Carbon Blues: Cars Catastrophes and the Battle for the Environment 9780228002161

Table of contents :
Cover
CARBON BLUES
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Smog of Capitalism
2 The Scramble for Oil
3 Carbon America
4 Motoring to Armageddon
5 “Exxon Knew”
6 The Geography of Catastrophe
7 The Forward March of Environmentalism
8 Renewables and Remediation
9 Reckoning: 2020–50
Epilogue Anton’s Song
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Acknowledgments

CAR BON BLU ES

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preface

CARBON BLUES Cars, Catastrophes, and the Battle for the Environment

MIKE MASON

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020 isbn 978-0-2280-0150-8 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0216-1 (epdf) isbn 978-0-2280-0217-8 (epub) Legal deposit second quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Carbon blues : cars, catastrophes, and the battle for the environment / Mike Mason. Names: Mason, Mike, 1938– author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190234962 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190234997 | isbn 9780228001508 (cloth) | isbn 9780228002161 (epdf) | isbn 9780228002178 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Climatic changes—History. | lcsh: Fossil fuels—History. | lcsh: Fossil fuels—Environmental aspects. Classification: lcc qc981.8.g56 m37 2020 | ddc 363.7—dc23

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon

preface

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 1 The Smog of Capitalism 10 2 The Scramble for Oil 19 3 Carbon America 27 4 Motoring to Armageddon 5 “Exxon Knew”

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6 The Geography of Catastrophe 87 7 The Forward March of Environmentalism 8 Renewables and Remediation 9 Reckoning: 2020–50

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Epilogue Anton’s Song 169 Chronology 171 Notes 191 Bibliography 243 Index 297

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Acknowledgments

From beginning to end Mary Hallard has listened to me, read what I have written, supported me, sometimes contradicted me, even deplored what I have claimed but, has over the years, helped and comforted me in more ways than I can count. So, once again, my abiding thanks and affection. Several of my friends have stood by me with help and support. I am especially grateful to Steve Mason, Jeff Lindberg, and Michel Cassar, as well as to the outside readers who read my manuscript for McGill-Queens University Press. My editors at the press, too, deserve my gratitude, especially Jacqueline Mason and Shelagh Plunkett. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the generosity of Anton Keppel and his father Robin Keppel, who have provided me with a touching Epilogue. This book has been written for our grandchildren, especially Amina and Hannah Mason; Josephine Mason-Woodcock; Elsa, Myla, and Aida Shepherd; and Sam Mason Cassar.

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Acknowledgments

The Backstory

CAR BON BLU ES

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2

On the House

Introduction

What follows is a short history of climate change, some of its consequences, its deniers, an indication of certain solutions for remediation, and a hint of what lies ahead. It is underpinned by a brief account of the actual world of carbon, that is of coal and of oil, of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and of cars. So, think of it as a documentary which begins with a brief vista silhouetting the headgear of coal mines and of blackened miners rising to the surface. The epic of coal lasts for two centuries before it is challenged at the beginning of the twentieth century by the epoch of gasoline and of the cars that it nourishes. The cars move across the screen in increasing numbers as the century advances, driving into the starry night on tarry highways which, as if by some divine engineering, grow wider and ever more webbed, rising skyward in overpasses, peeling off in spiralling cloverleafs and access roads, ramping downward and returning their gratified charges once again to earth, unharmed. And above the cars and the web of highways there is a cloud, billowing and darkening, casting a thick, choking carbonrich fog over the road. But the cars have air conditioners so the fog does not reach their drivers; yet the air conditioners burn energy and so add emissions to the thickening fog. Sooner or later the drivers will have to breath the air that their cars have helped despoil. But they seem unworried and will only pay scant attention to what becomes their carbon carprint.1 A road movie of sorts, then, with an ominous yet soaring sound track, familiar to viewers of disaster movies, dramatizing a story

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Carbon Blues

perhaps scripted by J.G. Ballard, pioneer of the New Wave of science fiction and author of Empire of the Rising Sun. Ballard wrote apocalyptic novels in the 1960s and early 1970s well before climate change had become widely accepted. They had titles like The Wave from Nowhere, The Drowned World, and The Terminal Beach. His Crash (1973) has been said to be “auto-erotic”; the “auto” here referring to “automobile.” One critic noted that Crash was “so eerily prescient in its portrayal of global warming ... that it can hardly be called fiction.”2 Taken as complimentary commodities, crude oil, that is, petroleum, cars, and highways have defined the postwar period in the world’s advanced and advancing economies. Their needs have determined the histories of states from the Congo to Liberia to Malaya whence rubber has come and from Algeria to Alberta to Azerbaijan where oil together with natural gas gush from wellheads. Although advocated with vehemence, and consumed with an enchanted compulsion, it has been clear for the last several decades that cars have carried us along at ever-increasing speed towards environmental desolation. Worse – as we shall see – there has been from the beginning of the present century a growing literature, as much literary and journalistic as academic and official, pointing to the certainty, which is to say inevitability, of several major manifestations of climate disaster.3 “Cli-fi” the fictional version of this literature is called. Its examples include novellas with apocalyptic titles telling stories of horrible disasters like the flooding of New York and the deaths of millions or the huddling behind high walls of defenders against the wave of immigrants, as in the recent fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson and John Lanchester.4 As the land alternately burns and is flooded, the glaciers melt, the seas rise and become acidified, the rivers burst their banks and emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere increase, pessimists might ask to what extent these novels are fiction. Carbon dioxide is at the centre of our story. The earliest chapter of the story of carbon dioxide customarily begins in 1896 with the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius publishing his theory that by burning fossil fuels and thus adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere would be raised.5

Introduction

5

This would come to be called the “greenhouse effect.” According to Spencer Weart: “This ‘greenhouse effect’ was only one of many speculations about climate change, however, and not the most plausible. Scientists found technical reasons to argue that our emissions could not change the climate. Indeed most thought it was obvious that puny humanity could never affect the vast climate cycles, which were governed by a benign ‘balance of nature.’ In any case major change seemed impossible except over tens of thousands of years.”6 The contemporary public awareness of climate change, its Pearl Harbor moment, dawned more than thirty years ago, in 1988.7 On 23 June of that year, in a twenty-minute presentation, James R. Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a scientist formerly preoccupied with studying Venus, testified before the Congress of the United States that global warming had begun; specifically, that there already had been a warming of the Earth by about half a degree Celsius relative to the 1950–80 average. Thus the CO2 which all cars and trucks produced was “changing our climate now.” His explanation was received with the sober respect due to his scientific credentials in a political atmosphere that was highly charged; 1988 was a presidential campaign year. The New York Times splashed Hanson’s testimony on its front page.8 As the post-1945 period wore on, it became evident to the few that the North Atlantic region was getting warmer. Some of these began to be called “climate scientists” and by the middle of the 1960s, the term “global warming” had been launched. This suggested that the entire globe, not just regions, was warming. Its alternate, “climate change,” the term if not the phenomena, seems to have been introduced as an attempt to reframe the shock of what appeared to be a quite daunting threat – the idea that this warming heralded a major shift, not just regional or superficial but permanent and globally profound. This was bound to be denied. So from the 1960s, scientists in increasing numbers carried out investigations and developed models to explain past temperature rises and to predict the future. In 1965 the US president was warned that pollutants on a global scale had increased the carbon

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Carbon Blues

dioxide content of the air. Also from the 1960s, the small but growing environmental movement in the West began to become more outspoken.9 Public interest rose. Earth Day was declared on 22 April 1970. Greenpeace was founded a year later. In 1974 one of the scientists that had been involved in the 1965 warning published a paper with the title “Climate Change; Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” In 1979 the Charney Report warned of a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.10 Political response now accelerated, at first gradually and then more vehemently. On the whole, however, worry was contained. This was due significantly to concerns over the war in Vietnam and to preoccupations with questions such as overpopulation and the economic development of the Third World. Anyway, it seemed likely that even given global warming, not everyone would be seriously affected. The view became current that the effects of such warming might pose a limited threat, greater in some parts of the world than others and even greater in some parts of some countries or even some cities. But not to everyone, everywhere. Yet there was a nagging insistence that the world’s rich, as well as the poor, might become affected – Hollywood as much as Bollywood, Miami as well as Mumbai. And along with the consequences of temperature increase would come pollution of the oceans as well as of the land and flooding of low-lying places, seashores, and river valleys. Sometimes, rather than flooding, there would be drought, other times, as in Australia and California, near incineration. Properties even in the most desirable locations and owned by movie stars and billionaires, as in California, might succumb to malign nature. Too, there was the widespread extinction of species, even bees, and the spread of pests and disease and, beside sea level rise, the acidification of the oceans. Migration on a scale hardly anticipated across borders and even seas would follow. Perhaps the most extravagant speculation concerned the Gulf Stream, the flow of which was in scientific terms once referred to as the “thermohalene circulation” (thc) and, lately, the “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” (amoc). It was unlikely to

Introduction

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stop circulating altogether but it might slow down in the short term. In the worst-case scenario, the west coast of Scotland, providentially washed by the warming Gulf Stream, could come to resemble the coast of Labrador or Kamchatka at the same latitude. This horror was captured in a popcorn thriller, The Day After Tomorrow (2004), which warned of how the advice of a climatologist might be ignored at the cost of the virtual submergence of both New York and London. A paper in Nature Climate Change has suggested that in some regions as many as six crises could hit simultaneously.11 James Hansen was not alone in his prediction; the word had already spread. In the same year as his testimony, 1988, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc). And in the years that followed, virtually every independent authority and certainly almost all scientists would come to nod acceptance of Hansen’s argument. But what was the cause of such threatening change? One view of increasing currency, in the words of an author writing in the journal of the Union of Concerned Scientists a full quarter of a century after Hansen’s testimony: “(T)ransportation [has] contributed more than half the carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides, and a quarter of the hydrocarbons emitted in our air.”12 These hydrocarbons, mainly CO2 and NO2, both “greenhouse gases,” had thus become an inescapable and increasing feature of our environment. This takes us to the present. According to The New York Times in an article published in March 2018, “Carbon dioxide emissions from the use of coal, oil and natural gas increased 1.4 per cent globally in 2017 after holding steady for the previous three years.” In that year 17.6 million new cars and trucks were sold in the US and about two million in Canada. Another article, published in December of the same year, noted that greenhouse gas emissions had gone up globally for five years running. In 2018 alone emissions had increased by 2.7 per cent. Worse was to come. And at the beginning of January 2019, a report explained that, “US Carbon Emissions Surged in 2018 Even as Coal Plants Closed.” The increase by 3.4 per cent in 2018 was the biggest in eight years. By 2018, humanity was producing roughly 50 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year. “There is already ... fully a third

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Carbon Blues

more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years – perhaps in as long as 15 million years”13 There have been several optimistic estimates concerning “turning points” when on the motorways of the world electric vehicles, evs, would dominate cars driven by internal combustion engines, ices. These estimates vary from year to year and from source to source. According to one, China, which since 2012 has pumped more CO2 into the atmosphere than the US and eu, by 2019 was substituting solar and wind power for coal. In eleven Chinese provinces, solar power was even cheaper than coal. China also surged ahead in electric cars and buses. Another estimate suggested that by 2040 “the US, eu and China will see electric vehicles account for 100% of new vehicle sales, collectively displacing 11 million barrels per day (b/d) of oil and helping accelerate peak oil to 2031, five years ahead of its base case.” Other writers support the argument that this would be even sooner. In 2016, Wired predicted that the electric car revolution would begin in 2022 when evs would become cheaper than ices.14 Meanwhile, gas-driven cars would continue to benefit from improved fuel efficiency, which would curb gas demand.15 “All the big European oil groups have acknowledged that this demand is likely to peak at some point in the next two decades, followed by a slow decline,” comments one analysis in the Financial Times. So sometime around 2040, even 2030 if we are lucky, assuming that most gas-driven cars have gone the way of Trabis and e-buses rule the highways, the consumption of fossil fuels by vehicles will have plummeted. This prediction is viewed with relief, as though lithium batteries will be our salvation.16 Until then, however, there will be more CO2 seeping into the atmosphere every year and stimulating climate change. Don’t forget, as I shall stress later on, there will also be more people on earth to be effected, especially more poor people travelling in beat up cars and trucks with inefficient motors and exhaust systems. Writing in 2010, Mike Davis, the historian of California and, appropriately, apocalypses, has repeated that over the next forty years, the world’s urban population will increase by 3 billion people. “No one – not the un, the World Bank, the G20; no one – has a clue

Introduction

9

how a planet ... with growing food and energy crises will accommodate their biological survival, much less their aspirations to basic happiness and dignity”17 I shall bring up the year 2050 again. Clearly, we have by now left the realm of actual history and entered the space of speculation and projection. In the meantime, history itself is being written in fire in California and Greece and Portugal, in the warming waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the flooding of the American midwest, the storm surges produced by Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut, and the melting ice of Greenland and Antarctica. Quite suddenly, it seems, certain politicians and newspapers have taken up the issue of climate change and even right-wing politicians have acknowledged it, often only when disaster strikes.18 Denial, of course, is like ignoring your credit card statement; future statements are bound to include the cost of present denials plus exorbitant interest.19

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Carbon Blues

1 The Smog of Capitalism

In the beginning there was coal. It was essential to steam power and to progress, that is to say, industrial capitalism.1 Coal energized and warmed modern times, yet its heating properties had been known for centuries. Even back in the day, the Venetian merchant Marco Polo (b.1254) reported that it was being used by the Chinese. In the early eighteenth century when the wheels of the Industrial Revolution began to turn, coal was used in steam engines to drive locomotives and to pump water out of the ground, all the better to hack the coal from the seams that lay there. By the end of the next century it had become the unchallenged fuel of the industrialized world. In fact, it made our world. It is impossible to imagine the globalization that was a corollary of the web of imperial bases and outposts without acknowledging the coal-driven steamers and gunboats that sailed from coaling stations to entrepôts around the world.2 But the burning of coal had a radical effect on the global emission of carbon dioxide. Around 1750, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, global CO2 emissions were probably minimal, under 200 parts per million (ppm). From the beginning of the twentieth century they rose rapidly. By mid-2019 they had reached 415 ppm.3 Yet, the smoke from coal also choked the cities of the West, as it does Chinese and Indian cities today. London, where coal in the form of coke was burned for home heating as well as industrial purposes, was famous for its choking fogs. Manchester, the cradle of the industrial revolution, was known as “the chimney of the

The Smog of Capitalism

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world.”4 In spite of decades and alarms, the Great Smog of 1952 descended, killing as many as 12,000 people in London.5 It provoked the Clean Air Act of 1956, and after that a combination of carbon tax and the closing down of major steel works hastened the decline of emissions. In the decade from 2006 and 2016 coal use in London fell 74 per cent; it now generates less energy than wind farms. As a consequence, Britain is one of the few European countries where CO2 emissions dropped in 2017. Its leaders have publicly committed to phase out coal by 2025. On 21 April 2017 Britain, once the heart of the empire of coal, went a full day without using coal to generate electricity. Other jurisdictions have followed France has promised to close all coal power stations by 2021, Germany by 2038.6

the slow decline of coal So coal is king no longer, but it remains a part of the royal family of carbons. Although some analysts claim that coal demand will remain stable in the near future, others like the Oxford energy economist Dieter Helm suggest that the endgame for coal will arrive before other fossil fuels and that in the not-so-distant future the end may be nigh for oil and gas as well. Germany’s influence here is not inconsiderable. When Germany abolishes fossil fuels in 2038, its satellite economies in Eastern Europe will probably follow. This is a significant reversal. For two decades the German coal industry snubbed its nose at the Energiewende, the policy of turning away from dirty coal to clean energy.7 Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions did not drop from its 1990 high to 2017 but then declined quite sharply in 2018, nearly 31 per cent on the 1990 figure and even 4.5 per cent since 2017. By 2030 Germany aims to cut green house gas (ghg) emissions by 40 per cent, making its goals more ambitious than those of the eu.8 As for the former Soviet bloc countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia, “[n]o sooner had the political dust of Eastern Europe’s revolution against communism settled in 1989,” wrote Al Gore, “than the world gasped in horror at the unbelievable levels of pollution – especially air pollution – throughout the communist

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Carbon Blues

world.”9 So out went communism, the dominant ideology of eastern Europe from c.1945 to 1990, and with it Trabis, and in came Volkswagens and the particular pollution caused by the nitrous oxide their diesel engines produced. So while the demolition of the Berlin Wall proves that there are sudden miracles, another miracle may be the sharp drop of German ghg emissions. Other salvations have been mooted, for instance the claim celebrating the sudden conversion of money managers or bean counters to become “the new warriors of climate change.” “Companies See Climate Change Hitting Their Bottom Lines in the Next 5 Years,” writes Brad Plumer in the Times. Trillions of dollars at risk. Will fiscal loss stimulate remedial action? Many are sceptical of these as climate change warriors.10 Perhaps, then, there might be no more coal use by the major economies of the eu by around 2038 or soon after. “By 2050 we may be well on our way to cracking climate change,” writes Helm.11 “Well on our way” but still not there? “Cracking”? Climate change is irreversible, isn’t it? Maybe, maybe not, as we shall see. But “cracking” might suggest that the diminution of CO2 emissions would keep the rise in global temperatures to below the desired 2° C, as agreed to at the Paris climate change conference of 2015, (cop 21).12 By 2050, a conventional date for predictions, even if coal has become toast in the West, certainly Arctic ice, Greenland glaciers, and Antarctic ice sheets will already have withered, cracked, melted, and trickled into the seas that will be lapping against the shores of New York, Miami, Jakarta, Singapore, and Osaka, submerging islands in the Caribbean, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, and flooding the villages and fields of Bangladesh. In the warming seas, phytoplankton, which provide over half of the earth’s oxygen would, like the coral reefs, perish. And, as now, there would be annual hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and so on, probably worse than we know now. Anyway this idea of limiting climate change to raising global temperatures by only 2° C. is hardly conceivable and the idea of “cracking” its secrets is, so far, a utopian view. After all, coal production is actually increasing, not everywhere but almost everywhere that matters.13 While decreasing comfortably in Canada,

The Smog of Capitalism

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Mexico, the US, Japan, and Britain, it is still, in 2019, increasing in Germany, eastern Europe, Russia, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, and, especially, India. Coal accounts for 36 per cent of Vietnam’s power generation capacity at present and is projected to grow to 42 per cent by 2030.14 The Chinese, whose own use of coal is declining rapidly, have made a loan to Pakistan to support more coal-fired energy production. This is but a small part of China’s expansionist “Belt and Road” policy which envisions hundreds of new coal-fired power stations across Asia. As many as 240 of these were under way in 2016.15 It is hardly necessary to point out then that in the global scheme of things, it scarcely matters if Ontario or Saskatchewan burn less or even no coal at all to generate electricity. What matters, as we shall see, is that Australia and Germany stop digging it, the “asset manager” Brookfield stops investing in its export, and Germany, India, China, and Poland stop burning it. Likely? Across the ocean from the coal-burning champion, India, are the Australians, world champion coal exporters. The country’s finance minister (later prime minister) recently brought a lump of coal into parliament for mps to admire and to firm up support for carbon exports, even while their country crackles in the heat and their cherished Great Barrier Reef blanches and shrivels.16 In global terms, then, optimism concerning the remission of CO2 emissions, should be guarded. But now the good news. In the US in 2007 coal generated 50 per cent of the country’s electricity; in 2016 that share had dropped to 31 per cent. Between 2011 and 2016, coal companies lost more than 92 per cent of their market value. In 1979 coal employed 250,000 people in West Virginia. In 2016 it employed 53,000. In spite of President Trump’s boast that “[We’re] bringing back jobs, big league,” The Guardian Weekly noted with satisfaction that “Coal revival looks unlikely.” The newspaper was presumably reminded that, as Dieter Helm claims, “[t]he big oil and gas companies in Europe have publicly turned their guns on coal.”17 So coal, in an important market, is on its way out, or so it might seem. In Canada, coal has been eclipsed by other forms of carbon. Canada has the fifth largest coal reserves in the world after Russia, the US, China, and Australia. Most Canadian coal is still used

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Carbon Blues

domestically for electricity generation. Saskatchewan is close to Germany in its use of coal, in 2014 getting 44 per cent of its electricity by burning locally produced coal. Alberta in 2018 got 47 per cent of its energy from coal and has pledged to phase out coal power by 2030. Coal was one of Canada’s five top mineral products by value in 2017.18 In early April 2014, the Government of Ontario announced that its Thunder Bay generating station, Ontario’s last coal-fired power plant, had gasped out its last pollution. Ten years earlier there had been five coal-fired plants, producing a quarter of the province’s electricity. Now “Ontario is the first province or state in North America to successfully phase out the burning of coal to produce electricity.” The closing of the Thunder Bay facility, one correspondent noted, was the equivalent of pulling seven million cars off the road.19 So Australian coal production and export continues to rise, as do the continent’s summer temperatures. This coal provides 38 per cent of China’s steam coal imports. In June 2017 it was announced that the Indian billionaire Gautam Adani would invest some $12–15 billion in a Queensland state coal mine. It was claimed that the mine would contribute $2.97 billion each year to the economy of Queensland and that it had the potential to create 6,400 new jobs. Then in the following October came a countrywide national day of protest. The Indian Express explained, “The 16.5 billion project has hit roadblocks due to difficulties in securing green clearance and a nearly billion dollar loan to kickstart the project.” Neither the state government of Queensland nor Chinese banks would lend Adani the funds for the project. The further destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of Queensland and an Australian national monument, was a sensitive issue. Governments in Australia, state and federal, the latter whose Liberal Party leaders had mocked the idea of climate change, promised $200 million to ameliorate the destruction of the reef. In February 2018, The Guardian carried the story that Adani had been accused of fraud in India. His great coal mine project appeared to have stalled. Australia itself has suffered from heat waves and in 2018 the most severe drought since 1902. In May (2019), contrary to the predic-

The Smog of Capitalism

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tions of pollsters, Scott Morrison’s Liberal-National party once more squeaked to victory in what had been called the “climate election.” Adani and coal and Rupert Murdoch, the proprietor of Fox News and The Australian, too, had triumphed.20

china and india Meanwhile, Dieter Helm, like Marco Polo, reminds us of China: Coal use is dominated by China on an extraordinary scale. It moved from being a net exporter in the 1990s to being responsible for over half the total world coal trade in the 2010s. An economy which doubles every seven to ten years, and has 80% coal in its electricity generation mix, is going to emit an enormous amount of carbon. The 80% is coming down, but a lower percentage of an economy which is growing this fast amounts to a colossal amount of extra emissions.21 China’s coal consumption actually peaked in 2013 and has decreased by a few percentage points every year since. In 2017 it was 2.81 billion metric tonnes. Thus, write Ye Qi and Jiaqi Lu,“We have no doubt that China’s coal consumption has peaked and coalfired economic growth has come to an end.” When? Debateable. According to an analyst for Wood Mackenzie, although fossil fuels will yield to renewables, “Fossil fuel use will not disappear any time soon. Our scenario envisages fossil fuels having a 77% share of global energy demand in 2035 – versus 79% in our base case,” ie, at present.22 Meanwhile, in spite of the gains made by clean energy, living in China’s numberless cities is a deadly experience. A “red alert,” the highest level of smog warning, was invoked in Beijing in December 2017, while at the same time the whole of northern China was afflicted by an “airpocalypse” that affected half a billion people in twenty-four cities. Smog levels there were six times higher than the World Health Organization’s daily guidelines. Schools were closed, road traffic restricted, and people were urged to stay indoors.23

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Carbon Blues

It has been predicted that India will overtake China’s growth rate, its energy demand, and also its pollution death rate. In an article in The Washington Post, Annie Gowen has warned,“You’re more likely to die from air pollution in India than China.” The 2017 State of Global Air report, released on 14 February 2016 by the Health Effects Institute in Boston, and others finds that since 1990 the absolute number of ozone-related deaths has risen at an alarming rate in India – by about 150 per cent – while in China, some European nations, and Russia the number has remained stable. Measured per head of population, India substantially outpaces China, with 14.7 ozone-related deaths for every 100,000 people compared with China’s 5.9.24 India has 18 per cent of the world’s population and a growth rate of 1.2 per cent per year. The un predicts that by 2022 it will be the world’s most populous country. In mid-July 2017 it had a population of more than 1,343,000,000. Its population is forecast to reach 1,620,050,849 in 2050, and its energy demand will double by 2040.25 In 2017, coal accounted for as much as 58 per cent of India’s total energy demand and provided 80 per cent of its electricity. Nonetheless, private investment in coal power has ground to a near halt, and many new plants have been abandoned due to competition from low-cost renewable energy.26 If pollution kills one in six people globally, as the eminent British medical journal The Lancet suggests, how many Indians will choke to death annually from the polluted air of India’s great cities? The future seems predictable. Gowen, from the same journal in October 2017, found that pollution was responsible for up to 2.5 million Indian deaths in 2015, more than in any other country.27 Yet “Coal India,” the industry’s lobbying arm, aims to double its production in the near future. Interviewed in The Hindu, one of India’s leading dailies, former coal executive Partha Bhallacharya had this to say: You can’t live without coal. Coal is at the centre of everything ... Going forward, the share will definitely come down. But the growth in renewables does not mean the generation from coal

The Smog of Capitalism

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will come down. It will never come down, at least in the next few decades.28 Obviously, Mr Bhallacharya is confident for the near future. Energy analyst Nick Butler is less confident than alarmed. In the Financial Times he has written Most of the current public debate in the developed world focuses on the incremental gains that can be delivered there. But these will be no more than a pointless distraction [my italics] unless we lift our heads to the real problem. India is where the dramatic shift ... has to take place.29 Meanwhile, other factors will intrude into India’s fate. One is already effective climate change. According to Reuters reporter, Nita Bhalla [E]xperts say India is likely to be hit hard by global warming. It is already one of the most disaster-prone nations in the world and many of its 1.2 billion people live in areas vulnerable to hazards such as floods, cyclones and droughts. Freak weather patterns will not only affect agricultural output and food security, but will lead to water shortages and trigger outbreaks of water and mosquito-borne diseases.30 It is assumed that the increasing use of coal in India accelerates the rate of climate change. Climate change is catastrophic not only because it effects droughts and the air Indians breath but also to the extent that it influences the monsoon as well as the accumulation of snow in the Himalayas, the source of runoff for India and Pakistan’s major rivers like the Indus and Ganges. In every year between 2014 and 2018 India’s monsoon failed to meet expectation.31 No glaciers, no runoff, no irrigation, diminished monsoons, reduced growth of food crops, malnutrition. So, uncertain monsoon rainfall and certain groundwater depletion. Estimates of the depletion of groundwater in the northern states of Punjab and Haryana, India’s breadbaskets, indicate that

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Carbon Blues

groundwater has been depleted at the rate of 54 billion cubic metres per year, a volume that could support the subsistence-level diet for some 180 million people. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, irrigated land has dropped over half in the last decade due to the depletion of groundwater. Sandra Postel, founder of the Global Water Policy Project, writes, “Tamil Nadu’s production of rice, bananas, groundnuts, and other dietary staples is threatened, as are the livelihoods of the farmers who produce them ... Over the period 2002–2012, the research team [of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment of nasa] found that farmers were pumping out 8 per cent more water on average than was being replenished, causing water tables to drop at an average rate of 1.4 metres ... per year.”32 By the spring of 2016 the situation was aggravated. The editorial board of The New York Times warned Some 330 million people – about a quarter of India’s population – are reeling from a drought that has turned vast areas of the subcontinent into a dust bowl, withering crops and forcing farmers from their lands. Coal-fired plants – the major source of India’s electricity – have had to suspend output because there is not enough water in nearby rivers to generate steam. Armed guards are being posted at dams to prevent desperate farmers from stealing water ... A growing population means that India’s water needs will only increase, even as climate change will most likely make water scarcer. Expanding on the question of water conflicts, Soutik Biswas warned that the summer was only weeks away and water availability in India’s ninety-one reservoirs was at its lowest in a decade with stocks at only 29 per cent of total storage capacity. In Maharashtra state, tens of thousands of farmers moved to camps providing free fodder and water for animals in parched districts, and in Orissa farmers breached embankments to get water for their crops. To the dismay of fishermen even the Ganges was running low on water. A headline in the Economic Times in May 2017: “India uses up more groundwater than US & China.”33

2 The Scramble for Oil

If coal was the father of the Industrial Revolution, it fathered petroleum, which was to become the blushing bride of late modernity and like sugar in earlier times, a dazzling source of enrichment. And like sugar, its history is woven into the fabric of imperial conquest, expropriation, and massive suffering. From the 1930s when Japan moved in on the oil of Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies to the turn of the twentieth century when Washington ravaged Iraq and nato dismembered Libya, oil and empire have marched together as in a Roman parade with the victors in the van and the vanquished chained in the rear. The cheering bystanders, including the gofers and glorifiers of empire, had little idea of what costs lay ahead. If it was the riches of China, India, and Southeast Asia that had become the glittering prizes that European capitalism ached to possess in the nineteenth century, it was the Middle East that became the cynosure of their desires in the twentieth.. By the beginning of the twenty-first the firms that dominated oil production from Saudi Aramco in the Middle East to Shell in Nigeria and ExxonMobil in America had attained a political influence that few national states could rival. Even more than any other commodity, it will be the consumption of oil that will determine the fate of humanity in the first half of the twenty-first century.

imperial oil No Western empire had staked claims to the continental Middle East in the nineteenth century, the great epoch of European impe-

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Carbon Blues

rialism, even though both Egypt and the Maghreb had fallen under degrees of European control from the first half of the century.1 It was oil that drew them eastwards beyond North Africa and the Levant. In fact, the first big oil play was not in the Middle East at all but around Baku in the Caucasus and on the Caspian Sea, within the Russian Empire. This was as early as the 1870s and it was here, in Baku, that the first great oil fortunes were made. And here, too, from 1920 when the Bolsheviks took control of Azerbaijan, we see the origin of the state-owned companies that today possess some 90 per cent of the globe’s oil supply. Until the end of the Great War in 1918, the Arab Middle East had been part of the Ottoman Empire and ruled from Istanbul. Under the Ottomans the first oil exploration in Iraq (then called Mesopotamia), as well as that of independent Iran (Persia), was undertaken. The exploitation of the oil of the Middle East was however barely more than a trickle before the region was confiscated from Istanbul and handed over by the League of Nations in 1920 to Britain and France, the victors of World War I. It was divided into “mandates”; the victorious European Great Powers were mandated to tutor the benighted Arabs in the ways of civilization. America was out of sight and basically minding its own business in the Atlantic world. By the end of the nineteenth century these Great Powers had quite suddenly awakened to the future of oil. Their firms and even governments moved with a measure of celerity. The last decades of the century had seen the scramble for Africa. It was gold and diamonds that the British found in South Africa that had been the compelling draw. In Africa below the Sahara, the French got largely sandy soil but little else of value while the Belgians did better with the Congo and its rubber. The Belgian exploitation of the Congolese rubber, a commodity essential to the mass production of cars, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans. Well known to historians of Africa and a few contemporary journalists, the Congo holocaust was up there with the greatest of European imperial atrocities. So, oil. On the eve of World War I Winston Churchill, the greatest champion of the British Empire’s defenders of the twen-

The Scramble for Oil

21

tieth century and, at the time, First Sea Lord, decreed that the Royal Navy should switch from coal to oil. Imperial oil would thus remain a British preoccupation for the rest of the century, long after gold and diamonds had lost their lustre. Coal, too, lost out and so, too, did oil-less Europe: “In 1950 Western Europe depended upon oil for only 8.5 per cent of its energy needs; most of the rest was still provided by coal, Europe’s indigenous and cheap fossil fuel. By 1970 oil accounted for 60 per cent of European energy consumption. The quadruple increase in oil prices thus put an end to a quarter of a century of cheap energy, sharply and definitively raising the cost of manufacture, transport and daily living,” Tony Judt has explained.2 America, on the other hand, not only had oil, but it was to have strategic domination of the Gulf. More than anywhere else, British exploitation of oil was focused on the Middle East, especially Iran where the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s (apoc, later Anglo-Iranian, aioc) refinery at Abadan at the head of the Gulf was unequalled in the region. But the British claim to the oil in the Middle East was time-sensitive and doomed by rising nationalism after half a century. Having earlier suffered humiliation at the hands of Colonel Abdel Gamal Nasser during the Suez crisis, in January 1968, at a moment of grave economic difficulty, the British government announced that it was abandoning its commitment to most of Asia, including the Gulf. As much as the defeat at Suez, the withdrawal from the Gulf tolled the end of the British Empire.3 British Petroleum (bp), the descendant of aioc, however, survived the end of empire to become one of the world’s largest oil firms, distinguishing itself by its cavalier operations, notably in the Gulf of Mexico where it was responsible for the most devastating marine oil spill in American history.4 Oil exploration never initially reached the furious heights of the nineteenth century’s several gold rushes nor was the conquest of oil-rich lands as merciless, although later, in the Middle East in the late twentieth century, this would change. But in the late nineteenth century, as the value of oil became apparent and avarice uncoiled, the long arm of carbon desire began to stretch

