Informed Comment

Michael Klare writes at Tomdispatch.com:

A New Energy Third World in North America?
How the Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn the United States into a Third-World Petro-State
By Michael T. Klare

The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land. Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy” — deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas. But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

Once upon a time, the giant U.S. oil companies — Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco — got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the U.S. the planet’s dominant energy producer. But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil.

Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America — the Third World — where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.

Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles. It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.

Knowledgeable observers are already noting the first telltale signs of the oil industry’s “Third-Worldification” of the United States. Wilderness areas from which the oil companies were once barred are being opened to energy exploitation and other restraints on invasive drilling operations are being dismantled. Expectations are that, in the wake of the 2012 election season, environmental regulations will be rolled back even further and other protected areas made available for development. In the process, as has so often been the case with Third World petro-states, the rights and wellbeing of local citizens will be trampled underfoot.

Welcome to the Third World of Energy

Up until 1950, the United States was the world’s leading oil producer, the Saudi Arabia of its day. In that year, the U.S. produced approximately 270 million metric tons of oil, or about 55% of the world’s entire output. But with a postwar recovery then in full swing, the world needed a lot more energy while America’s most accessible oil fields — though still capable of growth — were approaching their maximum sustainable production levels. Net U.S. crude oil output reached a peak of about 9.2 million barrels per day in 1970 and then went into decline (until very recently).

This prompted the giant oil firms, which had already developed significant footholds in Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, to scour the global South in search of new reserves to exploit — a saga told with great gusto in Daniel Yergin’s epic history of the oil industry, The Prize. Particular attention was devoted to the Persian Gulf region, where in 1948 a consortium of American companies — Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco — discovered the world’s largest oil field, Ghawar, in Saudi Arabia. By 1975, Third World countries were producing 58% of the world’s oil supply, while the U.S. share had dropped to 18%.

Environmental concerns also drove this search for new reserves in the global South. On January 28, 1969, a blowout at Platform A of a Union Oil Company offshore field in California’s Santa Barbara Channel produced a massive oil leak that covered much of the area and laid waste to local wildlife. Coming at a time of growing environmental consciousness, the spill provoked an outpouring of public outrage, helping to inspire the establishment of Earth Day, first observed one year later. Equally important, it helped spur passage of various legislative restraints on drilling activities, including the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. In addition, Congress banned new drilling in waters off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico near Florida.

During these years, Washington also expanded areas designated as wilderness or wildlife preserves, protecting them from resource extraction. In 1952, for example, President Eisenhower established the Arctic National Wildlife Range and, in 1980, this remote area of northeastern Alaska was redesignated by Congress as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Ever since the discovery of oil in the adjacent Prudhoe Bay area, energy firms have been clamoring for the right to drill in ANWR, only to be blocked by one or another president or house of Congress.

For the most part, production in Third World countries posed no such complications. The Nigerian government, for example, has long welcomed foreign investment in its onshore and offshore oil fields, while showing little concern over the despoliation of its southern coastline, where oil company operations have produced a massive environmental disaster. As Adam Nossiter of the New York Times described the resulting situation, “The Niger Delta, where the [petroleum] wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates.”

As vividly laid out by Peter Maass in Crude World, a similar pattern is evident in many other Third World petro-states where anything goes as compliant government officials — often the recipients of hefty bribes or other oil-company favors — regularly look the other way. The companies, in turn, don’t trouble themselves over the human rights abuses perpetrated by their foreign government “partners” — many of them dictators, warlords, or feudal potentates.

But times change. The Third World increasingly isn’t what it used to be. Many countries in the global South are becoming more protective of their environments, ever more inclined to take ever larger cuts of the oil wealth of their own countries, and ever more inclined to punish foreign companies that abuse their laws. In February 2011, for example, a judge in the Ecuadorean Amazon town of Lago Agrio ordered Chevron to pay $9 billion in damages for environmental harm caused to the region in the 1970s by Texaco (which the company later acquired). Although the Ecuadorians are unlikely to collect a single dollar from Chevron, the case is indicative of the tougher regulatory climate now facing these companies in the developing world. More recently, in a case resulting from an oil spill at an offshore field, a judge in Brazil has seized the passports of 17 employees of Chevron and U.S. drilling-rig operator Transocean, preventing them from leaving the country.

In addition, production is on the decline in some developing countries like Indonesia and Gabon, while others have nationalized their oil fields or narrowed the space in which private international firms can operate. During Hugo Chávez’s presidency, for example, Venezuela has forced all foreign firms to award a majority stake in their operations to the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. Similarly, the Brazilian government, under former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, instituted a rule that all drilling operations in the new “pre-salt” fields in the Atlantic Ocean — widely believed to be the biggest oil discovery of the twenty-first century — be managed by the state-controlled firm, Petróleo de Brasil (Petrobras).

Fracking Our Way to a Toxic Planet

Keep reading Tomgram: Michael Klare, Welcome to the New Third World of Energy, the U.S.

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A new study just published in Nature Geoscience has found it plausible for the first time that the world’s average surface temperature could rise by as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 C.) by 2050, only 38 years from now.

