Since I became immersed in Climate Change impacts in 2004 and energy transition in 2006, I have been waiting for the moment when both paradigms might converge in a common strategy framed in a shared context of awareness. That destination in time, space and understanding seems as remote as ever. I am reminded of this in a convergence of articles in yesterday’s New York Times.
Joe Nocera writes of a coal gasification project in Texas that holds promise of bringing coal back into the realm of tolerable energy options by reducing its carbon footprint and other collateral damages of pollution. He lists five benefits of a project currently under way in Texas. My auditor’s skepticism (cynicism) senses that the actual applicability of the technology will fall considerably short of its theoretical promise, as have so many before it. But that is my assumption. Like His, it will be confirmed or refuted by experience.
Mr. Nocera engages Bill McKibben to weigh in on the proposal. Mr. McKibben responds, in essence, that a half bad solution is not a good solution from an environmental perspective. In this exchange is embedded the crux of Clim-Ergy’s most immediate dilemma: Do we sacrifice the economy for the environment, or the environment for the economy? This should not be cast as a binary choice, but as yet we have not found the sweet spot of a compromise.
Mr. Nocera in essence argues for coal gasification on the grounds that it makes tolerable a resource that will be used in any case by economic necessity. Mr. McKibben, by contrast, in many of his pronouncements dismisses the economic implications of taking actions that will prevent an environmental catastrophy. Unfortunately, more people understand the negative impacts of a radical economic transformation leading to contraction and dislocation far better than they understand the implications of an environmental catastrophy which will inflict its own economic consequences. Even with the benefit of recent climatic events, most people remain in denial of the severity that could await us under Mr. McKibben’s, and the scientific community at large, projections of climatic consequences. This is not new, and that is disturbing. While more people are coming to accept that we are experiencing accelerating climate change, relatively few are willing to sign up for Mr. McKibben’s prescription.
Which brings us to President Obama’s proposal yesterday of a $2 billion program to explore automobile technologies to replace the use of fossil fuels. These are to be funded by federal royalties on the extraction of more fossil fuels to power the cars we have and further support global warming in the interim. This is the essence of society’s deal with the devil. We will commit a sin to secure a virtue. It is a contorted logic indeed, but the one we are operating under.
Mr. Obama is only half the fool his critics in both parties make him out to be. He knows the score as well as anybody. He knows that to promote alternative auto technologies to sustain America’s competitive (job) edge tells joe and Jane six pack that he’s got their back on jobs, and their happy motoring illusion of freedom is not in jeopardy. In truth, the technology that will transform autos and reduce environmental impact will transform many other realms of energy consumption. Whether the personal auto will survive in a constrained economic future, by any means of propulsion, is a truth for the future to reveal. But he also knows that he must move us toward a new energy future for environmental and economic reasons, even if he will not spell out explicitly the forces that compel our transition and the destination that we must reach of necessity (‘the moral [and economic] equivalent of war’).
Finally, an article, The Facts on Fracking is a generally well-balanced and descriptive definition of the process and of selected findings regarding its impacts. The authors, Susan Brantley and Anna Meyendorff, bring their expertise to give some context to a subject that is too often addressed by partisans with no intention of balance. Still, much remains to be understood.
They note that:
– fracking and enhanced recovery methods have actually been around for a while;
– the new methods of enhanced recovery introduce toxic cocktails of chemical agents, often containing undisclosed ingredients;
– the drilling for gas occurs at levels well below the water tables for potable water, reducing risk of contamination;
– methane releases occur naturally for various reasons, and that such releases may not necessarily be the result of co-incident fracking per se;
– some pollution has occurred as a result of faulty installation of casings and failures of proper waste disposal practices, but is believed to be relatively infrequent.
All of this is true, as far as it goes.
But all of the preceding does not authoritatively answer a host of questions and observations:
– Regulation across the industry and across state regulatory boundaries is spotty and inconsistent at best, and state regulators, with few exceptions, are no match for the companies they are overseeing in expertise or resources or political clout to fulfill their public mandate.
– While fracking has been around for a while, the increase and intensity in recent years and the enabling new technologies introduce potentially new dynamics which are not fully understood and will not be until further history evolves.
– The industry has too often knee-capped necessary studies to get a more authoritative and objective handle on the consequences of its practices. The studies to date, and the statistics cited by the authors are informative, but not necessarily conclusive.
– While it may be true that we are not seeing measurable negative results of fracking at the moment, we are dealing with a technology that is permanently altering geological structures with unknown and unknowable consequences until it ages and reveals them, as is often the case with many technologies in many fields. To be sanguine about its safety at this point in its evolution is a tad premature.
The most unsettling part of the article was in this passage:
“Pennsylvania has seen rapid development of the Marcellus shale, a geological formation that could contain nearly 500 trillion cubic feet of gas — enough to power all American homes for 50 years at recent rates of residential use.”
This is the seduction of assumption that the gas industry has used to achieve what borders too often on carte blanc for its practices and aggressive exploitation of a limited resource: the hope and hype that we can go on as we have been. But it cannot be a promise until proven, and there are many equally authoritative professionals who question that the projected reserves will be realized, either because they are less than believed, or they cannot ever be economically extracted at some point. This argument has legs, because we are seeing it in the oil industry now, which is why we have an exploding gas industry (pun intended), even as it simultaneously implodes on depressed market prices.
So the question is: who do you trust? The average citizen questions the environmental position of McKibben and James Hansen as an unknowable projection that is probably exaggerated. But the average citizen wants to believe fervently in that 50-years-of-business-and-life-as-usual energy scenario, even if he/she doesn’t think about what lies beyond, because he/she will then be in the Great Beyond where heat and air conditioning and transportation are irrelevant. Besides, the President has also touted that same 50/60 year horizon of continued bliss. It must be true, even if you don’t believe he was born in Hawaii.
But what if the average citizen is wrong? What if the President is wrong? What if McKibben and Hansen are wrong? What if the energy companies follow the same code of ethics and responsibility as the financial services industry of late?
* * *
I struggled to discern whether Ms. Brantley and Ms. Meyendorff were delivering a balanced, if incomplete, critique of fracking, or a subtle defense of it. But the final paragraph seemed an appropriate conclusion, regardless of intent.
“But if fracked gas merely displaces efforts to develop cleaner, non-carbon, energy sources without decreasing reliance on coal, the doom and gloom of more rapid global climate change will be realized.”
That is the risk that Mr. Nocera’s article seems to ignore. That is the risk that Mr. Obama’s $2 billion bet seems to want to hedge. That is the destiny that Mr. McKibben and Mr. Hansen fear, with consequences that can neither be proven nor dismissed at this time, any more than the availability of gas reserves.
We are all participants in a communal game of craps in which we individually and collectively throw the dice, in ways great and small, and wait for the consequences which will befall us all.
Onward.
20130318
Integrated Man 