22

Carbon Blues

out from Baku into neighbouring Persia and along the Gulf, as well as to British colonial Burma and Dutch colonial Sumatra. In Central Europe exploration and exploitation moved into Austrian Galicia (now in Poland) and Rumania. Oil produced its own gallery of villains, plutocrats, and revolutionaries, with Joseph Stalin as the most famous oil field agitator. He cut his teeth in Baku before going on to seize state power with the death of Lenin in the Soviet Union. And it was Russian oil in the Caucuses around Baku during World War Two that became the irresistible siren that lured Hitler’s oil-thirsty armies to their destruction. During the Great War of 1914–18, the French and the British, confident that the Ottoman Empire was too feeble and disorganized to hinder them, decided to portion out the Arab Middle East like a rich pudding. They had already spooned up Africa and much of Asia. At first, again on Churchill’s inspiration, the British sought to expand into the region by invading Turkey by way of the Dardanelles. Like other of Britain’s late imperial forays, this proved disastrous. Already the British had sat down with their French allies and worked out, in secret, how to divide the region. The secret agreement that the two powers arrived at was known after its negotiators, London’s Mark Sykes and Paris’ François Georges-Picot. By the Sykes-Picot agreement, the British got Mesopotamia, where most of the Middle East’s oil was thought to be and the French got Syria (which originally included Lebanon). Persia, not being a part of the Ottoman Empire, was excluded from the carve up and retained its independence although the British soon came to dominate its oil production. The confiscation of Iraq from the Ottomans was professed to be to the benefit of civilization generally. The French called this presumption la mission civiliatrice. It was the antecedent of the espousal of the “Right to Protect” (r2p), the idea, hatched in Canada and adopted unanimously by the un General Assembly in 2005, that immediate intervention might be necessary if genocides like that of Rwanda in 1994 were to be avoided. r2p was not meant to apply to Great Powers or the mercenary firms who continued to plunder the world’s supply of vital raw mate-

The Scramble for Oil

23

rials like oil and the three “T’s” from the Congo, tantalum, tin, and tungsten. In Iraq the British had misunderstood, or at least misrepresented, the mood of the inhabitants who had, contrary to their own wishes, became British subjects. Within six months of occupying Baghdad they had a widespread rebellion on their hands. This was in 1920. In 1929 British troops helped put down a mutiny in the newly created oligarchy in Saudi Arabia. Sixty-odd years later, in 1991, the Americans invaded Iraq and in 2003, after a second invasion, took over the running of the country. “Oil lies at the heart of Iraqi politics,” Greg Muttit has argued, explaining the objects of the Western oil companies to get control of Iraq’s rich resource.5 In late 2009, assisted by officials of the Obama administration, ExxonMobil obtained a profitable lease on Iraq’s oil reserves, specifically of the West Qurna oil fields, a behemoth that contained at least 8.7 billion barrels of crude. Within six to eight years it was hoped that Iraq’s oil production would rise to 2 million barrels per day (bpd).6 On the Gulf, the several small emirates like Kuwait and Qatar which were later to become oil and gas Klondikes became British protectorates, while Arabia, where the British had helped destroy Ottoman power, remained independent or, at least, nominally independent if, in reality after World War Two, an American satrapy. Yet in spite of the furious conniving between the Europeans for control of the Middle East oilfields, by 1945 the region produced only 7.5 per cent of the world’s oil, the largest share of which flowed through the pipes of apoc to their refinery at Abadan, once the world’s biggest. This refinery was nationalized along with the rest of the Anglo-Persian in 1951. The British had paid the Iranians less than 20 per cent of the profits from their oil. Later, after the Algerians had nationalized their oil, the Algerian oil minister made the point that the days of 12–18 per cent were over.7 In the years after World War Two, everything, except for the boundaries agreed by Sykes and Picot, changed. As the grasp of the European powers in the Middle East weakened after the Suez crisis of 1956, the sovereign states of the region themselves took con-

24

Carbon Blues

trol of oil production. A rising elite of nationalists, following the initiative of Pablo Pérez Alfonzo of Venezuela, had banded together and, advocating that countries had exclusive rights to the resources that lay within their borders, formed the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec).8 After Iran nationalized oil production in March 1951, Syria followed in 1964, Algeria and Libya in 1971, and Iraq in 1972. Oil production was on the way to becoming nationalized globally. It was the prime minister of Iran, Muhammed Mossadeq, one of the region’s enlightened, secular, modernists who stood out among the postwar leaders in the region. Leading the Iranian parliament, he had nationalized the assets of aioc in 1951, including the refinery at Abadan. The reaction of the Americans and British was quick in coming. Mossadeq was overthrown in a plot organized by the American and British secret services. They preferred rule by the shah, son of a former military dictator. Stability was sought with the American training of the Iranian secret police which were a major prop of what Juan Cole has called “one of the most repressive capitalist dictatorships in modern history.”9 To the surprise and enduring horror of the West, the shah was overthrown in 1979 by a religious revolutionary who shocked America by suggesting that the role of the US in the Middle East was Satanic. The shah’s pro-American despotism had been destroyed by an alliance of a new class of religious and secular students and western-educated professionals whose attempts to establish a secular, republican, nationalist government were eclipsed by the forces that favoured an Islamic Republic. This alliance was led by an eminent Shi’a cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini. Shi’ism, one of the two major doctrines of Islam, had historically been the most quiescent. This time it was different. The religious despotism established by the Ayatollah and his followers from 1979 which celebrated a novel form of Islamic nationalism and disparaged the West, forty years later was still a thorn in the side of Washington and its allies like Israel and the Gulf States. Oil was at the centre of the Islamic Republic’s survival and its ambitions in the Middle East.

The Scramble for Oil

25

The subversion of Mossadeq was an unambiguous lesson for the whole Third World: uncooperative governments could be toppled under pretexts which Washington and its allies deemed useful and which included their unsatisfactory human rights records or their threats to regional, that is American, security. Human rights were of course to be defined by Washington and its allies.10 Compliant governments, like that of the shah, were guaranteed a place in the American sun as long as they supplied cheap oil and served as insatiable markets for Americans arms. Up to the end of the 1960s, the oil companies seem to have had the region where they wanted it. And then came nationalism, opec, the 1973–74 oil crisis and oil price shocks, and the creation of the national oil companies, the nocs, which took control of ownership. By 1980 nationalized oil companies had come to dominate the oil and gas industries and were among the largest energy interests in the world. “Equity oil,” that is oil production in the hands of the oil majors, was the case only in advanced capitalist states like the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and Norway.11 None could compare to Saudi Aramco, the piggy bank for the Saudi oligarchs, or the Chinese companies, Sinopec and the China National Petroleum Corporation (cnpc).12 With the overthrow of the shah in 1979, to the dismay of Washington and the delight of the oil majors, oil prices doubled to a peak of $39 a barrel – equivalent to $140 today. One unintended consequence was the turning of Americans towards small imported cars, first, from the 1950s, with the German Volkswagen and then the Japanese Honda Civic in the 1970s.“By ... 1973, small cars accounted for more than 40 percent of all passenger cars sold in America,” explains Tom McCarthy.13 Quite suddenly the market share of mainly German and Japanese imports rose to nearly 25 per cent.14 Of course it would be a bit of a stretch to claim that the American overthrow of Mossadeq in 1953 was, after a lapse of a quarter century, the opportunity for Toyota and Datsun but the connection is tempting. Thus the heyday for the nonnational, independent, Western oil companies in the Middle East had been in the days before the

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Carbon Blues

opec shocks of the 1970s when they were able to fix oil prices and manipulate governments. Although by the end of the twentieth century 90 per cent of the world’s oil reserves were in the hands of sovereign, and normally, autocratic governments, with the end of the commodities super-cycle and the decline of oil prices in 2014 opec itself was threatened.15

3 Carbon America

As late as the 1880s, when coal was still king, most of America’s oil was produced in Pennsylvania. After refining, this oil was used mainly in the form of kerosene for lighting but also for cooking, as in camping stoves today. Oil production and distribution was a monopoly of Standard Oil, a firm owned by the Rockefeller family. At one point, controlling 90 per cent of America’s oil market, the Rockefellers had become American Saudis. A popular jazz hit of the ’30s, “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” echoed the contemporary popular view with the line “As rich as Rockefellers.” The Rockefeller clan comprised the direct descendants of the founding oligarch, John D. Rockefeller, one of the merciless titans of the Gilded Age and, in his day, the richest man on earth. The Rockefeller fortune had been partly built on coal that came from mines like that in Ludlow, Colorado, where the local national guard massacred striking workers who were seeking to unionize. The Great Coalfield War of 1913–14 led to such a national scandal that the Rockefellers called in William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Canadian labour minister who had been successful in dousing dozens of labour disputes in his own country. Mackenzie King was within a decade of becoming the prime minister of Canada and was seen as a genius in the tripartite relations between labour, management, and capital.1 The Rockefeller family fortune was barely diminished over the whole of the twentieth century even though their oil monopoly was broken up by the US Supreme Court acting on the basis of antitrust laws. The giant Rockefeller

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Carbon Blues

oil firm was originally called “Standard Oil” and with its breakup several state-based oil firms were established, two of which, ExxonMobil and Chevron, became super-majors. Outside of the US, oil came to be produced in significant quantities at different sites in the Americas, especially Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, and Canada. The oil of the Americas was largely consumed by Americans. That of the Middle East, especially of the Gulf, was a different matter. There oil was not about motive but rather political power, that is, global strategy. Since the end of World War Two American interest in the immense hydrocarbon reserves of the Gulf, like that of Britain, “has always been principally about the strategic advantage from controlling … hydrocarbons, not Western oil needs.” In fact, America itself has never imported more than a token amount of Gulf oil.2 In mid-2011 the oil story shifted gears. Previously, US crude production, which was overwhelmingly in Texas, had yo-yoed between 5 and 6 million barrels a day (mbd). Prices were equally volatile, ranging from below $20 to above $100 a barrel; $12.52 in 1950, $102.58 in 2011. For investors, a crisis point was reached in 1998 with domestic crude prices, at $11.91, lower than 1946.3 Then, as we shall see below, thanks to the perfection of a new technique known as “fracking,” as shale oil and gas came shooting up to the wellhead, overall production rocketed. In less than a decade, in fact mainly during the two terms of office of a single president (Obama), fracking in the US transformed the world’s energy markets. In 2018 Exxon produced 3.9 mbd. Still, oil as well as gas futures remain hedged by uncertainty. Oil companies are in fact oil and gas companies. But for the moment just consider oil. By 2019 the US had overtaken Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s largest oil producer. The arguments for peak oil, that is, that limited supply would drive prices of crude up as far as $200 a barrel, vanished. Dieter Helm has stressed, “The net results of these various developments have not only been to add enough extra supply to crack the world price, but also to undermine any remaining faith in the concept of peak oil. It is no longer plausible to assume that the stock of future oil reserves is known.” (To anticipate, it was the cracking of the world

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29

price, together with increased production in the US that helped to undermine the prospect of the Alberta oil sands.4) By the early 1990s, beyond the world’s oilfields, change was everywhere. It was in this decade, “the world’s most prosperous,” that, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States became unmistakably the world’s dominant power.5 As one highlevel Washington task force put it in 2000, “As the world’s only super-power, [the United States] must accept its special responsibilities for preserving access to worldwide energy supply.”6 In other words, America held the world by its oil. It was hardly surprising, then, that in the aftermath of the Cold War in the 1990s American writers crowed with self-assurance; the end of history had arrived and they were there to collect the garlands. They gave the orders and paid the tab for the World Order. The tab included huge military expenditures, by far the most extravagant in the world. “The annual Pentagon budget of $700 billion was equivalent to the combined spending of the next twenty largest military powers,” commented David E. Sanger in The New York Times. Elements of the American military had already moved in to dominate the Gulf and were to remain immoveable for the next two decades. The largest air base in the world was established at al-Udeid in Qatar, while Bahrain was the permanent headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet.7 Talk of a pivot to East Asia, a favourite theme of the Obama era, came to nothing. The object was clear; if necessary through endless wars America would assure its dominance in the lands around the Gulf, the storehouse of the world’s greatest mineral asset. The military and diplomatic historian Andrew J. Bacevich, writing in a closely-argued study called America’s War for the Greater Middle East: From the outset, America’s war for the Greater Middle East was a war to preserve the American way of life, rooted in a specific understanding of freedom and requiring an abundance of cheap energy. In that sense, just as the American Revolution was about independence and the Civil War was about slavery, oil has always defined the raison d’être of the War for the Greater Middle East. Over time, other considerations intruded

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Carbon Blues

and complicated the war’s conduct, but oil as a prerequisite of freedom was from day one an abiding consideration.8 America’s finest hour (enfolding “the best decade ever”), its hegemonic peak years, came in the epoch of Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush (together 1989–2009). In 1991 and again in 2001 the US invaded Iraq and put an end to the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. In 2001 the American military turned its attention to Afghanistan. These were also considered the years of the Great Moderation when history was proclaimed to have come to an end and economists with customary prescience claimed that global economic problems had finally been solved. The financial crisis of 2008 was soon to follow.9 While the war in Afghanistan seemed to be circling endlessly (and at unbelievable expense), the final punctuation to the question of oil and the Middle East seem to have come in 2014, when oil prices fell apparently irrecoverably. The uncertain future of Big Oil appeared now to be foretold.10 With reconstruction in Europe and the independence of most of the Third World after 1945, the price of oil had become a dominant factor in the global economy. It was also the source of the sheer carbon dependency for states like those in the Gulf, Nigeria, Angola, and Venezuela.11 By the beginning of the new millennium this had led to a new fear, even in North America, that of oil depletion. Timothy Mitchell has suggested that fear of imminent depletion has been a factor even in the Arab uprisings of 2011, especially in Tunisia and Egypt. “For many countries,” he wrote in 2013, “the supply of oil may be already passing from a plateau to a declining slope.”12 Yet while this fear of depletion stalked some states the anticipation of opportunity was echoed in others, especially the US and Canada.

opec While in the early twentieth century Europeans had thus scrambled for control of the oil of the Middle East, by the middle of the

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31

century regional producers had become masters of their own resources. Meanwhile, in the background, oil production in the US had moved ahead with a quiet determination. By 1945 the United States produced two-thirds of the world’s oil while more than half of the remaining third was produced within the American sphere of dominance in Latin America and the Caribbean. Oil was not just another commodity, like wheat or gold. First, it had become the largest commodity in world trade in both value and volume. Second, it was traded in US dollars, the currency of the international companies that monopolized its production. The largest of these companies, notably Exxon and Mobil, were American.13 From the onset of the postwar era, Europeans were dependent upon American dollars and American-controlled oil supplies. In 1945 only 7.5 per cent of the world’s oil came from the Middle East and most of this came from the fields of British-controlled Iraq. In order to maintain high prices, American oil majors had persuaded the president to establish import quotas limited to 9 per cent of domestic demand. This led to the huge profits that, at least recently, we have since associated with oil production.14 One consequence of this was that as the demand for American crude increased, American reserves became depleted. Timothy Mitchell: “By 1971, US production had started to decline, as the volume of reserves in the lower forty-eight states passed their peak. Declining production, coupled with continually rising demand, meant that the US no longer had the surplus capacity required to regulate prices.”15 Another consequence was that several Gulf producers, together with Venezuela and later Nigeria, set up the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (opec). By 1980, the oil world had been permanently transformed. It would change again with the exploitation of shale or “tight” oil from late 2011 and with the decline of the commodity super-cycle from 2013.16 As I have suggested, at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, in 2012, a break through in technology took place. As fracking technologies advanced and prices stabilized , shale oil together with gas came on stream adding over 3 mbd of oil to U.S. output.17 World oil markets were transformed, but oil prices, after hitting rock bottom in the mid-$20s in February 2017,

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Carbon Blues

remained relatively modest. Oil was thus both cheap and plentiful. As a correspondent for The New York Times enthused in November 2017,“By the 2030s, largely because of production from shale-rock formations, the United States is expected to produce more than 30 million barrels of oil and gas a day … That is 50 percent more than any other country has ever produced in a single year.”18 This was not anticipated. In 2010 when oil prices had recovered from the 2008 financial crisis to reach around $100 a barrel, and Goldman Sachs predicted the price to reach $200 a barrel, the nocs and the majors looked like they were on the stairway to heaven. Analysts swooned. They invested billions in shale oil, in Alaska and in Alberta’s tar sands. New pipelines were laid. Canadian governments, Conservative and Liberal, federally, and the social democratic ndp provincially, showed themselves unwavering in their fealty to Big Oil and Big Pipelines. How had Canada, land of the beaver, the moose, and the spruce become entangled in a subject whose natural habitats were the barren wastelands and tropical palm lands of the Caspian and the Gulf of Benin.

canada: “global energy powerhouse” Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Canada managed to cultivate its reputation as a peace-loving, aid-giving, and environmentally sympathetic middle power, a little chilly perhaps but an Arcadia of decency and reasonableness, inhabited by nice people with outdoorsy tendencies and compensated for their lack of heritage sites by a prolific endowment of trees, grasslands, mountains, and lakes. In Canada the idea of “wilderness” has been rare since much of the country was barely out of the woods. Prudence, sympathy, and a certain sober lack of irony were thus deemed to be governing virtues, at least for English-speaking Canadians. One Canadian prime minister in the 1960s even won a Nobel Prize for striving for world peace; a few years later, Canadians founded Greenpeace. A leading mandarin, Maurice Strong, became the first head of the United Nations Environment Programme (unep).19 In 1971 the federal government of Pierre Tru-

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deau (1968–79) passed the Clean Air Act and the next year the Canada Water Act. Yet, it was Trudeau’s Liberal party that supervised the collapse of Canada’s cod fishery on the Atlantic coast, “an ecological crime comparable to the Soviet Union’s draining of the Aral Sea.”20 In the early twenty-first century the leaders of the normally dominant Liberal party threw themselves collectively under a passing bus, and the Conservatives, normally divided and out of power and popular mainly in the suburbs and rural areas, won a minority government under Stephen Harper. This was in 2006. Earlier in the same century the Conservatives managed to transform themselves radically. Historically, they had called themselves “Progressive Conservatives” and their progressive, “Red Tory” wing, which had always sheltered a number of liberals, remained influential. Then came the merger of the Progressive Conservatives with the smaller Reform Party. The Reform Party was based in Alberta and had strong populist and especially evangelical roots. Its ties to the “oil patch,” headquartered in Calgary, were virtually matrimonial. If fact, it would only be a slight exaggeration to say that they were the party of carbon and nativism.21 Most Conservatives anathematized, in equal measure, the federal government and environmentalists. Party spokespersons hammered environmentalists as being aliens indifferent to the employment of “working people” and the welfare of families, especially of Alberta. Those who pursued environmental remediation, or even bird watching, were viewed as secular heretics or even the useful idiots of radicalism. One Conservative cabinet minister referred to the opposition to developing the oil sands as “eco-terrorism.” In the Harper government discourse, thus, environmentalism became regarded much as pacifism during wartime or feminism in the Vatican. Under Stephen Harper the Canadian state radically and rapidly reversed its image as being peace-ish, nice-ish, and green-ish, cutting funding for environmental research, suppressing the registry of “long” guns, and even the detailed “long form” census. It waved off troops to Kosovo and Afghanistan while ostentatiously supporting Israel and denouncing peace negotiations in the Middle East. It was predictably intolerant of marijuana use, a habit of

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Carbon Blues

widespread popularity especially in urban Canada. And, more to the point here, it followed the US out of the Kyoto Agreement. The National Post quoted Elizabeth May, Canada’s one federal Green mp, who compared Canada to North Korea when Ottawa withdrew from the un Convention of Drought Prevention; another journalist claimed that Canada’s image was in tatters. It had become to climate what Japan was to whaling, he claimed hurtfully.22 Whether the Harperites were consciously imitating the government of George W. Bush (who had emphasized that global warming was not a problem) or more modestly following the playbook of the conservative Liberal governments of Australia, which also put resource sales ahead of all else, is a matter for students of comparative government. What remains obvious is that under global conditions of what has been called “the endless crisis” of capitalism, many Western governments saw the need to win votes by keeping taxes down, uprooting any organizations devoted to protecting the environment, and standing by (with subsidies) certain industries (like “defense” in the US and resource extraction in Canada). As for oil, Jeff Rubin has cited one of Harper’s first speeches as prime minister, given before the Canada–UK Chamber of Commerce in London in July 2006: One of the primary targets for British investors has been our booming energy sector [explained Harper]. They have recognized Canada’s emergence as a global energy powerhouse – the emerging “energy superpower” our government intends to build. It’s no exaggeration. We are currently the fifth-largest energy producer in the world. We rank third and seventh in global gas and oil production respectively … But that’s just the beginning. In 2017 Alberta produced 4.2 mbd of oil of which 64 per cent, 2.7 mbd, was tar sands oil. The production of oil sands oil had exceeded conventional oil since 2010 and continued to rise. By February 2019, oil sands production constituted 85.9 per cent of all oil produced in Alberta. A few problems rose here: the first is

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that the extraction of bitumen produces CO2 emissions some 17 per cent in excess of most other conventional crudes. The second is that Canada’s oil production is dependent on US markets – “a lemonade stand with one customer.” Thirdly, in all of the main categories of production, emissions from oil sands would rise steadily. Who would be responsible for the clean up of the mess left by oil exploration and exploitation? But the abiding problem for the oil producers turned out to be none of these. It was that at the end of every economic cycle, in its recent exaggerated iteration known to economists and investors alike as “the super-cycle of commodities,” besides the pot of gold, there are broken hearts. This seems to have been forgotten as oil sands production, and profits, were expected to rise continuously and vertiginously. If the genesis of the Canadian energy superpower dream came with Harper’s election in 2006, lamentations came in mid-2014 when oil prices began their death march down the graphs of investors’ profits. In the months that followed, there was loose talk of oil at C$40 or even C$20 a barrel, a price which would lead to widespread bankruptcies, recriminations, and layoffs in the oil patch. In fact, oil from Alberta, known as “Western Canada Select” (wcs), plunged to $27.47 per barrel in early August 2015 and then plummeted even more sickeningly to C$17.93 by mid-November 2018. The sky that fell on investors was soon to collapse on both the federal and the Alberta Conservatives. Since both the Conservative governments of Alberta, in power for forty-four straight years, as well as the social democratic ndp, in power for four, had boasted of having no sales tax, with the sickening fall in oil prices the leaders of both parties were forced to dip further into to the province’s sovereign wealth fund. Commented The Globe and Mail in an article that compared the funds of Alberta, Norway, and Alaska, “Through times of rich surplus and deep deficits, Alberta’s Tory government has failed to set aside most energy royalties for 27 years.”23 Spending oil royalties to avoid taxes was part of the magical solution that provincial Tories trumpeted as “the Alberta advantage.”

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backstory Now, to go back in our story. The biggest environmental story of the newborn twenty-first century had oil at its heart. Here was a story which admitted to no understatement and in which the leading brands – ExxonMobil, Mobil, Shell, and bp – had a popular recognition up there with such all-American brands as Kleenex, Coca-Cola, Heinz, and Ford. But here, too, was a cautionary tale that appears to have wrecked the cherished image of Canadians as an intelligent, prudent, and nature-loving people. Oil had been discovered in southern Ontario in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Canadian Oil Company was established in 1860. By 1884 there were seven oil refineries in Petrolia and twenty in Oil Springs, Ontario. But in the early postwar years, with the discovery of the Leduc oil field in Alberta in 1947, the focus of oil production leaped westwards.24 In the 1950s the first pipelines were constructed to link the production of Alberta to the consumption in the US and eastern Canada. In 1947, just over six million barrels of oil were produced; by 1972 this had reached over 522 million barrels per year and by 2017, 2.7 million. By 2008 Canada had become America’s largest single foreign supplier of oil and Koch Industries was the largest importer of oil out of Canada. In 2008 the US imported around 75,000 barrels of crude monthly; by 2018 this had been nearly doubled.25 Jane Mayer, in her study of the oligopolies behind the altright in America explains how the Pine Bend refinery in Rosemount, Minnesota was essential to the fortunes of the Koch brothers, Charles and David. These were the sixth and seventh richest men in the world and pillars of the far-right, libertarian, branch of American Republicanism: After refining the cheap muck, the company could sell it at the same price as other gasoline. Because the heavy crude oil was so cheap, Pine Bend’s profit margin was superior to that of most other refineries. And because of a host of environmental regulations, it became increasingly difficult for rivals to build

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new refineries in the area to compete … The Kochs’ good fortune, however, was the globe’s misfortune, because crude oil derived from Canada’s dirty tar sands requires far greater amounts of energy to produce and so is especially harmful to the environment.26 Alberta meanwhile had gone from a poor cousin to rich British Columbia, to the richest province in Canada. Oddly, given its location between two provinces celebrated, if fitfully, for their progressive politics, Alberta lurched rightwards early on, to the point of becoming a Canadian political Oklahoma with a Californian living standard (but a Mongolian climate). For decades, its governments and nearly all of its federal members of parliament were conservatives of one sort or another while provincially the struggle mutated as a contest between mainstream Conservatives and the even further right, populist, evangelical-tinged Social Credit and Wild Rose parties.27 Until early 2015, liberals in Alberta were an endangered species; social democrats may have been viewed as political passenger pigeons but, in fact, their presence in Edmonton, the provincial capital, was fairly solid. Discussion of global warming in Alberta politics was conspicuous by its absence. Then, on 5 May (2015), the earth stood still as a social democratic party, against all predictions, won the provincial election.28

oil sands The official launch date for the exploitation of Canada’s oil sands (also called “tar sands”) was in 1996 although Alberta’s oil sands policy had been created in 1962 and extractions had started in 1967. Up to then there had been speculation about the possibility of exploiting the extensive underground tarry deposits of crude oil in three different locations around Fort McMurray in the north of the province, but the technology for recovery had been wanting and the price had not been right, as extraction of heavy oil from the tar sands remained an expensive process. Sale describes the situation in northern Alberta:

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Here, economically recoverable tar sands oil lie less than 100 meters deep under some 3,500 square km of boreal forest, wetlands and rivers. The oil [is] like toxic peanut butter. But 100 meters depth or less and in deposits 40 to 60 meters thick covered by an overburden of about the same thickness, it can be strip-mined. These tar sand deposits make Canada second only to Saudi Arabia in the quantity of its recoverable oil resources, but recovering this oil is far different from conventional oil extraction.29 Mainly since the late 1990s, a mere 2.6 billion barrels (bbl) of oil had been extracted. The oil sands contain an estimated reserve of more than 165 bbl. This extraction had, as a subsidiary effect, produced a galaxy of Olympic-size swimming pools of liquid toxic waste called “tailing ponds.”30 These ponds contain a mixture of bitumen and sand together with the water and chemicals necessary to make the bitumen flow. By 2014 the tar sands were producing more than 2.3 mbd.31 In the days of ebullient optimism, before the discovery of shale oil, it was assumed that about three million barrels of bitumen would be produced a day by 2015. If this were to come to pass, an incredible 286 Olympic-sized swimming pools of liquid toxicity would be created daily, ultimately yielding more than half a million pools. Canada would be able thus to boast of its own man-made chain of lakes in northern Alberta – including the Great Sludge Lake – to complement Great Slave and Great Bear lakes. Inevitably, not only the ground water but even the Athabasca River into which it flows would suffer hideous pollution. By 2017, tailing pond breaches were threatening Wood Buffalo National Park, due north of the tar sands near Fort McMurray. As man-made travesties go, this would catapult Canada to the top of the who’s who of environmental villains, if not in a league of its own then listed somewhere in the class of Deepwater Horizon but above Exxon Valdez.32 By 2017, as we have seen, Alberta was producing over 4 mbd of crude oil, 80 per cent of the Canadian total, two thirds of which was heavy, diluted bitumen. The oil sands accounted for nearly 10 per cent of Canada’s total ghg emissions and 0.1 per cent of global emissions.33

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So, expanding the production of tar sands bitumen would require the solution to two problems: first, what to do with the additional liquid tailings, that is, the billions of gallons of waste, and, second, how to transport the bitumen to markets, either in the US or Asia. For those preoccupied with environmental questions, the first problem was the most compelling. In fact there was a further major problem that lay within the first and that was whether it was possible to contemplate clean energy solutions as an alternative to dirty oil. This problem was seldom broached with seriousness. Unlike Norway, which used its sovereign wealth fund as an energy fund used to develop renewable energy, Alberta exhibited only a passive interest in solar and wind possibilities. When the Norwegian oil fund klp exited investments in Canada’s oil sands, shares in major oil producers dropped by between 10 and 55 per cent. Actually, in fact it was coal that was the Albertan alternative. The province was Canada’s largest producer of coal: 53 per cent of the province’s electricity being coal generated.34 For the industry and the conservative governments of Alberta and Canada the most ticklish question was the second, transportation, since a number of constituencies, including American farmers and Canadians, and especially many aboriginal people and a substantial population of bc’s citizenry, had regularly shown themselves uneasy about the building of bitumen-carrying pipelines snaking through their territories – not to mention oil tankers, like the Exxon Valdez- traversing their coasts.35 Some adjudication of this problem was clearly called for. In the Spring of 1995 the “National Task Force on Oil Sands Strategies” was set up to promote the extraction of oil from tar sands. It was sponsored by the Alberta Chamber of Resources and produced a prospectus called “The Oil Sands: A New Energy Vision for Canada.”36 Unsurprisingly, it was upbeat. Like most business visions its implicit focus was on wealth creation.

peak and shale Over the next decade came the news of a reprieve from the American concern over oil dependency. In this concern, villains like

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Hugo Chavez and Saddam Hussein who ruled major oil producing countries were framed in the catalogue of threats to America’s energy security. Some recalled, as we shall see below, that it had been the normal policy to overthrow governments, like that of Iran and later Libya, which threatened the peace of mind of western investors. So when Chavez died of cancer and Hussein was captured by American forces and then hanged, few in Houston or Calgary, lamented their fates. Up to c.2010 the theory of peak oil supply was widely believed. This theory assumed that oil prices were going to go up and up and up as greedy foreign oligarchs cashed in on the apparently insatiable American demand for petroleum. At some point while prices were climbing, supplies would predictably begin a steady decline. Here was a lesson learned by every student of Economics 101, an apparently inescapable doomsday scenario, just short of nuclear war but up there above mere bank failure, with oil becoming a resource attainable only at a extravagant price. But of course for those in possession of oil or control of its supply, like the Kochs, the story would be one of dazzling riches. Then, unexpectedly for most pundits, especially the Albertans and the other oil sands and conventional oil producers, terrifying news struck: the Americans actually had plenty of accessible domestically produced oil and gas, as well. Since at least the 1950s this black gold was known to have existed, locked in rocky strata known as “shales” found especially in North Dakota but also in Texas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and elsewhere. The shales clamped the oil and between them, like the filling sandwiched inside an Oreo cookie. For a long time it seemed that there was no way to get it out, although by 1953 “fracking,” that is, hydraulic fracturing, was being used to extract oil from the Pembina oil field, the biggest in Alberta.37 In 2005 there was a breakthrough; the technology was developed that enabled the drillers to liberate the oil. This was fracking. Other, associated, problems were solved in 2009 by horizontal drilling. From 2011 shale oil began to ooze out of the more than eight thousand wells in North Dakota, right in America’s backyard, closer even to the Gulf than the tar sands of northern Alberta. By January 2013, the Bakken shales in North Dakota and

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Montana were producing 673,000 barrels daily. By 2014 tight oil production surpassed Iraq’s annual production.38 Other sources of energy seemed to be pointing in the same direction – for instance, the exploitation of natural gas: “The abundance of cheap gas in the US is helping drive an industrial renaissance,” cheered The Financial Times. Later enthusiasts spoke of the “US energy revolution” and “the new oil order.”39 America, it seems, was soon to be freed from dependence upon foreigners for its fuel supply; this, as a number of commentators pointed out, was bound to have a titanic effect on US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. There was initially little mention of the connection between new sources of energy and environmental problems, including an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. Several European countries as well as a number of Canadian provinces and American states however banned fracking, although in others, like British Columbia, which expected to benefit from a shale gas bonanza, it was embraced.40 Of course, there was bound to be a price. The less significant environmental price of the development of the Bakken shales in 2012 was 1,000 oil spills. Perhaps nothing to lose sleep over, unless, of course, you lived near a railway line where tankers full of inflammable oil pounded by day and night – over seven million barrels in the month of August 2018.41 On 6 July 2013, a seventy-twotanker train carrying six million litres of Bakken light crude from North Dakota derailed in downtown Lac Mégantic in southern Quebec, incinerating the centre of the town. Nearly fifty people died in one of the worst disasters in Canadian history. There was little recall of this tragic event when advocates of the oil industry and the premier of Alberta demanded that Canada’s federal government allow more rail transport of oil across the country.42 Canadian producers and governments, provincial and federal, might have been indifferent to this but for the fact that oil spills elsewhere, in North Dakota, Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico tended to be seen by environmentalists as just another reason to keep Big Pipelines at arm’s length. This was the case, for instance, of the Canadian Keystone xl line, proposed to run from the tar sands of Alberta via refineries in North Dakota through Nebraska to the Gulf of Mexico.43 Yet politicians from both Edmonton and Ottawa

