy infrastructure projects in poor countries that depend on coal, gas and oil. This blanket ban will entrench poverty in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, but do little to reduce the world’s carbon emissions.

Africa accounts for around 17% of the world’s people but less than 4% of annual global carbon emissions. It is not fair for rich countries to fight climate change at the cost of low-income countries’ development and climate resilience. Instead, rich countries should help African governments to pursue a broad portfolio of energy sources for rapid, sustainable development.

The fossil-fuel infrastructure that already exists in Africa is carbon-intensive and serves its wealthiest countries. South Africa and several North African countries together hold two-thirds of the continent’s electricity-generation capacity. The other 48 countries have a capacity of only 81 gigawatts between them, out of a total of 244 gigawatts across Africa and 9,740 gigawatts for the world. The average Ethiopian consumes only 130 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, about the amount the average person in the United States consumes in 4 days.

This imbalance is both a cause and a consequence of Africa’s lack of modern infrastructure. For hundreds of millions of people across Africa, energy is scarce, food is expensive and often imported, and full-time employment is hard to find. Much of what is necessary for development — roads, schools, housing, reliable power — cannot be realized quickly with green power alone.

Can the world kick its fossil-fuel addiction fast enough?

Natural gas is a fossil fuel, but it could do much to lift communities out of poverty efficiently. It is roughly twice as carbon-efficient an energy source as coal, and is abundant in many African countries outside North Africa, including Nigeria, Mozambique, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Energy for Growth Hub, an international research network, estimates that if the 48 countries tripled their electricity consumption overnight through use of natural gas, the resulting carbon emissions would be less than 1% of the global total (see go.nature.com/3app2ff ).

Natural gas also offers the best way to modernize food production and transport. Despite impressive efforts in solar irrigation systems across Africa, natural gas is still better for large-scale agriculture; it is reliable, inexpensive and burns more cleanly than other fossil fuels. It can be stored until needed. It is one of the best feedstocks for producing synthetic fertilizer; it can power cars, buses, trucks and ships, plus cold-storage systems. That means less food will spoil, and farmers can supply more food with less land.

A blanket ban on fossil fuels will do little to propel growth of renewable energies across Africa: that growth is already under way. The electricity for Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique and Uganda — which together represent one-fifth of Africa’s population — comes mainly from renewable resources like hydroelectric power. Moreover, fossil-fuel development can be used as renewable sources are built up, laying the groundwork for more ambitious projects. A 2020 PhD thesis (see go.nature.com/3tbfg25 ) found that ‘dispatchable’ gas-fuelled generators that are movable would be essential for South Africa to transition to renewable electricity, because wind and solar sources would be too variable as they were scaled up. And there is risk in scaling up too fast — the intermittent supply from a large wind farm in Kenya has made the electrical grid costly to operate.

The United States can help the IMF to rethink how it lends

Critics will counter that those with interests in fossil fuels will attempt to squeeze out renewable sources, and that governments might be captured by fossil-fuel lobbies. I understand these concerns, but, speaking as an advocate for sustainability, I believe fossil fuels are still necessary. International finance institutions must prioritize funding for renewable-energy projects whenever possible, and rich countries must invest in research and development that will bring down the costs of renewable energy. They must also not discount the plight of poverty. (Almost 600 million Africans lack reliable access to electricity.) As natural disasters and other climate risks become more common, people’s need for roads, hospitals, resilient power grids, warning systems, robust food supplies and other infrastructure that requires reliable energy will be even greater.

Rather than banning fossil fuels in development projects, the European Union, United States and World Bank should adopt funding criteria that consider economic growth alongside climate impact. For example, the exploitation of a substantial resource of 4.2 trillion cubic metres of natural gas along the Tanzania–Mozambique border would expand access to electricity and generate much-needed revenue in two low-income, low-emitting countries. I can imagine a tiered system in which countries with lower per-capita incomes, low emissions or high use of green energy are deemed more eligible for development projects that depend on fossil fuels. Any infrastructure that is built should be modern and well maintained, to reduce waste caused by leaks and the need to flare methane gas.

Most of the legacy emissions causing global warming came from rich countries, which still rely on fossil fuels. It would be the height of climate injustice to impose restrictions on the nations most in need of modern infrastructure and least responsible for the world’s climate challenges.

Nature 592 , 489 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01020-z

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Should we depend on fossil fuels or renewable energy?