In February, the United Nations warned that the world only has a few years to substantially reduce its dependence on hydrocarbons, if it was to avoid the disasters facing the earth with a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees C. The likelihood that such a rise in temperature can be avoided is now low (emissions were up 6% in 2011).

The study took advantage of extra computing power donated by individuals via Climateprediction.net.

The likely impact of temperature rise on North America will be much hotter summers and more extreme weather events. But it is Africa that will likely be struck by catastrophe, and within only a decade if we go on like we are. Projections suggest that in:

“Africa: By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to increased water stress; yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent in some regions by 2020; agricultural production, including access to food, may be severely compromised.”

Increased drought and reduced crop yields and malnutrition are also expected in the Middle East over the next few decades as a result of climate change, including in Israel, and the new findings will accelerate the time scale over which these developments will occur. US foresees water wars in the Middle East.

There is also increased likelihood of flooding in parts of Asia, which we perhaps have already started seeing in Pakistan.

Another study, just published in Nature Climate Change, concluded that there is already a strong link between rising temperatures and extreme weather. In 1951-1980, it was only at most 0.2 percent of the globe’s land area that you had extremely hot summers. Now it is ten percent of global land area. And the change will be costly, even in North America. In 2011, the US was struck by 14 extreme weather events that caused more than $1 billion each in damages. That just isn’t normal, the paper argues.

Weather, as opposed to climate, is affected by cyclical things such as the el Nino. But those cycles now act out against a backdrop of discernible climate change, so that their effects can be amplified with calamitous results.

Thus, the 7,000 temperature records set or equaled in the United States during this March can probably not be explained only by weather (cyclical or one-time factors), but rather show the amplification effect of climate change (long term trends) caused by human beings dumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The advent of spring in the US has already moved up 3 days, and 5 days in some states. The longer warm weather season has increased pollen and allergies, with the potential for increased childhood asthma.

NOAA on atmospheric CO2, 2008-Feb. 2012

From NOAA

The past decade, 2001-2010, is the warmest on record. 2011 should have been cooler because of a La Nina, but the warming trend owing to climate change was so powerful that it produced another record-breaking hot year.

With their unsustainable addiction to oil and gas to power a consumer society, human beings are carrying out a cosmic experiment with life on earth, one that could easily blow up in their faces. Human beings as we now know them are fairly recent, perhaps 120,000 to 200,000 years old, and their entire development has taken place in a relatively cold era. It is not clear whether they can survive a 10 degree Fahrenheit temperature rise over the next century and all the changes it will wreak on animal and plant life, on fresh water availability, and on the health costs of outdoor activity.

Consumers in the US are going to have to sue Big Oil and Gas if we are to get any serious change. As with cigarette smoking causing cancer, there is a tort here that juries and judges can eventually be persuaded to recognize.

Posted in Environment, Israel/ Palestine, Middle East | 12 Comments

The hottest year on record is 2010, not 1998, according to new calculations of the major British climate study unit.

The findings have just been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, which means that they have been subjected to searching scrutiny by other climate specialists. The UK Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit (Cru) at the University of East Anglia was able to recalculate climate change data so as to incorporate large numbers of observations from the arctic, which had earlier been sparsely recorded.

Since 1900, the average surface temperature of the earth has increased by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit, about .75 degrees C., because of the enormous amount of carbon dioxide and soot that industrial society is spewing into the atmosphere. Because of increasing carbon emissions, the earth is likely headed toward a 3-5 degree C. increase (5-7 degrees F.), which will over centuries melt all the surface ice, produce tropical conditions over the entire planet, and cause a sea level rise of dozens of meters/ yards. In the worst case scenario, a third of all land will be submerged.

New research on the Pliocine era has shown that even a 2 degree C. increase will likely cause a sea level rise of as much as 60-70 feet (20-23 meters). That would affect 70% of the earth’s inhabitants, hundreds of years down the road. Typically in past geologic eras, a 1 degree increase in average surface temperature produces a sea level rise of 10-20 meters (roughly 30-60 feet). But note that in the Pliocene, a couple of million years ago, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was only what it is presently (about 390 parts per million), whereas we are moving rapidly toward much higher levels before emissions level off.

For a list of 100 good recent documentaries on sustainability, see this site

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Solar, wind and biofuels saw global revenue expand by 31% in 2011. With all the negative hype put out by Big Oil and its acolytes, you’d have thought the green energy market had crashed rather than growing by a third.

But investment in green energy rose only 5% over the year, which tells me that somebody is making a lot of money and others are losing out. Green Tech Media reports,

“…costs of solar panels fell by more than 40 percent last year, while installations grew by 69 percent, yielding a 29-percent increase in solar market revenues last year, Clean Edge reported.”

In the US, solar installations more than doubled, with 1.8 gigawatts in capacity added. That is roughly like two small nuclear plants.

There are indications that solar photovoltaic cells will will fall rapidly in price because of technological breakthroughs. Even with relatively low natural gas prices, the likelihood is that over the next decade the renewables will be decisively less expensive than hydrocarbons and the main obstacles will be an old 20th century energy infrastructure built for coal, gas and oil.

