I fully share concerns about the ecological and health damage caused by our capitalist system. The problem is finding a practical path forward that will save the world from climate disaster and ecological collapse.
Recent commentary has likened fossil fuel industries to tobacco. That is reasonable as far as their record of deceit is concerned, but there is a big difference in that smoking has negative economic value and is directly deadly to its users, whereas fossil energy totally underpins the world economy and has high enduring value. Fossil fuels are only deadly, in terms of global warming, if we do not work out how to mitigate their effects.
Rapid decarbonisation of the economy would cause chaos, poverty and conflict. This is increasingly seen by the majority of voters, who will not support emission cuts that go well beyond their economic interests. That makes the idea of shutting down emissions a futile and unworkable objective in the coming decades. The formidable alliance between fossil fuels and the military and intelligence world, with all their industrial, political and media supporters, dwarfs the power of their opponents, even if their opponents gain state power.
What is needed is a bit like a ‘judo climate policy’, using the weight and momentum of the opponent to achieve victory. That would mean allying with fossil energy industries on direct climate cooling. But the difference from judo is that this alliance would serve mutual interests in a flourishing planetary future.
I read the
Stanford petition condemning university partnership with the fossil fuel industry and was appalled by its vain and shallow analysis. That whole line of thinking is wrong.
Demonising fossil fuels is perfectly fair in terms of their duplicity about climate change and their arrogant destruction of people’s health. However, partisan attack is a highly risky and counterproductive strategy when it comes to defining a path out of our climate peril.
Direct climate cooling through technologies such as Marine Cloud Brightening is the only method that could mitigate extreme weather in this decade. CDR and emission reduction are too slow.
Who has the assets, the skills, the networks, the incentive, the funds and the overall material interest to implement direct climate cooling? The fossil fuel industry certainly does have all these. Direct climate cooling would support the commercial interest of fossil fuel companies in securing their future by enhancing ongoing climate stability. It would also benefit the insurance industry.
If the fossil fuel industry shifted its policy to support planetary brightening, we would see an immediate transformation of the climate debate. They should make this policy shift. It would directly mitigate the harm their products are causing as extreme weather worsens, and it would also be in their commercial interest, justifying the inevitable slower transition to renewables than that demanded by the IPCC.
The danger is that the prospect of an energy transition has been over-hyped. This northern winter is expected to be a costly disaster for Europe. The prospect of energy rationing is due in significant part to the failing fantasy of shifting too fast to renewables. There is talk of a coal renaissance.
People are most unlikely to agree to decarbonise at a speed that would mitigate climate change. The world needs to buy time to delay catastrophic tipping points that would swamp carbon-based climate policies. The only way to do that is solar geoengineering.
Fossil fuel companies are the main organisations able to switch world policy to accept solar geoengineering, and to cooperate with governments in ensuring its deployment is safe, fast and effective. I hope they will talk about brightening the planet at COP27. Climate activists should engage this debate, not shun it on ideological tribal grounds.