• should we depend on fossil fuels or renewable energy?

*Updated 2023

With more focus on the environment, especially following extreme weather events such as historic  snowstorms in texas or unprecedented tropical storms in california, not to mention the un’s cautionary warnings about global warming, the battle between fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal) and renewable energy (specifically solar and wind energy for this article) is increasingly relevant. should the global economy continue depending on fossil fuels or should renewable energy replace them, here are three arguments in support of fossil fuels and three in support of renewable energy., why we should depend on fossil fuels.

High energy density

Fossil fuels are the world’s dominant energy source mainly because of their high  energy density . Energy density is the amount of energy stored in something. When it comes to fossil fuels, oil – or more precisely, its fuel derivative, gasoline – has a very high energy density, especially compared to solar energy. This makes gasoline more efficient.

For example, a mere gallon of gas contains enough energy to charge an iPhone every day for  almost 20 years . In comparison, the  energy density in solar power is so low  that even if you get enough solar power to charge your phone, it’ll most likely need to be recharged the very next day.

More economical: cheaper and safer to store and transport

Fossil fuels  are considered some of the planet’s cheapest fuel sources. Sure, the process of extraction and refinement is expensive, but the return on investment more than makes up for it. Plus, today’s  innovative technologies  may now be able to use fossil fuels in ways that don’t pollute.

Also, the constant state of fossil fuels’ molecular composition means they don’t form other compounds when stored in canisters for long periods. This makes them easy to store and safe to transport over long distances, either on trucks or pumped through pipes above and below ground. The same cannot be said about handling or transporting nuclear energy, whose risks outweigh its extremely high levels of energy density.

Source availability and reliability

Oil, natural gas and coal are reliable sources of energy because they are  abundant and easily available . In fact, fossil fuels can be found in almost every country and will not be depleted any time soon. Plus, with the speed at which  technology  is constantly developing, fossil fuel extraction and refinery procedures have improved, making their availability even greater.

This reliability includes generating electricity, transporting fuels, and making byproducts, like plastics, cosmetics, and even medicine, for the world population’s  energy needs . Fossil fuels also provide more reliable sources of electricity than solar and wind energy since they are not dependent on  climactic conditions .

Why We Should Depend on Renewable Energy

Endless potential for technology and job creation

Unlike oil, natural gas and coal, solar and wind energy are  technologies  – not fuel. This means they are not restricted by eventual depletion or an innovation cap. As research continues and technologies improve, there will be even more advances in renewable energy – and at lower costs.

And with technological growth comes  job creation , not only in  the US  but also worldwide. While fossil fuel technologies are mostly mechanized, the renewable energy industry is more about labor. According to the  Environmental Defense Fund , jobs in the solar and wind power sectors have grown at about 20% annually in recent years. And this is just the beginning.

Stable Energy Prices

Renewable energy sources can be continually replenished through natural processes, unlike fossil fuels. This can, perhaps, limit the potential for political conflicts, wars and, especially, price volatility. Renewable energy is already providing affordable electricity across the  United States . The trend is soaring as costs to generate electricity from solar and wind power are  steadily declining . In fact, in 2019, US renewable energy consumption surpassed coal for the first time in over 130 years.

While renewable energy facilities are costly to build, once built, operations are low-cost, especially as the fuel is free for most renewable technologies. This leads to relatively stable renewable energy prices over time. In contrast, fossil fuel prices are vulnerable to dramatic price swings. Increasing our reliance on renewable energy can also help protect consumers when fossil fuel prices jump.

No harmful impact on environment or health 

The most obvious advantage of renewable energy is its environmental impact, or lack thereof. Solar and wind energy, among other renewable energies, are non-pollutants, producing little to no  global warming emissions . In contrast,  fossil fuels  overload our atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. These all trap  heat , which steadily increases Earth’s temperature and creates  disastrous impacts  on our environment and climate.

Health-wise, the air and water pollution (even in our drinking water) emitted by coal and natural gas plants is linked to breathing problems,  neurological damage , heart attacks, and cancer. Also, unlike fossil fuels, wind and solar energy don’t need water to operate and therefore don’t erode or pollute our water resources and ground.

The Bottom Line:  The availability and high energy density of fossil fuels make them a more economical resource to depend on for energy. However, they significantly contribute to global warming whereas renewable energy is a non-pollutant with limitless technological potential and output. Should America continue relying on fossil fuels or switch entirely to renewable energy?

