But that’s not the scariest number. The scary one is the third one—it comes from a team of financial analysts and environmentalists in London who calculated it in the summer of 2011 in an effort to educate investors about the possible downside risk to their stock portfolios.
The number is 2,795 gigatons—that’s the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal, oil, and gas reserves of the fossil fuel companies and countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil fuel companies. It’s the fossil fuel we’re currently planning to burn—and the key point is that 2,795 is higher than 565. Five times higher.
James Leaton led the Carbon Tracker Initiative, which used proprietary databases to figure out how much fuel each firm already had on the books. Oil and gas companies have to report their reserves annually to the Securities and Exchange Commission; reporting requirements are less strict for coal. (“I think the assumption is there’s so much coal around why would you worry?” said Leaton.) But painstakingly, company by company, they built their list. The numbers aren’t all absolutely perfect—they don’t fully reflect the surge in the past two years in shale gas and other unconventional energy, for instance. And Middle Eastern countries have been known to play games with the reported levels of their reserves, in part to protect their quota shares under OPEC agreements. For the biggest companies, though, the figures are quite exact. Russia’s Lukoil and Dallas’s ExxonMobil lead the list of oil and gas companies, for instance. If you burned everything currently in their inventories, each would release just over 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Which is exactly why this is such a big deal. We’ve known the other two numbers for quite a while. The 2 degrees is the limit—call it equivalent to the 0.08 blood alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks it takes to get there—say, the bottle of wine shared over the course of an evening that might let you stay just beneath that line. And the 2,795 gigatons? That’s the five bottles of wine that the fossil fuel industry has on the table, uncorked and ready to pour. To repeat: We already have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as any scientist thinks is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before anyone knew those numbers, our fate had been likely; now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain. It’s a lot like nuclear overkill: we’ve got five times the carbon that we need to cook the planet already in our arsenal. But this time we’re clearly planning to go ahead and push the button.
Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still physically in the soil. But it’s already economically aboveground—it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil fuel companies have fought so hard and so effectively to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide—those reserves are their assets, the holdings that give their companies their value. It’s why they’ve worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada’s tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or to frack the Appalachians—the value of ExxonMobil is, more or less, the value of those reserves. If you told ExxonMobil that they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of the company would plummet—a research report from the world’s second largest bank, HSBC, showed that such a restriction would cut its stock price in half.
The financial analyst John Fullerton, who runs the Capital Institute, tried to put a number on it. At today’s market values, he calculated, those 2,795 gigatons equal about $28 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you’d be writing off more than $20 trillion worth of assets, much of it belonging to the richest people on earth. The numbers aren’t exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look puny by comparison. Of course, it won’t necessarily burst—we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet, but now that we know the numbers it looks like you can’t have both.
Do the math. 2,795 is roughly five times 565. That’s how the story ends—unless we can leverage this new knowledge to somehow change the politics of this fight.
What Naomi had pointed out to me was that these numbers for the first time pinned down the fossil fuel industry—for the first time it was clear that they were planning to wreck the earth. Despite running hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ads proclaiming their commitment to some kind of sustainable future, their business plans proclaimed in black and white that they were going to take us over the edge. If ExxonMobil burned its current reserves, it would use up 7 percent of the available atmospheric space between us and the risk of two degrees. Chevron would fill about 5 percent, and Shell about 4 percent. Just among those three, of the two hundred firms listed in the Carbon Tracker report, you’d use up more than an eighth of the remaining two-degree budget. This industry alone holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they’re planning to use it.
Clearly they’re cognizant of global warming—they employ some of the world’s best scientists, and they’re bidding, after all, on all those Arctic oil leases made possible by the staggering melt of northern ice. And yet they relentlessly search for more hydrocarbons—in early March 2012, ExxonMobile CEO Rex Tillerson told Wall Street analysts that the company would spend $37 billion a year through 2015 (slightly more than $100 million a day) searching for yet more oil and gas.
You could argue that this is simply in the nature of these companies. Having found a profitable vein, they’re compelled to keep pursuing it. And so to call these companies enemies is to think of them as people, with some kind of free will. As I’ve said, they’re more like automatons, or bees—admirably efficient because they’re driven by pure profit.
But as the U.S. Supreme Court has decided, they are people of a sort, with a kind of free will. In fact, thanks to the size of its bankroll, the fossil fuel industry has far more moral agency than the rest of us—these companies don’t simply exist in a world whose hungers they fulfill, they help create the boundaries of that world. Left to our own devices, citizens might indeed decide to regulate carbon and stop short of the brink—the most recent polling shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans would back an international agreement that cut carbon emissions 90 percent by 2050. Most of us would be perfectly happy with power from the sun or the wind. But we aren’t left to our own devices.