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persisted, shuttling back and forth to Washington in the spring of 2013 in an attempt to persuade Americans that Alberta’s high environmental standards meant that there was nothing to worry about.44 Environmentalists in the US, too, opposed the pipeline, organizing the Tar Sands Blockade. Some chained themselves to the railings outside the White House. President Obama spoke purposefully but menacingly against a background of plummeting US oil imports – 17 per cent since 2005. As Eric Reguly of The Globe and Mail put it presciently, “The new American energy reality puts a lot of energy-exporting countries in a tight spot, none more than Canada. Canadian gas and oil exports will never stop, but they are likely to fall substantially.”45 He was not alone. The cover of Canadian Business in March 2013: “What Happens When America Doesn’t Need Canada’s Oil?”46 When President Obama announced that it was no dice on the Keystone pipeline, the effects were evident almost immediately. In a headline of The New York Times: “Oil sands boom dries up in Alberta, taking thousands of jobs with it.”47 That was on 12 October; on 13 October, The Financial Post carried the same story. Two years later, on 19 October 2015, the Harper government was voted out of power. Harper himself resigned as head of the Conservative Party and in August 2016 gave up his seat as a member of Parliament. As we shall see below, the premier of Alberta, social democrat Rachel Notley, struggled on, accepting a C$10 billion deficit which left the province with a predicted C$71 billion debt in 2019–20. “Alberta is desperate,” reflected Jack Mintz, leading spokesman for Alberta’s oil economy at the University of Calgary.48 By early 2018 Notley appeared to have formed an alliance with Prime Minister Trudeau in an attempt to build a pipeline from Alberta across bc to tidewater.49 The social democratic ndp government of bc, newly elected in June 2017, was adamantly opposed to it. By November (2018) when Trudeau spoke in Calgary and failed to promise to bail Alberta out, the romance appeared to have cooled; “a deafening silence” appears to have replaced ready promises.50 Was Alberta to be left to stew in the juices of its own profligacy? Jason Kenney, a former minister in Harper’s government thought not. As head of a new coalition of

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Alberta conservatives, the United Conservative Party (UCP), he became premier of Alberta in the election of 16 April 2019, promising to restore Alberta’s fortunes. Kenney promised to “fight back” against the federal government over its climate change policies. Pipelines were at the head of his list of priorities. “Alberta is back in business,” he claimed in his victory speech. In the week of his electoral victory, wcs bitumen dropped to $54.47 a barrel, $10 below wti crude. In a report in a late 2015 issue of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ (ccpa) Monitor, in which a number of changes to Canada’s environmental record were lauded, it was reported that Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions were 18 per cent higher than they had been in 1990. “We are producing and consuming more fossil fuels than ever,” the report’s author underlined. The worst offender, unsurprisingly, was Alberta. It produced, in one estimate, 37 per cent of total emissions.51 Coal consuming Saskatchewan, ruled also by a conservative government and being represented in Ottawa by a large delegation of conservative mps, “has seen the biggest increase in ghg [green house gas] emissions in the past two decades and is the worst per-capita ghg emitter.” In 2016 Canada produced 704 megatonnes of greenhouse gases. In 2016 Ontario, the most industrialized province, emitted 161 megatonnes.52 In early September (2015) the newly elected Alberta Environment minister Shannon Phillips, gave the keynote address at the climate summit in Edmonton hosted by the Pembina Institute. She admitted that Alberta created 37 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions in Canada and that the amount was forecast to reach 39 per cent by 2020.“Phillips said the effects of climate change can be seen in Alberta with wildfires, drought and shrinking glaciers.”53 What to do? Eight months later, as we shall see, a massive wildfire consumed the boreal forest around Fort McMurray, north of Edmonton. Reference in the Canadian media to any effects due to climate change remained muted. In May 2015, right after the newly elected ndp government of Alberta had appointed an energy minister, she was accused by the opposition of “sending a trouble message” [sic] to the oil and gas sector. “I hope [Energy] Minister McCuaig-Boyd will take a clear stance and state unequivocally

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that she’ll stand up and fight for projects that are good for Alberta jobs, growth and long-term prosperity,” said the Wildrose energy critic. In the provincial election of April 2019, McCuaig-Boyd lost her seat.54

“economy of the future” Justin Trudeau, elected as prime minister of Canada in October 2015, in succession to Stephen Harper, was believed by his many followers to represent everything progressive and open in Canadian politics. With a degree of good-natured, telegenic, flamboyance he established himself as sympathetic to aboriginal land claims, to women, to gays, to transsexuals, to refugees, to the legalization of marijuana, and to the environment. The New York Times assured its readers that “Mr. Trudeau … stands for aggressively cutting the country’s carbon emissions.”55 After the obedient largely male nodders of the previous government, his ministers seemed to be unusually open and well informed; the adjective “woke” was used to describe him. Half of his cabinet were women. Then, not just for environmentalists, came a shock. On 29 November 2016 Trudeau announced that his government had approved a second pipeline from Edmonton, to be built by Kinder Morgan, and which would terminate in Burrard Inlet in Vancouver whence oil would be shipped to thirsty customers in Asia. It would follow the route of the original pipeline, called the “Trans Mountain,” that had been built in 1953. The second pipeline was to be larger than the original and followed its route nearly threequarters of the distance between Edmonton and Burnaby. It was referred to as the “tmx” (Trans Mountain Extension) pipeline. As a consequence of the building of the second pipeline, the number of tankers travelling through the harbour on which the port of Vancouver had been built and which much of its downtown and several of its rich suburbs had been focused would increase, in one estimate, from approximately five to thirty-four a month. The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency estimated that the new capacity would result “in roughly 13.5 to 17 megatonnes of additional ghg emissions each year.”56

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Trudeau’s arguments and those of his defenders was that in the short term Canada needed the economic stimulus that crude exports would provide. Neither he nor his spokespersons specified how long or short the “short term” might last or how the climate, not to mention life on earth more generally, would fare while it was ticking away. Often, as I have suggested, 2050 was seen as a viable time horizon.57 The argument of the Government of Alberta was that the federal government had failed to build new pipelines and this was costing the Canadian economy C$80 million a day. When David McKay, ceo of the Royal Bank of Canada, gave a speech encouraging the building of new bitumen pipelines, arguing, in the Orwellian mode, that this would be in the interests of an energy transition to a “cleaner economy,” Catherine McKenna, the federal minister of the environment and climate change, was enthusiastic. She tweeted: “We can’t get to the economy of the future if we don’t use all our resources, smartly and sustainably.” And in The Globe and Mail, Gary Mason, the paper’s western correspondent, insouciantly headed an article in favour of the pipeline with the tag line, “Sorry, Vancouver: The rest of Canada needs pipelines.”58 The premier of Alberta echoed a similar argument; Alberta needed time, she protested, to shift away from dependence on oil. “Managed transition” was the sweetened watchword. Otherwise, tens of thousands of Albertans would face unemployment and even destitution. Certainly they would have to pay sales tax. Yet even more bad news was on the wing: investment in the oil sands, capital spending and thus profits, like Canada geese, were now flying towards the south. “The great oilsands era is over,” announced the cbc News in mid-September (2018). By early November oil sands bitumen (Western Canada Select) was selling at a discounted rate of $15 a barrel. Oil producers were losing around $30 million a day, according to Alberta’s ministry of finance and the Wall Street Journal. This claim, often repeated by Premier Notley, seems to have been an exaggeration.59 In November (2018) the Chinese economy showed signs of slowing with global monthly imports (including oil) increasing by a disappointing 3 per cent – the expectation had been an increase of 14.5

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per cent. 60 Anyway, most of Alberta’s bitumen exports would likely continue to go south to the US, not west to China. Hearing Trudeau’s announcement, opponents of tar sands oil exploded. Arguments, mainly against, flooded the media.61 Thomas Mulcair, former leader of the social democratic ndp denounced the announcement as “a betrayal of trust.” The City of Vancouver, boasting of its green credentials (“the strongest and greenest [economy] in Canada”) put up a message from its mayor Gregor Robertson titled “It’s Not Worth the Risk.”62 Certainly, the risk was staggering – essentially the fear of a devastating oil spill in Burrard Inlet, the gorgeous harbour on which the cities of Vancouver, West Vancouver, North Vancouver, Burnaby, and Port Moody had been built and on which one of the richest, best educated, and environmentally conscious populations in Canada lived. Thus the matter of the bc Liberal vote bank, which had provided the party with seventeen seats in the most recent federal election, was in the balance. In every federal election the Greater Vancouver area had been contested by the ndp, itching to recapture ridings lost to the Liberals. Gregor Robertson’s blog included a map that pinpointed the several oil spills along the line of rail and the pipelines from Alberta throughout the province of bc.63 In a 3 a.m. telephone communication published in The Globe and Mail, Robertson complained personally to Trudeau, with whom he had enjoyed a “bromance” (in newspeak). Trudeau seems to have been caught off guard: “[W]e’d be crazy to be sitting on billions of barrels of oil and not get it to market.” Robertson: “That is total bs, man.” And then, ambiguously, Trudeau: “Seriously, do you think that this thing is actually going to get built?” Presumably there was a follow-up call in which Trudeau explained the politics of a pipeline which might never be built.64 Meanwhile, in the words of Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hébert: “Pipeline pain comes with little political gain for Trudeau.” Elizabeth May, the vociferous and effective leader of the Green Party, which enjoyed a significant popularity in bc, claimed she would go to jail if necessary to block the pipeline. Unsurprisingly, business papers mocked May and stood firmly behind the oil interest. But stalemate ensued with Hébert, one of the most widely consulted columnists in Canada,

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predicting that the prime minister lacked the means to end the feud between bc and Alberta. An oil spill in the East China Sea in January (2018), producing “an environmental threat that experts say is unlike any before” was likely to feature in any arguments against shipping condensate along the bc coast. In November there was another oil spill, this time from an offshore drilling platform in Newfoundland. This was the province’s largest spill ever with 250,000 litres pouring into the Atlantic Ocean.65 On 24 January (2017), President Trump announced that he would lift the embargo on another pipeline that passed from Alberta into the US, the Keystone xl pipeline. The pipeline was to deliver up to 830,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Canada to the refinery in North Dakota. The New York Times: Along with a decision in late November to approve two other pipeline projects, Mr Trudeau’s welcome of the Keystone xl revival has alienated many environmentalists in Canada, and has also strained his relations with some indigenous communities affected by the pipelines … “You can’t make a choice between what’s good for the environment and what’s good for the economy,” Mr Trudeau [said]. “We can’t shut down the oil sands tomorrow. We need to phase them out. We need to manage the transition off our dependence on fossil fuels … The responsibility of any Canadian prime minister is to get our resources to market and, yes, that includes our oil-sands fossil fuel.” The Times pointed out that the project would create few permanent but would generate thousands of short-term jobs. It is for this reason that several unions supported the project.66 The increased production of oil from the Alberta tar sands and the expansion of pipelines were likely to kill the Paris targets, according to at least one report.67 So here was a question that several commentators have either addressed or at least hinted at: was this all a feint, a salesman’s “bait and switch” whereby something attractive is offered to consumers and then, discretely, withdrawn? The something in question here would be the Liberal vote in Alberta benefitting Premier Notley. Notley had promised the Alberta electorate that she would fight

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for pipelines. After all, without oil Alberta would be a simple prairie province dependent on its dairy, its beef and crops, and its tourism. Unless the pipeline was built, Notley would almost certainly be out of office after the next provincial election. (She was.) So, with the help of the prime minister she appeared to have fulfilled her promise. Thus whether “the thing” was actually going to be built or not seemed to be no longer a matter for conjecture. But what about the price for oil? When Trudeau made his announcement, wcs bitumen stood at a disappointing $50 a barrel. Earlier in the year Maclean’s magazine had asked, “Life at $[C]20 a barrel: what the oil crash means for Canada.”68 It seemed obvious what it would mean for Alberta. Oil prices in the summer of 2018 did little to justify the federal government’s $C4 billion plus pipeline investment. In the Financial Post in early September (2018) Geoffrey Morgan headlined, “Oilpatch’s summer of woes,” pointing out how prices of Alberta’s Western Canada Select (wcs) bitumen had paused at $39.57 on the way down from $52.73 to $17.71. By late November 2018 it had fallen to just under C$15 and was still descending. By mid-January 2019 one oil analyst was to write, “There’s No Sugarcoating Canada’s Oil Crisis.” Even though the Conservative government of Alberta had lowered corporate tax, Alberta oil profits were in decline in spite of surging production.69 In spite of his green posturing, the prime minister’s willingness to keep the oil lobby on side has always been clear. At the beginning of March (2017) at an oilman’s conference in Houston he had thrilled the audience by asserting,“No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave it there.” The journalist Deborah Yedlin in The Calgary Herald headlined her article with the good news: “Trudeau charms global energy leaders in Texas.” Yet, as global temperatures rose and the climate became more erratic, the price for dirty oil, like the share price in oil companies, continued to plummet. Trudeau meanwhile insisted stubbornly that in the “national interest” the “pipeline will get built.”70 In the pipeline debate, unsurprisingly, the environment is almost never mentioned by the governments of Canada or Alberta.71

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And public policy? The historian of Canadian environmentalism, Laurel Sefton Macdowell, has stressed the duplicity that has always been a feature of Canada’s climate change policy: Canada’s policy on climate change has been slow, inadequate, focused on voluntarism, and since the election of the Conservative government, virtually nonexistent. The federal government continues to give millions of dollars in tax breaks annually to the oil and gas industry – the source of the majority of carbon emissions – but has spent little on alternative energy sources. The federal government released Climate Change Plan for Canada in 2002, but its policies have not prevented emissions from rising rapidly since the 1990s, largely because of the Alberta tar sands, which it actively supports and hardly regulates. To support the coal and oil and gas industries, it tried to get an agreement to allow Canada a 25-percent increase in emissions at home. The plan failed but demonstrated the government’s priorities. Canadian programs contained no financial penalties for greenhouse gas producers and no regulated limit on industrial emissions.72 So, in late August (2018), the pipeline controversy exploded again, predictably. In the words of a headline of the National Observer, “Commercial viability of Trans Mountain’s expansion just took a huge hit from the Federal Court of Appeal.” The federal court, given the task of reviewing the application of Trans Mountain, had turned it down on the basis of the lack of consultation with the First Nations groups occupying land through which the pipeline would pass and the failure of the application to take account of the City of Vancouver’s reservations. “We have been let down,” Notley complained.73 Trudeau responded hastily by purchasing the pipeline from its owners, who, having failed to sell it to anyone else, were jubilant. The cost: C$4.5 billion.74 Commented Andrew Willis in The Globe and Mail, “Ottawa now stuck with Trans Mountain other investors wisely rejected.” In the same paper John Ibbitson, a commentator on national politics, stated, “Trudeau’s trou-

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bles mount with the next election just 13 months away.”75 On a different note, it is obvious that Trudeau’s 2015 Paris promise of a 30 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030, like the promises of his predecessors, had gone up in smoke. “His staff know this, so he knows it, too,” commented the energy consultant Mark Jaccard. According to Kinder Morgan’s ceo his company’s third quarter net income had reached $1.35 billion “with most of that resulting from the Trans Mountain sale.”76 But once more, reality that had been ignored returned with a malevolent vengeance. At the beginning of November (2018) Canada’s major print media carried the story that the Alberta Energy Regulator had estimated that the cost of cleaning up oil spills and spent facilities in the oil patch might be as much as C$260 million. Another account even spoke of billions.77 In an arrangement not unlike Colonel Saunders being appointed to manage chicken welfare, the regulator “an industry-funded agency that ostensibly operates at arm’s length from the provincial government and is charged with both promoting and policing the oil business,” appears to have worked better at promoting than policing. What drew the attention of the media is that he apologized not so much for the billions but for “spooking” the public as to the cost – which was at least C$200 million more than previously admitted.78 In any case who would pay for the clean up? Surely not the petroleum industry. In a coordinated but ultimately failed attempt at damage control, the Alberta government and industry broke from cover with a flurry of implausible explanations for the admission by the head of the regulator. He would resign, it was conceded. Just before the federal election of 2019, it was disclosed that the ceo of the Alberta Energy Regulator had been involved in the defalcation of public monies to finance his own consultancy firm. Perhaps the worst news for the government was that investor confidence and perhaps even confidence in Ottawa would be shaken. The worst news for most Canadians was that the federal government would become committed to the C$260 million clean up – as they had six years earlier for the C$400 million clean up of a toxic waste site left by a steel mill in Nova Scotia. Reporters for the

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National Observer claimed that Alberta officials had “no idea how to clean up toxic oilsands tailing ponds” which had sprawled to cover an area “twice the size of the city of Vancouver.” The Globe and Mail explained how flipping oil wells and then simply abandoning the less profitable of them had become a glittering source of profit as well as an inexpensive way of dumping clean up costs on the public.79 The explanation for Alberta’s conundrums have little in common with the litanies of blame, many of which have been paid for by the Government of Alberta, which have flooded the media. These lay the blame on a shortage of pipelines – the fault of the Liberal government in Ottawa. An alternate explanation, however, points the finger at the failure of the industry to establish refineries to upgrade heavy to lighter oil and in the process reduce production. Obviously, the federal government does not build refineries. Lack of refineries, due to lobbying by oil interests, have benefitted the Koch brothers’ Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota where the Alberta bitumen is upgraded. It is the firms that have been complicit in this that have demanded yet more subsidies and bailouts from Ottawa.80

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4 Motoring to Armageddon

William Nordhaus has helped us grasp how transportation has been a major contributor to climate change by estimating the cost of going for a spin; driving one hundred miles between two cities in Connecticut, he points out, would use five gallons of gas which would produce about one hundred pounds of CO2 . In metric terms this would be nineteen litres to produce forty-five kg. of CO2 to go about 160 km. If everyone in the world made this trip twice a week they would add about thirty billion metric tonnes to the atmosphere every year. Just take the US, the Western world’s leader and greatest emitter. The total population of the US in 2010 was 309 million. The total ghg emissions produced was 5,640 million tonnes. In 2017 the US produced 5.9 billion tonnes equivalent ghg emissions – the lowest since the early 1990s. If the US economy grows at the rate of 0.7 per cent a year, by 2050 (half of the world growth rate between 1913 and 2012), the population of an estimated 399 million would produce 7,550 million tonnes of CO2.1 How much longer can the US continue to produce record amounts of CO2? A conventional guess might be somewhere around thirty more years, that is, until 2050. It is not yet clear how many million tonnes of CO2 the environment could sustain or what would happen when the saturation point was reached. As we shall see below, even in the immediate term the affects of climate change have become not a little alarming.

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auto odyssey From the very beginning of the twentieth century, cars, at first quaintly dubbed “horseless carriages,” became the grail of middle class status and the defining force of modernism. At first, they were like tiny Cinderella coaches, conspicuous tokens of consumption built by hand in workshops rather than factories by tens of small firms everywhere in the industrializing world. In France, for instance, where all things novel and chic have a persuasive edge, and design is of supreme value, the building of cars was an explosive business and French design, if not engineering (as in Germany), was as eccentric as it was irrepressible.2 Unsurprisingly, in America Henry Ford’s cars did not conform to French tastes. André Citroen, whose descendants produced the most stylish of European cars, sniffed that he was “greatly impressed by the power of Ford’s production and his marvelous industrial creations” but, regrettably, “the artistic element is absent. Nothing about Ford or his plant suggests a trace of the finer esthetic qualities.”3 The cars of the first generation were driven by internal combustion engines that were fuelled by gasoline. Gas thus fuelled cars while cars, in turn, fuelled the demand for gas. The economies of whole American cities and states were transformed by cars and gas. Detroit became Motown, while the economies of Texas and Oklahoma were completely remade. Texas went from being a land of longhorns to one of nodding “donkeys” with the first modern refinery being built in 1898. “In 1901,” writes William Vollmann, “Oklahoma … produced 10,000 barrels of oil. In 1908 it produced 45,798,765 barrels. In 1970 it produced 224 million barrels.”4 It was in America, where nearly half of the world’s wealth was concentrated,5 that standardization stole the day and mass manufacturing captured the future. Henry Ford, who became the world’s leading icon of industrialization, built his first car in 1896. Within a decade motor cars were on a roll, a number of them competing in a race from New York to Portland, Oregon that took the winner forty-four days. By 1910 Ford Motor Company factories were turning out a hundred cars a day. The germ of mass-produced

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cars spread overseas irrepressibly. By 1911, Fords were being assembled in Manchester, England, and London was importing 400 assembled vehicles a year. Automobile registration in the US rose from 8,000 in 1900 to 902,000 in 1912. By 1914 there were Fords for sale everywhere in the West and in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela in Latin America. Production had begun in Buenos Aires, the most advanced of Latin American cities, in 1917.6 In the beginning, makes and models came and went. But then Henry Ford entered the picture. “We do not want to cater to the rich man,” he lectured to visitors to his small Detroit factory in 1906. “It is my whole ambition to build a car that anyone can afford to own, and to build more of them than any factory in the world.” So Ford workers were paid enough to buy the cars that they produced. More than Karl Marx’s appeal to the workers of the world this was to resonate as a revolutionary dictum of the twentieth century. Even the leaders of the communist party drove American cars around Moscow. Cars trumped communists and were the most visible symbol of capitalist success and of globalization from Cuba to Kerala. Henry Ford’s ambition took the form of the Model T, the highly standardized but revolutionary American people’s car, first assembled in 1908.7 The next two decades were the great decade of car sales with prices falling from an average of $2,109 to $827. Driven by a twenty-horsepower engine and weighing 1,200 pounds, the Model T , both the car and its production, came to be among America’s greatest industrial legends. By 1921 Ford had captured more than 50 per cent of the American car market, producing more than two million Model Ts a year. In 1928, when the Model T was replaced by the Model A, nearly half the cars in the world were Model Ts. By 1925 every second person in Los Angeles owned a vehicle.8 “Fordism” became the everyday term for efficient assembly-line production; “speedup,” the relentless, dehumanized push on workers to accelerate production in a synchronized assembly line, was its most notorious practice. On its voyage to posterity Ford created a deluge of motor enthusiasts who guaranteed the success of

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mass production. Between 1910 and 1912 alone there emerged seven thousand Ford dealers across America. In Canada, the McLaughlin Motor Car Company was founded in 1907 in a small factory in Oshawa, Canada’s Detroit sprung up in what previously had been farmland to the east of Toronto. Carriages were McLaughlin’s forte. They were propelled by drivetrains built in Flint, Michigan. So, from the very beginning a supply chain had been born, and car production in North America was an international business. Meanwhile General Motors (gm), the second of what was to become the Big Three motor companies, had been formed in the US with the first Chevrolets built in Canada emerging in Toronto in 1915. Three years later McLaughlin was sold to gm and Canada was permanently out of the race as an independent producer. The branch plant was to become a defining element in the Canadian industrial economy.

tetraethyl lead Whereas Ford is credited with the relentless assembly line production which carries its name, gm was known for having discovered leaded gasoline. By adding just a small amount of tetraethyl lead (tel) to gasoline, cars were able to travel the same distance at the same speed with only half as much fuel. But there was an environmental catch; leaded gasoline is toxic and carcinogenic. “Adding it to gasoline meant releasing trace amounts of lead to the atmosphere with automobile exhaust wherever automobiles were used. Suspended in the air, people inhaled the lead dust, and the metal permanently accumulated in their bodies. The lead in the exhaust also fell to earth, blanketing roads and the nearby landscape with fine lead-laden dust,” writes McCarthy.9 But while the effects of tel were demonstrably deleterious to health, the profits of a product which came with every gallon of gas were significant. Never mind. The matter of toxicity was taken to the courts where Mammon triumphed over morality; lawyers representing the firms that benefited from the sale of tel won over those who had argued against it.

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Faced with a choice between profits and prudential caution in the face of a strong possibility of harm to public health, senior executives at Ethyl, gm, Du Pont, and Standard Oil disputed the health risk and chose profits. By 1940, 70 percent of the gasoline sold in America contained tel, a percentage that rose even further after World War Two. Over the sixty years from 1926 to 1986 the Ethyl Corporation produced 6.6 million tons of tel that were burned with gasoline, and Americans inhaled lead whenever they inhaled automobile exhaust. Lead was finally phased out of gasoline sold in the United States in 1986 and in the European Union in 2000 … [T]he removal of lead from most modern gasoline, which started in the 1980s, has been hailed as one of the greatest public-health triumphs of the last century.10

gm made $43.3 million in patent royalties and $82.6 million in Ethyl profits before its patent expired in 1947.11 In the late twentieth century, arguments similar to those in favour of toxic tel were made by both ExxonMobil and Volkswagen, namely that the claims that public health was endangered were spurious and that Big Oil and Big Auto knew best. Huge money was invested in misleading the public. Meanwhile, and especially from the 1950s, other gasoline additives became widespread. First was benzene, long designated as a “known human carcinogen” by the World Health Organization and the US Department of Health and Human Services. In 1960, according to William Vollmann, the United States produced 150 million gallons of benzene. Mixed with chlorine, ethanol, and sulphuric acid it was an ingredient in ddt.12 Although apparently still used today, after 1990 benzene was at least partly superseded by mtbe (methyl tertbutyl ether), which made gas burn yet more efficiently but was also found to be another potential human carcinogen. Several states banned mtbe altogether while the US Environmental Protection Agency (epa) drafted plans to phase it out. From 2001 ExxonMobil found itself involved in hundreds of cases brought by cities, towns, and individuals who claimed that mtbe had affected their health.13

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The climate change doubters’ finest hour came when a candidate that they supported became president. A headline in The New York Times at the end of March 2018 lamented: “epa Prepares to Roll Back Rules Requiring Cars to Be Cleaner and More Efficient.” In the account that followed it was explained that greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy standards would be undermined “handing a victory to car manufacturers and giving them ammunition to potentially roll back industry standards worldwide.” Readers consulting the epa report on mtbe, for instance, will find a note at the top of the report that indicates that the information on the website is no longer current. It had been censored.14 From the get-go the auto industry was a main consumer of America’s major resources. Tom McCarthy: In 1929, the industry used 18 percent of total US production of all forms of steel, while taking 60 percent of the strip steel and nearly 30 percent of the sheet and bar steel. It used 52 percent of the malleable iron, 84 percent of the rubber, 73 percent of the plate glass, 58 percent of the upholstery leather, 31 percent of the lead, and 26 percent of the nickel consumed in the United States. It also took 37 percent of the aluminium, 24 percent of the tin, 18 percent of the hardwood lumber, 16 percent of the copper, 10 percent of the cotton, and 6 percent of the zinc. Most of the basic raw materials came from the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada.15 The environmental impact of the automobile was consequently immeasurable, not just in the US and Canada but as far away as Southeast Asia and Africa where in British Malaya, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and neocolonial Liberia, rubber plantations were launched with transplants smuggled from Amazonia. In the end the forests of Brazil were massacred while Southeast Asia suffered a similar fate, as Peter Dauvergne has detailed at length.16 Thus as the tidal wave of car sales roared across the country, industrial pollution crashed down upon the environment. Tom McCarthy again:

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Making automobiles produced some of the most extraordinary industrial pollution ever recorded. Fly ash, iron oxide, heavy metals, sulfur dioxide, and, of course, millions of tons of carbon dioxide belched from the smokestacks of the coke ovens, blast furnaces, foundries, steel mills, and plants of the American steel and auto industries. Iron, sulphuric acid, cyanide, phenols, and heavy metals poured into the sewers and rivers that served as liquid waste conduits away from the plants. The manufacturers dumped the remaining by-products – liquids, sludge and solid wastes – that resisted ready disposal in the atmosphere or a local water body wherever an accommodating landowner could be found.17 This was before the consumers of the automobiles switched on their ignitions to produce exhaust fumes comprising the deadly trio of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrous oxide.

peoples’ cars Here the story becomes both clear and complicated; clear because we can quite easily tabulate the expansion of global car ownership before and after World War Two but complicated because although the first owners of mass-produced cars were Americans, subsequent production expanded to several countries. So, if first out of the starting gate were the products of Detroit and right behind them were cars from branch plants in Argentina, Germany, and Britain, behind them came cars from Japan, Argentina, India, and finally South Korea and China. It was Ford that had started up a parts operation in Hamburg in 1912 and opened an office in Berlin in 1924. In England, Ford first assembled cars manufactured in Michigan in sooty Manchester, and in 1931 it opened a massive plant in Dagenham in east London. (In the 1930s, in the Ford plant in Manchester manufacture turned from cars to bombers, which were used against Germany. The Germans in 1940 in turn bombed the former Ford motorcar factory in Manchester, which had taken up making bombers).18

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Motorized vehicles like communists knew no frontiers. During World War Two, Ford’s German plants served the Nazis, producing trucks for the Wehrmacht and even using slave labour from its conquered European territories in some of its factories. This was hardly an embarrassment to Henry Ford who had earlier formed a mutual admiration society with Adolph Hitler. In 1929 Ford’s rival gm bought out the German auto maker Opel. Like Ford, gm went along with the conversion of their German plants to military production.“gm was an integral part of the German war effort,” writes the historian, Bradford Snell. “When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944 … [I]t came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel – a 100 percent gm-owned subsidiary – and flying Opel-built warplanes.”19 After the war, automobile production spread throughout Europe and Asia. The French continued to produce Renaults, Peugeots, and Citroens. The Renaults and Peugeots were found everywhere in both French and British colonial Africa. Citroen manufactured 4 million versions of the “people’s car,” the deux chevaux, between 1948 and 1990. These Citroens spoke of the French genius for eccentric design – and for durability. When General De Gaulle’s enemies sprayed his Citroen ds 19, La Deess (“Goddess”), with machine gun fire in an assassination attempt in 1962, they failed to stop it. After independence, France turned to the oil fields of Algeria where commercial oil was discovered and began to be produced from 1956. Thereafter Algeria became the oil giant of the Mediterranean. At first the production of this oil was in the hands of foreign, and especially French, companies, but in 1971 production was nationalized. By 1900 German workshops were producing 900 cars a year. The iconic “people’s car,” the mass-produced Volkswagen, was first built in 1938. Hitler was there clicking his heels and cheering at its launching. Interrupted during World War Two, German car production was resumed right after 1945, and by 1955 Volkswagen (vw) had made a million Beetles. A decade later the company had built 10 million. “Old” vws, that is, those following the original

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Beetle design, were still being built in Mexico up to 2003 when the last of the 21-plus million original models rolled off the production line. After the war Communist East Germany manufactured its own version of the “People’s Car,” the Trabant or “Trabi,” an inefficient and underpowered fibreglass blast from the automotive, precapitalist, past. Spewing fumes, it putted into history from 1957–91 and then disappeared with the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of communism. Since then it has been cherished and even collected for its quaintly absurd qualities. (Travelling on a train through the former East Germany in 1993, I saw one being used as a chicken coop.) In Asia, European knock-offs were produced first in India. But no chapter in the production of cars in Asia is more impressive than that of the most famous Japanese brands, Toyota and Datsun/Nissan or the sudden emergence of China and South Korea as a major automakers, notably the Chinese Chery, a Chevvy in Chinese tones, and the Korean Kia. In fact, China may leapfrog even Japan in the future for even now three quarters of the current world fleet of electric vehicles (evs) are Chinese. This is all the more likely with China becoming the home of the most advanced battery technology. “Batteries are set to be one of the great industries of the 21st century,” it has been claimed. Nick Butler in the Financial Times thinks that the internal combustion engine may disappear altogether in the near future.20 America’s golden automobile decade coincided with the years the French have called les Trente Glorieuses, the Golden Age of capitalist expansion and uncontested American hegemony in the world that capitalism had made. This age lasted from 1945– 75 and peaked, automotively speaking, with Elvis Presley buying a pink Cadillac in 1955; two pink Cadillacs actually, one for his mother. The Cadillac was at once the apogee of American automobile production and the antithesis of the people’s car. Thereafter came a gradual subsistence of American motorcar domination. By the time Janis Joplin sang “Mercedes Benz,” the Cadillac had fallen irretrievably behind in the status race and twilight time had arrived for the Golden Age. Following the

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Cadillac, other American brands suffered from foreign competition, not excluding foreign cars built in the United States. Tom McCarthy: The American consumer’s love affair with the postwar automobiles of the Big Three did not last. After 1955 some Americans stood the Cadillac-dominated status hierarchy of automobiles on its head by buying the Volkswagen Beetle … Sales [of cars made by the Big Three] fell 46 percent in three years … [T]he sudden shift in consumer tastes toward smaller cars raised the possibility that consumers and critics could nudge producer offerings in an environmentally friendly directions using explicit environmental concerns.21 The garage door that opened a crack for Volkswagen in the mid1950s opened wider for Toyotas as a direct consequence of the shocking rise in gasoline prices due to developments in the Middle East – first, the opec shocks of the 1970s, then the Iranian Revolution of 1979. As a consequence of the latter, as we have seen, gas prices went through the sunroof at least until they came down in 2014 and consumers rushed to buy suvs. In 2017, researchers explained that each year in the US, 214 million drivers piloting 240 million registered vehicles drove 2.7 trillion miles, emitting 2.4 trillion pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere. But the automobile heyday could not last. By 2018, auto sales in America and Europe had stagnated and the auto industry itself was said to be “under siege.”22 Meanwhile, right across Motorland a major auto/environmental scandal was about to rock the market.