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the environment debate

Banning the sale of fossil-fuel cars benefits the climate when replaced by electric cars

If a ban were introduced on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, and they were replaced by electric cars, the result would be a great reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. That is the finding of new research from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, looking at emissions from the entire life cycle -- from manufacture of electric cars and batteries, to electricity used for operation. However, the total effect of a phasing out of fossil-fuelled cars will not be felt until the middle of the century -- and how the batteries are manufactured will affect the extent of the benefit.

A rapid and mandatory phasing in of electric cars could cause emissions from Swedish passenger cars' exhausts to approach zero by 2045. The Swedish government has proposed an outright ban on the sale of new fossil fuel cars from the year 2030 -- but that alone will not be enough to achieve Sweden's climate targets on schedule.

"The lifespan of the cars currently on the roads and those which would be sold before the introduction of such a restriction mean that it would take some time -- around 20 years -- before the full effect becomes visible," says Johannes Morfeldt, researcher in Physical Resource Theory at Chalmers University of Technology and lead author of the recently published scientific study.

To have the desired effect, a ban would either need to be introduced earlier, by the year 2025, or, if the ban is not brought in until 2030, then the use of biofuels in petrol and diesel cars needs to increase significantly before then -- in accordance with the revised Swedish "reduction obligation." The combination of these two measures would have the effect of achieving zero emissions from passenger vehicles and keeping to Sweden's climate targets.

"The results from our study show that rapid electrification of the Swedish car fleet would reduce life cycle emissions, from 14 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2020 to between 3 and 5 million tonnes by the year 2045. The end result in 2045 will depend mainly on the extent to which possible emission reductions in the manufacturing industry are realised," says Johannes Morfeldt.

A transition from petrol and diesel cars to electric cars will mean an increased demand for batteries. Batteries for electric cars are often criticised, not least for the fact that they result in high levels of greenhouse gas emissions during manufacture.

"There are relatively good opportunities to reduce emissions from global battery manufacturing. Our review of the literature on this shows that average emissions from global battery manufacturing could decrease by about two thirds per kilowatt hour of battery capacity by the year 2045. However, most battery manufacturing takes place overseas, so Swedish decision-makers have more limited opportunities to influence this question," says Johannes Morfeldt.

From a climate perspective, it does not matter where the emissions take place, and the risk with decisions taken at a national level for lowering passenger-vehicle emissions is that they could lead to increased emissions elsewhere -- a phenomenon sometimes termed 'carbon leakage'. In this case, the increase in emissions would result from greater demand for batteries, and the risk is thus greater the higher the emissions from battery production.

In that case, the Swedish decision would not have as great an effect on reducing the climate impact as desired. The life-cycle emissions would end up in the upper range -- around 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide instead of around 3 million tonnes. Due to this, there may be reason to regulate emissions in both vehicle and battery production, from a life cycle perspective.

"Within the EU, for example, there is a discussion about setting a common standard for the manufacture of batteries and vehicles -- in a similar way as there is a standard that regulates what may be emitted from exhausts," says Johannes Morfeldt.

But, given Sweden's low emissions from electricity production, a ban on sales of new fossil-fuel cars would indeed result in a sharp reduction of the total climate impact, regardless of how the manufacturing industry develops.

The results of the study are based on Swedish conditions, but the method used by the researchers can be used to obtain corresponding figures for other countries, based on each country's car fleet and energy system. The year 2045 is highlighted because that is when greenhouse gas emissions within Sweden should reach net zero according to the climate policy goals of the country.

• Automotive and Transportation
• Environmental Policy
• Global Warming
• Energy and the Environment
• Energy Issues
• Environmental Policies
• Transportation Issues
• Alternative fuel vehicle
• Electricity
• Battery electric vehicle
• Electric power
• Carbon dioxide
• Ocean acidification
• Alcohol fuel
• Flexible-fuel vehicle

Story Source:

Materials provided by Chalmers University of Technology . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Johannes Morfeldt, Simon Davidsson Kurland, Daniel J.A. Johansson. Carbon footprint impacts of banning cars with internal combustion engines . Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment , 2021; 95: 102807 DOI: 10.1016/j.trd.2021.102807

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• The best case for and against a fracking ban

Fracking has helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But it also keeps us dependent on fossil fuels.