Wind power turbines were also put in at record rates throughout the world in 2011, with China leading the way. By 2020, China will have large numbers of mega-wind installations, generating 148 gigawatts of power.

The US is falling behind on wind installations. It only installed 6,800 megawatts worth in 2011. Altogether, wind now generates enough power to meet electricity demand in 10 million US homes. If there are roughly 60 million US households, that would mean we only have 50 million to go!

There are lots of growing pains in this industry. Many startups will fail or be absorbed. An old electricity grid is often an obstacle. Battery power and life is still too limited. But we should be suspicious of the negative tone of a lot of press and political comment on renewable energy, since any business that expands revenue by a third in one year is anything but a basket case.

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The first country to face being wiped off the map by climate change is Kiribati in the South Pacific. Its 100,000 residents live on flat atolls only a few feet above sea level, and they are already beginning to be inundated.

The government is making plans for everyone to emigrate to Fiji. I guess it won’t be necessary for the last one to leave to turn off the lights, since all the electricity will short out as the islands disappear under the waves.

(courtesy Taringa

Fiji is a good choice, since its two main islands, Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, are mostly at least 150 meters above sea level.

It is only America’s oil billionaires, who have multiple mansions atop hills, who can afford to deny the effects of climate change. They are the ones responsible for the Kiribati migration, and if there were any justice, the residents would be allowed to sue the major petroleum, coal and gas corporations for compensation.

The most conservative estimates are that by the end of this century, sea level will rise about 3 feet or a meter, as a result of surface ice melting under the impact of rising temperatures. The temperature increase is a direct result of humans spewing massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning gasoline, coal and natural gas, and by putting other green house gases such as methane into the atmosphere.

(From NOAA)

The oceans warm up very, very slowly, because of all the deep, cold water that only rarely circulates in great amounts to the surface. So although automobile-driving and coal-heating humans could provoke an average surface temperature rise of 2 to 5 degrees Centrigrade (more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit), and although historically each increase of 1 degree C has resulted in a sea level rise of 10 to 20 meters/ yards, the full catastrophe won’t strike for centuries.

If humans run through all the currently known hydrocarbons, that would provoke the 5 degree C increase, and would over time cause all surface ice to melt, all regions of the earth to become tropical (including Antarctica), and so much increase in sea level that about a third of the world’s land would be inundated. This scenario last played out beginning about 55 million years ago, in the Eocene. It is not clear that the human species, which evolved under much colder conditions, could survive under these circumstances. Certainly climate catastrophes would kill millions.

How unseriously Americans are taking this looming crisis is obvious in that they still keep enormous numbers of neon lights over commercial establishments burning at night. Surely at least that should be illegal, or legal only if they are powered by renewable energy.

Posted in Energy, Environment | 13 Comments

Bill McKibben writes at Tomdispatch.com:

The Great Carbon Bubble
Why the Fossil Fuel Industry Fights So Hard
By Bill McKibben

If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet — as we shall see — it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.

In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology. Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history — 56% of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”

In the face of such data — statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet — you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to… deny there’s a problem.

Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”

Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40% over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.

And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.

It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.

Keep reading Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Why the Energy-Industrial Elite Has It In for the Planet

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Ellen Cantarow writes at Tomdispatch.com

Shale-Shocked
Fracking Gets Its Own Occupy Movement
By Ellen Cantarow

This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains. Clean water should be a right: there is no life without it. New York is what you might call a “water state.” Its rivers and their tributaries only start with the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna. The best known of its lakes are Great Lakes Erie and Ontario, Lake George, and the Finger Lakes. Its brooks, creeks, and trout streams are fishermen’s lore.

Far below this rippling wealth there’s a vast, rocky netherworld called the Marcellus Shale. Stretching through southern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, the shale contains bubbles of methane, the remains of life that died 400 million years ago. Gas corporations have lusted for the methane in the Marcellus since at least 1967 when one of them plotted with the Atomic Energy Agency to explode a nuclear bomb to unleash it. That idea died, but it’s been reborn in the form of a technology invented by Halliburton Corporation: high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing — “fracking” for short.

Fracking uses prodigious amounts of water laced with sand and a startling menu of poisonous chemicals to blast the methane out of the shale. At hyperbaric bomb-like pressures, this technology propels five to seven million gallons of sand-and-chemical-laced water a mile or so down a well bore into the shale.

Up comes the methane — along with about a million gallons of wastewater containing the original fracking chemicals and other substances that were also in the shale, among them radioactive elements and carcinogens. There are 400,000 such wells in the United States. Surrounded by rumbling machinery, serviced by tens of thousands of diesel trucks, this nightmare technology for energy release has turned rural areas in 34 U.S. states into toxic industrial zones.

Shale gas isn’t the conventional kind that lit your grandmother’s stove. It’s one of those “extreme energy” forms so difficult to produce that merely accessing them poses unprecedented dangers to the planet. In every fracking state but New York, where a moratorium against the process has been in effect since 2010, the gas industry has contaminated ground water, sickened people, poisoned livestock, and killed wildlife.

Keep reading Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, An Environmental Occupy Fracks Corporate America

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