das auto Is it fair to blame the makers of the machines that pollute? Take the case of the German automakers. Now engineering is a German triumph and tearing across the country in autobahns without speed limits are the German thing. The Germans have more cars per capita than even the Californians; 48 million for a population of 82 million.23

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Nobody covers the high end of the auto market like the Germans, especially the export market. Think Mercedes, the car of ceos, Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, and Janis Joplin’s dreams. Dream of a Porsche, the car of her friends in which James Dean met his death. Contemplate the vw Beetle, in production in more or less the same buggy shape from the 1930s to 2018. For decades autos have been at the very heart of the German export miracle and implanted in the minds of the country’s political rulers. It was assumed, with their solid designs and reliability, not to mention their fabulous diesel engines, the Germans would put the pedal to the metal and zoom past the Japanese (who had earlier accelerated past the Americans) and from the middle to the top end of the auto market the Germans would dominate. Then fate hit the brakes with the sobering shock known as “Dieselgate.” At first this only affecting Volkswagen but soon afterwards it involved practically all the major German brands. In Canada the Dieselgate scandal burst into the news right after the Fort McMurray fire in 2016 (which I shall anatomize below). Dieselgate was about the use of computer “defeat devices” to conceal the fact that vws loosed streams of toxic nitrogen oxides (NOx) into the air, knowingly, if furtively. The toxic plague displayed not merely indifference to pollution standards but an egregious exhibition of hubris (the Greek word for arrogance). Of course, up to 2015 it might be argued that Volkswagen was entitled to a certain degree of Hochmut. According to Fortune magazine Volkswagen had become the world’s largest automobile company by profit in 2014, the eighth corporation globally in overall profit ratings, one rank above Toyota and just below the giant oil companies.24 Of course, many businesses cheat anyway or have the laws arranged so that they are not regarded legally as cheaters, and many ceos and their platoons of lawyers even get paid to lie and dissemble. This is the case not only of ceos who oversee colossal pollution (like the heads of Exxon and bp), as well as the civil servants who fail in their duties to expose pollution or who condone emissions. Politicians pressure civil servants to pinch their noses and look the other way as a matter of course. We have learned only

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recently that the British government has knowingly agreed to eu regulations on pollution but then blocked any attempt to enact them, even though it had been claimed that nitrogen oxides and particles in the air had caused an estimated 40,000 premature deaths. Based on minutes, correspondence, and conversation, the German left-liberal journal Spiegel International disclosed that the European Commission and member states knew since 2010 at the latest “that the extremely harmful emissions from diesel engines were strikingly higher than legal levels.”25 Now the alarm provoked by the automobile scandal in Germany ran like this: First, there was the political question, that of an industry dictating standards to a national government. Perhaps in the land of Krupp and Siemens there was nothing new here. In any case “[t]he government [was] no longer able to come down hard on carmakers because it has loosened the laws over the years to the point that few still have much impact … They [the carmakers] feel unassailable – too big to fail.”26 The loosening of laws has been laid at the feet of Chancellor Angela Merkel, “the climate chancellor.” George Monbiot, the environment critic of The Guardian, makes the point that although Merkel has been celebrated for brokering the first un climate agreement when she was environment minister and for persuading the G7 leaders to phase out fossil fuels by the end of the century, she has shown herself completely complicit in the defense of the diesel-dependent German auto industry. This is why, says Monbiot, “Europe now chokes on a fug of diesel fumes.” He continues: The worst instance was in 2013, when, after five years of negotiations, other European governments finally agreed [to] a new fuel economy standard for cars. They would produce an average of no more than 95g of C02 per km. by 2020. Merkel moved in to close the whole thing down.27 By a combination of pressure and blackmail, the German chancellor blocked negotiations for safer exhaust emissions. Of course no good turn goes unrewarded. bmw donated to her party, the conservative Christian Democrats, €700,000. When the European

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Commission in Brussels explained to the German government that diesel engines caused more pollution than the auto industry admitted, the advice was ignored. At the same time, Merkel, alarmed by the Fukushima disaster in 2011, made a snap decision and turned back to coal. As well, Germany continued to import biofuels, like palm oil, the consequence of which was the ravishing of the tropical forests of Southeast Asia and, especially, Indonesia so that palm plantations might be planted. 28 Of course, other European states seem no less reluctant to put the wellbeing of the atmosphere ahead of their own economies. In France the government commission set up a laboratory to test car emissions in the wake of the vw scandal. The lab tested eighty-six models of diesel cars. It did not find the kind of illegal defeat devices American investigators found in vws. It did find that some emitted nitrogen oxides at seventeen times higher than the eu limits. But it could not rule on the defeat devices because, after all, it did not actually test the software of the cars. One French senator complained, “We created the commission to see if there was a fraud, but we have no idea if there is or not.” In September 2017 Reporterres bore a headline which pointed the finger: “Renault toujours champion european de la pollution et de la triche.” In March 2018, Le Parisien repeated the claim: “Pollution: Les constructeurs automobiles épinglés, Renault mauvais élève.”29 Nor do all of the servants of the British state have entirely unstained hands. When the Transport Committee of the British House of Commons investigated the furor that surrounded the accusations of vw’s falsified emissions reports, it found that there had been a sweetheart deal between the official Vehicle Certification Agency, the body within the Department of Transport that dealt with car licensing, and Skoda, one of the vw brands. The department had earned £12.6 million a year for “product verification.” It had approved of nine out of thirty of the most polluting cars made by vw. One mp noted that there appeared to be a conflict of interest at work. It was reported that, “Nitrogen oxide gases, emitted by diesel vehicles, contributed to more than 23,000 deaths in the UK in a year.”30

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So the Dieselgate scandal seems to have been one manipulation too far, sticking to the reputation of German automakers like tar on a tacky roadway and leading even influential German politicians to a rash of collective blushing. According to two German journalists, “It is not the work of a few criminal managers in the Volkswagen Group, but ultimately the result of secret agreements within the entire German automobile industry.”31 Even Forbes, the magazine that has generally applauded a nicely-turned profit, warned that Volkswagen and Audi were heading for a collision not only with the US Justice Department but with the eu: “Tests conducted by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission suggest that Audi has manipulated the diesel engine of its best-seller A3,” it quoted Suddeutsche Zeitung as claiming. Later it was admitted that the software used to conceal excess diesel emissions was first developed by Audi. In early June (2018) the head of Audi was accused of fraud in connection with illegal software as well as false advertising.32 And yet, beneath the visible, rush hour traffic in corporate villainy, the impending global crisis has continued to ease forward, starting, faltering, then starting again, accelerating and always swelling – in 2015 more cars and even more suvs and trucks were bought not only on both sides of the Atlantic but in the growing economies of Asia.33 Gas was cheap, air was free. In the UK where car sales broke all records in 2015, mps produced a study that showed that air pollution was a “public health emergency.” A few months later, as the glaciers continued to quietly liquefy, global temperatures continued to rise, and acidification of the seas increased, the World Health Organization (who) produced a study with the same headlines.34 The heart of the problem in Europe was diesel. Herr Rudolf Diesel (1858–1913) was a German. German automakers have depended and refined the engine he invented over decades. Over half of the millions of cars driven in Europe have diesel engines. Diesel was thought to be a kind of mechanical deus ex machina in that it appeared to produce significantly less in the way of CO2 than ordinary gas. Alas. Der Spiegel:

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[A] diesel engine has one drawback. It produces nitric oxides, which contributes to air pollution, especially in urban areas. Lawmakers [in the US] decided to reduce nitric oxide limits. Officials in the United States threatened to withhold approval of large Daimler and Audi models.35 Rather than apply solutions that might affect the market for their luxury cars in an increasingly competitive market, German automakers decided to rely on the “defeat devices” that I have mentioned. These were installed by the manufacturers in the computer systems to distort the levels of nitric oxide emissions when the cars were tested. They hid the emissions, which were 15–35 times the level allowed by American law. Some 600,000 Volkswagens equipped with defeat devices were sold in the United States. But disaster came when a team of investigators from a small university in West Virginia discovered the deception in September 2015.36 The chief executive of vw was told of this. A whistle was blown. The automakers dissembled. American representatives of vw lied. More whistles. More deception and bristling hubris on the part of the auto executives topped off with pusillanimity on the part of the German government. But to no avail; so the pressure mounted. Jack Ewing, “[T]he most costly aspect of the wrongdoing for Volkswagen may have been the cover-up that the company orchestrated after regulators first became suspicious.”37 In March (2017), faced with dropping sales, the German automakers confessed and paid stupendous fines – after making a guilty plea in a case brought by the US Department of Justice. In January 2017 Volkswagen paid the first criminal fine of $2.8 billion.38 In Germany, there was public indignation and the directors of the automobile firms were investigated. All feigned innocence. The situation worsened when the European Commission found out that the major German automakers – Daimler, bmw, Audi, Porsche, and Volkswagen – were involved in a cartel to prevent competition. Records were seized. “Coordination” the automakers called it; their only crime was the pursuit of excellence, they implied. Others saw it differently:

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[T]here are … millions of owners of diesel cars. In an almost bizarre way, they are victims of the German auto cartel. For the first time, there is proof that it was agreements among these five automakers that ultimately ensured that emissions from diesel vehicles were not cleaned as effectively as would have been technically possible … Diesel buyers are now left with the damage. They face the prospect of no longer being able to drive their cars in cities, and of suffering significant losses when selling the vehicles. Shareholders are also among the victims. Penalties for cartel violations weaken the companies in which they hold shares and can lead to declining share prices.39 Under pressure, and counting on reducing the penalties imposed for their collusion, Volkswagen blew the whistle on their erstwhile coconspirators. The advertising tagline “Das Auto” was dropped. Lessons learned? An article published in December 2017 in the business newspaper, Handelsblatt Global, exposed the fact that an environmental group, Deutsche Umwelthilfe (“Environmental Care”) had accused Audi of manipulating the engines of their 320 diesel model to conceal their actual NOx emissions.“The car spews out up to seven times more nitrogen oxide on the road than during lab tests, the group said.”40 Lab tests were themselves a source of criticism. In early 2018 it was disclosed that in a laboratory in Albuquerque, German car manufacturers had, in 2014, financed the testing of carbon emissions on live monkeys.41 A worse threat than million dollar fines and mere obloquy was just coming over the horizon; on the autobahns, Teslas were replacing Porsches. In May (2018), Martin Winterkorn, the former head of vw, was subpoenaed by an American court. Most writers assumed that he would be protected from American laws by the German refusal to extradite its citizens outside of the eu. Just sometimes there is carbon justice. On 15 April 2019, Winterkorn and others were charged by the public prosecutor of Braunschweig with breach of trust, tax evasion, and false certification. The executives of the auto firm had claimed that they knew nothing of the defeat devices until the Americans exposed their

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use in 2015. The public prosecutor rejected their claim and maintained that the deception was initially conceived in 2006. vw had so far paid $33 billion in fines and was said to have caused the loss of public trust in the German auto industry.42 Other leading members of the vw management were promoted; the finance chief of the company at the time of the scandal, for instance, was elevated to Winterkorn’s job. Then, in April 2019, Winterkorn was charged with aggravated fraud in the first criminal indictment in Germany in connection with Dieselgate.43 Three years after Dieselgate, it was revealed that European automakers were still exploiting loopholes in the law which allowed for levels of NOx that were higher than that prescribed by environmental laws. No penalties were imposed. Volkswagen remained the only carmaker to have pleaded guilty for cheating on NOx emission tests. Patrick McGee: It had been an open secret in the industry for years that carmakers were gaming the eu lab tests in myriad ways: overinflating tyres, taping doors, removing the sound system and turning off the air conditioning were just a few of the methods that helped cut emissions in the lab but that were impossible to replicate on the road.44 In The Guardian of mid-September 2018, the paper’s environment correspondent noted that the number of diesel cars and trucks still on Europe’s roads had risen to 43 million. In the same year, 24 million cars were sold in China. Also in the same year, however, global car sales declined ominously – for the first time since 2009.45

california dreamin’ Meanwhile on Planet California, environmental radicalism had spread like wildfire.46 As far back as 1929 and 1938 state laws had been passed severely restricting where drilling for oil took place. Public campaigns, often led by organizations like the Sierra Club or the Communities United Against the Dirty Energy Proposition

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fought business interests to guarantee air quality and water management. As campaigns to protect the environment advanced, public attitudes shifted accordingly. Water, coastlands, trees (like the giant sequoias and redwoods), and air quality were all defended over the decades before and after World War Two. By the second decade of the twenty-first century California had become the vanguard of the global battle for air quality improvements as well as national efforts to improve energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or in legislation-speak, the leader in regulatory environmental policy. Here is David Vogel: By 2000, California’s population had reached 34 million, with 23.4 million registered vehicles being driven 280 billion miles a year. Nevertheless, that year vehicle emissions for nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons totaled 1.2 million tons – a decrease of 200,000 tons from 1990. Between 1955 and 2013, the amount of particulate pollution – small dust particles that are harmful to public health – declined by 80 percent. Since 1960, pollution emissions of all smog-causing chemicals had declined by 98 percent. In 2014, ozone levels in Los Angeles were 40 percent of what they had been in the mid-1970s despite a doubling of the number of cars driven. These are remarkable accomplishments for a city whose residents breathed some of the dirtiest air in the world in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s and that has become a national symbol of urban air pollution.47 Thus far, then, a triumph for popular environmental politics and for political persistence that has produced notably stringent regulations. Yet, compared to the rest of the US, air quality in California remains relatively poor. Of the seven cities in the US with the worst air quality, six, including Los Angeles, are in California. The explanation: the increase in the number of cars in America’s largest automobile market and the frequency with which these are used. For three years running, from 2015 to 2017, new car purchases in California have exceeded two million. Trucks and suv sales have proportionately increased. Small car sales have de-

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creased. Thus a paradox: Californians are willing to legislate for a greener environment but are unable to break their dependence on automotive opioids. The only ways to break out of this vicious spiral includes the substitution of non-gas-using vehicles, especially electric vehicles (evs) to replace the gas guzzlers together with high-speed inter city trains and subways. In 2017, nearly ten per cent of new vehicles purchased in California were either electric or hybrids.

ev s “Breaking up is hard to do” went Neil Sedaka’s signature hit from the 1960s. As I have indicated above, first, kicking the diesel habit and then kicking the gas habit will also require some hearts to break. Science, and even the state government of Texas (which offers subsidies), seems to be on the side of evs as a report in the journal of the Union of Concerned Scientists indicates: “From cradle to grave, battery-electric vehicles are cleaner now and will become even cleaner as more electricity is generated by renewable sources of energy.”48 Thus, increasingly car manufactures have turned away from the gas-fed internal combustion engines (ices) of yore, professing that they will cease building gas and diesel cars in the very near future; Chevrolet, among others, already has an all-electric subcompact, Bolt, on the market, while Volvo promises to have surrendered to all-electric cars by 2019. The all-electric Bolt drives 383 km. on a single charge and costs a mere $37,495. The major auto companies are predicted to spend well over $400 billion in the next five years developing electric cars.49 And while Germany says no more gas-guzzlers after 2030, the governments of France and Britain have pledged that they will discontinue allowing the manufacture of automobiles driven by the fuels of the carbon era by 2040. Finally, even the European parliament kicked in: The European Parliament on Wednesday [3 October 2018] voted to introduce rules that would force carmakers to lower

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their 2020 CO2 emissions targets by 40 per cent by 2030 – an unprecedented demand on this sector. The binding rules will be finalised likely by the end of the year with input from … 28 countries. Carmakers that miss the targets will face penalties.50 So expect the Charge of the Electric Brigade: Tesla had hoped to produce 500,000 of its Model 3 mass-market sedan in 2018; it produced 350,000. By the end of February 2018 there were 50,000 evs on Canadian roads and some 2.5 million worldwide. By 2025 the International Energy Agency predicts that that number will rise to between 40 and 70 million.51 In one optimistic view, the demand for cars with internal combustion engines will peak in the mid-2020s; in fact, in another view, the demand has already peaked. If this is the case, then by the magical date c.2030 it seems that nonelectric cars may be a relative rarity and that gas stations will become derelict and ruinous like churches, bank branches, and suburban cinemas.52 Perhaps some will become dedicated museums, refurbished to shine a light on a glorious, gassy past, like war museums. Otherwise, everywhere, in garages, farmers’ fields, and vacant lots, stranded assets up on blocks, their tires removed, their mirrors cracked, and their paint jobs dulled by time. As more cars become electric, fewer people may buy cars at all – my grandchildren in 2030 may share electric vehicles, drive rented community cars, and ride bicycles as many urban thirty-somethings do today. Obviously, greenhouse gases will still continue to seep into the atmosphere, but we will have all eternity to deal with the effects of the previous decades of CO2 emissions and especially the changes that have taken place. Of course, if we had just said “no” in the 1970s when Exxon learned about the threat of greenhouse gases, our descendants would have less about which to repine. A slow change may be taking place, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the Financial Times writes, perhaps a little in the alarmist science tradition of J.G. Ballard: “Car sales across the world are down,” he rejoices, adding

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China has just had its steepest monthly fall in six years. UK sales are on pace to fall for two years running for the first time since the depths of the financial crisis. Choked by pollution and congestion, cities have started to treat cars like a pandemic of vast armour-plated rats, bringers of pestilence. Hamburg has banned older diesel vehicles, Luxembourg is about to make public transport free, the City of London aims to banish motorised traffic from half its roads.53 But as Meghan L. O’Sullivan, champion of America’s new energy abundance, points out: One reason to expect positive growth [of oil demand] is that nearly all of the world’s transportation runs on oil-based fuels. By one account, the need for fuel for transportation will drive as much as two-thirds of the growth in demand for liquid fuels in the decades ahead. With 57 cars per 100 people in oecd countries and only 7 per 100 in developing ones, ExxonMobil, for instance, expects the absolute number of light-duty vehicles to nearly double from the one billion on the road today. A graph in a study by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, confirms this, illustrating how the demand for both gas and diesel will have hardly diminished between 2019 and 2040.54

5 “Exxon Knew”

The key moment in the early climate change debate was seized in 1988 by James E. Hansen, the space scientist whom we have met above. Addressing the US Senate, Hansen warned that, in the words of The New York Times, “global warming has begun.”1 Then came reaction. More than a little like the pushback by the tobacco companies against the claim that smoking was injurious to health, the reaction to the claims of those – climatologists and journalists alike – who talked about climate change was fast and vitriolic. Spencer Weart: Corporations and individuals who opposed all government regulation began to spend many millions of dollars on lobbying, advertising, and reports that mimicked scientific publications, in an effort to convince people that there was no problem at all. Environmental groups, less wealthy but more enthusiastic, helped politicize the issue with urgent cries of alarm. But the many scientific uncertainties, and the sheer complexity of climate, made room for limitless debate over what actions, if any, governments should take.2 The corporate centre of the pushback against effective climate change legislation was the International Climate Action Partnership that had as its members some of the Goliaths of capitalism: Shell, Dow Chemical, the Ford Motor Company, and the major coal-dependent utility companies. The greatest of the American oil

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majors, Exxon, had taken the lead in denouncing those who warned about the hazardous effects of climate change. Bill McKibben spells this out: [I]t turns out Exxon didn’t just “know” about climate change; it conducted some of the original research. In the nineteenseventies and eighties, the company employed top scientists who worked side by side with university researchers and the Department of Energy … By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black, was, according to his own notes, able to tell the company’s management committee that there was a “general scientific agreement” that what was then called the greenhouse effect was most likely caused by man-made CO2; a year later, speaking to an even wider audience inside the company, he said that research indicated that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius. That’s just about where the scientific consensus lies to this day. “Present thinking,” Black wrote in summary, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”3 After an investigation which drew on archives, leaked documents, and interviews, two groups of investigators disclosed that Exxon knew all there was to know decades from “as early as” 1977 but then denied the knowledge and spent extravagantly to obstruct the discussion about global warming. Later they were to spend further hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to publish “infomercials” in America’s leading newspapers.4 So Exxon, the lineal descendant of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, headed the parade. Originally it had moved from Manhattan to Texas but not before being broken up by federal legislation into several rival companies, one of which, Standard Oil of New Jersey, was rebranded as “Exxon” in 1973. That Exxon, America’s biggest oil company, should take a lead in the parade is hardly surprising, as Steve Coll stresses, “From the 1950s through the end

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of the cold war, Exxon ranked year after year as one of the country’s very largest and most profitable corporations, always in the top five of the annual Fortune 500 lists.” The oil company’s influence, often invisible, seemed invulnerable. “The corporation’s lobbyists bent and shaped American foreign policy, as well as economic, climate, chemical, and environmental regulation. Exxon maintained allweather alliances with sympathetic American politicians while calling as little attention to its influence as possible.” In the concluding sentences of his book on Exxon, Coll makes the point that in 1999, the year that Exxon acquired Mobil, while “the net cash flow of the United States … was approximately negative $5.7 trillion. ExxonMobil’s net cash flow from operations and asset sales during the same period was a positive $493 billion.”5

calamity Still, even a behemoth can have a bad day. On 23 March 1989 Exxon’s carefully designed transparency was breached on the southern coast of Alaska. The ice-free tanker port of Valdez had been built to provide an alternative source of crude after the Middle East oil embargo of 1973.6 Actually, a number of crises in the Middle East from Suez in 1956 onward had led Western oil producers to think hard about future alternatives to the region’s oil. It was British Petroleum (bp), ever on the lookout to newer and more secure reserves, that had set its sights on Alaska and invested in exploration there. The oil the geologists found was in the far north of the state, under the Brooks Range, just south the Arctic Sea in America’s Siberia. Following their discovery, bp had pioneered the building of a pipeline south to the Valdez Marine Terminal on the Gulf of Alaska. To finance and operate the pipeline, bp had formed a consortium with two of Exxon’s predecessors. The crude from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was thus borne at a rate of about 2 million barrels a day, “at an amount equal to more than a quarter of all America’s domestic crude oil production,” writes Coll. Tankers like the Exxon Valdez took on oil at the port of Valdez and then carried it south to California for refining. Loaded with crude, the tanker struck the Bligh Reef and 240,000 barrels of crude oil,

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11 million gallons, gushed into the pristine waters of Prince William Sound. During a wild storm that followed, crude was blown up into the trees adjacent to the reef. More than 1,000 miles of coastline were fouled. Thousands of birds, seals, sea otters, and orcas became saturated in oil and died. Twenty-five years later traces of oil were still being spotted.7 Exxon and bp, like Shell, were multinationals with tentacles in a number of regions of the globe. By the 1980s bp had reached out from its Persian/Iranian base where its career had begun – and virtually ended it when Iran’s oil was nationalized in the 1970s.8 More than was usual for an oil giant, bp had its fingers in the sticky oil pie right across the world from the Middle East to the Arctic Sea, across the Atlantic to the North Sea, south to the Gulf of Mexico, and east again just above the equator to the Bight of Bonny off the coast of Nigeria. Finally, back again across Siberia to Sakhalin in Russia’s far east, the company undertook one last major play until Vladimir Putin did what most nationalists tend to do and squeezed the foreigners out.9 Yet, no better example exists than bp as an irrepressible multinational oil company struggling with great dexterity and more than a little desperation against a troop of rivals – ExxonMobil; the oil nationalists; the national oil companies; not to mention its critics, the environmentalists.10 Unsurprisingly, given its unconventional and sometimes even buccaneering style, bp’s record for oil spills matched that of the larger ExxonMobil. Exxon’s reputation was nearly as global as bp’s. It had interests that stretched from Aceh in Indonesia to Iraq to Chad, Nigeria, and Equatorial Guinea (“the Kuwait of Africa”), and across the Atlantic to Venezuela. Its status in America, and in American foreign policy, especially under George W. Bush in the early twentyfirst century, was beyond compare. Its view of Iraq, for instance, was conspicuously predatory. “From Exxon’s perspective, Iraq is the last of the easy oil,” noted one State Department official. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, Exxon Mobil trained the men who would remake Iraq’s oil policies after the invasion. So everywhere, Exxon’s interests were America’s and America’s interest in much of the world was oil.11

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Following the Exxon Valdez catastrophe, however, a public relations apocalypse ensued, one that would cost Exxon $430 million in compensation.12 Exxon suddenly became the most hated firm in America. Still, the oil giant struggled on against its environmentalist and political critics, while all the while its profit performance remained, says Coll, “more consistent and durable than that of other great corporate behemoths of America’s postwar boom, such as General Motors, United States Steel, and ibm.”13 But for oil producers, recovery has more than one meaning. In 1998, a decade after the disaster in the Gulf of Alaska, Exxon had absorbed the rival giant Mobil, half its size, on which bp had set its sights. The situation began to look even more optimistic for Exxon with the election of George W. Bush as president the next year. Bush was an oilman, the son of an oilman, and mentored by Richard Cheney, ceo of a highly profitable oil services company, as vice president. Bush seemed not to have much of a clue about anything except the redistribution of wealth upwards and terrorism. Oil bound these two preoccupations together: make the oil flow and liquidate the terrorists (who were often from oil-producing countries and financed by oil profits) was their preoccupation. So for the eight years Bush was president it looked like the big business heyday of president Ronald Reagan had returned. Environmental organizations like Greenpeace were suddenly on the back foot, while Exxon Mobil was quick on the offensive. In an account widely circulated (but uneven in its details) at the annual meeting of Exxon Mobil shareholders in Dallas in May 2000, Lee Raymond, the ceo of the oil giant, flourished a petition supposedly signed by 17,000 scientists denouncing the Kyoto agreement. Signatories of the petition apparently also included one of the Spice Girls, a member of the cast of the television series “M.A.S.H.,” and James Brown, “the Godfather of Soul.”14 Raymond’s successor in 2006 was Rex Tillerson. Tillerson, although somewhat less aggressively, kept up the pressure. In a speech to the Council of Foreign Relations in June 2012, he stressed that fears about climate change and drilling were overblown. “Tillerson acknowledged,” reported The Guardian, “that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will

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be able to adapt.” He blamed a public that was illiterate in science and maths, a “lazy” press, and advocacy groups that “manufacture fear for energy misconceptions.” Then, opening his heart to the public, Tillerson blurted out his guiding ideology: “My philosophy is to make money.” He had reason to feel complacent. In August 2011, Standard & Poors downgraded US treasury bonds to aa. ExxonMobil remained “only one of … four American corporations to maintain the aaa mark, now possess[ing] a credit rating superior to that of the United States.”15 The Shell story is almost as sordid as that Exxon. Like Exxon, Shell had carried out an assessment of the CO2 released by fossil fuels. In 1988 the company knew, as Exxon did, not merely that by the middle of the twenty-first century CO2 levels could reach as high as 560 parts per million but that by 2030 they might see the 1988 rate doubled. The report that disclosed this was marked “Confidential” even though its conclusions were devastating: “Shell’s assessment foresaw a one-meter sea-level rise, and noted that warming could also fuel disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, resulting in a worldwide rise in sea level of ‘five to six meters.’” Shell’s analysis also warned of the “disappearance of specific ecosystems or habitat destruction,” predicted an increase in “runoff, destructive floods, and inundation of low-lying farmland.” All told, Shell concluded, “the changes may be the greatest in recorded history.” The Shell report was disclosed by a Dutch news organization early in 2018.16

an inconvenient truth and the stern review Then, early in the new century, other changes took place on the uneven battlefield between Big Oil and the environmentalists. Early in 2006 came Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which told the story of the dangers of climate change.17 The ground had now shifted, all the more as the Republican Party, which had received some 95 per cent of ExxonMobil’s political campaign contributions, slipped back politically. On 7 November 2006, Democratic candidates swept to victory nationwide behind Barack Obama, a critic of Big Oil. The next year the ipcc reported that the

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earth’s warming was an “unequivocal fact.” The position of ExxonMobil now was forced to mellow but only a very little: in fact, it changed “so subtly that it was very difficult for outsiders to detect the change.” Even after the 2008–09 economic recession, the company still felt that it was above the law. According to one Washington observer, the company “seemed … to follow a track that was quite different from the other [oil] majors – being firmly fixed in the ‘Fuck you, no apologies, oil-is-here-to-stay mode.’”18 In Canada, in the same epoch, oil companies and their advocates, perhaps conscious that in the US the tide of public opinion was beginning to run against them, seemed to express a little remorse, at least verbally. This shift towards accepting some degree of responsibility had began across the Atlantic where, in the UK in October 2006, a general appraisal of the question of climate change, The Stern Review, had been published. Its author, Sir Nicholas Stern, was a former World Bank economist and British government mandarin of impeccable credentials, if little global renown.19 Massive, the report weighed the costs of climate change. Its greatest value was to remove climate change from a scientific debate and pose it as an economic issue. What would be the cost to the global economy of a continued rise in CO2 emissions? The report explained that if carbon emissions continued to rise up to 450–550 parts per million, for instance, the cost would be 1 per cent of global gdp annually, but if it continued to rise beyond, that could cost up to 20 per cent of gdp. One writer, commenting with the hindsight of a decade after it had been published, advised that while the aim might be to limit global warming to 1.5° it would be wise to prepare for a rise of 2° or 3°C or more. (Now, c. 2020, only climate optimists would contend that global warming will remain as low as 2°C.). In early May 2019, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere had reached 409.92 ppm. Bill McKibben has warned that 450 ppm would be the critical point.20 His review had catapulted Sir Nicholas Stern into the global limelight. When in early 2007 he visited Toronto to address a packed audience on the costs and opportunities of remedial climate change action, the ceo of Shell Canada admitted publicly

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that, “life would have been much easier had we taken this up twenty or twenty-five years ago.”21 Neither Shell nor its brethren in arms took up the cause of climate remediation. In fact, what came about was what Donald Gutstein has described as “a new [corporate] discourse.”22 This discourse was new in that it abandoned its previous position of climate change denial in favour of a “new reality.” This reality emphasized “a huge opportunity” for Canada to become an “environmental superpower.” Predictably, the Canadian oil lobby continued to show more interest in business opportunities than in climate risks. But their risk assessment failed to adequately answer the question posed by Canadian Business only a few years later: “What Happens When America Doesn’t Need Canada’s Oil?”23 In 2008, a year after Stern’s visit to Toronto, during the US presidential campaign, Barack Obama lashed out against ExxonMobil – which had recently announced $11.68 billion in quarterly profits: “We must end the age of oil in our time,” he insisted. In July of that year oil prices had passed $140 a barrel, and by 2010 US crude oil production was surging.24 Then, after a pause, came two changes, the collapse of oil prices in 2014 and by 2015, the fracking windfall. Together they overturned the complacency of managers of the politics and economy of Alberta and cast the province out of the ranks of the economically prosperous in Canada. Unsurprisingly, Exxon again survived a storm of criticism, and, at the highest political levels, the oil opportunists and climate change deniers continued to win the argument. In America generally, according to a Gallup poll, 69 per cent of Republicans thought that the threat of climate change was “exaggerated.” Only 4 per cent of Democrats shared this view. Thus, while the majority of Americans agreed with the scientific consensus a strong and well-organized minority opposed any change. But the war was far from over. In 2017, under President Trump, America withdrew from the 2015 Paris climate agreement and eviscerated the Environment Protection Agency (epa), rolling back a number of the laws that had been passed to safeguard the environment. He appointed Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier, as head of the epa and Rex

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Tillerson as secretary of state. When ethics scandals and improprieties forced Pruitt to resign, in his resignation letter he made clear his belief in his, and Trump’s, secret weapon: “I believe that you are serving as President today because of God’s Providence … I believe that same providence brought me into your service.”25 Once more, profits and providence were assumed to be linked. And from the land of The Stern Review came weighty support for denial. Lord Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and founder of the anticlimate change “Global Warming Policy Forum” (gwpf), pronounced on the bbc that, “during this past 10 years, if anything, mean global temperature, average world temperature, has slightly declined.” This might have been a merely laughable canard if Lawson had been an obscure crank, but the opposite was the case; he was a major Conservative spokesman and frequently in the limelight. When his views got out, there was uproar. The popular scientific journal New Scientist commented resignedly, “We were supposed to be past this.”26 But Lord Lawson was not alone in Europe. The president of France (2007–12), Nicholas Sarkozy, more remarkable for his vulgar flamboyance than climatological insights, explained that climate change had not, after all, created the Sahara Desert.27 Yet gradually, pushing against the titanic resources of Big Oil, the interests of politicians seeking to protect their political turfs, and the media magnates, with the journalists and lobbyists who served them, by early 2018 even a few conservative politicians had come around on the side of the anticarbon lobby. Perhaps even Trump himself, Gillian Tett hinted in the Financial Times in mid-July (2019).28 ExxonMobil especially, but Big Carbon more generally, again seemed to have hit a reef, perhaps in surprising places. Liberal Republicans critical of Big Oil included Arnold Schwarzenegger, the “Austrian Oak,” seven times Mr Olympia, star of “Terminator,” and former Republican governor of California (2003–11). Schwarzenegger made his views clear: The oil companies knew from 1959 on, they did their own study, that there would be global warming happening because