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During the vice presidential debate, Vice President Mike Pence accused former Vice President Joe Biden and California Sen. Kamala Harris of wanting to ban hydraulic fracturing.

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want to raise taxes, bury our economy over a $2 trillion Green New Deal,” Pence said. “They want to abolish fossil fuels and ban fracking.”

Harris, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, was adamant that this was not true. “First of all, I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking,” Harris said. “That is a fact. That is a fact.”

Biden’s plan to address climate change calls for the United States to zero out its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 while helping the workers and communities that may suffer job losses in the switch to clean energy. It does not mention fracking at all.

Trump, meanwhile, has no published plan to deal with climate change. He has, however, relaxed environmental regulations around mining and drilling in the United States to boost US fossil fuel production.

Activists have pushed presidential contenders to address fracking — which involves pumping highly pressurized water, sand, and other chemicals into a rock formation to create fractures that can release trapped oil and gas — because it has radically reshaped the US economic, energy, political, and environmental landscape.

It’s turned the United States into the largest oil producer in the world. It helped pull the country out of a recession. It’s created boomtowns flush with cash in once sparsely populated parts of the country. At the same time, fracking has led to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the US.

Wastewater injection from fracking wells has also caused a spike in earthquakes. It has caused local air quality and safety problems. And while they’re cleaner than coal, oil and gas from fracking are still fossil fuels.

For policymakers, the difficult choice is deciding whether the benefits outweigh the harm, and if fuels from fracking can be a stepping stone toward cleaner energy. “This is one of those issues where there’s just so much gray,” Sam Ori, executive director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, told Vox in 2019. “I don’t think that there’s a really clear case that says fracking is necessarily good or bad, on net.”

And for presidential candidates, it’s tough to find the right pitch to voters, who are themselves divided. A 2019 poll by KFF and the Cook Political Report of voters in the key swing states of Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, showed widespread support for proposals like the Green New Deal , but much less support for a fracking ban. In Pennsylvania, 69 percent of swing voters said they support a Green New Deal, but only 39 percent wanted to ban fracking.

It’s a microcosm of the broader policy discussion about the role of the fossil fuel industry in the carbon-constrained future, whether it should be fought as an adversary or embraced as a partner.

As for fracking, researchers and analysts have been studying it for years and still continue to debate its merits. Here is a summary of the best arguments for and against a ban on fracking.

The best case against a ban: Fracking has reduced greenhouse gas emissions and helped expand clean energy

Though hydraulic fracturing as a technique has been around since the 19th century and the first commercial fracking for gas took place in the 1940s, the most recent fracking boom started in earnest around 2005. That’s when the rising prices of oil and gas forced energy companies to look for other sources, when related techniques like horizontal drilling and low-cost slickwater fracking matured, and new estimates revealed the gargantuan amounts of gas stored in formations like Marcellus Shale .

Fracking has now become the dominant technique for extracting oil and gas in the US.

Fracking has risen against the backdrop of the United States’ massive carbon footprint. The US is responsible for the highest share of cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions of any county. Currently, it’s the second-largest emitter in the world, behind China. It also has some of the highest per capita emissions in the world.

Scientists have warned that if humanity wants to limit warming this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, countries would need to halve global emissions by as soon as 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

During much of the fracking boom, the US economy grew and emissions declined . One study found that between 2005 and 2012, fracking created 725,000 jobs in the industry, not counting related supporting jobs. “This has been one of the most dynamic parts of the U.S. economy — you’re talking about millions of jobs,” Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of IHS Markit and founder of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, told CNBC .

That’s largely due to natural gas from fracking displacing coal in electricity production. Natural gas emits about half of the greenhouse gas emissions of coal per unit of energy. It doesn’t have the massive land footprint that open pit mines or mountaintop removal coal mines do. While it has its own pollution problems, burning natural gas doesn’t produce pollutants like ash and mercury, which can pose health and environmental hazards for years.

“Regardless of what you believe about the future, shale gas has played a substantial role in getting rid of carbon emissions and conventional emissions from coal,” said Ori.

A 2013 report from the Breakthrough Institute titled “ Coal Killer ” explained that coal-fired power generation declined from producing 50 percent of US electricity in 2007 to 37 percent in 2012. Natural gas from fracking largely rose to fill that void.