The Koch brothers, for instance, have a combined wealth of $50 billion, meaning they trail only Bill Gates on the list of richest Americans. They’ve made most of their money in hydrocarbons, they know any system to regulate carbon would cut those profits, and they spent as much as $100 million on the 2012 elections. In the 2010 election cycle, the biggest player was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which took huge amounts of fossil fuel money and then outspent the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined; more than 90 percent of its support went to candidates who denied global warming. The week before the 2012 election Chevron made the largest contribution of the post–Citizens United era, spending millions to successfully ensure yet another Congress dominated by climate deniers.
* * *
So what should we do with this math? The plan Naomi and I had been turning over in our heads looked like this: the day after the presidential election we’d start a twenty-cities-in-twenty-nights road show around the country, beginning in Seattle. We’d gather as many people as we could each night, making sure that the bulk of them came from local colleges and universities. We’d go over the math, we’d have some music to charge people up, and then we’d send them off to see their trustees with this question: are you paying for our education by investments in an industry that guarantees we won’t have a planet to make use of that learning?
If all worked out in the real world as it wo
rked out in my mind, six months later the sparks we’d lighted would spread into a full-blown divestment movement of the kind that helped damage South Africa’s apartheid regime during my years in college. There was already a nascent campaign, with students at Swarthmore College pushing especially hard on coal-mining stocks, and with groups like the Responsible Endowments Coalition and the Wallace Fund trying to spread the campaign. But I reckoned we might be able to take it up a notch by tying it more explicitly to carbon and turning it into a national campaign. Divestment wouldn’t bankrupt the fossil fuel companies, but at least we’d alter the geometry of the political battle a little. I e-mailed my old friend Bob Massie—he helped lead, and then wrote a history of, the antiapartheid movement in America, and went on to help build the Investor Network on Climate Risk, so I figured he was as well placed as anyone to offer an opinion.
“The divestment movement allowed millions of Americans to cut through the obfuscation and express a clear and direct view that they did not want to profit from the destruction of the people of South Africa,” he wrote back. “By supporting divestment, they rejected the halfhearted measures, feeble solutions, and institutional equivocation advanced by executives, institution leaders, and government officials. Given the severity of the climate crisis, a comparable demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the planet would not only be appropriate but effective. The message is simple: We have had enough. We must sever the ties with those who profit from climate change—now.”
Movements rarely have predictable outcomes. But any campaign that weakens the fossil fuel industry’s political standing clearly increases the chances of retiring its special breaks. Consider Barack Obama’s signal achievement in the climate fight: the large increase he won in mileage requirements for cars. Scientists, environmentalists, and engineers had advocated such policies for several decades, but Detroit was politically powerful enough to fend them off; only when it came under severe financial pressure did its resistance founder—and once the changes were made the industry began to recover, this time on sounder footing. A widespread understanding that the business model of the fossil fuel industry is—coldly and mathematically, not rhetorically—destructive to the planet might have similar effect. Or so we’d see. I spent much of the week outlining the plan to my colleagues at 350.org. They gulped, knowing at least as well as I did the amount of work this would entail. But they also knew as well as I did the basic fact that for all our work, we were still losing. And so they began to plan.
The odds seemed at least as good as that importing some bees from Siberia via the Ukraine might help a Vermont beekeeper survive the trouble that wiped out half the nation’s hives. At any rate, it felt good to be in motion again.
* * *
Earlier I described a week of giving speeches around California; maybe I should describe another semi-typical week, this time involving some actual action. It began with nights in Boston (where we taped a public radio show before a huge live audience at the Paramount Theatre) and New York (public television, small audience, tiny studio). From there I flew to Columbus, Ohio, where a bunch of my cohorts from 350.org had been hard at work with anti-fracking activists from around the Buckeye State. Their organizing efforts became progressively easier after New Year’s Eve, when the injection of high-pressure fracking water into a deep well managed to trigger a series of earthquakes. I’m not the kind of Christian who believes in signs from God—but you have to admit, earthquakes get your attention.