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of fossil fuels, and on top of that it would be risky for peoples’ lives, that it would kill … We’re going after them, and we’re going to be in there like the Alabama tick. Because to me it’s absolutely irresponsible to know that your product is killing people not having a warning label on it like tobacco … [E]very product that has fossil fuels should have a warning label on it.29 With Republicans like the “Guvinator” on the side of the environmentalists, it is hardly surprising that California was North America’s leading jurisdiction for climate action. The most backward and poorest of the American states, on the other hand, was Louisiana where God-fearing, Tea Party-voting, and climate-change-denying citizens formed an apparently invincible troika of reaction. And as in Alberta, jobs in the petroleum industry continued to trump climate change concerns.30 In November 2015, Exxon was subpoenaed by the New York attorney general for possible climate change lies. “Specifically, the attorney general points to a recent report to investors, where Exxon employed a set of wildly exaggerated assumptions about the costs of a low-carbon future to make the claim that its hydrocarbon reserves were immune from climate risk. High costs, it argued would prevent society from taking climate action.” Among its intentionally scary canards was that gasoline would cost $20-plus a gallon.”31 But nothing happened to Exxon even after the sickening price decline in 2014 when oil prices for the standard West Texas Intermediate (wti) slumped to $59 a barrel. Rex Tillerson, who had striven so relentlessly to assure all that climate change would not stand in the way of investor profit (and his own bonuses), went on to become the Secretary of State in the government of Donald Trump. His downfall was ignominious; he was forced to resign before he was sacked.32

so who knew? In the late 1990s market strategists led by researcher Frank Luntz, “America’s top political wordsmith,” had advised the Republicans in the United States on how to cast doubt on the public support

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for climate policy. It was his strategy, taken from the tobacco lobby, that cast a shadow on the credibility of the environmentalists by claiming that science was divided.33 This worked for several decades. Uncertainty prevailed. A combination of the failed climate talks in 2009, along with a “constant barrage” of climate change denial in the media made the American public sceptical about the issue of climate change. “Polling by Gallup from 2014 found that more than 40 per cent of Americans felt that the seriousness of global warning was exaggerated by the media.” But this changed and by early 2016, according to a Gallup poll, a record number of Americans had come to believe that global warming would pose a threat to their way of life.34 But some held out, clinging to a populist antipathy towards any authority, especially governments, and belief that environmental degradation was either an aspect of God’s will or a plot by the Chinese to weaken America. In her study of political opinions on climate change and of the role of government legislation, the sociologist Arlie Russel Hochschild considered one of the very poorest and most polluted states, Louisiana: “As for threats to coastal Louisiana from climate change, no one … thought it was real.” Many who believed in “end days” counted the Book of Revelation, more than epa or Green explanations, as a better source for what might actually come to pass. This changed quite suddenly. By the time of the US mid-term elections of November 2018, “72 percent of registered voters supporting Democrats … said climate change was a ‘very big’ problem, compared with 11 percent of Republican voters.”35 In Canada, a poll in early 2018 reported that 70 per cent of those surveyed believed that the earth was warming due to human activity and industrial causes, while 30 per cent believed that it was due to natural patterns in the Earth’s environment. A poll from late May/early June 2019 disclosed that only 6 per cent of those consulted did not believe in climate change. More people believed in climate change in bc and Quebec than in the Prairies and Ontario. Yet in Ontario, the most populous and one of the most well-educated provinces in the country, where most people believed that climate change was caused by human agency, an angry electorate

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brought in a government that almost immediately upon attaining office swept away the previous government’s program of carbon pricing.36 And out there in the world of the struggle for public opinion The Fraser Institute, “Canada’s leading public policy think tank” (financed by a grant from one of the alt-right Koch foundations that had grown rich on Albertan oil), continued to question climate change.37

media At what point do we find the media connecting the dots, joining together questions of extreme weather, wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and melting ice sheets in order to formulate well-attested arguments about climate change? Of course, the media is normally hardly absent from news about the environment, although, perhaps, on the question of climate change, certain media outlets may seem to have been, especially in the recent past, a little tongue tied. Writing about the simultaneous frightful events of July 2018 – a heat wave killing sixty-five people in Japan, a heat havoc and record wildfires in California, fires in Greece killing at least eighty people, fifty fires in Sweden, accompanying the worst drought in seventy-four years – Emily Atkin in The New Republic underlined an obvious point: [D]espite these facts, there’s no climate connection to be found in much news coverage of extreme weather events across the globe – even in historically climate-conscious outlets like npr and the New York Times … Major broadcast TV networks are the most glaring offenders. Media Matters reviewed 127 segments on the global heat wave that aired on abc, cbs, and nbc this summer, and found that only one … mentioned the connection between climate change and extreme heat. This fits a long-running pattern. As Media Matters noted, its annual study of broadcast coverage found that “during the height of hurricane season in 2017, neither abc nor nbc aired a single segment on their morning, evening, or Sunday news shows that mentioned the link between climate change and hurricanes.”

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When asked why the coverage of climate change was so paltry, the science editor of National Public Radio (npr), the closest American equivalent to Canada’s cbc, offered a feeble defence: “We’re actively working on a story trying to see what scientists think [about] all of these events. You don’t want to be throwing around, ‘This is due to climate change, that is due to climate change.’” Replying to this on Twitter, one Dr Genevieve Guenther commented, “I happened to listen to @npr for a few hours this morning and I heard three stories that are very much connected to #climate change without anyone on the radio mentioning climate change even once.”38 “Throwing around,” the term used by the npr commentator, suggests a degree of impetuous randomness, as if it was commonplace for journalists to throw out flying saucer speculations or wonder about black helicopters. But both scientists, like Hansen and those who work for the various governmental climate organizations, as well as journalists like Elizabeth Kolbert, are normally scrupulous in establishing the connection between, say, wildfires and hurricanes and global warming and oceanic changes. Given the reluctance to acknowledge what has been established over the decades about climate change, a certain resignation about media denial is perhaps inevitable. We can almost imagine John Doyle, the television critic of The Globe and Mail, shrugging his shoulders resignedly when he writes about Canada’s state-supported news medium: “Get used to it people. The cbc decides what’s news and you and I just pay for it. We should just leave it to them, the experts. Besides, think about the advertisers.” Certainly, a number of writers are equivocal about the connection between climate change and certain disastrous environmental events like wildfires. The historian Stephen J. Pyne stands out among others for emphasizing that wildfires are not simply caused by climate change but, rather, that climate change, alongside other causes, such as the widespread drought especially in the American West, and particularly in the Southwest in 2002, has contributed to their frequency and ferocity.39 Yet it seems obvious that any discussion of wildfires is only partial without mention of simultaneous environmental phenomena such as hurricanes, melting glaci-

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ers, rising temperatures, flooding of islands and lowlands, and so on. Their association in the same historical epoch begs for some overall, unifying, explanation like climate change. There is simply no reputable science that has demonstrated, for instance, that we have entered an entirely different planetary epoch, one defined by the advent of meteors or radiation or some other transforming phenomena. So generally, rather than “throwing around” connections, the writers even in serious papers have been guarded about climate change, if mentioning it at all, stressing that climate change is one of several factors in environmental disturbances. It is common enough for some journalists to recognize the problems of the “see no evil” approach by governments and the media. Simon Kuper in the Financial Time, for instance, has criticized governments for not telling us about climate change, while Jennifer Good, in the Toronto Star, in a mid-September (2017) analysis of two weeks of broadcast news stories in a representative sample of American and Canadian news outlets, has demonstrated just how easy it has been to backseat climate change at a time of convulsive hurricanes. She has used the example that in 1,500 stories on hurricanes, only seventy-nine mentioned climate change.40 Yet a shift after 2016 seems visible. Quite unexpectedly, not only did such major American newspapers like the New York Times and The Washington Post appoint reporters dedicated to climate change but so, too, have major Canadian outlets like The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and even the once-hesitant cbc News. Of course, the proof of influence is in the pudding of actual response – Canadians and Americans may be broadly sympathetic to the arguments of environmentalists, but they seem quite reluctant to actually accept the costs, for instance in the form of increased taxes, to assure climate change remission.41 It might be recalled that on the wall behind a statue to George Orwell at the bbc headquarters in London is an inscription taken from the author’s famous satire, Animal Farm: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”42

6 The Geography of Catastrophe

Doubtless, as Nathaniel Rich has made clear, we have missed the opportunity to avert climate change.1 So when will the climate apocalypse come? Are we in the run-up to end times now? Since few well-informed people believe that nothing is happening out there in the seas and skies, at what point will the “run for your lives” moment arrive? It is almost universally acknowledged by both the leading scientific journals and the major Western media outlets, that there has been an increase in the ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere and a predictable and unremitting rise in the rate of global warming. In fact as Rich has pointed out, this has been evident since the 1980s. Even conservative politicians and oil companies acknowledge this – the fact that they have known it for decades suggests not just conspiracy but also criminality. In any case, it has remained unclear to what extent the climate might substantially and permanently change and at what point a flipping point might be reached.2 The answer can’t be known for sure although a certain amount of informed approximations are current. An upper limit for a safe increase in global warming of 2°C was first proposed to the public by the Stockholm Environment Institute in a 1990 report. This was actually a political rather than a scientific target. At the Paris Climate Change conference of December 2015 (cop 21), a consensus was reached that the upper limit actually should be set at “well below” 2°C. Thus the estimate of an increase of only 1.5° became popular. At the un climate summit in Katowice, Poland, in December 2018 (cop 24), following a un

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report in early October, it was claimed that “fossil-fuel emissions would have to fall roughly in half within 12 years to avoid serious climate disruptions.”3 So a twelve-year timescale became a kind of millenarian view, even though the countdown to catastrophe is by now (mid-2019) well under way. By the end of 2015 the earth had already warmed nearly 1°C (.94°C. or 1.7°F) since 1880.4 Increase of a further degree has been watched with apprehension. Increase to above 2°, it is estimated, could trigger “potentially devastating effects.” Nonetheless, some have argued that there is little chance of temperatures increasing by as little as 2°C. The consequences of a temperature rise of 3°, 4°, or even 5°C has been projected.5 As three recent summers yield new records of heat, hurricanes, and wildfires, as I shall describe below, our thinking on this subject is likely to take on a slightly alarmist edge. Still, as the cbc pollster, Éric Grenier, has discovered, few Canadians are willing to rush out and willingly pay an extra C$10 a month in taxes to avert imminent disaster.6 We know about ice, although few of us, unlike Icelanders, have witnessed its large-scale melting.7 So take the more obvious matter of heat. In mid-2018 it was widely acknowledged that “[2018] is shaping up to be the fourth-hottest year on record. The only years hotter were the three previous ones [2015, 2016, 2017] … And even if there are variations in weather patterns in the coming years with some cooler years mixed in, the trend line is clear: 17 of the 18 warmest years since modern record-keeping began have occurred since 2001.” July (2018) was the hottest month globally in recorded history.8 The argument that since there has been no effective mitigation of CO2 emissions and that emissions and thus future temperatures were likely to increase again in 2019 and 2020 is not likely to restore complacency. Unsurprisingly, climate change alarmists would have it that we are only a decade or so away from the edge of an unpredictable and unimaginable disaster. Survivalists have already begun to eye mountain refuges.9 New Zealand is a “go to” place, as was the case during the Cold War; Tasmania, too, but not Australia. Alberta? Maybe Banff. Perhaps it is best to ignore the poor – there may be too many of them to worry about. What about the rich? David Wallace-Wells

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relates an account of a keynote speaker at a private meeting of hedge-fund nabobs. Turning their attention from more mundane matters of money making, these raised the Darwinian matter of survival, not of the fittest, of course, but of themselves, the richest. One burning question was of the best refuge at a time of climate crisis – Alaska or New Zealand. Another was security. How to make the refuge of plutocrats safe from angry mobs. Perhaps armed robots. No secure answers, alas, were forthcoming.10 Back to the question of the tangible, earthly, changes so far? Never mind for now the denialist argument that calamities are normal and therefore natural (or, at least, divinely inspired) or that “it is too early to tell” or that we will adapt to them. Let us look at just some of the most evident symptoms of climate change in the years since the late 1980s. These may be discussed under a few simple headings, all of which have been underlined in the US government’s November 2018 Fourth National Climate Assessment (nca 4), a product of the US Global Change Research Program. It should be stressed, of course, that it is impossible to prioritize these symptoms to the extent of claiming which are the most imminent, the most important, or the most calamitous. They are, 1. Rising average temperatures, drought, wildfires, and melting ice; 2. Rising sea levels and flooding and more powerful storms; and, 3. Migration. For reasons of brevity I shall omit such equally crucial subjects such as the case of the pollution that creates the unbreathability of the air. I shall even avoid radical changes in rainfall patterns, even though Washington, dc, the capital of the western world, in 2018 had the wettest year in recorded history.11 I shall concentrate here on North America in the present decade, but I shall also include some examples of the environmental catastrophes of our times in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

1. rising average temperatures, droughts, wildfires, and melting ice In January 2015, The New York Times predicted that the summer of the new year would likely be the hottest ever recorded. It was. A year later, in the summer of 2016, it was even hotter. For the third

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year in a row the world had broken temperature records for July. In early August 2017 a heat wave melted Europe with temperatures exceeding 40°C in unusual places. In July 2019 records were broken with Paris reaching 42.6°C. In sum, the surprising fact that 2018 was the fourth-hottest year on record globally,12 in spite of there being no warming influence from El Niño, has stimulated concern with the influence of heat waves on human health. Unsurprisingly, tropical countries are predicted to have higher rates of mortality than temperate countries. One group of researchers looking at a total of 412 communities in twenty different “countries/regions” thus set themselves the macabre task of quantifying excess deaths related to heat waves under climate change conditions. They drew up a “multicountry time series modeling study.” Their predictions resulted in the conclusion that in the US there would be a fivefold increase in heat related deaths by 2080, but in the Philippines deaths would be twelve times higher.13 In Japan in mid-July 2018, temperatures exceeded 40°C with thirty deaths and thousands more seeking hospital treatment for heat-related conditions. In an editorial on the Australian failure to face the issue of climate change, The Financial Times confirmed that Australia was facing the worst drought in a century. At Christmas (2018), temperature records right across the country were shattered. A report from the Bank of England in the same year was even more unsettling. It predicted that by 2100 global surface temperatures might increase between 3.7°C and 4.8°C. The range in this report actually increased to 7.8°C when it included “climate response uncertainty.”14 The temperature had reached 36.7°C in London in July 2015, just a shade cooler than the record 38.5°C in the summer of 2003. Then in June 2017 for five days in a row London’s temperatures, which averaged 21°C for July, exceeded 30°C. When the July 2018 temperature reached a record 38.1°C, the longest heatwave in forty years, temporary mortuaries were set up in refrigerated trucks. There were widespread complaints of sleeping problems, irritability, and reduced productivity at work in a city where few had air conditioners.15

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Returning to North America, on 10 November 2016, The Washington Post had headlined an article on North America’s balmy autumn. “North America is flooded in warmth and there is no sign of real winter,” it announced, perhaps just a little uncertainly. In neighbouring Canada, the Post explained that in the second week of November “temperatures have been up to 30 degrees [F] warmer than normal … In McCreary, a small town about 150 miles [250 km.] northwest of Winnipeg, the mercury rose to … [22°C], obliterating the previous record of … [11°C] … As Canada is the source region for cold air over the Lower 48, it’s no surprise snow is lacking there as well.”16 In Toronto, where the June average was 24°C and reached 27°C in July, the summer of 2016 was the hottest on record with the temperature reaching above 30°C for more than thirty-eight days. At Pearson Airport the heat wave of late June–early July 2018 broke the previous record of 35°C, reaching 35.4°C on 30 June. The last time that temperatures reached 35°C. was in 1964. Montreal in the same summer recorded its highest temperature in nearly 150 years on 2 July (36.6°C); the historic average for this date was 26°. As in London, the city’s morgue was swamped. The heat that gripped eastern Canada was unique, less for its extremes than for its duration. According to University of Waterloo climatologist, Blair Feltmore, “while one isolated event might be normal, the world and Canada are seeing more extreme weather events – patterns that can be attributed to climate change.”17 Nearly 500 km to the northeast of Toronto is the smallish (compared to New Delhi or London) metropolis of Ottawa, practically at the limits of effective agriculture, where the average high temperature for July is 30°C. In early July 2018 the temperature in Ottawa reached 35° on two days and 36° once. Conclusion: global warming by 2°C, on its own and not for prolonged periods, is likely to be uncomfortable but not disastrous, at least in the more hospitable zones of the northern hemisphere. It is obvious that this is likely to provoke radical and expensive ideas about climate remediation. The Arctic comprises a large part of the Canadian landmass. Here the matter is more serious. While the rapid thawing of Arctic permafrost had previously been recognized, a un report

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released in March 2018 warned that temperatures were likely to increase by 3 to 5 degrees by 2050 (compared to 1986–2005) and by 5 to 9 degrees by 2080. “Even if global emissions were to stop overnight,” the report says, “winter temperatures in the Arctic would continue to rise up to 5°C by 2100 compared to average temperatures in the late 20th century.” The rise in temperatures is described as “locked in,” that is to say assured, because of greenhouse gases already emitted and heat stored in the oceans. A report from the federal Department of the Environment and Climate Change, titled “Canada’s Changing Climate Report,” leaked on 1 April and released on 2 April pointed out that “Canada is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and that Northern Canada is warming even more quickly, nearly three times the global rate.” In the north, annual average annual temperatures have increased by 2.3°C. Three of the past five years there have been the warmest on record.18 But in Canada it is not merely the heat, as it is in towns in India or Pakistan or Iraq or at the edge of the Sahara in Algeria. It is a matter of what Canadians refer to as “humidex” (“humidity index”), that is, temperature increased by water vapour in the atmosphere.19 On Canada Day, 2018, in Ottawa the humidex hit 47.2°, “the highest ever been recorded in the City of Ottawa since it started tracking humidex levels in 1953.” And beside humidex there is the question of duration. Not only was the heat wave in Ottawa in early July only matched by four other heat waves in the last thirty years but the duration of the heat lasted longer each day, too; it came earlier in the morning and lasted longer in the evening. With temperatures recorded at 8am, 9am, and 10am, the morning of Monday, 2 July, was the hottest morning that the city of Ottawa has ever recorded.20 Increased temperatures invite the question, what is the upper limit for human life? A feature article in The Guardian Weekly has taken up the question: “Melting Point: Life in the City at 50C.” It explained, “At 50C – halfway to water’s boiling point and more than 10C above the healthy body temperature – blood thickens, muscles lock around the lungs, and the brain is choked of oxygen.”21

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With this in mind, it seems that even in the normally hospitable realms of Earth, where most people live, the thermometer actually knows only uncertain limits. Forget the northern hemisphere, the global north, rich and for the most part privileged, and consider the global south. In April 2018, for “the 1.3 million residents of Nawabshah, Pakistan … temperatures hit 50.2°C. In neighboring India two years earlier, the town of Phalodi sweltered in 51°C – the country’s hottest ever day.” In India in June 2019 temperatures reached 48°C in the capital, New Delhi (population 20 million).22 Two years earlier the temperature in Basra, Iraq had reached 53.9°C. In Mecca, also in 2016, the temperature reached 51°C. Huge tents were erected for the millions of pilgrims and air conditioners weighing twenty-five tonnes were brought in.23 In July (2018) in Ouargla, Algeria, a provincial capital and petroleum centre with a university and a population of 133,024, the temperature ascended to nearly 51.3°C, “the highest reliable temperature ever recorded in Africa.”24 Still, even the southern latitudes of the north have not entirely escaped the blast of the hair dryer. The temperature in Cordoba, Spain on 6 August 2017 was 42°C., in parts of Greece also 42°C, and in Italy and parts of the Balkans, 45°C. In the heat wave in Athens in the same summer, when temperatures exceeded 48°C, 700–1,000 people perished. The hospitals had to send to the fish market for ice to chill bodies in the mortuary.25 Is it unlikely that temperatures will go up in parts of southern Europe, including southern France, to within the 45–50°C range in the present century? In Europe’s 2003 heat wave nearly 15,000 died in France and 35,000 throughout the western part of the continent.26 Harvests were affected and in France nuclear reactors had to be closed down for a lack of cooling water. In Portugal in the summer of 2018, 5.6 per cent of forests were destroyed by wildfires. Alpine glaciers decreased by more than 10 per cent. “[T]his type of occurrence is expected to happen more frequently,” comment the authors of the unep report.27 We must remember that no matter by what increments, no one seriously thinks that temperatures are going to rise a few degrees and then stop and retrace the steps back down the thermometer

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towards zero – no matter what remedial measures are taken in the future. Or that they are going to rise at a predictable rate – say by 1° every July for a decade. No. As long as we continue to pump greenhouse gases into the air, which we seem to be unable to stop doing, over the next several decades temperatures are not only going to be higher but they are going to be unpredictable; they are going to continue to rise. How fast does runaway heat increase move? How far? Where? Unknown with any certainty, perhaps, but not unpredictable in their consequences. For instance, a report in the medical journal Lancet Planetary Health estimates that extreme weather will cause 152,000 deaths a year in Europe “as a direct result of hazards relating to extreme weather, with those living in southern Europe likely to be the hardest hit.”28 As temperatures rise, then, in much of Africa and large parts of Asia and Australia extensive or continuous drought will prevail. In response to drought, the people in northern Africa, such as Egypt, Algeria, and the Sudan, as well as the Levant and West Africa will be tempted to migrate towards lands with more hospitable climates – across the Mediterranean to western Europe in particular.29 There will be large-scale movements towards the relatively sparsely populated lands of Central Asia and Siberia. We may have had a foretaste of this. In 1968–73, there was a prolonged drought across the African savannah with the most deadly phase falling between 1972 and 1973. The drought devastated crops and herds of cattle and was responsible for an estimated 100,000 deaths. It has been argued that the drought was affected by changes in surface temperatures of the North Atlantic caused by global warming.30 The years of maximum rainfall, between 1915 and 1960 in the adjacent Sahel of Nigeria, was a time, coincidentally, of colonial rule in the region, perhaps making cotton and groundnut crops, at the heart of the colonial economy, look more economically sustainable than it has become since. In North America several breadbaskets such as in the southwest of the US and the Midwest are likely to be further affected by a combination of increased temperatures, a shortage of water, and drought. A drought in Mexico in 2009 was the worse in six decades. In the summer of 2015 in the state of Chiapas, a ruined

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sixteenth century church that had been submerged in a reservoir under 100 feet of water since 1966 became visible. Further north, the farming zone in Canada seemed to be shifting northwards. Sylvain Charlebois, professor of agriculture at Dalhousie University, explains the possible fate of the Canadian Prairies. He has warned that according to a recent Manitoba study, “the prairies could be the most affected area in the world over the next few decades. A permanent return to the circumstances of the Dirty Thirties is not unfathomable.” He goes on: Reports claim that crop yields could easily drop by more than 50 per cent in the Prairies due to climate change. Consequently our contribution to global food systems could seriously be endangered. Changes in weather cycles can also influence crop pests and diseases as they could increase due to higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Increased prevalence of pests and pathogens in livestock and crops is also a definite possibility in the future with many more days of 30C temperature, the severity and impact can potentially be significant as well.31 One study in Nature Climate Change has calculated how much global wheat yields will decline per centigrade increase in temperature. “On average 5.7 percent, it found, but with large variations: hot countries – those in or near the tropics, holding most of poor humanity – will suffer greater loses: 11–20 percent in Upper Egypt, compared to some 4 per cent in France.”32 We might recall Al Gore’s description of the Dirty Thirties in the US: The big dust storms began in January 1933 and continued off and on for more than four years, devastating the crops, dispiriting the people, and creating nightmarish conditions, leading many to pick up stakes for California or back east. In 1934, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes advised the people of the Oklahoma pan-handle to simply leave their homes. Only 15 percent of the acreage between Texas and Oklahoma would be harvested that year … Not until 1937 did conditions finally stabilize.33

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A new drought cycle began to hit the American West in the late 1980s. The California drought that lasted for sixteen years reached its low point in 2015 when it broke a 500-year record. Having noted that most of Los Angeles’s water comes from the Colorado River which was at its lowest since the 1930s, the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times concluded in June (2016), “If the drought emergency is over, it’s only because drought is no longer an emergency, but a permanent reality.” Like wildfires, then, the “new normal.”34 By early 2013 drought in the US affected about half of the country and ecological disaster was thus no longer merely looming, it had arrived.35 In early 2015 there were historic levels of rainfall in Texas and Oklahoma. Then, after five years of drought Texas got nearly a week of rain. In Houston the land couldn’t absorb any more water. The resulting flood submerged entire neighborhoods and swept away cars and houses. Officials reported 21 dead and many more missing. This flooding, which has also plagued Oklahoma, comes two years after floods devastated Colorado … California and much of the American West has been embroiled in a multiyear drought that’s endangered the nation’s agricultural sector and threatened the drinking water supply for millions. In California after years of drought in the winter of 2016–17 it rained and rained, flooding highways and bursting dams. In northern California in August 1987, a “fire siege” was experienced that comprised 1,000 blazes. It was thought that such a phenomenon might only be endured once in a lifetime. The next year the fire in Yellowstone broke the 1987 record. In 2003 Arizona and Colorado “simultaneously had the largest wildfire in each state’s history to that date.” A year later came the largest fire so far in California’s history. The “Fire Siege of 2003” had burned across several counties turning 2,232 houses to cinders and blackening 275,000 acres of land. Between New Year’s Day and Labour Day, 2017, 6,400 wildfires burned in California. The fire in Santa Rosa (pop. 175,000) was the most spectacular; it cost 2,800 homes and businesses. Wildfires were still burning in Southern California in mid-December 2017. In 2017 and 2018 they scorched the grasslands of Oklahoma, home of Senator James Inhofe, a leading cli-

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mate-change denier, and Scott Pruitt, the notoriously corrupt head of the Environmental Protection Agency. It incinerated 350,000 acres across Oklahoma. The Mendocino fire that burned in northern California in July and August 2018 broke the previous record, making it “the most sizeable California fire in a century of record-keeping.” It burned nearly 282,100 acres. A small item in The Nation records that 50 per cent of California’s largest recorded wildfires have occurred within the last ten years. In California’s first fire season of 2018, which ran from June through September, the season of the Mendocino fire, wildfires burned 5.7 million acres in the state. In early Novmber 2018, the spectacular Camp fire which destroyed the town of Paradise, about 300 km. north of San Francisco, alone burned more than 110,000 acres and with other fires in the state led to a death toll of at least eighty-eight. This matched the previous most deadly fire ever recorded in California. By mid-November, as many as 300,000 people in the state were under evacuation orders.36 The cost of wildfires was nearly three billion dollars, almost double the previous ten years.37 The connection between wildfires and climate change was no longer skirted. As the Financial Times correspondent in San Francisco has explained: The frequency and intensity of California’s wildfires have increased in recent years, spurred by drought and higher temperatures – a pattern emerging elsewhere in the world as climate change acts as an “accelerator,” according to scientists. California has seen the two largest fires in its history in the past twelve months. A Canadian record was set in 1987 when 7.5 million hectares were burned from Quebec to Alberta to Yukon. In British Columbia in August 2003 hundreds of fires burned simultaneously consuming more than 260,000 hectares and destroying 134 homes: “By most accounts, the blazes of 2003 constituted the biggest, most intense, most expensive, and most devastating wildfires in the history of [the province].” The cost was C$700 million. No attempts were made to link these fires to climate change.38

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The spectacular wildfire around Fort McMurray, Alberta, of the summer of 2016 compelled huge interest in the media and widespread concern among Canadians in Alberta and elsewhere. It cost nearly C$9 billion and was the costliest insured natural disaster in Canadian history. The fires in bc in the summer of 2017 burned more than 1.2 million hectares and cost C$563 million. Insurers paid out C$127 million.39 Tim Flannery has made the point that in regions as diverse as Spain, Africa, and North America “increases in the extent and intensity of forest fires have been linked to climate change.” In Canada, he explains, “the area of forest burned has increased in the last four decades as summer temperatures have risen. One study estimates that the boreal forests have not burned as extensively in the last 10,000 years. The massive wildfires that burned through the Northwest Territories scorched an area six times greater than the twenty-five year average.40 In the massive July– August (2017) conflagration in British Columbia, nearly 150 wildfires were burning out of control in the worst fire season on record, and one town of 10,000 had to be evacuated. Although over the previous decades wildfires had cost C$214 million a year, as we have seen, the cost of the 2017 fires was C$568 million. These fires burned more than 3 million acres by the end of the year. Researchers noted that “wildfires of 2017 may have burned as much as 11 times more land than they would have without the influence of human-caused climate change.” The wildfires of the summer of 2018 broke the 2017 record. 41 Corollary damage caused by wildfires affects the increasingly polluted air we breathe. In parts of California “air is so thick with smoke it ranks among the dirtiest in the world.” In the northern part of the state “pollution levels now exceed those in cities in China and India that regularly rank among the worst.”42 It has been stressed that most of the wildfires that rage across the globe often have unintentional human origins. However, it can be argued that these are less destructive than the conventional clearing of forests in pursuit of profit, that is, through logging. This devastation of global forests by logging and clearing has largely taken place since 1945 and has affected the forests of Southeast Asia and

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Amazonia.43 The consequences of deforestation on climate are varied and have been felt right across the globe. Michael Williams, writing in his encyclopedic history, Deforesting the Earth: The ability of humans to alter local climate by clearing forests had long been suggested but difficult to prove. The most common effect of deforestation had always been assumed to be decreased rainfall. But more recently the idea has grown that global temperatures may be increased by the changed albedo … [D]uring the mid-1960s … it was established that emissions from fossil fuels and from land-cover change, of which deforestation was the most important component, could absorb the infrared radiation emitted by the earth’s surface and by trace gases like methane (CH4 ) and nitrous oxide (N2O), both of which interact radioactively in the atmosphere. This could trigger alterations in the heat balance of the earth, and hence temperatures, atmospheric moisture amounts, and even sea levels.44 According to Nature Geoscience, deforestation is the second largest anthropogenic source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, after fossil fuel combustion, while forest fires produce as much as 25 per cent. With the burning of forests comes the destruction of their capacity to absorb methane. In three decades this has fallen by 77 per cent. With more burning, stresses Wallace-Wells, “comes more warming … means more burning.” Consider, thus, the question of Brazil’s rain forests which are slated by the new populist government of Jair Bolsonario to be “developed.” “A group of Brazilian scientists’,” notes Wallace-Wells, “has estimated that between 2021 and 2030, Bolsonaro’s deforestation would release the equivalent of 13.12 gigatons of carbon. Last year, the United States emitted about 5 gigatons.”45 The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as other parts of the planet. According to nasa, the extent of ice covering Arctic waters has fallen by 13 per cent per decade. Melting ice releases locked-up carbon dioxide and methane, some of which is stored in permafrost. For the first time in recent memory there is both

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a spring and autumn in Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic. At the present rate of melting, by 2100 there will be no ice. No polar bears either.46 According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (nsidc) in Colorado, the extent of Arctic sea ice on 10 September 2016 was the second lowest in the satellite record, tying with 2007. “During the first ten days of September, the Arctic lost ice at a faster than average rate. Ice extent lost 34,100 square kilometers … per day compared to the long-term average of 21,000 square kilometers … per day.”47 Antarctic ice has also continued to melt faster than ever.48 The shrinking of the Greenland Ice Sheet is “one of the profound geological shifts of our time.”49 Between 2010 and 2018 Greenland lost nearly 2,500 gigatonnes of water; a gigatonne being a billion metric tonnes. Since 1998 the ice sheet has failed to gain mass in any year. Perhaps this is nothing to worry about since 2010 the melting of Greenland ice has only added a quarter of an inch (.635 cm) of water to global sea levels. So even if the melting Antarctic ice sheet adds the same amount, then every decade melting ice will add just over half an inch. Between 2020 and 2050, the next three decades, all things being equal (which is unlikely), melting Western Arctic ice will add less than two inches to global sea levels. Why worry? Unsurprisingly, this crude calculation omits corollary consequences – such as the fact that the ice in question seems to be melting at an accelerating rate and that with the almost certain increase of warming, the entire Arctic, Russian as well as Canadian, land, water, and ice will warm up at an accelerated rate, releasing considerably more CO2 and methane. Let us assume for now that the melting ice of the North Pole is of more concern to us than the shrinking ice of the South Pole. Just the opposite may be true for Australians, Argentines, Chileans, and Falkland Islanders, not to mention penguins. There is no certainty here; the amount of ice may increase in areas within polar regions in particular years although the trend is generally downward. “We are not going back to how it was” is the reigning sentiment. Eventually, it is assumed, we will lose the summer ice in the Arctic Sea altogether. This may not happen this year or even