The main reason for this shift is that fracked natural gas is cheaper than coal for the energy it produces. That makes it attractive for utilities, especially in competitive markets. Many natural gas power plants use combined-cycle gas turbines . Not only do they produce 50 percent more energy for the same amount of fuel compared to a single-cycle turbine, they can spool up quickly to meet surges in demand or shortfalls from other power producers. Compared to coal and nuclear power plants that have a harder time ramping up and down, this added flexibility makes natural gas power plants particularly valuable on the grid.

Even the newest, cleanest, more efficient coal-fired power plants struggle to compete with natural gas.

Natural gas’s flexibility has also eased the integration of variable renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. When the breezes slow down and clouds form above, natural gas steps in. This has reduced the need for other ways to compensate for intermittency, like energy storage.

In fact, as fracking has grown in the US, renewable energy generation has doubled since 2008. Renewables, including hydropower and biomass, now comprise just over 17 percent of total US electricity generation. Coupled with nuclear power, about 19 percent of the electricity mix, that still leaves nearly two-thirds of power generation that needs to decarbonize. And that will take years.

So fracked natural gas’s record as a coal slayer and renewable energy booster makes it a valuable weapon in the fight against climate change.

“If you’re talking about natural gas as a decarbonizing fuel while replacing coal, I think the facts on the ground really support that,” said Alex Trembath, a coauthor of the “Coal Killer” report and deputy director at the Breakthrough Institute. “We’ve actually seen significant growth in solar and wind in particular even alongside the fracking revolution.”

At the same time, fracking has helped insulate the US from global economic shocks, particularly in oil markets. US shale oil has provided more than half the growth in global oil supplies, so rising tensions and disruptions in countries like Iran, Libya, and Venezuela have barely moved the needle at the gas pump.

“The oil price impacts of those big disruptions have been pretty muted and a lot of that has to do with the incredible growth of shale oil as a source of new supply in the global market,” Ori said.

In short, natural gas obtained by fracking has reduced emissions, aided the economy, and helped clean energy rise, while costing less than dirtier fuels.

The best case for a ban: Fracking keeps us dependent on fossil fuels and undermines decarbonization

Both the oil and natural gas produced from fracking have their downsides. Natural gas is mainly used for power generation (it’s now the largest source of electricity in the US) while oil is mostly used for transportation, like cars, shipping, and aviation.

So while low natural gas prices have helped knock dirty coal off the market, low oil prices driven in part by fracking have encouraged more travel. In fact, transportation is now the largest source of greenhouse gases in the US. And after years of decline, US emissions in 2018 rose by 3.4 percent .

Low oil prices have undermined the business case for cleaner transportation alternatives, like electric cars and fuel cell-powered buses . Instead, the United States has experienced a growing appetite for larger, thirstier cars and more air travel .

Meanwhile, low natural gas prices have had some collateral damage for nuclear power , the largest source of clean electricity in the US. Some of the nuclear power plants that have announced early retirements are likely to see their capacity replaced by natural gas . So while replacing coal with natural gas often leads to a reduction in emissions, replacing nuclear energy leads to an increase.

Natural gas itself can also become a climate problem. Methane, the dominant component of natural gas, produces less carbon dioxide than coal when burned. But if methane leaks, which it often does in some quantity during normal gas extraction operations, it becomes a potent greenhouse gas. Over 100 years, a quantity of methane traps more than 25 times the amount of heat compared to a similar amount of carbon dioxide.

Of course, methane is the product, so the gas industry has an incentive to limit leaks. But leaks are difficult to track, and they could easily overwhelm the gains from replacing coal.

Robert Howarth, a researcher studying shale gas at Cornell University, recently reported that US shale gas production plays an outsized role in global methane emissions . He estimated that over the past 10 years, more than half of the global increase in methane emissions came from fracking in the US.

“Natural gas production in the United States is leaking somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.5 percent of the gas we produce into the atmosphere which is, you know a relatively small amount of gas if you think about it. Most of it is getting to market,” Howarth said. “But that 3.5 percent is enough to do severe damage to the climate.”

This is a higher leakage estimate than the EPA and the industry calculate, but with the Trump administration’s ongoing rollbacks of Obama-era regulations on monitoring and restricting fugitive emissions of methane, the problem is poised to worsen.

And then there’s the technique of fracking itself. It requires a massive volume of water . Wells can release toxic chemicals like benzene into the air. Fracking sites can experience explosions and fires . They can contaminate drinking water . More than 17 million people in the US live within a mile of an active fracking well, and research shows that fracking can lead to low birth weight in infants born in that radius.

