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Art Hobson, [email protected] NWA Times, 5 August 2012 Fossil fuels and the battle for the environment Bill McKibben is an honored scholar at Middlebury College, author of many books including The End of Nature, and a leader in the movement to stop global warming. If you google on "global warming's terrifying new math," you'll find his article from the 2 August 2012 issue of Rolling Stone. The article is well founded scientifically, and McKibben's gameplan for winning the climate battle is the most plausible I've heard. The scientific foundation comes down to three important numbers. The first is two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). This is the maximum safe limit for the planet's temperature increase due to global warming, a limit that was agreed to by the 167 nations that signed the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Accord. Climate scientists are nervous about setting the limit this high, arguing that two degrees could be a prescription for long-term disaster. Global warming has already increased temperatures by 0.8 degrees Celsius, with another 0.8 degrees automatically in the pipeline just from the effects during the next few decades of the CO2 we've already emitted. The second number is 565 gigatons (billions of tons) of carbon dioxide (CO2). This is the amount of CO2 humans can emit into the atmosphere during 2012 to 2050 without exceeding the two degree limit. Unfortunately, last year's emissions were 32 gigatons, and emissions have increased by over three percent every year. At this rate, we will reach the 565 gigaton limit by 2027. The third number is 2,800 gigatons. This is the amount of carbon dioxide that will be emitted if we burn the world's known, proven, fossil fuel reserves. These reserves are five times larger than we can actually burn without raising temperatures above the two degree limit. The fossil fuel industry intends to draw its profits during the next few decades from extraction of these reserves. The implication is that the business model of the fossil fuel industry includes the destruction of our planet as we know it. The battle lines, with fossil fuel industry profits on one side and preserving some semblance of our present planet on the other, could not be more clear. The only action that will keep these fossil resources in the ground is a rise in the price of carbon, a rise that can only come from such government action as a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system. The fossil fuel industry has battled hard and successfully against any semblance of this kind of legislation since at least 1989 when Exxon, Shell Oil, Ford, General Motors, and other corporate interests formed the Global Climate Coalition to oppose the United Nations' international studies of climate change, and to oppose Senate ratification of the Kyoto Protocol that would reduce CO2 emissions. It's widely documented, for example in Naomi Oreskes book Merchants of Doubt, that the fossil fuel industry hired a handful of industry-connected scientists, sponsored massive advertising campaigns, and saturated Congress with lobbyists, in order to persuade America that there is no global warming, that global warming is not caused by humans, and that industry is responsibly pro-environment. Industry's global warming propaganda is similar to, and even more immoral than, the tobacco industry's campaign to persuade us that cigarettes don't cause cancer. The pro-tobacco campaign began around 1960, when industry knew or should have known that smoking causes cancer. Oreskes' book reports on this and other industrial campaigns against environmental health. It's interesting that most of the handful of scientists who worked on the tobacco industry's behalf also worked on industry's behalf concerning global warming and several other issues. Conservatives have bought industry's hype hook, line, and sinker, with such scientific illiterates as Senator James Inhoff crying "Hoax!" at any mention of global warming. Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron and others have managed to create the impression that there is a scientific debate about global warming, and that they are responsible custodians of the environment. But in fact, at least eight polls of climate scientists (also, google on Oreskes' article "The scientific consensus on climate change") during the past few years reveal an overwhelming consensus that global warming is real and caused by humans. And any industry whose business model includes dumping 2,800 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere can hardly be regarded as environmentally or socially responsible. My column has hammered global warming pretty heavily during the past few months. It's the foremost scientific issue of our era, and one that conservative interest groups have managed to make politically incorrect in American society. I plan to continue hammering it.