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next year, but we are on a predictable trajectory. A un environment report released in March 2019 describes a scenario where Arctic winter temperatures increase by 3 to 5 degrees celcius by 2050, compared to 1986–2005. There is no escape clause here. This temperature rise is expected to happen regardless of the success or failure of the Paris or Katowicz or any other agreements on climate change. This would, according to the un report, devastate the region while increasing sea level rises worldwide. Sobering in this report is the explanation of inevitability. Even if emissions were to stop overnight, changes would be “locked in” because of greenhouse gases already emitted and heat stored in the ocean.50 So everywhere in the world from the Himalayas to the Alps to Greenland, ice sheets and glaciers are dripping to death. Of the 150 glaciers that once existed in America’s Glacier National Park, only twenty-six remain today. By 2030, it is estimated, they will have disappeared entirely. Even pet glaciers are not spared a melting fate. One of the world’s most studied glaciers, the Peyto Glacier in Banff National Park, which has long been regarded as a global reference for climate change studies, will have downsized perceptibly. “Canada’s glaciers are sending us a very strong message that we are in climate change,” said Dr John Pomeroy, director of the Centre for Hydrology at the University of Saskatchewan. “Future generations driving down the Icefields Parkway will wonder why they named it that,” he added.51 As the ice sheets of Greenland and the polar regions melt and cause the oceans to rise another effect is also apparent. Cooler seawater affects the ocean currents. Thermohaline currents (tcs) flow in all of the world’s oceans although they are stronger in the Atlantic than the Pacific. Perhaps the best known such current is the Gulf Stream, a branch of the “Atlantic thermohaline circulation.” In highly simplified terms, this current is disrupted when denser, colder fresh water, flowing into the ocean from the ice sheets, sinks below the warmer saline water of the ocean currents and slows down the flow.52 The branch of the Gulf Stream known as the North Atlantic Drift, flows northward towards the coasts of Scotland and Norway extending up to the Greenland and Norwegian Seas and pushing

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back the winter sea ice. It warms the coastal waters of Scotland and Norway even making it possible in Scotland to grow flourishing gardens that support sub-tropical flora.53 Due to the benevolence of the Gulf Stream, Scotland’s average temperature is about 12°C, warmer than Kamchatka in the Far East of Russia, which is at about the same latitude.54 In much earlier times, the Gulf Stream shifted directions and even reversed its flow. If this happened to the North Atlantic Drift it would cause the west coast of Scotland to resemble the east coast of Siberia. Glasgow would become Scotland’s Magadan, the centre of Stalin’s most eastern gulag archipelago. A recent study has shown that, in the words of one report, the “Gulf Stream current [is] at its weakest in 1,600 years.” That is, it is slowing down by as much as 15 per cent. Serious slowing of the thermohaline current by as little as 20 per cent would be what is called a “low probability, high impact risk.”55

2. rising sea levels and flooding and more powerful storms About half the CO2 that humans have produced since the Industrial Revolution has been absorbed by the sea. Among the large effects on the sea itself and on marine life is a rise in sea levels; not just more water (from melted ice caps and glaciers) but more warm water. Warm liquids occupy more space than colder liquids. The impact on humans of this rise has been discernible.56 “For the past two centuries, two trends have been steady and clear around the United States. Sea level has been rising, and more people have been moving closer to the coast.” This is the first sentence of a recent book citing a report by nasa scientists.57 The substance of this book as well as other studies of the same issue is that of the dire fate of cities like Miami and New Orleans and even New York.58 Both of the former, Jeff Goodall argues, will gradually be inundated by rising seawater tides. These tides are inevitable; that is, even if the production of CO2 were to be halted immediately, sea levels would still continue to rise for the rest of this century. The superstorms like hurricanes Matthew, Harvey, and Irma which devastated stretches of the east and Gulf coasts of America in the

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autumn of 2016 and the late summer of 2017 are merely a taste of what is to come. Cost? Deborah Acosta has called them “billion dollar storms.”59 How far and how fast will the sea rise? One prediction, recalled in Retreat from a Rising Sea, is of a minimum of one-and-a-half feet and a maximum of five feet with a likely rise of three feet by 2100.60 The chief resiliency officer of Broward County in South Florida admitted to The New York Times that the seas could rise two or three feet.61 Most of Miami is less than five feet above sea level. A rise of three feet would be a disaster for coastal populations not just in Florida but globally from Miami to Mumbai. In 2013 in a report published by the ipcc it was estimated that by 2100 sea levels would rise between twenty-six and ninety-eight centimetres (about one to three feet or a metre) globally. This did not take full account of the melting ice sheets. A later more radical and extreme report by the noaa which did take melting ice into account raised the level to between thirty centimetres and two-and-a-half metres, that is between one foot and more than eight feet. 62 In a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters in early August (2017) researchers from the University of Florida calculated that from 2011 to 2015, “the sea level along the American coastline south of Cape Hatteras rose six times faster than the long-term rate of global increase.” People in Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and other coastal communities had already noticed that a foot or two of salt water often flooded their streets on otherwise unexceptional days.63 A number of coastal cities will parallel the plight of Miami. Whatever happens in the future, Florida’s sea level has already risen as much as eight inches. Within two or three years, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, Miami may be flooded 237 times a year, that is more than once every other day. The picture that thus emerges is that of rising seas, floods caused by surges, and the destruction of drinking water by seawater seeping through the limestone on which much of south Florida stands. Readers (and realtors) might wonder about how much more must be spent in Miami to escape this watery doom.“We spend too much money to live here,” one Ft Lauderdale resident complained.“We knew about

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this [the flooding] but we didn’t think it would be this bad.” In 2017 Miami Beach budgeted $1 billion to reinforce the defenses against the rising seas. The Miami Herald explained that the city’s sustainability office “is tasked with bracing the city against climate change.” The mayor observed that, “climate change is fuelling stronger hurricanes.”64 Actually, the answer to the question of what can be done seems to be counterintuitive. More, not fewer, and higher, condos are being built: “Miami has been undergoing a nearly unprecedented surge in real estate construction,” comments one writer in Business Week. “A Miami Herald article noted that in 2013 there were nine skyscraper multiuse projects under way in greater Miami, most of which were on the waterfront, and four of which were more than 40 stories tall. In addition, in 2013, 20 residential projects were gearing up, ranging from 57 floors to five floors in height.”65 But not everyone has been comfortable with the climate change explanation. Employees of the Florida state environmental agency were told not to use the terms “climate change” or “global warming” in e-mails, talks, or other official communications. But bad news is like rising seas; it is hard to suppress. “Miami as we know it is doomed,” wrote Jeff Goodell in a sobering Rolling Stone article in 2013. Later, Fort Lauderdale mayor, Jack Seiler, was more equivocal. Mixing allusions, he said, “When paradise goes under water, we’re all going to feel the impact.”66 New Orleans may be in an even more immediately precarious situation than Miami. “New Orleans is sinking an average of two inches per decade and it is anticipated that it will sink roughly three feet in the next 100 years.” Over the same period, the sea level is expected to rise about three feet. So over the twenty-first century the city will be some six feet lower than the surrounding sea. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina submerged four-fifths of New Orleans and killed 1,400 people and 1,577 people in the whole of Louisiana. Much of New Orleans flooded as the system of dykes (“levees”) around the city failed catastrophically. This has been regarded as “the greatest civil engineering failure in the history of the United States.” Hurricane Katrina cost $148.8 billion in 2013

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dollars. “[T]he survival of both Miami and New Orleans beyond the twenty-first century is in serious doubt.”67 In early 2015 it was reported that Halifax sea levels might rise by eleven centimetres in two years. Two years later, on the last day of the Obama administration, the noaa presented a report to the president called “Global Regional Sea Level Scenarios for the United States.” The report included the coastlands of the Canadian Maritimes. It concluded that by 2100 the waters of the Atlantic coastal region from Newfoundland to Key West could rise by as much as 2.5 metres and warned that Nova Scotia would be particularly hard hit. Even a lower level of one foot – much lower than the 2.5 metres – would be problematic: “the one foot [rise] would be if we stop everything now and do anything we can to avoid further climate change.” If the water rose the full two and a half metres (8.2 feet) then much of the valuable coastal property of Nova Scotia would be under water. Storm floods would make the situation worse although it is obviously impossible to predict just how far the sea level would actually rise. Even a single foot of sea level of rise would increase the likelihood of flooding twenty-fivefold. This would mean that rather than a flood every five years, flooding would take place five times a year. It is possible, with the highest level of greenhouse gas emissions that by 2030, there would be a twenty-five-fold increase in floods by 2030.68 “Global average sea level has gone up about 8 inches since 1880,” notes an article in the Miami Herald. “Some 2.4 million people and 1.3 million homes … sit within 4 feet of the local high tide line … Overall, sea level rise is making the odds of a South Florida flood reaching more than 4 feet above high tide, by 2050, on par with the odds of losing at Russian roulette.” A four-foot rise would affect more than half the population of more than one hundred Florida towns and cities. Parts of New York and its neighbour, New Jersey, were flooded as a consequence of Hurricane Sandy in late October 2012. This was the second most expensive storm in US history, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As many as 117 people died in storm-related accidents. Most of the financial district, the centre, of course, of

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global capital (and home of the World Trade towers destroyed in 9/11) was flooded, as were most of the tunnels of New York’s subway. In reaction, the New York City Panel on Climate Change was established. A report, called “A Stronger, More Resilient New York” which was issued less than six months after Hurricane Sandy, outlined the measures that would have to be taken to deal with future weather events. Those measures have a price tag of $19 billion. The authors of the report claimed, with a flourish of can-do bravado, that the “city cannot, and will not retreat.” In the view of the authors of Retreat from the Rising Sea, however, this is a “tough but ultimately absurd stance … Ultimately, if one were not to retreat at all, the city would have to build 500 miles of dikes, levees, and massive seawalls.”69 A watery fate seems inescapable. In one prediction, floods of seven feet (2.26 m.) or more, which before 1800 struck New York once every 500 years, are now occurring roughly every twenty-five years and could come every five years by 2030. As already noted, by the end of the century the sea level could rise eight feet.70 Other seas, other submergencies. Whereas the rate of global sea level rising is at an average of three millimeters per year, the rate of rise in the western Pacific is faster – up to twelve millimeters a year around Micronesia and the Solomon islands. This has already led to the complete disappearance of eight Pacific islands with others poised on the verge of becoming mere reefs. Storms 2,000 km. away in the South China Sea can trigger jumps in Singapore’s sea levels of up to 40 cm for several hours.71 By the end of 2017, scientific projections have upped estimates of the likely temperature rise to an estimated 3.2°C. Scientists at the nonprofit organization Climate Central estimate that 275 million people worldwide “live in areas that will eventually be flooded at 3C of global warming.” Image modelling has projected several highly populated cities would be radically effected; large swaths of Osaka with a population of 19 million and a gdp as large as that of the Netherlands, would disappear. Shanghai’s 17.5 million people would have to move.“When it comes to flooding, the coastal city is one of the world’s most vulnerable.” Alexandria, with a population of 3 million, would be flooded; Rio de Janeiro with a population of

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nearly 2 million would see the loss of its famous beaches but also its inland area. A feature article in The New York Times at the end of 2017 warned, “Jakarta is Sinking So Fast, It Could End Up Underwater.” In April 2019 it presented a magazine feature about the submergence of Bangladesh with the title “What Survival Looks Like After the Oceans Rise.” The consequence of an overpopulated and impoverished country of 168 million people being forced to abandon their fields and villages is almost too sobering to imagine.72 Reefs, which have come and gone since long before humans appeared on earth, are particularly susceptible to environmental change. Climate change and ocean acidification will probably finish most of them off. The greatest reef of them all, the Great Barrier Reef of the coast of Queensland, appears to be on the verge of extinction. The first intimations of its mortality came in the 1970s when areas of coral turned white and then died. Coral bleaching – as the phenomenon is known – occurs when underwater heat waves stress the coral polyps, causing them to eject the algae living in their tissues and so turn white. Without algal partners, the coral polyps cannot grow the bony skeleton that forms the reef. Indeed they cannot even properly feed themselves. Over a period of weeks the coral polyps slowly starve, then die. When added to the threat of ocean acidity, the attack is devastating. So it is that heat and acid, from atmospheric CO2 caused by burning fossil fuels, are killing the reef. And it’s happening fast. “It fills me with despair,” laments the Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery, “but my beloved Great Barrier Reef is doomed.”73 Elizabeth Kolbert is hardly more sanguine: Ocean acidification is … not the only threat reefs are under. Indeed, in some parts of the world, reefs probably will not last long enough for ocean acidification to finish them off. The roster of perils includes but is not limited to: overfishing, which promotes the growth of algae that compete with corals; agricultural runoff, which also encourages algae growth; deforestation, which leads to siltation and reduces water clarity; and dynamite fishing, whose destructive potential would seem to be self-explanatory.

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In the Caribbean area, coral reefs have declined by close to 80 per cent. Writing about them Peter F. Sale warns, “Unless humanity shows rapid improvement in how we manage coastal environments and address problems of overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction, inappropriate development, and other forms of stress, coral reefs around the world are going to continue to decline.74 Then there is the matter of hurricanes. Ironically, the governor of Florida, elected in November 2018 to the US Senate, had banned the Florida Department of Environmental Protection from using the term “climate change.”75 A year earlier, in August (2017), Hurricane Harvey had devastated several islands in the Caribbean and crashed ashore on the Texas coast, flooding Houston. It was followed by Hurricane Irma. “In all of US history,” Eric Holthaus has written, “there has never been a storm like Hurricane Harvey.” But the warnings were there to be ignored, as they were in Florida. Since the 1950s, Houston has seen a 167 per cent increase in the frequency of the most intense downpours. Still, there has been a reluctance to confront the reality of climate change. In the views of one writer, “If we don’t talk about the climate context of Harvey, we won’t be able to prevent future disasters and get to work on that better future.” And another: “Harvey will likely sharpen the ongoing debate over whether Houston, a city driven by real estate, has overbuilt at the expense of flood control … Harvey might come to represent a warning about climate change.76 In the case of the Midwest, where a third of the world’s corn and soybeans are grown, the flooding as a result of record downpours have now become a factor in US food production. In the winter of 2018 and the spring of 2019, the American Midwest was flooded, delaying crop planting by weeks. In 2003 Arizona and Colorado “simultaneously had the largest wildfire in each state’s history. Across eastern North America, rainfall has exceeded expectations. There by early June only two-thirds of corn and half of soybeans had been planted in sodden, muddy fields. Precipitation in Iowa, the top US corn producer, from April to June exceeded by 24 per cent the twentieth-century average. Although

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there has been argument that heavier rainfall is a matter of merely changing weather, not climate, one official prediction has suggested that increasing spring rainfall will continue until mid-century. Perhaps unsurprisingly, resistance to the idea of climate change remains strong with the American Farm Bureau Federation, the largest lobby group in Washington, clinging to their opposition of climate policies such as carbon taxes and cap-andtrade emission schemes.

3. migration The flooding of countries like Bangladesh and islands like the Maldives along with a number of the oceanic republics, together drive a refugee problem that is becoming increasingly acute. Referring to the Maldives, in a report published by the Canadian Library of Parliament it is noted that “rising sea levels that are ‘exceeding our worst expectations’ may mean that this low-lying nation of islands in the Indian Ocean will soon be uninhabitable displacing its 400,000 citizens ‘decades ahead of schedule.’” Elsewhere on the shores of the Indian Ocean, the flood of refugees from Bangladesh into neighbouring Indian states, numbering as many as 12 to 17 million, together with an attempt to prevent “terrorism” and smuggling, has led to the construction of a, albeit highly permeable, barrier 2,100 miles long and known as the “Great Wall of India.” If the Asian monsoon becomes harsher and sea level continues to rise,” writes Bidisha Banerjee, “the fence … won’t be enough to keep Bangladeshis from fleeing to India.”77 Estimates of the number of people who will be compelled to move globally vary widely from 25 million to 1 billion. Some of the most inflated figures come from apparently unimpeachable sources. The UK shadow immigration minister in 2013 quoted a un estimate from 2008 putting climate change refugees at 20 million. In the longer term, he said, the figure 200 million “may be about right.” But even 20 million people, it seems, is little more than a guess. The Stern Review, nonetheless, cited the 200 million, as did the president of the un General Assembly, and as have

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numerous ngos.78 Another report notes that the United Nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) puts the figure of “refugees of concern” at present at 10.5 million and that “[m]ore people are already displaced annually by natural disasters than by conflict.” Mann and Wainwright cite estimates that have 500 million climate refugees by 2050, “mainly from Asia and mainly remaining in Asia.”79 In sum then, while it is obvious that even now there are quite staggering numbers of climate refugees, the numbers for the future are merely informed guesswork. Indeed, it is far from clear even who counts as a refugee – are the folks on the Louisiana coast who have paid hundreds of thousands for a slab of concrete which supported a house that was blown away by a hurricane to count the same as persons on the Maldives forced to flee as their entire nation sinks beneath the rising seas? Unlike the question of the role in climate change of the Fort McMurray fire, this question, discussed on the first page of The New York Times of 18 November 2016, was regarded as not too indelicate to ask.80 At the time of writing Syrians and Afghanis, both victims of civil wars and invasions, were the main migrants although it is predicted that Africans from the Sahel were not far behind. In 2017 there were famines in three African countries in all of which the problems of overpopulation, soil degradation, and commercialization of food crops loomed large. Writing in The New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman warns, “A changing climate makes things [in Africa] even harder. Scientists say large stretches of Africa are drying up, and they predict more desertification, more drought and more hunger. In some years, maybe only one country in Africa will be hit by famine. In 2017 famine stalked three, pushing more than 10 million people in Somalia, Nigeria and South Sudan to the brink of starvation.” According to one source, “[s]enior US military and security experts have told the environmental Justice Foundation … that the number of climate refugees will dwarf those that have fled the Syrian conflict, bringing huge challenges to Europe.” The same source refers to “not just one or two million, but 10 or 20 [million]” refugees, mainly from the African Sahel.“They are not going to South Africa, they are going across the Mediterranean.”81

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Several famines have ravaged the Sahelian area from Ethiopia to Mali in the last decades. In both 2015 and 2016 over a million African refugees and economic migrants arrived in Europe. Though the figure was down to 650,000 in 2017, it is estimated that some 200,000 African refugees crossed the Mediterranean to Italy alone. Most of these might be seen as economic migrants although the distinction between climate and economic migrants is bound to be arbitrary. It has been estimated that by 2020, 60 million people from sub-Saharan Africa are expected to migrate mainly because of desertification.82 Right across not only Africa but also the broader Middle East and the Indian subcontinent climate change is already affecting weather. “These changes have contributed to more frequent natural disasters like flooding and drought. Agricultural land is turning to desert and heat waves are killing off crops and grazing animals. Over the long term, changing weather patterns are likely to drive farmers, fisherman and herders away from affected areas.” In the Levant region and Greece, although there have been persistent droughts over centuries, “the recent drought (1998–2012) exceeds what [researchers] have seen in the past 900 years. In fact, the recent drought is likely the driest period in the last 900 years and very likely the driest period in the last 500 years.”83 Not just here but in other cases uncertainty, not to say controversy, flourishes. According to a bbc news report of 2 September 2013 the 200 million figure was produced by the Oxford scientist Professor Norman Myers and appeared in papers he published in 1995 and 2005. Yet on the website of the Biodiversity Institute at Oxford University it is asserted that Myers’ work on environmental refugees “is widely viewed as lacking academic credibility.” Stephen Castles of the university’s International Migration Institute has put the figure at tens of thousands, not millions.84 Nonetheless the figure repeated in the Canadian Library of Parliament research publication, revised on 1 February 2013, cited the inflated figure: Estimates of the number of people who will be compelled to move by 2050 because of climate change range from 25 mil-

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lion to 1 billion. The most widely cited figure appears to be 200 million migrants by 2050. It has also been estimated that between 500 million and 600 million people (approximately 10% of the world’s population) are at extreme risk due to climate change. A World Bank report of early 2018, however, estimated that climate change could force 140 million to migrate.85

7 The Forward March of Environmentalism

The earliest public cautions about the changing environment were voiced with slowly increasing public attention a decade after the end of World War Two. This was the epoch of “preservationist environmentalism” which was effectively bipartisan, that is, it was supported from both sides of the political spectrum, left and right. Its first major North American achievement was the Wilderness Act of 1964, which designated more than nine million acres of American lands as parks.1 California was the leader here, not just nationally but globally, all the more from the 1960s.2 In California, as one environmental leader claimed, “Air pollution is a bigger issue than Vietnam.” The war in Vietnam (1965–74), it might be recalled, was the unsurpassed trauma in the consciousness of several generations of Americans. The protest against it, which ultimately led to the American withdrawal and the defeat of the president who sought to direct it, marked a level of political mobilization that has, so far, never been equalled in any Western democracy in the postwar era. Environmentalists look upon the political mobilization that was its most signal achievement wistfully. Any key to the increased awareness of climate change must stress the clout of environmental groups, spearheaded by the Sierra Club.3 Like conservationists everywhere in the West, the Sierra Club was small, quite exclusively middle class and, initially at least, just a little dominated by academics. So it is easy to imagine it meetings attended by tweedy white males with PhDs, liberals all, agitating for the protection of the redwoods and beaches of Cali-

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fornia. Still, its influence was undeniable. “The Sierra Club had, over the course of the decade, become an influential organization in Washington, dc, scoring victories over bigger and better-funded industrial groups.” It had led environmental groups across America in the move from amateur to professional environmentalism. In 1969 the leading groups employed only two or three lobbyists working the halls of Congress; by 1985 there were more than eighty.4 Before they were known as “greens,” the few people concerned with the environment remained largely anonymous, only later were they called “conservationists” or sometimes “environmentalists.” With the reaction against environmentalism in the 1970s, they began to be disparaged as “flakes,” “eco-freaks,” “granolas,” and “tree huggers.” The far right did more than hint that they were the recipients of Moscow gold. In Canada, Conservatives claimed that environmentalists were funded by “wealthy American foundations” involved with “shadow funding.” One of these foundations was the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.5 Yet in much of the G7 world in the early post-1945 years, environmental struggles and warnings about climate change were barely noticed even by the well-educated public. Serious studies of the environment, including climate change, were hardly mentioned. Yet they were out there for those who sought them. In 1953 the Canadian Gilbert Plass published his “Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change” in the Bulletin of the American Meterological Society and the next year “Carbon Dioxide and the Climate” in the more accessible Scientific American. Plass argued that CO2 levels would rise 30 per cent from 1900 to 2000 and planetary temperatures would increase by 1°C.6 (Actually CO2 levels rose 37 per cent during the twentieth century and global temperature by about 0.7°). Still, in colleges and universities the question of climate change barely challenged other topical subjects, for instance Development Studies, which in Canada, like elsewhere in the West, proliferated from the 1970s and attracted the sympathies of idealistic students. The idea of a climate change that was not only increasing and was highly threatening especially to the poor people in developing areas was virtually ignored. Even the great Sahelian drought in Africa in the early 1970s did not raise the alarm. So Exxon knew

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and so too did other energy outfits, like the Electric Power Research Institute which represented utilities in the US that were responsible for 29 per cent of CO2 emissions. Even if Big Energy became enlightened, it kept its light under a bushel of self-interest.7 This meant that almost everywhere, right through the same period, cars had a free pass – almost nobody was worried about exhaust emissions. People (like me) bought Volkswagens while others bought Toyotas, but they did so not because their emissions were sweeter but because they cost less to fill up. It seems fair to say that although a handful of engineers had been aware of the question of emissions from early in the century, this concern only fitfully made it past the technical literature until the 1980s.8 But there was, perhaps inevitably, a murmuring of discontent. In Canada there were exceptional studies that echoed Plass’s predictions and to some extent reinforced his studies. In 1972 the Canadian Society of Zoologists sponsored the publication of a landmark study called A Citizen’s Guide to Air Pollution.9 This slim volume, modest in its claims that problems such as heavy smoking were a particular threat to public health, made no mention of the greenhouse effect or of climate change. It did seek to awaken its readers to the consequences of air pollution. “[I]t has become increasingly clear,” its author, David Bates, a professor of physiology at McGill University, explained,“that unless problems of air pollution are dealt with now they can only get worse in the future.” Bates had been a young physician in London during the Great Smog of 1952. He now reminded his readers of a British environmentalist who, with bold prescience, had made the assertion as far back as 1913, that “unless all coal mines were closed for a number of years the human race would be asphyxiated by the year 1950.” Sulphur dioxide (SO2), this early green prophet argued, was the main culprit. But Bates’s real foresight concerned the subject of “Pollutants from Automobiles.” Prefiguring the crisis that would in a few decades engulf cities from Los Angeles to Beijing, he warned that [t]he ubiquitous motor car cannot be controlled by a city (although it can be excluded from certain streets in the city)

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and there are major problems of inspection and enforcement which will have to be operated in most areas if legislation is to have very much effect.10 The consequences of Bates’s intervention? In Canada, they were barely detectible – had Rachel Carson, whose swan song was published a decade before Bates, made so little impact? Apparently. In Washington under President Harry Truman and his successors President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson (together, 1945–68) had signalled their concern with the issue of the environment. In 1949, the newly elected President Truman opened the first un conference on the environment, entitled the “United Nations Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources” (unsccur), attended by observers from fifty-two countries as well as participants from academia and ngos. Interior Secretary Julius A. Krug announced its aim: “It’s high time that we start a new era in conservation, an era consecrated to the development and wise use of what is available to the people of the world.” Hard on the heels of unsccur, also in 1949, came the International Technical Conference on the Protection of Nature (itcpn). Whereas unsccur aimed at the exploitation of nature, itcpn focused on environmental protection against “[o]il spills, predatory whaling, herbicide overuse, river-destroying dam projects,” and vanishing species. It was like opening a window into the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s, a concatenation of headlines from the future.”11 A novel manifestation of environmentalism was thus given its official global baptism. The atmosphere, as distinct from the terrestrial environment and its creatures, appeared even later on the list of concerns. In 1965 scientists delivered a paper to President Lyndon B. Johnson called “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” The burning of fossil fuels, the paper explained, “may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in the climate that could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.” This included global warming, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels. But other issues, notably the war in Vietnam, obtruded. President Johnson, who was defeated by the war, was succeeded by the almost-impeached

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Richard Nixon (1969–74) “a president not generally recalled as a visionary environmentalist created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law several signature pieces of environmental legislation: the Clean Air Act Extension, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.”12 Environmental consciousness had by this time become a growing public matter. With the first celebration of Earth Day later in the same year, the first peak of environmental consciousness had been reached. It was this that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (epa) in December 1970. In the same year for the first time environmental issues played a starring role in Congressional elections.13 Meanwhile, even in the late 1960s, the auto industry had responded to concerns over the environment only with lassitude. As late as 1967 the industry had spent only about 4 per cent of research and development on emission controls. Quite suddenly, this changed, and by 1970 public pressure had pushed the pedal to the metal and the big three began to spend real money on the problem, $157 million a year, as Tom McCarthy has pointed out.14 The secular saint at the very genesis of contemporary environmental activism was the American marine biologist Rachel Carson (1907–64). No attempts to raise the threshold of environmental consciousness in the postwar period have been more widely read than Carson’s three classic monographs, published in the decade between 1951 and 196215, nor had any contemporary work on the environment ever had as much unambiguous influence. Her warnings about the choices that lay ahead echo down to the present. In her final book, and ecological masterpiece, Silent Spring, published in September 1962, she wrote: We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one less traveled – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.16

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The reaction on the part of the chemical industry that her claim was spreading disinformation and that public officials were complicit in its spread was vitriolic to the point of hysteria. Among other slanders it was suggested that Carson was in the pay of the Communists.17 Yet in spite of the calumnies of her antagonists, Silent Spring sold 65,000 copies in the first two weeks and altogether half a million copies. It stayed for thirty-one weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and was translated into two dozen languages. It was debated in the British House of Lords while the eminent biologist (and founder of unesco), Julian Huxley, wrote the Forward to the British edition. A historian of Germany has explained how the book remained on the best-seller list there for many months, while a Swedish sociologist has testified that in his country “it was Carson’s book that served to usher in the modern era of environmentalism.”18 Following Carson at the end of the 1960s, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin founded Earth Day. The moment was auspicious according to the Earth Day Network: The height of counterculture in the United States, 1970 brought the death of Jimi Hendrix, the last Beatles album, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” War raged in Vietnam with students nationwide overwhelmingly opposed to it. At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 engines, industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. “Environment” was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news … [M]ainstream America largely remained oblivious to environmental concerns.”19 On 22 April 1970, the first Earth Day, 20 million Americans took to the streets to demonstrate in favour of a healthy and sustainable environment. The demonstrations were not notably partisan as they involved politicians from both parties although they comprised mainly college-educated youths in cities and on America’s

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coasts – if fact the same groups that later came overwhelmingly to vote for the liberal Democratic party. On the first Earth Day, Gaylord Nelson gave a speech in which he remarked that, “I am convinced that the same concern the youth of this nation took in changing this nation’s priorities on the war in Vietnam and on civil rights can be shown for the problem of the environment.” The first Earth Day – possibly the largest single demonstration in American history – was followed by other acts seeking the guarantee of clean air, water and endangered species. Beyond the daily news of celebrity affairs and foreign wars, worries about the future of the earth had come bubbling to the surface from the early 1960s. Prominent among these, less worrisome than the fear of nuclear wars but more visible than concern with the environment and the development of the Third World, was the question of global human sustainability. Simply put, could the earth carry more people? World Bank president Robert McNamara, who had distinguished himself as one of the more murderously mistaken hawks during the Vietnam War, made the forceful point that “the greatest single obstacle to economic and social development” was too many people – or, at least, too many poor people. (No world leader has ever said that there were too many billionaires). In 1969 the un Secretary General U Thant told his listeners that they had only a few years “in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion and the supply the required momentum to development efforts.” Three years later, the Club of Rome, a debating society for the affluent, issued an even more apprehensive report: [The report] sold nine million copies in twenty-nine countries, using an early computer-generated world systems model to map the association between population, resource depletion, pollution, industrial output, and food. Into the computer went the data; out came exponential population increases, shrinking crop yields, and escalating levels of environmental degradation.