Many of these environmental risks, on balance, are less than those associated with mining and burning coal. However, the sudden surge in fracking means many people are being confronted with its impacts for the first time, making it a more vivid political concern. That’s in contrast to coal hazards, which are mostly familiar to the public consciousness.

Another factor is that the business case for fracking is starting to weaken as more drillers declare bankruptcy . The Rocky Mountain Institute estimates that clean energy is already competitive with new natural gas power plants, and by 2035, it will be cheaper to build new wind, solar, and storage projects than to continue running 90 percent of existing gas power plants.

And when it comes to limiting climate change, a key factor is time. Methane leaked from gas wells can stay in the atmosphere for a decade. Carbon dioxide from burning it can linger for a century. So it is imperative to ramp down greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible. Yet every new natural gas power plant represents a decades-long commitment to continue using the fuel. That means gas plants will have to install carbon capture systems, which would add to their operating costs and worsen the business case further, or some poor investor is going to be left holding the bag.

“Not only is natural gas dangerous and destructive, it’s increasingly unnecessary,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “We do think there should be a national ban on fracking.”

What can a president actually do about fracking?

President Obama often boasted about the rise of the United States as an energy producer. President Trump has pushed to leverage US oil and gas in order to exert energy dominance . But it’s clear that the era of bipartisan support for fracking at the national level has come to an end.

Obama: "Suddenly America is the largest oil producer, that was me people ... say thank you." pic.twitter.com/VfQfX1SR0x — Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 28, 2018

Now some Democrats are openly hostile to the fossil fuel industry , with Sen. Bernie Sanders calling for criminal prosecution of some companies.

The federal government can limit export licenses for oil and natural gas. However, a lot of the energy policy in the United States is governed at the state and local level, so a president can’t easily shape the agenda without local backing.

At the local level, despite environmental and safety concerns, voters have been reluctant to restrict fracking. A ballot measure that would have severely restricted fracking in Colorado failed in 2018, despite Democrats winning the governorship and majorities in both state houses.

Breakthrough’s Trembath argued that a president would best be served by building an off-ramp for the bridge away from fracking, rather than cutting it off. It would be less disruptive and contentious and would allow the country to continue harnessing the benefits of fracking while coming up with better options.

“The first way we hasten the end of the bridge is to make the [alternative] technology cheaper,” he said.

That would require investment in clean energy research and development, particularly for technologies like long-duration energy storage and advanced nuclear. Pricing carbon dioxide would also help ensure that the biggest sources of greenhouse gases get reduced first, and the revenue these prices generate could fund further research. Biden’s climate plan stipulates that “domestic polluters bear the full cost of their carbon pollution.” So while fracking may continue under a Biden administration, it may become more costly over time.

Update, October 7, 2020: This story was originally published in 2019. It has been updated now to reflect discussion of a fracking ban during the 2020 vice-presidential debate.

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A New York Bill Seeks to Reduce Natural Gas Use. Here’s What to Know.

Legislators and activists are rallying to squeeze the NY HEAT Act into the state budget by the April 1 deadline.

By Hilary Howard

Reporting from Albany, N.Y.

A bill gaining traction in Albany aims to break New Yorkers’ reliance on natural gas in hopes that they will seek out greener alternatives.

Efforts to shoehorn the NY HEAT Act into a packed state budget are underway, with supporters contending that swift action is necessary because of the pressures of climate change and opponents say the proposed law should be set aside and more carefully considered. The deadline to finalize the budget is April 1.

But what does the bill propose, exactly? Here’s what to know.

What would it do?

The NY HEAT (New York Home Energy Affordable Transition) Act seeks to limit a requirement known as the “obligation to serve,” where utilities automatically provide gas to new customers who request it, and to curb the expansion of gas infrastructure.

Gas companies must provide free hookups to new customers within 100 feet of the pipe system. Existing ratepayers subsidize the work.

Getting rid of the so-called 100-foot rule would save ratepayers about $200 million annually and encourage utilities and new customers to explore other energy options.

What’s the goal?

The bill’s broader aim is to accelerate a shift away from natural gas and help limit emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that cause global warming.

“Current law is slanted toward natural gas,” Michael Gerrard, an environmental law professor at Columbia Law School, said. “This new law will level the playing field and take away some of that preference.”

