The Future (57 page)

The ability of the public to see through the lies and deceptions of the carbon polluters and their allies has been hampered because the traditional role of the news media has changed significantly in the past few decades—especially in the United States. Many newspapers are going bankrupt and most others are under severe economic stress that reduces their ability to fulfill their historic role of ensuring that the foundation of a democracy is a “well-informed citizenry.”

As noted in
Chapter 3
, the rising prominence of the Internet is a source of hope, but for the time being television is still far and away the dominant medium of information. And yet the news divisions of television networks are now required to focus on ways to contribute more profit to the corporate bottom line. As a result, they have been forced to blur the distinction between news and entertainment. Since ratings are the key to profitability, the kinds of news stories that are given priority have changed.

Virtually every news and political commentary program on television is sponsored in part by oil, coal, and gas companies—not just during campaign seasons, but all the time, year in and year out—with messages designed to soothe and reassure the audience that everything is fine, the global environment is not threatened, and the carbon companies are working diligently to further develop renewable energy sources.

The fear of discussing global warming has influenced almost all mainstream television news networks in the U.S. The denier coalition unleashes vitriol at almost anyone who dares to bring up the subject of global warming and, as a result, many news companies have been intimidated into silence. Even the acclaimed BBC nature program
The Frozen Planet
was edited before the Discovery Network showed it in the United States to remove the discussion of global warming. Since one of the overarching themes of the series was the melting of ice all over the planet, it was absurd to remove the discussion of global warming, which is of course the principal cause of the ice melting. As activist Bill McKibben wrote, “It was like
showing a documentary on lung cancer and leaving out the part about the cigarettes.”

During the hot summers of 2011 and 2012, the evening newscasts often resembled a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. But each time, the droughts and fires and windstorms and floods were covered as lead stories, the explanation was often something like, “a high pressure area” or “La Niña.”

On the few occasions when global warming is discussed, the coverage is distorted by the tendency of the news media to insist on including a contrarian point of view to falsely “balance” every statement by a climate scientist about global warming—as if there was a legitimate difference of opinion. This problem has been worsened by the shrinking budgets for investigative reporting.

For someone who grew up believing in the integrity of the American democratic process—and who
still
believes that its integrity can be redeemed and restored—it is profoundly troubling that special interests have been able to capture control of decision making and policy formation in the nation that Abraham Lincoln eloquently described as “
the last best hope of earth.” But the fight is far from over. Its epicenter is in the United States, simply because the U.S. remains the only nation capable of rallying the world to save our future. As Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is
for good men to do nothing.” That is what it now comes down to: will good men and women do nothing, or will they respond to the emergency that is now at hand?

In the last few years, the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events connected to the climate crisis have begun to have a significant impact on public attitudes toward global warming. Even in the U.S., where the denier propaganda campaign is still in full force, public
support for actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has gone up significantly. Proposals to do more have been supported by a majority for many years, although the intensity of the majority’s feeling has been too low to overcome the efforts of the carbon polluters to paralyze political action. More recently, however, support for action has been building steadily.

At the beginning of President Barack Obama’s administration in 2009, hopes were high that U.S. policy on global warming would change—and for a time, it did. His
stimulus bill put a major emphasis on green provisions, including measures to accelerate the research and development, production, and use of renewable energy systems in the United States. His appointment of the extremely able Lisa Jackson as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency set the stage for a series of breakthrough rules and initiatives that have contributed to the reduction of CO
₂
emissions and the cleaning of pollutants from the environment.

The EPA rules requiring a reduction of CO
₂
emissions from new power plants and automobiles were courageous, and the EPA’s ruling that mercury emissions from coal plants must be sharply reduced has contributed to the decisions by many utilities to cancel planned construction of new coal-fired generating plants. The success by Jackson, her cabinet colleague, transportation secretary Ray LaHood, and White House adviser Carol Browner in reaching an agreement with U.S. carmakers to require significant improvements in auto mileage—eventually almost doubling the current average to 54.5 miles per gallon—was described by one environmentalist, Dan Becker, who runs the Safe Climate Campaign for the Center for Auto Safety, as “
The biggest single step that any nation has taken to cut global warming pollution.”

But several things happened over the last few years to make the political challenge more difficult than Obama expected. First, the economic crisis and Great Recession he inherited made the administration reluctant to confront a longer-term challenge when the economic distress of the present was so pressing. The effects of the recession lingered because of its unusual depth, the massive deleveraging (repayment of debt) it triggered, the collapse of the housing market, and the inadequate size of the fiscal stimulus that injected some—but not enough—demand back into the economy.

Second, China surprised the world with its massive commitment to dominate the production and export of windmills and solar panels,
heavily subsidized with government-backed cheap credit and low-wage labor—which allowed them to flood the global market with equipment priced
well below the cost of production in the United States and other developed countries.

Third, even though his climate legislation passed the House of Representatives while it was still under his party’s control, the obsolete and dysfunctional rules of the U.S. Senate empowered a minority to kill it in that chamber. Senators in both parties said privately that passage of the climate plan might have been within reach but that it seemed to them that President Obama was not prepared to make the all-out effort that would have been necessary to build a coalition in support of the plan. Earlier, he had chosen to make health care reform his number one priority, and the badly broken U.S. political system produced a legislative gridlock on his health plan that lasted until the midterm campaign season began, leaving no time for even Senate discussion of the climate change issue.