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Readers lapped up the message; the earth had become a lethal time bomb, primed by man himself. Singing in tune with the global chorus of warning about the environment, President Nixon told his environment policy chief that he wanted to give the US a “leadership role” in international discussions. It was to facilitate this that he set up the epa, which began business in the December of his first year in office (1970) – coincidentally the year Earth Day was founded. Its first task was to cancel pesticide licenses for the production of ddt – the focus of Carson’s Silent Spring – and similar toxic chemicals. The US thus became the second country after Sweden to ban these. It was in 1971 that Greenpeace, the Canadian pioneer of militant environmentalism, was founded.20 Canada had become caught up in the global environmental debate at about the same postwar moment as other Western jurisdictions.21 In British Columbia, where there had always been a vociferous current of fairly genteel conservationism,22 logging had proceeded for well over a century before the first environmental groups were moved to try to save the vestiges of first-growth forests. Rather suddenly from the late 1960s, and echoing changes that were taking place especially in California, one heard for the first time the echoes of places that had hitherto remained quietly obscure (except for the sound of chain saws): Clayoquot Sound, Stein and Carmanah Valleys, Great Bear Rainforest, and so on. There was also, by the 1970s, a concern raised for the fate of the coastal waters which in the course of the twentieth century were being depleted of wild fish due to over-fishing, industrial pollution, and open-net fish-farming. For a short, euphoric moment, from the 1970s to the 1990s in fact, it looked as though environmentalism in Canada, led by British Columbia, might even become a defining national quality. Then times changed. In America, Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981 and in Britain, Margaret Thatcher. Both were advocates of the economic dogma of neoliberalism, the essence of which was that the market knew best. In Canada, environmentalism ran into problems while the bonanza of the tar sands was extolled and suc-

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cessive federal governments, Liberal and Conservative both, got cold feet about environmental protection. In the decade after the 1979 energy crisis, oil prices leaped up and remained high for the rest of the 1980s. By 2014 the Alberta oil sands were producing 2.2 Mb/d while crude remained at 590,000 b/d. Greenhouse gas emissions soared as oil now ruled over the environment.23 Ms Prudence Canuck, loved but unwed, had birthed the Tar Baby; the genitor, Big Bill Oil, was not in the country but sent the promise of a large cheque. Charles David Keating (1928–2005) had meanwhile been studying atmospheric carbon concentration at the observatory near the peak of Mouna Loa, a volcanic mountain in Hawai’i. Here through the development of accurate techniques of measurement he confirmed the hypothesis of Svante Arrhenius that atmospheric CO2 levels were increasing due to the burning of fossil fuels. His original calculation was that there were 310 parts per million in the air. By 2005 his estimate had leaped up to 380 parts. In the near future this was expected to pass 400 parts and reach 500 by the end of the century. This would have significant consequences for the temperature of the earth. In an essay in 1998 Keating attacked the deniers who warned that the earth’s warming was a myth. The real myth, he said, was that “natural resources and the ability of the earth’s habitable regions to absorb the impacts of human activities are meaningless.”24 But by then the political tide had turned against efforts to rein in environmental destruction. In the 1980s, the years of President Ronald Reagan (1981–89) and the decades that followed, the pesticide producers managed to slow down the process whereby certain chemicals were viewed with suspicion. Their campaign was easy enough, at least until 1996 when Our Stolen Future by Theo Colborn lifted the lid on the toxicological effects of many of the by-products of ddt. As one review from 1996 explained: Our Stolen Future profiles decades of research. Bald eagles in Florida were found to be sterile in the 1940s. Britain’s otters began to disappear in the 1950s. Research pointed to a synthetic chemical cause. Mink raised in farms around the Great Lakes were fed fish, and began to suffer dramatic reproductive prob-

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lems; studies linked the problem to pcbs. In the 1970s, California gulls experienced a shortage of males; researchers wondered if pesticides were feminizing male embryos. In the 1980s, 60 percent of alligators in one Florida lake had abnormally small penises. And in this decade, researchers have begun to focus on human reproductive problems, pointing to a decline in male fertility.25 Still, the struggle was far from a walkover. It was not until over a decade later, in 2009, before the herbicide Atrazine, which had the effect of disrupting endocrines in the human body, was banned in the US. The European Union had banned it twice, partially in 2003 and more completely in 2006, but in the US, after extensive lobbying from the industry, it was relisted as legal for sale. In Canada, where Atrazine contamination had been reported in all major provinces, the federal health ministry approved of its continued use.26 While Washington was thrusting ahead with environmental legislation in the 1960s and 1970s, the forward march of environmental progress was being sustained elsewhere. In 1972 a major environmental conference was held in Stockholm under un aegis establishing an international environmental program. At first it seemed to languish at least until U Thant appointed the energetic and efficient Canadian Maurice Strong, a figure of the Ottawa corridors and one of the movers of the Canadian foreign aid program, to take over as first director of the United Nations Environment Programme (unep). One of the most significant victories of the unep was that a number of countries set up ministries along the lines of the American epa. And soon the un’s own Environmental Protection Agency was established.

the forward march halted? But end-time seems to have arrived. Just a decade after the first Earth Day Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States. In his two terms in office he completed a number of major agendas, one of which undermined environmentalism as an ideol-

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ogy and a course of action. Previously it had become, in one view at least, an American “responsibility.” Now it was derailed at an official level. Domestically, Reagan’s administration rolled back legislation from the previous decade and slashed the epa budget by a third in two years. “After undoing the environmental achievements of Jimmy Carter, Reagan seemed determined to undo those of Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and, if he could get away with it, Theodore Roosevelt (86–87).”27 But Reagan’s blitzkrieg met with only partial success. As Mark Mazower has noted, popular environmental consciousness was by now so deeply entrenched in the developed world that his assault on the new regulatory apparatus in fact prompted more Americans to join conservation groups. When asked by pollsters, Americans for the first time ranked a clean environment above a good sex life.28 The dark days of the Reagan rollback continued under presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush over the next two decades (1989–09). The issue of global warming, which had been carried forward by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization acting through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc), was the greatest casualty. Under George W. Bush, Washington blocked ratification of the Kyoto Climate Change Convention as well as other initiatives such as the Law of the Sea. Ottawa followed Washington, withdrawing effective December 2012.29 But paralleling American repudiation of laws favouring environmental amelioration, as if as a reminder of the consequences of unregulated capitalism, came the most spectacular environmental catastrophes, most notably the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989, the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, and the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2011. In reaction to the hostility of Washington to environmental regulations, mobilization on the part of environmental groups was unremitting. In 2006, former vice president Al Gore had made the film An Inconvenient Truth about climate change, which persuaded many fence sitters to jump down on the side of environmentalism. Others, however, perhaps because Gore was a Democrat and a lib-

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eral, remained unwilling to be moved by his urgent message.30 Attempts to discredit him, however, on the whole failed. The environmental situation seemed to be looking up. Yet in 2009, under President Barack Obama (2009–17) the efforts of environmentalists stalled. Despite years of effort, the Senate majority leader Harry Read, a Democrat, and even though the Democrats had a fiftynine-seat Democratic majority, announced that he would not bring to a vote a bill meant to address the greatest environmental problem of our time – global warming. In that year alone, Nathaniel Rich has noted, “the oil and gas industry spent about half a billion dollars on lobbying efforts to weaken energy legislation.” The lead donor in the lobbying campaign was ExxonMobil.31 Nor was the leadership of the Democratic Party as interested in environmental questions as it was in the issue of public health. In the campaign that led to his reelection as president in November 2012, Obama skirted environmental issues, in spite of the droughts, floods, hurricanes, and oil-spills that had ravaged the American heartland in the previous months.32 Globally, at the beginning of May 2013 it was announced that global carbon dioxide levels had passed the symbolically significant point of 400 parts of CO2 per million (ppm). If CO2 levels were to continue to rise at the rate that they did between 2013 and 2017, the British journal New Scientist has explained, then by the end of the century ppm will have doubled and the temperature of the planet will have risen by about 3°C. This alarming view was confirmed by British chemist and former ipcc chairman Robert Watson, who warned that, “we’re not on the pathway to a 2°C, we’re on a pathway to 3, 3.5°C.”33 Meanwhile, the cost of the fourteen named disasters in a single year – 2011 – including wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and flooding, has been estimated variously at $52 and $60.6 billion dollars “in aggregate damage.” According to Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, “nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.” It referred to Hurricane Sandy in audit-speak as a “weather-related loss event.”34 And more was to follow: the droughts that affected the American grain and cornbelt in 2012 were to become the stuff

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of legends, or at least nightmares. In fact their effects were spread over 60 per cent of the country with costs estimated at $60 billion. The wildfires in British Columbia in 2017 totalled about a tenth the cost of Hurricane Sandy in the United States. Before it was over, Hurricane Florence, which fell on the Carolina coast, “the most expensive storm ever,” was estimated to cost up to $170 billion. The estimate for the California wildfires of 2018 was $24 billion. During the hottest winter ever in the UK wildfires burned in the moorlands across the country. Swiss Re has estimated that insurance companies faced losses of $76 billion from natural catastrophes in 2018. “The Insurance Bureau of Canada figures show losses associated with extreme weather events in Canada that rose from an average of $405 million a year between 1983 and 2008 to $1.8 billion a year between 2009 and 2017” a report cited by The Globe and Mail suggests.35 By now James Hanson had resigned from his official appointment and was working free-lance within the environmental movement. His position about the consequences of continued environmental degradation has hardened, if anything: “We have reached a fork in the road and the politicians have to understand we either go down the road of exploiting every fossil fuel we have – tar sands, tar shale, off-shore drilling in the Arctic – but the science tells us we can’t do that without creating a situation where our children and grandchildren will have no control over, which is the climate system.”36 Still, there was some relief from environmental alarms. According to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, CO2 emissions in the United States decreased in 2015 by 2.6 per cent, which was mainly caused by a drop in coal consumption. This represented the largest relative decrease in any fossil fuel in the United States over the past five decades. By 2017 UK carbon emissions had fallen to levels last seen in 1890.37 In 2017, renewable energy in the US comprised 17 per cent of primary energy consumption. Wind power accounted for 5.55 per cent, and solar a mere 1.5 per cent. Nuclear generated around 20 per cent.38 In his first months in office, President George W. Bush had rejected the 1997 Kyoto agreement on climate change as discrimi-

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nating against the economic interests of the US. His vice president Dick Cheney, earlier the ceo of Halliburton, one of the world’s leading oil services companies, “stacked the top ranks of government with friends of the fossil fuel industry.”39 The Kyoto agreement, which was judged a failure, was renegotiated under Bush’s successor Barack Obama and led to the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. This gained the adherence of Washington, but not for long. On 1 June 2017, newly elected US President Donald Trump repudiated the Paris agreement. Nonetheless at the end of 2017, virtually every other country in the world, and even several American states, remained committed to it. Yet not only were the climate change sceptics and supporters of Big Energy hostile to the Paris agreement, so, too, were others. James Hanson was among those who actually denounced it: “Paris is basically a fraud. It’s just wishful thinking. They’re trying to tell every country you should do the best you can but it has essentially no effect. I don’t think the US pulling out has mattered much.” Five years earlier a cbc reporter had written that the Kyoto agreement had reached “a sorry end.” Was effective global climatechange agreement then to be a totally elusive goal? Gus Speith seems to think that there was little reason for optimism: “It would be nice to think that the international treaties and action plans, the main focus of efforts to date, have given us the policies and programs we need, so that we could at last get on with it. But that is not the case. Despite all the conferences and negotiations, the international community has not laid the foundation for rapid and effective action … [T]he lion’s share of the blame must go to the wealthy, industrial countries and especially to the United States, the principal foot-dragger,” he wrote.40 But while despair may have reigned in some quarters, by 2015 another argument was becoming heard not only in the appeals of the environmentalists but in the boardrooms of the central banks. This was that in order to avoid another financial, crisis fossil fuels might have to be left in the ground.41

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stranded assets and the transformation of energy If we seek rationality behind President Trump’s repudiation of climate change we may find it in predictions of America’s future as an energy colossus. Here predictions vary quite widely although those of the US Energy Information Administration (eia), which admits that it makes “modelled projections” rather than predictions, may be as accurate as any. All the while, we should take a warning from the fact that while the predictions of the International Energy Agency (IAE) “for many the gold standard for analysis and future projections,” has a record that is “awful” and that “[t]he other widely respected global energy agency, the US Energy Information Administration (eia), is not much better.” With this in mind, we will go ahead and point out that the eia projection is 11–12 mbd for US production from the late 2020s through to 2050.42 But according to another source, the annual Global Energy Trends, published in mid-November (2017), by the 2030s, largely due to production from shale rock formations (that is, “tight oil”), the US is likely to produce more than 30 million barrels of oil and natural gas a day. This is fifty per cent more than any country has ever produced in a single year. It is also predicted that by the mid2020s the US will continue to be the world’s leader in the producer of natural gas. China will overtake the US as the world’s largest oil consumer around 2030. An article published on the Bloomberg New Energy Finance site predicts that, “global demand for gasoline and diesel will have hardly diminished between 2019 and 2040. It will remain at around 40 mbd.”43 To paraphrase Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who, sitting on Canada’s endowment of oil and gas, would willingly not exploit it? In the same key, the World Energy Outlook for 2017 proclaimed, “The era of oil is not yet over.” Nor had the endgame arrived for the appropriation of the environment by profiteers. “In the next five years,” Adam Federman has written, “millions of acres of America’s public lands and waters – including some national monuments and relatively pristine coastal regions – could be auctioned off for coal and gas development, with little thought to the

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environmental consequences. The source for this prediction is the Department of the Interior’s strategic vision, which is committed to ‘America’s energy dominance.’”44 What, then, of the naysayers or, to cite the title of an article by Bill McKibben, what about “A Future Without Fossil Fuels?” McKibben, we might recall, had warned his readers about Justin Trudeau’s enthusiasm for the tar sands.45 In a recent celebration of the decline of fossil fuels he has reviewed two major studies that stress that while coal has run out of steam, oil and gas are also approaching the end of the road. His argument, then, is not the conventional one that governments will have to act against them if the planet is to survive. No, his argument is quite simple: an energy transition, that is the global shift from carbon-based to clean energy, is upon us, and the fossil fuel peak is right around the corner, that is during the decade of the 2020s. Even natural gas, viewed sometimes as the key bridge fuel for the carbon economy, will soon be out-priced by clean energy.46 This is quite simply due to its relative expense compared to renewables, especially solar and wind. Investment will begin to visibly wither; the market will do its magic.47 Within five years, thinks Brad Plumer, climate change will hit the bottom lines of companies. Already insurance firms are backing away from dirty oil and its transport. It’s over for coal. Methane, that is lng, will be next. By c.2050 twilight time for dirty energy will have arrived. Arguments of the revival of profits and America’s new global leadership based on oil surpluses are, thus, so much hot CO2.48 This argument against the global benefits of a carbon bonanza had first been foreshadowed by Mark Carney who in 2015 publicly raised the question of “stranded assets,” that is oil and gas, not being developed, at crushing costs to investors, because of the environmental cost of exploiting them.49 An application of this point, it has been pointed out, applies to oil and gas plants and pipelines; build them now and we will see them obsolete before the banks that financed them get their money back. Unsurprisingly the stranded assets argument, which is accepted as inevitable by many, has provoked anxiety and protest among certain vested interests. Still, for some, the matter is simple; in terms

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of cost alone, oil and coal simply may soon, perhaps in the next decade or so, no longer be able to compete with the sun and wind as sources of energy.50 So even though the oil and gas industries will continue to bribe and cajole (and demand government subsidies), their doom is foreseen; change is here. Investors, including governments and sovereign wealth funds, realize this and are backing out. Of course there will be blood; petrostates in the Gulf, in Africa, and in parts of America, not to mention Alberta, will not just suffer but will be drained of life-giving wealth. Diesel will die from lack of roads. Nor is the picture for lovers of internal combustionpowered Mercedes Benzs and Porsches, not to mention the American suvs and trucks, consoling: “[B]y 2017, Tesla was worth more than gm or Ford. And for every Tesla that rolls off the assembly line, Chinese manufacturers are producing five electric cars. Of the 3 million electric vehicles on the roads last year, the majority were in China. Auto analysts were already warning consumers to think twice before buying a gas-powered car, since its resale value might fall dramatically over just the next three years.”51 If this analysis is correct, gas stations will be like suburban churches, cinemas, and canals, ruined reminders of a different world.

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8 Renewables and Remediation

Consider the clean energy alternatives to Big Carbon. The leading renewables, hydro, wind, and solar, and nuclear power are so far the most widely adopted alternatives to continued dependency on oil, coal, and gas. Hydropower remains the largest and cheapest source of renewable power globally, commanding 3 per cent of primary energy production compared to 1.5 per cent from wind, solar, and geothermal energy. Of total global renewable energy capacity of 2,351 gw reached by the end of 2015, hydro accounted for 1,172 gw and wind and solar energy account for most of the remainder, with capacities of 564 gw and 480 gw respectively. Other sources include 121 gw of bioenergy, 13 gw of geothermal, and 500 mw of marine energy.1 I shall return to hydro and nuclear but for now let me note that Dietrich Helm virtually passes over the potential of hydropower with the comment that it comes at “enormous environmental costs,” that is, it is inimical to biodiversity. So he damns dams. Yet, he has explained, “global warming cannot be seriously mitigated by current wind and solar technologies.” With these, he explains, there are two serious sticking points: first, they are both troubled by intermittency – the sun not shining at night and the wind blows unpredictably. Both have to be backed up. Backup in most of the world, he thinks, would be by fossil fuels, that is, coal, oil, and gas power. Second, current wind and solar generation is “low density,” that is, in Helm’s words, “[t]he biggest wind turbines might reach 7 megawatts, compared with 500–1,000 mw for a

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modern coal or gas-fired power station.”2 So, given the present state of wind and solar technologies, investors in fossil capitalism, excepting coal, should not worry, he writes with a certain assurance, for at least for a couple of decades. Helm’s argument about the advent of solar and wind technology may also be unduly pessimistic since over the last decade, solar costs have dropped by 88 per cent and wind power by 69 per cent. Batteries have become the alternatives to the intermittency sticking points of solar and wind. As David Roberts has explained, batteries, “started getting cheap faster than anyone expected.” He continues: It happened so fast that, in certain limited circumstances, solar + storage or wind + storage is already cheaper than new natural gas plants and able to play all the same roles (and more). The cost of natural gas power is tethered to the commodity price of natural gas, which is inherently volatile. The price of controllable, storable renewable energy is tethered only to technology costs which are going down, down, down. Recent forecasts suggest that it may be cheaper to build new renewables + storage than to continue operating existing natural gas plants by 2035.3 But wind and sun, even with their limitations, remain our leading hopes. Yet, it is salutary to look at projections for India, the world’s second biggest consumer and importer of coal – to the tune of 753.9 million tonnes in 2017. India is a country not without wind or solar power potential and with plans to become a world leader in nuclear electricity generation. Yet by 2027 it will still be dependent on coal for 73 per cent of its power. The argument follows that coal will remain a major source of energy there until the 2040s.4

wind Wind is one of the very cheapest forms of all energy – except where there is little wind and lots of sunshine. Wind power has been used to propel boats and provide power to grind grain since Ancient times. It is the form of manmade mechanical power with the

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longest pedigree and the lowest cost. Although since around 1500 wind power adoption became commonplace in Western Europe, it was only in the nineteenth century that it became popularized, often by farmers, and particularly in the United States and the Netherlands where it was used to pump water. In 1887 windmills for electricity generation were built in both Scotland and Ohio, and just a few years later they took off in Denmark. In 1903, a Dane, Poul la Cour, founder of the Society of Wind Electricians, discovered that fast rotating wind turbines with just a few blades were the most efficient way to generate electricity. La Cour’s vision put Denmark on the fast track to leadership in the production of wind-generated power. The most celebrated feat of independent wind generator construction in the postwar era was in Tyvind, Denmark. This generator was built in 1975–76 by teachers and students at a local school. In its day it was the biggest wind generator in the world. In key respects the Tyvind windmill showed the way for Denmark to become the cradle of windpower, exporting windmill equipment and install experts globally. Of course, Danish initiative has been helped by the fact that in some parts of the country the wind blows for 300 days a year. Plainly, wind power depends on a regular source of wind; whereas solar power is only produced during daytime, wind power can be generated at night and year round. 5 Wind took off in North America nearly a quarter century after mass-produced cars. In 1927 the Jacobs Wind Factory in Minneapolis, which produced wind turbines for farms, was opened. In the same year the vertical axis wind turbine, known as the “eggbeater windmill,” was invented. But renewed interest in wind power in North America remained sluggish, at least until after gas prices skyrocketed in the late 1970s. The first large wind farm was not installed in California until 1970 and it was not until 1993 that the National Wind Technology Center was launched near Boulder, Colorado. By 2018, US installed capacity of windmills remained just below 89 gw, enough to power over 20 million homes. In 2017 there were more than 126 million households in the US.6 In Canada in 1975 an eggbeater windmill was installed by Hydro-Quebec Research (ireq). In the next decade the ireq,

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together with the National Research Council of Canada, installed experimental vertical-axis generators on the Magdalene Islands and on the Gaspé peninsula, and in 1986 Hydro-Quebec built another wind turbine in Kuujjuaq in Nunavik (northern Quebec). Up to that date, in Canada the most significant interest in wind-generated power had been on the part of the state. This increased when in 1993–94 the Cowley Ridge Wind Farm was built near Pincher Creek (“Wind Capital of Canada”) in southern Alberta. It generated 60,000 mwh annually until it was decommissioned in 2016.7 In Canada as a whole by 2017 there were 295 wind farms (each producing 100–3,000 mw) and in most provinces around 20, the majority of which produce only small amounts of electricity (between 20 and 80 mw).8 It is apparent that those provinces with rich sources of hydropower, like bc and Quebec, have been less interested in harnessing wind power than provinces like Ontario which has limited accessible hydro. Prince Edward Island gets 97.9 per cent of its electricity from wind, while bc gets a mere 1.3 per cent.9 Quite rapidly, from the 1970s after the first oil price shock, wind power caught on and wind farms began to spread throughout the advanced capitalist world. By the 1990s, worldwide wind capacity doubled about every three years and with this increase construction costs dropped. By the same decade, wind generation had become the fastest growing energy technology. But growth was unsurprisingly uneven, with 70 per cent of wind energy capacity at the beginning of the twenty-first century taking place in Europe and only 19 per cent in North America. It may be that North America is simply less windy than Europe. There is also the possibility that the lobbying of dirty energy had an influence; recall that Steve Coll’s history of Exxon was called Private Empire, that is it was an empire within the most powerful of states. Exxon had virtually imperial levels of political influence. It may be safe to presume that until the early years of the new millennium, they had little interest in any form of clean energy. In the UK, one of the windiest countries in Europe, there are 186 operational wind farms, onshore and offshore, with a further several dozen under construction. In 2017 it was claimed that wind power accounted for 18.5 per cent of electricity generation, with

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wind surpassing nuclear power. In January 2018, the UK set a new national record for wind power production. In France wind power, getting off to a slow start and inexplicably finding opposition from the rural population, rose from 148 mw in 2002 to 13,759 in 2007.10 While India burns up hundreds of millions of tonnes of coal every year, and sees its exploding population choking as a consequence, wind power continues to increase, to the extent that by mid-2018 India’s 34.293 gw of wind power gave it the fourth largest installed wind power capacity in the world. India’s wind power development began right after independence in 1947 and now has the target of 60,000 mw by 2022. India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu, where the wind turbines of have a capacity of 7.9 gw, produces more power than Denmark, which has a capacity of 5.5 gw. Tamil Nadu also claims to produce more rooftop solar power and is third in the world in solar farms. Wind energy is so far the biggest source of renewable energy, accounting for nearly three times as much as solar. Together, renewables were predicted to account for 27 per cent of India’s power sector by 2017. But coal is still king, in 2017 providing 76 per cent of the total power generation. Optimistic claims that coal use will decline are bound to be partially offset by the fact that there is a pivot to coal in neighbouring Pakistan. It remains to be seen whether when fossil fuel demand stops growing, wind power will take off.11

solar The future of solar energy compared to other low-carbon options is almost as bright as the sun itself.12 Seriously.“The sun’s energy is so abundant that more energy is transferred to our planet in an hour’s sunlight than the entire global electricity industry can generate in a year.”13 The huge advantage of solar over other forms of clean energy is that not only is it increasingly better and cheaper but it is universally available at relatively low cost. Of course, there is the obvious problem that sunlight is neither universal nor perpetual.14 Here is Dieter Helm again:

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What is needed for solar to really cut into the demand for fossil fuels is to address the two weaknesses in current technology: only a small part of the light spectrum is harvested; and the materials in the solar panels are still relatively primitive. Solar cells harvest the visual light spectrum to generate electricity. They cannot yet harvest the infrared and ultraviolet sunlight, which comprise, respectively, 47% and 46% of the light spectrum. The great challenges facing solar generation follow: how to open up the light spectrum from the current 75 and how to harvest the energy through more efficient materials and mechanisms.15 Still, it is easy to believe, along with the various sun-worshippers in the past, that solar will be our salvation, at least once the question of long-term storage is answered and recent innovations in battery technology are encouraging. Global solar installations, that is pvs (photo voltaics), in 2017 reached 98 gw, an increase of 31 per cent over 2016. More than half of this increase (53 gw) came from China. The world’s largest operational solar project at 1,547 mw was unrolled in Tengger, China, while the largest floating solar project (40 gw) was commissioned in the Anhui district. India installed 10 gw of solar in 2017, double its 2016 record.16 United States statistics regarding solar power are individually impressive although the total contribution of solar to American electricity production is not. Thus, although America is second in the world in electricity production from solar power, in 2017 it accounted for only 1.44 per cent of total electricity. On the other hand, solar power contributed nearly 12 per cent of California’s total energy and 39 per cent of all new electricity generation capacity came from solar installations. In September 2018, Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring California’s utilities to get 60 per cent of their electricity from renewable energy sources by the end of 2030. By 2045 this was to reach even higher. In 2016 clean-energy jobs surpassed oil-drilling jobs for the first time in US history. As Governor Brown boasted, “California has been

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doing stuff that the rest of the world … is just hoping they might get to someday.”17 But figures regarding the potential of solar power in American national consumption are more than a little difficult to disentangle since national figures for solar power production are often distinctive from state figures, while, as far as potential is concerned, vested political interests have such a large part to play in US energy production. Some states have actually legislated against rooftop solar panels, while tax credits for solar have become a political football (with the Republican party investigating the tax credits provided by the Obama regime). Regarding use, a significant part of solar energy in America is used to heat swimming pools. Finally, in generalizing about energy in America it should be stressed that the climatic differences between one part of the country and another are quite staggering – California, Hawai’i, and Arizona, for instance, have brilliant solar futures; Washington state, North Dakota, and Maine, not to mention Alaska, not so much. In Canada, outside of Ontario, solar capacity has reached 2,310 mw, yet coal-generated power is still used in Alberta, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Solar power is of marginal significance in most provinces. A large part of this is due to the gargantuan influence of hydropower in bc, Quebec, and Newfoundland and coal in Alberta and Saskatchewan. So for Canada as a whole, solar energy accounts for just 0.5 per cent of all generated energy. In the decade between 2005 and 2016, when coal fell from 16 per cent to 9.3 per cent as a source of power, renewables like wind, solar, and biomass grew from 1.5 per cent of total electricity generation to a modest 7.2 per cent. (At this rate, that is around 6 per cent per decade, it will take until the middle of the present century for clean energy to prevail.18) Renewables in one Canadian estimate are expected to grow at an average annual rate of 11 per cent between 2015 and 2035. If at present wind and solar comprise some 7 per cent of total power supply, by 2040 they may reach nearly 40 per cent. So by 2035/2040, fossil fuels will still have an overwhelming share in global energy supply but clean energy will be coming up fast. But it seems that fossil fuels will still be around by the middle of the century at least

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with coal being nearly extinct, oil peaking in the 2020s, and gas hanging on until as late as c.2050.19

other sources of clean energy: nuclear, hydro, biomass Nuclear

Nuclear power, it has been argued, for instance in France, has a significant future. Not only do the French but also the Russians, the Chinese, and even some Americans continue to look to nuclear power futures. The American Department of Energy in 2018 went so far as to publish a report titled “Nuclear Power is the Most Reliable Energy Source …”20 But both because of recent disasters in Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011) and expense, the nuclear option seems restricted, at least for the present. Nearly everywhere, nuclear power plants are ageing; new ones are seldom built, significantly because of cost. The projected cost of the plant at Hinkley Point in England, the first nuclear plant to be built in Britain since the 1990s, will be, when it is completed, the most expensive power in the world. “It’s three times over cost and three times over time where it’s been built in Finland and France … Nuclear simply doesn’t make sense any more.”21 Nuclear power in Europe got a kick start after the oil embargoes of 1973. France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, and even Japan all undertook major nuclear projects with only limited misgivings. This hardly changed with the nuclear disaster at Windscale in the UK in October 1957 that was, in fact, hushed up.22 But in the next decade nuclear power peaked. France built the bulk of its fleet of fifty-eight nuclear reactors in a fifteen-year period in the 1980s and 1990s. The French continue to be keen on nuclear, constructing the Hinkley Point power station in Somerset, England, which, perhaps unsurprisingly given its cost, is in large part being financed by the Chinese who are already busy building a third of the world’s nuclear reactors in their own country. At its completion, the two 1.6 gw reactors are expected to meet 7 per cent of the British electricity demand – at a cost significantly greater than wind or solar.23

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Elsewhere, following sensational disasters, a decline of interest from the 1980s has been discernible. In the public imagination, panic ensued, especially in Germany, where public sympathies, orchestrated by the chancellor, switched from nuclear back to coal. Nuclear power “is not going to come to the rescue anytime soon,” Helm has concluded. Germany is not alone in being both cautious and sceptical about nuclear power. Another commentator has noted that Hinkley was conceived in a time before wind and solar electricity began to rapidly fall and US shale undercut conventional energy costs.24 Yet, in spite of the huge psychological misgivings about nuclear, it has maintained a steadfast presence in much of the world with 450 nuclear reactors providing about 11 per cent of the world’s electricity. France gets three-quarters of its electricity from its fiftyeight nuclear reactors while Hungary, Slovakia, and Ukraine get more than half of theirs. Other countries significantly dependent on nuclear power include Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, the UK, and the US. Saudi Arabia has been slated as one of the biggest new markets in the world. In March 2019 the Saudis discussed nuclear technology sales with the US. Chinese companies installed more civil nuclear power than anyone else in 2017.25 Canada has nineteen operable nuclear reactors and in 2017 they generated 15 per cent of Canada’s electricity. Emily Chung on the cbc News has predicted that small, modular nuclear reactors (smrs) will become the next wave of innovation and could become an “important technological opportunity for Canada.” Following a deal in August 2018, the Canadian company that bought the nuclear services firm Westinghouse became involved in the building of six nuclear reactors in India.26 Still, the attraction of nuclear power seems obvious on the national balance sheet with France becoming the world’s largest net exporter of electricity. Nuclear power has occupied the same privileged position in the national economy as tar sands oil has done in the Canadian economy with the president of France, Emmanuel Macron (May 2017–present) seems not to be bothered by the risks of nuclear power. “Nuclear is not bad for carbon emission,” he explained. “[I]t’s even the most carbon-free way to produce electricity with renewables.”