More than half of New York’s greenhouse gases come from buildings and transportation, and in New York City, buildings account for about 70 percent of these emissions .

The Climate Act , signed into law in 2019, requires New York to decrease greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030 and 85 percent by 2050 from 1990 levels. NY HEAT seeks to contribute to those goals.

“We are in a race against time,” said Liz Krueger, a Democratic senator sponsoring the bill, “not because of the mandates of our legislation, but because of the reality that the world is in crisis and at risk of self-destruction.”

What’s not to like about that?

Those who oppose NY HEAT have raised concerns that the rush to include the bill in the budget could result in future problems with the reliability of energy infrastructure.

“If you remove service to a neighborhood, you’re inevitably going to impact service in surrounding areas, because it’s an interconnected energy system,” said Randy Rucinski, chief regulatory counsel for National Fuel Gas Distribution Corporation, which provides energy in western New York.

Opponents also fear the proposal will cost jobs in the gas industry without offsetting the losses in the still-emerging green energy sector.

Alternative energy should be “readily available and affordable across the state before proposals like the NY HEAT Act are considered,” said Mario Cilento, president of the New York State AFL-CIO.

One of the bill’s goals is to cap energy bills for customers; although it does not say specifically how this would be accomplished, some opponents argue it could hurt efforts to conserve energy.

“What is your incentive to turn off the lights when you walk out of the room? Or to use energy-efficient lightbulbs and refrigerators?” said Daniel Ortega, executive director of New Yorkers for Affordable Energy , a coalition of business and labor interests.

Because of these concerns, some critics want the bill studied further. “We should have this conversation in an open way in which every single aspect of the energy industry is taken into consideration,” Mr. Ortega said.

What do supporters say?

“The autopilot of gas hookups must stop,” said Assemblywoman Patricia Fahy, a Democratic sponsor of NY HEAT who represents Albany and parts of Albany County.

Gas will still be an option, Ms. Fahy added. But the bill does intend to accelerate green development.

One way it will do this is by encouraging entire neighborhoods to shift to renewable energy sources in unison, said Jessica Azulay, executive director of the nonprofit Alliance for a Green Economy.

As people transition away from gas, “the same unions and the same workers that build gas pipes can build water pipes for thermal energy networks to supply people with clean heating and cooling,” Ms. Azulay said.

And the possibility of a cap on energy bills is an enticement for many New Yorkers, said Sonal Jessel, policy director at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a nonprofit group based in Harlem.

NY HEAT will not drive gas companies out of business, Professor Gerrard of Columbia University said. “These are still regulated utilities that are entitled to a rate of return,” he continued.

Where does the bill stand in budget talks?

Last year, the Senate passed NY HEAT but the Assembly did not. This week, the Senate passed it again.

It is up to the Assembly — most members of which now support the bill — and the governor, who has shown interest in parts of it , to reach a consensus on its inclusion in the budget.

If the bill does not become part of the budget, it could still become law, should the Assembly decide to vote on it later this year.

Hilary Howard is a Times reporter covering how the New York City region is adapting to climate change and other environmental challenges. More about Hilary Howard

Politics in the New York Region

Targeting Trans Athletes: A proposed ban on transgender women playing on women’s sports teams  has turned a Long Island county into the latest battleground for conservatives who have put cultural issues at the center of a nationwide political strategy.

Illegal Donations: A Chinese business titan pleaded guilty to federal charges that he made more than $10,000 in straw donor contributions to political candidates  — including, a person familiar with the case said, to a New York congressman and Mayor Eric Adams.

A Cannabis Mess: Gov. Kathy Hochul has ordered officials to come up with a fix for the way New York licenses cannabis businesses  amid widespread frustration over the plodding pace of the state’s legal cannabis rollout.

N.Y. Budget: Both of New York’s legislative chambers have announced their budget proposals. They have until April 1 to hash out a spending plan  with Gov. Kathy Hochul, who unveiled her proposal in January .

Covid Deaths: Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo was subpoenaed to appear  before a House subcommittee to answer for his administration’s handling of nursing homes during the pandemic, a development that could further damage his chances at a political comeback.

Redistricting: After rejecting a congressional map proposed by the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission  and seizing control of the drawing process, Democrats adopted new district lines  that would improve their chances of winning the House majority in November, but not drastically.

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