It dawned thundery, but this didn’t seem to discourage the crowd. The wind did play a certain amount of havoc with the pair of helium balloons that were supposed to lift the banner high above the crowd—it eventually worked, but only because our stalwart actions chief Matt Leonard jury-rigged an incomprehensible number of extra guy wires and used four sturdy men in harnesses as anchors to keep it down. A few of us spoke our pieces, and then we marched the half mile to the state capitol, a line of at least eight hundred squeezing down to four abreast along a sidewalk. This was an impressive sight, but it was nothing compared to eight hundred people crowded into the ornate rotunda of the Ohio Statehouse, where the dome with the stained-glass state symbol rises maybe ten stories overhead. It didn’t just look good—it sounded good, an echo chamber that made the standard chants into something dervish and grand. I think it was as close as Ohioans come to frenzy outside a football stadium; eventually, though, folks quieted enough to hear five or six locals give testimony to this “people’s session” of the legislature. The week before, the actual legislators, beneficiaries of large lobbying donations, had passed a series of laws to make life easier for the oil and gas companies; our “resolution” didn’t carry the same legal heft, but the outcry was a sign that the industry was facing a harder fight than they expected.
I had to leave before the rally ended, off to the airport for a flight to Chicago connecting to Munich connecting to Istanbul. The first leg went fine, and we were on the runway at O’Hare in line for takeoff, when word came that Air Force One was landing so the president could attend a wedding. I’d spent two weeks getting people arrested outside his home, so I was in no position to complain about the inconvenience, but the ninety minutes sitting on the tarmac meant I missed my connection in Germany and got to spend ten hours at the airport fighting for a seat on the next flight to Turkey. It wasn’t entirely bad; it allowed me to get online to help with the Twitterstorm we were organizing to draw attention to fossil fuel subsidies as world leaders arrived in Rio for an environmental summit. All day long we were rounding up people to tweet with the hashtag #endfossilfuelsubsidies—we fell just short of our goal of setting a record (birthday greetings to Justin Bieber remain the top all-time tweet subject for a single day), but we were the number one trending topic around the globe. That is, the arcane and somewhat dull topic of fossil fuel subsidies drew more tweets than any subject on Earth that day. If you’re going to sit in the Munich airport you might as well feel connected to something useful.
I finally talked my way onto a flight and got into Istanbul about eleven thirty in the evening, after thirty-six hours of travel, and without my suitcase—but there was a man with a sign with my name on it waiting for me. He spoke no English so I just climbed into his car, and we drove for an hour through the city till he deposited me at a dock—where another man, also speaking no English, loaded me aboard a small boat and disappeared into the wheelhouse, and we sped off down the Bosporus. I had no exact idea where we were heading, other than into the very choppy darkness, but I just sat there enjoying the thrum of the engine and the warm wind and trusting it would all work out. Sometime around two thirty a.m. we landed at the dock on the island of Halki, where an old friend, Father John Chryssavgis, was there to greet me and get me into bed.
I woke four or five hours later to the screech of seagulls and the travel-poster view of the sun-dappled Sea of Marmara, with its spray of islands, and the towers of Istanbul on the distant horizon. Halki is one of the few remaining seats of the Orthodox Church that once ran Constantinople; the nation’s only Christian seminary was at the top of the hill above us, but the government of this overwhelmingly Islamic nation shut it down in the early 1970s. The Orthodox patriarch Bartholomew has fought to reopen the monastery, but as shepherd of the three hundred million Eastern Christians, he’s also emerged over the past decade as one of the planet’s most outspoken environmentalists. Indeed, in the fall of 2009, when 350.org was just seven college kids and me, he and the Dalai Lama were two of the first world leaders to endorse a call for people to rally. “Global warming is a sin and 350 is an act of redemption,” he said in a sermon—which made it easier to organize across the Balkans. It was one reason our first global day of action turned into such a wild success. So I didn’t think twice when he asked if I’d join a few others for a small gathering on Halki.
I was a little groggy from long travel, but that disappeared when Jane Goodall rose to address the small assembly. I’ve heard her speak before,
and I knew how she’d begin: with the greeting call of the chimp in the forest, a lovely soft hooting that reaches deep inside our primate selves. Before long it was my turn to speak—which is harder than usual when a patriarch for whom the proper form of address is “Your All-Holiness” is sitting in the front row in robes, long beard, and remarkable hat. I suddenly got a little nervous, but the day’s subject, spirituality and climate, engages me deeply. I talked about the book I’d written years ago on Job, and about the clerics who’d come to Washington to get arrested, and about the basic blasphemy we’re engaged in as we write the first chapter of Genesis backward—as we destroy the planet we were given. The patriarch speaks seven languages, Father John had told me, so I figured he could follow along, and everything was going fine until I mentioned the toll that climate change was taking on one of my favorite of God’s creatures, those tick-ridden moose. Bartholomew instantly turned to one of the junior clerics, who turned to the next, who turned to the next, all searching for a translation of this strange word, which clearly described some kind of mythic beast. We finally settled on “horse with antlers” and continued.
Oil and Honey Page 14