By then, Obama and his political team in the White House had apparently long since made a sober assessment of the political risks involved in states where the power of the fossil fuel industries would punish him for committing himself to the passage of this plan. So instead, when his opponents in Congress took up the cry “drill, baby, drill,” the president proposed the expansion of oil drilling—even in the Arctic Ocean—and opened up more public land to coal mining. For these and other reasons, the positive impacts of the energy and climate proposals with which he began his presidency were nearly overwhelmed by his sharp turn toward a policy that he described as an “all of the above” approach—one that has contributed to the increased reliance on carbon-rich fossil fuels.

Fourth, the discovery of enormous reserves of deep shale gas depressed electricity prices as more coal-fired generating plants switched to cheaper gas—thus pushing the price of kilowatt hours below the level needed for wind and solar to be competitive at their present early stage of development. Shale gas has flooded the market since the discovery and perfection of a new drilling technology that combines horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Although most of the debate about fracking has involved its use in the production of shale gas, it is used in the production of oil as well, opening previously inaccessible supplies and increasing the yield of oil from fields previously nearly depleted.

Experts have cautioned that the world can expect a steady increase in the price of shale gas as liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports transfer the gas from low-priced markets like the United States to much higher-priced markets in Asia and Europe,
with the average cost of shale gas going up significantly in the process. Nevertheless, the size of the new reserves opened up with fracking have at least temporarily overturned the pricing structure of energy markets. And the resulting enthusiasm for the exploitation of these reserves has obscured several crucial questions and controversies that should, and over time will, inspire caution about shale gas.

To begin with, the fracking process results in the leakage of enormous quantities of methane (the principal component of natural gas),
which is more than
seventy-two
times as potent as CO
₂
in trapping heat in the atmosphere over a twenty-year time frame. After about a decade, methane breaks down into CO
₂
and water vapor, but its warming impact, molecule for molecule, is still much larger than that of CO
₂
over shorter time scales.

The global warming potency of methane has led to proposals for a global effort to focus on sharp reductions in methane emissions as an emergency short-term measure to
buy time for the implementation of the more difficult strategies necessary to reduce CO
₂
emissions. Similarly, others have proposed a near-term focus on sharply reducing black carbon emissions, or soot, which trap incoming heat from the sun and which
settle on the surface of ice and snow to increase heat absorption and magnify melting. Taken together, these two actions could significantly reduce warming potential by 2050. Given how long the world has waited to get started on controlling emissions, we need both and more.

There are huge leakages of methane in the fracking process before the equipment is put in place to capture the gas at the surface. After the underground formation is fracked by the injection of high-pressure liquids, there is a “flowback.” That is, when the fracking water, chemicals, and sand used to do the fracking flow back to the surface and out of the well, this material contains large amounts of methane, which is either vented into the atmosphere or burned. Although many of the largest drilling operators take steps to prevent this leakage,
the majority of smaller “wildcat” drillers do not. Additional methane is typically leaked into
the atmosphere during the processing, storage, and distribution of gas. The total volume of methane leakage is so large that multiple studies—including a recent lifecycle analysis by Nathan Myhrvold, formerly of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, and Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology—have now found that
virtually all of the benefit natural gas might have because of its lower carbon content compared to coal is negated.

In its ongoing operations, the fracking process also requires the continuing injection of huge amounts of water mixed with sand and toxic chemicals into the shale where the gas is confined. The requirement of
an average of five million gallons of water for each well is already causing conflict in regions suffering from droughts and water shortages. In many communities, particularly in arid areas of the American West, the competition for scarce water resources was
acute even before the spread of the thirsty fracking process. In parts of Texas,
fracking wells are being drilled in communities where water supply limitations are already constraining usage for drinking water and agriculture.

The fracking process sometimes also inadvertently contaminates precious underground aquifers. Although the gas-bearing rock is typically much deeper than the aquifers supplying drinking water, the upward migration of liquids underground is not well understood and is difficult to predict or control. Many of the deposits where fracking is taking place are found in oil and gas fields that are dotted with old abandoned shafts drilled decades ago in the search for reserves that could be produced through conventional means. These old wells can serve
as chimneys for the upward migration of both methane and drilling fluids.

Some have speculated that abandoned drill holes and other poorly understood features of the underground geology may be responsible for the fact that numerous existing water wells located far above the ongoing horizontal drilling have already been poisoned by fracking fluids. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that the fluids used to drill for gas in Wyoming are the likely
cause of pollution in the aquifer above an area that was fracked there. Reports of similar pollution from fracking in other areas have been made, but the EPA has been hampered in its investigations because of an unusual law passed in 2005
at the behest of then vice president Dick Cheney, which provides a special exemption for fracking activities from U.S. government oversight under the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act.

The industry disputes most of these reports, and believes that in any case the pollution of some water wells is a small price to pay; the CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, for example, said recently, “
The consequences of a misstep in a well, while large to the immediate people that live around that well, in the great scheme of things are pretty small.” Nevertheless,
political resistance from landowners has been growing in several regions.