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A different set of questions applies to China where safety is less of a question while secrecy conceals environmental costs. “If anyone can do it [build a nuclear power plant], it is the Chinese,” writes one journalist. The Chinese, she comments, have established themselves as world leaders in the complete engineering challenges involved in building nuclear power plants. At the end of March 2017 there were twenty reactors under construction in China.27 Hydro

The leading hydro powers in the world are China, Canada, Brazil, US, and Russia. China produces a quarter of the world’s installed capacity of hydro from its 87,000 dams. China has more large dams than any country in the world and has built the gigantic Three Gorges that spans the Yangtze River and is the world champion. It produces 352 gw of electricity annually. Canada is the second largest producer of hydropower in the world. “Hydro,” which in both Canadian English and Canadian French (“bc Hydro,” “Hydro-Quebec”) is synonymous with “electricity,” as in “the hydro is off again.” Hydro accounts for more than 25 per cent of Canada’s total energy production, 28 per cent of the energy of Ontario, and nearly 96 per cent of the power generated in Quebec. In 2013, hydro in Canada produced 392 tetrawatts or trillion watts (tw) of electricity. Giant hydro projects are the Canadian politicians’ catnip. Massive projects in Quebec, bc, and Newfoundland proclaimed and celebrated unapologetically by politicians, often against the advice of planners and environmentalists, have led to cost overruns that have drained provincial exchequers. The gigantic and controversial Muskrat River project in Labrador, costing the (relatively poor) province $1 million a day in interest payments, is slated to produce 2,250 mw of electricity, with luck, sometime after 2023. Critics like Konrad Yakabuski of The Globe and Mail put it on the same page as Britain’s Hinkley Point nuclear power project in terms of delays, cost overruns, and unpopularity. Yakubuski has called it “an albatross that threatens the province’s very solvency” and “a Shakespearian tragedy in a Newfoundland accent.”28 Obviously where

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the dream of clean energy meets political expediency is a place that is very expensive to go to. Hydro is the largest source of clean energy in the US, accounting for 35 per cent of total renewable electricity and 6.1 per cent of total US energy. In August 2015 President Obama announced his Clean Power Plan stressing that more clean power and especially more hydro power should be developed. Two years later, Scott Pruitt, Trump’s head of the epa, repealed the plan. Nonetheless, most hydro outlets in Canada continue to yearn for access to the US energy market. The head of the Canadian Hydro Association has explained that the US was “where opportunity lies.”29 So far Canada has accounted for a mere 1 per cent of American hydro consumption. Since wind and solar power hardly exist, it is hydro that is the main form of clean energy in Russia. Russia has 102 hydroelectric power plants with the capacity of more than 100 mw, making it the fifth in the world in hydro terms. Yet so far, hydro has only accounted for 18 per cent of electricity generation, the same as coal and just a little more than nuclear. Most of Russia’s energy (46 per cent) comes from natural gas.

biomass Biomass shelters in the shadows of hydro, solar, wind, and nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels. There are two main types of biomass, the traditional, that uses wood and specific energy crops, including grasses, and even animal dung and the modern, including ethanol and biodiesel production. Car gas ethanol is made from corn (in the US), rapeseed oil and wheat (in Europe), and sugar cane (in Brazil). Like other forms of both clean and dirty energy, the use of biofuels has become politicized: George W. Bush in his 2100 energy plan, advocated the use of biofuels to pander to farmers in the Midwest. Obviously, the use of farmland and food crops to produce energy not only drives up the price of the crops but also removes the land from the food bank. Tree planting is also an excellent way to provide biomass, except that in temperate climates it takes decades for trees to grow; hardwood trees planted now will barely reach a significant size by 2050. Softwood both

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grows and burns faster. Alongside wood-burning stoves, there is the burning of dung, used widely as fuel in India. A propos, in early 2019 the Canadian government announced that it was planning to invest $2.7 million in the ZooShare Biogas Cooperative to process animal waste generated at Toronto Zoo.30 Problematically, many biofuels have high carbon emissions on a life cycle basis thus negating their ability to reduce the carbon footprint. Yet another way of reducing our adverse effect on the climate is to reduce our food dependence on cows and other meat producing farm livestock. These animals emit quantities of methane into the atmosphere and require huge tracts of land for their survival. Troy Vitesse discusses this under the heading “Euthanize the carnivore.” The simple attraction of veganism is that it would free up land for clean power devices and trees, as well as reducing carbon emissions substantially. So far, the discussion of the subject of the doomsday for cows has been kept out of the mainstream. Nonetheless, Vitesse’s main point is inescapable: “Agriculture is by far the most profligate sector of the economy in its greenhouse-gas emissions and land-use; its expansion, especially over the past half-century, has had terrible effects.” A British report for the Countryside Commission has argued that there must be a shift from intensive farming which produces cheap but nonnutritious food to more organic and wildlife friendly production.31

carbon capture, storage, and sequestration In its fifth assessment report (2014), the ipcc advocated meeting its goals based on what it called “negative emissions,” that is, ways to withdraw from the atmosphere and then to sequester CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Various carbon capture techniques are presently at an experimental stage. The main technology currently being explored is “amine scrubbing.” This involves bubbling the gas from burning coal through a solution of CO2 and monoethanolamine in a “stripper.” This process is almost insuperably expensive on a global level although costs are likely to come down. It is a technology that

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requires a constant stream of CO2, so its applications are limited. The Conservative government of Saskatchewan, heavily dependent upon coal, has invested C$1.24 billion in a single stripper and has claimed nonetheless that it is preferable to a carbon tax. This rivals the claim, mentioned above, that fracking is beneficial to the environment. In the US the Energy Department offered a $2 billion loan for a project similar to that in Saskatchewan, but this has presumably gone nowhere under President Trump.32 Then there is “direct air capture” technology. As the name implies, this involves taking CO2 from the air mechanically by means of massive fans, in one case up to thirty-three feet in diameter. The first commercial carbon capture plant was opened in Switzerland in 2016 but seems to have vanished into the air it recycles. Another more recent project is that of Carbon Engineering, a small Canadian company established in Squamish, bc that has become involved in “direct air capture.” The Carbon Engineering venture has been backed by several oil companies including Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, and bhp, the giant Anglo-Australian mining company that is invested in bma, Australia’s largest coal producer. So far $68 million has been raised for this experiment – little enough by the standards of the petroleum industry and considering the cost of the clean up of oil well sites, estimated in the billions. In fact, some critics claim, not implausibly, that the sums invested are so small as to amount to a kind of greenwashing. One recent proposed experiment in CO2 removal, discussed at a meeting of scientists and policy officials in Gothenburg, Sweden, outlines the building of a plant that would be capable of removing between 100,000 and 1 million tonnes of CO2 from the environment a year. The cost of removing a single tonne would be between $94 and $232. The aim for most climate engineers would be a cost of around $100. Given the costs of such technologies, we should note that introducing greater energy efficiency would probably be a more effective focus of our attention. Reforestation is also a potential method of removing carbon from the air. It is estimated to cost only $20–$100 per tonne of CO2 captured and stored, explains Tim Flannery. “But at $100 per tonne, it would still cost $370 billion to sequester a gigatonne of carbon

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by planting trees.” This sequestration would require roughly planting half the area of the UK each year for 50 years; that is between 70,000 and 150,000 square kilometers.33 While this is imaginable, it is hardly workable. And anyway, since solar panels, wind generators, and biofuel crops would require virtually all of the national territory if fossil fuels were to be replaced, there would only be standing room for the population. But Troy Vitesse has a different view: Reforestation has had a significant effect in the last decade or two, enough to forestall the worst of climate change’s ill effects. The collapse of communist forestry and agriculture in the 1990s allowed the forests in Russia’s European half to absorb more carbon, increasing by a third. China, often regarded as bearing the brunt of globalization’s environmental costs, actually has an extremely effective state-directed reforestation program. In the last quarter of the twentieth century the carbon sequestered by its forests increased fivefold. This was partly due to more tree plantations, but it was the expansion of protected wild forests that was particularly effective. Wild ecosystems generally sequester more carbon per hectare than their managed equivalents … Rainforests, both the temperate sort found in British Columbia and the tropical kinds strung along the Equator, are capable of sequestering 200–600 tonnes of carbon per hectare – Californian redwood forests can contain an amazing 3,500 tonnes per hectare …34 In addition to these “benign” approaches, there have been proposals for geo-engineering which usually require some measure of messing with the environment; they are based on several different possibilities, most of which, after more than a decade of experimentation, are still at the theoretical stage. For instance, there is a process that aims to control the amount of radiation reaching the earth. This is the case of the project to shoot or pump sulphur into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and lower temperatures. It is a short-term fix – that is, it only works as long as the spraying of sulphur continues. Then there is the possibility of carbon capture and storage (ccs) on the ocean floor – aqua – rather than geo-sequestration. Here we

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encounter the idea of creating areas of oceanic algae to absorb carbon dioxide. Much of the geo-engineering ideas appear to have come from the drawing board of Jules Verne although, perhaps out of desperation, among a sizeable contingent of scientists and engineers it is taken seriously, even if it is prodigiously expensive. The Australian coal industry has shown itself remarkably enthusiastic about inventing means of capturing the CO2 that is produced by burning its dirty fuel. One writer has suggested that the survival of the industry is at stake.35 A decade ago, c.2010, geo-engineering was a hot issue, although even then not all scientists warmed to it. In an article from 2008, Dr Alice Bows of the University of Manchester put the question like this: I’m not a huge fan of messing with the atmosphere in a geoengineering sense because there could be unpredictable consequences. But there are also a lot of unpredictable consequences of temperature increase. It does appear that we’re failing to act [on emissions]. And if we are failing to act, then we have to consider some of the other options.36 Others call geo-engineering a “risky distraction” and deplore “quick fix” solutions that evade the problem of emissions by offering “magical geo-engineering solutions to get us out of the hole we have dug ourselves into.”37 While most of the ideas have been dogged by stratospheric costs or uncertain workability, the search for the grail of negative emissions, that is to keep global temperature rise below 2°C, has been unremitting, though has not attracted the scale of investment that would be required to make it operate on the scale required. As an article in The Economist has pointed out, with an unusual melodramatic flair, “[N]o one has said guaranteeing civilization’s survival was going to come cheap.”38 It seems unlikely that Big Coal or Big Oil will pony up the cost of CO2 removal. Recall that the environmental record of the oil firms in Alberta and bc is to drill, then cut and run. In Nigeria the record is worse.

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The assumption underlying the consideration and experimentation of all of these expensive technologies is that greenhouse gases will continue to be emitted between now and sometime after 2050.39 No one has proposed any technological fixes that would allow the restoration of Arctic ice and permafrost or the reversal of oceanic warming.

auditing emissions Let us consider costs, so far as they can be calculated, and who will pay them, remembering that about half of global emissions have come from only 10 per cent of the global population. Here, even for the rich countries, there will be no free lunches even though emissions may be paid for, as though by credit card, by future generations but not necessarily by the descendants of investors and managers. As we have suggested, at every turn the solution to the problem of climate change will be costly and the cost will rise with time, as in the case of tropical storms in the US, which cost $9 billion in 1989, $30 billion in 2017, and as much as $170 billion in 2018. Perhaps as Mann and Wainwright have suggested above, the cost will be beyond the reach of capitalist economies and thus only more radical political solutions will be effective. By now, it is clear that increased taxation will be the standard means of attempting to influence behaviour and of raising government revenues to address the costs associated with the climate change, which results from ever-increasing carbon content in the atmosphere. In Ontario the gas tax is C$.17 a litre. But not all governments are singing from the same hymnal. The recently elected Conservative government has promised to lower this tax substantially. In Britain, which with Sweden, has the highest tax in Europe, the tax is £0.5795 per litre (about C$1.00). In the US federal gas tax has been stalled at $.18 per gallon.40 Or consider air travel. International and national airlines produce as much in carbon emissions as the annual CO2 for Germany. But air travel only benefits about 7 per cent of the global population. Wagner and Weitzman:

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Every time you board a plane to fly from New York to San Francisco and back, you put roughly a ton of carbon dioxide into the air, some of which will stay there for decades or even centuries after your trip. That’s you personally, not the whole plane, which emits a couple hundred times more. And that ton will cause at least around $40 worth of damages to the economy, ecosystems, and health. Since January 2012, passengers in the European Union have been charged for their role in carbon pollution – not very much, it is true, and, certainly, it is not the thought that counts, it is the amount.41 No one has dared limiting air travel or even proposed that it be heavily taxed. In fact, most major advanced economies subsidize the building of civilian and military aircraft, the former of which they must know are to be used mainly for the purposes of transporting tourists. In Britain, over 2017–18, the number of flights taken by officials from government departments dealing with climate change has increased from 2,700 to 4,500.42 And imagine the economies of London or Paris, not to mention Florida, without tourists. Military aircraft are prodigiously wasteful; they burn up huge, and unaccounted for, amounts of kerosene. The American Department of Defense is the world’s largest consumer of fuel. It uses about as much fuel per year as the entire population of Sweden.43

carbon pricing Carbon pricing seeks to impose a cost on the combustion of fossil fuels by industries or citizens either through a regulatory charge (sometimes simply referred to as a tax) or indirectly through a capand-trade system. “Do you understand anything about carbon tax?” asks the celebrated French economist, Thomas Piketty. “In principle,” he writes, “what distinguishes a successful ‘carbon tax’ from traditional environmental taxes is that it’s wholly guided by coherent ecological objectives, not by political or budget considerations.”44 Few people in the electorates of even of the most literate of Western countries actually understand the mechanics of any

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form of climate remediation, including carbon pricing, the most popular official solution and one supported by governments in the most advanced states, like Canada (but not the US) and by advocates of remediation outside of governments. To most, carbon pricing is simply another tax and, given their dependency on cars and trucks, an inconvenient one. It is therefore often difficult to impose it in any form. On 3 October 2016 the federal government of Canada announced a national “floor price” on carbon that would require all provinces and territories to have some form of carbon pricing by 2018. Ottawa proposed a carbon tax of $20 per tonne in 2019, rising to $50 a tonne by 2022. That is, in 2022 factories producing CO2 would have to pay C$50 a tonne for emissions. Is this a little or a lot? Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said that this price was “too low to be taken seriously.” Another writer noted, “What’s wrong with Trudeau’s policy? Simply put, it won’t get us where we need to be. According to several calculations, a carbon price in Canada would need to start at $30 a tonne and reach $200 per tonne by 2030 to put us on track to meet our climate targets. More than the low carbon tax of C$10 per tonne, the Liberals are using the climate targets set by Stephen Harper. These have been repeatedly criticized, including by Trudeau’s own Liberal Party, as too low to do Canada’s part on climate.”45 By the time of the prime minister’s announcement some provinces had already passed legislation introducing a carbon tax. As we have seen, Alberta (in 2007) was first, with a tax that envisioned rising gradually from an initial $20 per tonne to $30 in 2018. Alberta was followed by bc and much later, Ontario. Saskatchewan, under a Conservative government, continued to fight a desperate rearguard action in part because much earlier it had invested in prodigiously expensive and untested CO2 “amine scrubbing” equipment that we shall see below. Some 44 per cent of the electric power of the province continued to be produced by generating plants using coal. Besides being heavily used in Saskatchewan, coal provided nearly all the fuel for Nova Scotia’s energy. By 2016 this was down to, or still up at, 56 per cent of total fuel use.46

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Carbon tax is the most direct form of carbon pricing. This tax is effected by taxing all fossil fuel sources in proportion to their carbon content, thus different fuels would be taxed at different rates. The tax rate is normally calculated on the basis of per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions. In a province where the carbon tax rate is C$35 per tonne, a company that emits one hundred tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year will pay the government C$3,500 per annum. Since governments normally collect from industry, industries normally pass the tax on to consumers. Here we see how any government willing to do this might be signing its own death warrant and why conservative governments from Louisiana to Ontario win popularity by discountenancing it. On the other hand, should I avoid paying for the greenhouse gases that I produce and let my grandchildren pick up the tab? 47 By mid-2014, carbon taxes had been established in a number of countries including India, Japan, South Korea, France, UK, Finland, and Ireland and several Canadian provinces and American states. Carbon taxes have been supported by a number of economists, environmentalists, and politicians including the Keynesian Joseph Stiglitz and the environmentalists James Hansen and William Nordhaus, as well as the Liberal Party of Canada. Scrapped in Australia, where fidelity to the coal industry has become a major act of faith, it is roundly condemned in Alberta where a huge number of jobs have been lost in the oil industry due to the drop in oil prices, where other costly problems have risen, and a balanced budget is a thing of the past. In general, North American conservatives of whatever stripe loath carbon tax, but it seems fair to say that rather than framing an alternative to carbon tax, they simply mouth platitudes about its cost to soccer moms and the elderly and ignore the question of climate change as though it was merely some passing panic.48 In November 2018, Washington State established a ballot initiative that raised the matter of a carbon tax that would have been the first ever in the US. “bp, Valero, Phillips 66, the Koch brothers, and other members of the fossil fuel fraternity dumped more than $30 million into Washington state to crush the initiative.” The tactics of the fraternity included “relentless fear mongering about job losses,

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higher electricity bills, and more expensive gasoline.” The ballot failed to pass.49

cap-and-trade This is an even more complicated system than simple carbon tax. Troy Vettese notes its origins: The cap-and-trade concept was devised in 1968 by John Dales, an economist at the University of Toronto … to deal with the environmental degradation of the Great Lakes. He proposed that rather than simply dictate industrial standards, it would be more efficient to impose a limit, or “cap,” on emissions and then have industries buy and trade pollution-permits amongst themselves. Cleaner factories, for example, could sell permits to dirtier ones, if the latter wanted to avoid upgrades. Dales’s idea has proven to be incredibly versatile, seemingly applicable to any environmental problem, including over-fishing, acid rain, climate change and biodiversity loss. So, basically, major producers and distributors of fossil fuels have their own cap set by the government. This cap is regulated by permits specifying the amount of carbon they are permitted to emit. If the permit-holders under produce carbon then they can trade their unfilled quotas to others. So the buying and selling of permits will take place. On 1 January 2018 Ontario joined Quebec and California to institute a cap-and-trade program. In August 2018, the newly elected Conservative government of Ontario in a grandstanding gesture aimed at its rural constituents passed the Cap and Trade Cancellation Act. “Cancelling cap-andtrade means cancelling all current program funding designed to cut Ontario’s carbon pollution.”50 Public protest against this measure was muted. A few months later the Canadian federal government reminded Ontarians that any province establishing the cap-and-trade system would have to set emissions caps that correspond to how much a specific carbon price is expected to reduce emissions.

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Although the cancellation of Ontario’s cap-and-trade has been lamented by some environmental organizations, other commentators, writing from a green perspective, have been openly critical of it. Troy Vettese: [N]ot only does cap-and-trade rarely work, sometimes it is not even intended to. The world’s biggest cap-and-trade programme for CO2 emissions, the European Emissions Trading System (ets), has largely functioned to forestall meaningful action against climate change since its creation in 2005. At its nadir, in 2013, a tonne of carbon fetched less than €3, and even at the moment of writing (early May 2018) the price is only €10 per tonne. This is a far cry from an effective price for carbon – ExxonMobil estimates that the price would need to be $2,000 per tonne for global warming to be limited to 1.6 degrees centigrade … The problem originated from the European Union’s decision to placate industry by setting the number of permits too high, so ensuring prices would remain low.51 Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright are no more convinced by the capand-trade solution. Arguing that the problem of climate change can only be addressed by confronting capitalism itself, they make the point that “While planetary warming accelerates ecological transformation and human suffering, liberal capitalism can only conceive of the buildup of anthropogenic greenhouse gases as a straightforward ‘market failure,’ for which various market-mending policies are proposed: cap-and-trade, carbon offsets, catastrophe bonds, mandatory risk disclosure, flood and hurricane insurance, and so on.”52

managing the change So will carbon taxes pay for the billions needed to sequester CO2? Or to pay for the increasing levels of damage inflicted by rising sea levels, freak storms, or wildfires? This is not obvious. And before we speculate how to waterproof the oceanfront of New York or Stockholm or Singapore, provide for the tides of refugees, or subsidize the rebuilding of towns like Fort McMurray, we should look

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ahead to predictions of the world economy, for even rich countries are caught up in the web of international trade on which taxation is to a large extent is dependent. But the news here is also less than cheery. In simple terms, global growth is already on a downward slide. The period 1870–1970 was an epoch of uniquely high growth. From the 1970s, that economic growth began to slow down; since then it has shrunk further, helped by the banking crisis of 2008. By 2016 Greece, one of the poorest of the rich countries, had been in recession for eight years; Italy, not so poor, has had no growth for sixteen years; in the US, the powerhouse of the world, gdp growth has dropped from 2.3 per cent per annum in the 1950s to 0.8 per cent in the 2010s. Even China’s gdp has dropped from double digits in the 1990s to 6.7 per cent in 2017–18 (and 6.2 in Q2 2019), a twenty-five-year low. And over the decades since the 1970s, inequality in the West has increased, though the peoples in Asia have seen a rise in their prosperity, albeit not to the same levels as western countries. So what we are faced with is not just global warming but global warming at a time of falling growth and great inequality. How, we might ask, does this triangulation play out? Or, a simple question – do we close down schools and hospitals, and not rebuild Fort McMurrays in order to subsidize sea walls and support the tide of emigrants flowing from desiccated lands or flooded islands? Mending the actual or potential damage caused by overwhelming catastrophes will be expensive. But what constitutes “expensive”? In 2017 global defense expenditure, including the invasion of Iraq, reached $1.7 trillion or 2.5 per cent of global gdp. As Lili Fuhr of the Ecology and Sustainable Development Department at the Heinrich Böll Foundation stresses: Geo-engineering solutions are not the only alternatives. They are a response to the inability of mainstream economics and politics to address the climate challenge. Instead of trying to devise ways to maintain business as usual – an impossible and destructive goal – we must prove our ability to imagine and achieve radical change.53

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Nor are there geo-engineering solutions for ocean acidification. William Nordhaus: There are no easy technological solutions here. [There are] geoscientific solutions to the climate change problem [that] may slow warming, but they will do almost nothing to address ocean acidification.54 Alarmed by the uncertainty of future profits from fossil fuels, and perhaps blindsided by shareholder resolutions, and even perhaps aware of the consequences of continued denial of the connection between dirty energy and global warming, by 2017 certain oil giants had begun to shift gingerly from dependence on carbon fuels for their prosperity to a slight equivocation. Having already given up on coal, around 2010 they then began to hedge their bets further. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they moved in the direction of natural gas. But natural gas had problems of its own. In Canada, where the federal government released its report on the phase-out of coal-fired power by supporting natural gas as a bridge to the more extensive use of clean energy, there has been protest that an increase in the exploitation of gas was unlikely to significantly help towards a successful climate policy. And anyway, by the time that the bridge between coal and clean energy had been completed, clean energy combined with superior batteries would be cheaper. David Roberts: [N]atural gas’s value proposition is no longer taken for granted. Gas’s purported dominance was based on necessity – it is cheaper and cleaner than coal but able to do things renewables can’t. That sense of necessity is crumbling. There are now emerging alternatives, packages of clean energy resources that can do all the same things, at competitive costs, with no greenhouse gas emissions.55 But, as noted, at last the music of the times has penetrated the executive meeting rooms of the big oil companies. Thus there came to pass what has been perceived as a dramatic shift towards non-

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carbon alternatives. Leading the pack of reformers was the Dutch– British firm Shell, which allocated up to $2 billion a year to investigating and exploiting alternative sources of energy. Shell boasted of moving away entirely from carbon by the magic year of 2050. Given that in May 2013 the level of CO2 in the environment had passed 400 parts per million, it may be assumed that nearly four decades later levels will have climbed vertiginously and, probably, catastrophically. Shell, congratulating itself on “going forward,” was joined, tentatively, by other oil majors, like the French company, Total. So the idea of renewables had now become acceptable, in a modest way, by Big Oil, if not effectively for the immediate present then at least in the not-too-distant future, somewhere around 2050. Assuming, indeed, such a future might actually eventuate.56

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9 Reckoning: 2020–50

“Climate-heating greenhouse gases at record levels, says un,” warns The Guardian, reporting on an end of 2018 summary by the World Meteorological Organization.1 This depressing news, which comes as states and provinces in the US, Canada, and Australia either repudiate attempts to moderate climate change or even celebrate the opportunities to produce more coal, gas, or fracked oil, is merely one of the sources of frustration and despair which have led to the birth of groups like the American Green New Deal (gnd) and the sudden emergence of the British “Extinction Rebellion” (xr) as well as to the Green surge in the eu elections of late May 2019. Whereas the Green New Deal idea emerged as early as 2007, the year after the publication of The Stern Review, and has been proposed in the US Congress, xr has been around only since late 2018 when the World Meteorological Organization published its bad news. In Europe, the surge in popularity of Green parties in the eu elections has been interpreted to suggest that the cresting of Green political influence matters more than the rise of the far right, a headline-grabbing political shift which has preoccupied commentators for several years.2 The Green New Deal seems first to have been mooted, coincidentally, in both New York and London in 2007. Combining both a socialist agenda and a green urgency, it took its cue from President Roosevelt’s radical New Deal program of the 1930s, the capstone for social democratic reformism and the model for much of progressive thinking for the whole of the twentieth century. Before

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it was proposed in February 2019, no legislation on climate change or any form of environmental remediation had been attempted since the US Clean Energy and Security Act, which failed to be passed in 2009. In the months that have followed, this resurrection of the New Deal has been at the centre of Democratic Party debates and, predictably, the object of conservative scurrility and of questioning among liberals.3 The Extinction Rebellion combines millenarianism with an effervescence not seen since the 1960s. Widespread in the western world, xr has pledged to shut down the sources of runaway climate change and, in effect, to deny the plausibility of climate reformism. No more un conferences, thus, or extravagant carbon capturing gimmicks invested in by oil and coal companies and hyped by the media as though they might save us from a fate of global warming. The millennial side of xr is apparent. According to one reporter, the movement apparently espouses the view that civilization itself is in peril and without radical (but peaceful) action, societal breakdown due to climate change could take place, or at least begin, within three years.4 The Extinction Rebellion was inspired by a research essay by Jem Bendell, “professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria.” This paper was called “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.”5 Whereas most academic papers are at best read by half a dozen scholars, by early April 2018, Bendell’s paper had been downloaded more than 350,000 times. The digital magazine Vice claimed that Bendell’s conclusions, which were bleak even by the standards of climate change writers, was so depressing as to send people into therapy. The Extinction Rebellion belongs in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience as has previously been practiced by the Suffragettes, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and even the gilets jaunes. Its defining practice, rather than any kind of bomb, or even egg, throwing, involves citizens undertaking peaceful civil disobedience by acting up in public and blocking certain of the normal amenities of liberal capitalist society – urban bridges, for instance. It shares the same sense of immediacy and desperation as other movements that accept that there is no apparent solution to

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the wide range of problems which have beset the West, including climate change, but which seem to be beyond the reach of contemporary reformism of the liberal bourgeois type. Elsewhere, at least in the West, Green political parties edge forward. In the European Union elections that were held between 23 and 26 May (2019), the various national Green parties did surprisingly well in western Europe, collecting sixty-nine seats out of a European total of 751, that is about 10 per cent of the total vote. The Greens had a particularly strong showing in Germany where they won twenty-two seats giving them a key role in any centre-left coalition. The French Green Yannick Jadot led the Greens to the third place in European elections in France in May (2019). It has been suggested that he “plans to put the environment at the heart of French politics,” thereby undermining the support of the neoliberal prime minister Emmanuel Macron.6 Compare this to North America where the Greens have three seats in the Canadian federal parliament and none in the US. These remarkable political shifts raise the question of “political will.” Although much climate change legislation has been passed, climate change deniers and agnostics still rule in the capitals of the world from Washington to New Delhi, Moscow, and even Canberra and Brasilia as well as provincially in Toronto. The captains of industry, like the heads of German auto firms, American and Canadian oil companies, and Australian coal producers, in spite of their recent dissembling, still exhibit their belief that carbon and nitrogen emissions and the resulting destruction of the environment are a small price to pay for secure profits.7 Even the most progressive of politicians have been accused of compromise. Take Governor Jerry Brown of California, a politician standing at the very apogee of climate change accomplishments. A growing campaign in California, called “Brown’s Last Chance,” has accused him of being too cozy with the oil industry. “During the past seven years, Brown has issued permits for 20,000 new [oil] wells while receiving over $9 million in political contributions from energy industry special interests,” the campaign has charged. No one has done more, politically, for the environment, says Brown, and who could fault him?8

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The prospect for remediation of the problem of global warming might, therefore, justify pessimism or even radicalism. Recall that by the end of 2018 it was acknowledged that greenhouse gas emissions had been increasing for five years running and that year they increased by nearly 3 per cent, an all-time high. July (2019) saw the highest global temperatures ever recorded.9 It takes no imagination at all to realize that if emissions continued to grow at this rate until, say, 2030 or 2050, a twenty-year-old today will be living in a hugely different world by the time she is thirty or fifty. What this world might look like is a matter of simple projection – billion dollar storms, one hundred-plus million refugees, and billion dollar costs for protection and prevention. When? Actually, right now: “The US just witnessed its 12 wettest months in 125 years, and the floods keep coming,” reported The Washington Post in early June 2019. It is no wonder that there is apprehension in the insurance sector where “weather-related loss events” cost $135 billion in 2017. Uninsured losses might have been as much as half of this total again.10

paradox and predictions The problem of maintaining the status quo is obvious. What often appears as a coherent strategy on the part of governments is merely political kabuki: theatre designed to distract. As we have seen, for instance, despite stringent emission rules enacted by the eu, a complete lack of enforcement has meant that auto companies have gone for years exploiting loopholes in the law and concealing the toxic emissions of their products.11 Thousands of Europeans have suffered from damage to their health, but few car company executives have seen the inside of courts, much less jails. Some have even been promoted, and many have retired with staggering pensions. In Canada, the provinces of Ontario and Alberta have repudiated carbon pricing, while the federal government has bought a pipeline, for several billions, to transport more bitumen from one province to another and then across the sea to a grateful Asia, all the while uttering earnest professions about combating climate change. Australia even outdoes Canada for double talk. In January

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2018 the Australian government announced a $63 million project to protect the Great Barrier Reef. Everyone knew that the reef was endangered, probably even doomed, by climate change. But Australia is one of the world’s greatest exporters of coal and one of the country’s most valued customers is India. Enter the major Indian capitalist and coal miner Gautem Adani who proposed to build a huge coal mine in Queensland, near the reef. The mine would create jobs, it has been argued, and thus benefit the economy of the state. The Australian government has proposed subsidizing it. Widespread popular protests against the project were organized in October 2017. In the face of these protests the government in Canberra proposed fiscal remediation. Seeking to have it both ways, at some considerable expense, the government proposed both subsidizing the mine and the reef. This echoes remarkably the contradictory Canadian practice of imposing a carbon tax, planting millions of more trees, and financing a pipeline to carry newly produced bitumen. Or supporting the tar sands in order to keep provincial taxes at a minimum in an epoch when CO2 is generally accepted to have deleterious, and in effect costly, effects on health. The contradiction in Australia is merely obvious, if not exceptional. In the words of one environmentalist: “[protecting the reef] will be a classic case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic unless the federal government moves quickly away from coal and other fossil fuels.”12 The analogy of subsidizing cigarette sales in the lobby of a cancer clinic has been suggested. But the message of climate change did dawn in some quarters. In February (2019) a judge in the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales ruled against permission to establish a new coalmine. This was a first for a country with an A$467 billion coal export industry. In fact, the message of the dangers of climate change had already reached business circles where investment in coal had already dropped off. Echoing the exodus of oil firms from Alberta, the giant Rio Tinto sold off its Australian coal mines in 2018. Still, on 13 June (2019) the final approval by the state government of Queensland for the mine was given.13 Let us talk again about California, America’s leading automobile market and standard-bearer in environmental legislation. Here, at

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first glance the situation looks rosy – between 1955 and 2013, for instance, the amount of particulate pollution declined by an amazing 80 per cent. Since 1960, as David Vogel points out, “pollution emissions of all smog-causing chemicals have declined by 98 per cent.” Smog alerts, for which Los Angeles was infamous, have plummeted. This seems wonderful. Yet California, the state with the most stringent air quality regulations in the US contains six of the seven cities in the country with the worst air quality. The worst wildfires in history in November 2018, evidence that, “the link between climate change and bigger fires is inextricable,” are likely to lead Californians gasping for survival.14 So the laws are remarkable even though the air remains ghastly. What becomes apparent is what we might call the “California paradox”: as long as gas-driven cars are driven, the air quality in California will be at gagging levels. And even given electric vehicles, the fact that California is strung together by a cat’s cradle of highways means that cars will be indispensible most of the time. So where does this all lead us? What predictions for Queensland (home of the Great Barrier Reef) or Canada, for that matter? Now consider predictions, but before we do, we should weigh the considered view of two major scientists: Peter Ward, a geologist who has researched mass extinctions, and Donald Brownlee, a researcher in the solar system’s origins, both of the University of Washington. In the Preface to their book on the complexities of life on earth they make their premise clear: “Proof is a rarity in science.”15 That is, all discussions of the earth’s past are bound to be after the event. We only know about the future on the basis of what we think we know about the past. This leaves us with predictions. These, we might argue, are of two major kinds. Scientific predictions usually refer to something that is going to happen on the basis of what has happened before or what seems to be in the pipeline. Solar eclipses are thus accurately predicted. Weather, in the short term, can be predicted with impressive accuracy but in the long term, less certainly. Tsunamis and earthquakes cannot be predicted. Volcanoes are usually a nasty surprise. Global warming and its consequences may in the near future be predictable with increased certainty, but as we move towards the more distant

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future guesswork taints accuracy. Cost and availability predictions for some things like crops and resources are a nightmare. From the 1950s to the early years of the present century there was a steady stream of predictions about the availability and price of oil. The earth possessed a finite amount of hydrocarbons, it was assumed; “peak oil” was a source of debate.16 Oil prices would continue to ascend, it was predicted, as supply dried up. No serious writer predicted the fall in oil prices of 2014–15. Instead, financial bonanzas were imagined. Goldman Sachs expected $200 a barrel, erroneously. Take the Paris-based International Energy Agency (iea), “the gold standard for analysis and future predictions.” Dieter Helm: “It turns out that iea forecasts (or ‘projections’ as it prefers to call them) have been so bad that since the 1970s it has almost always been better to extrapolate the current price than rely on the iea’s expertise.” Think, for variety, about soybean prices, a major crop in the flooded fields of the American Midwest and one of the victims of the trade war with China. Still, the need to predict persists unshakably. “Profound change predicted for tropics,” headlined The Globe and Mail on 10 October 2013. A statistician at the University of Hawai’i quoted in the Globe predicted that the turning point for climate change would be 2047. Not just in the tropics. In city after city the numbers seemed implacable; profound change would come in Montreal in 2046, in Vancouver not until 2056. “Climate ‘crunch point’ looms,” The Guardian Weekly warned on its cover article of 11–17 November 2016. “Next 20 years crucial,” claimed one authority it quoted. Bill McKibben has insisted that even if most governments live up to their 2015 Paris climate change pledge “the global temperature will still rise by about 3.5 degrees Celsius, which everyone [has] acknowledged goes far beyond any definition of safety.”17 That would happen in 2036, ten years earlier than the prediction in the Globe. Justin Gillis in The New York Times estimated that we have twenty-five or thirty years before the effects of climate change become profound. Twenty-five years from now would be around 2045. That may be optimistic. Nick Butler, formerly a vice president of bp, leading Fabian, and Financial Times energy guru, estimates we have only fifteen years at the current level of emissions,

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“before we cross the 2 degree line”18; so 2035. After that – we will be skating on thin ice, or walking under water, or frying. The estimates of the indc which are based on the analyses of a number of organizations, indicate that the world will become 2.7 to 3.7°C warmer sooner, that is, by 2025–30, less than a decade from now.19 Jean Jouzel, who was the vice chairman of the ipcc in 2007 when it won the Nobel Prize, has predicted that heat waves like that which killed at least 70,000 people across Europe in the summer of 2003, will become “the norm for summer” after 2060. They could push temperatures in Europe toward 50°C, the point beyond which humans begin to melt.20

what to do? Preparations then? Hot air and resolutions billowing up from meetings and speeches by suits posing in posh venues, like Paris, for sure. Still, some positive action: “California Is Preparing for Extreme Weather. It’s Time to Plant Some Trees” The New York Times has headlined. “The state expects drier dry years and wetter wet ones in the decades ahead,” writes Henry Fountain. Six months earlier, he had written,“In a Warming California, a Future of More Fire.”21 More fire, then, and more water, in unpredictable cycles. “Researchers say it is unclear whether climate change will make California drier or wetter on average. What is more certain is that the state will increasingly whipsaw between extremes, with drier dry years, wetter wet ones and a rising frequency of intense periods of precipitation.”22 Maybe another climate change conference in Paris, or anywhere in southern France, would not be such a good idea. Simon Kuper who writes from Paris for the Financial Times has something to say about this. South of Paris, on Friday, 28 June (2019) in Gallarguesles-Montueux the temperature reached 45.9°C, the hottest any place in the country has ever suffered. Recall that 50°C is the maximum the human body can tolerate – in fact babies, old people, sufferers from respiratory diseases, and others might not even survive to 50°. Yet, certainly, temperatures will rise in the future. The French weather agency Méteo-France predicts that by 2050 heat

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waves will be twice as common as they are now. And, presumably, more extreme. We might guess at the political outcomes. Once temperatures rise, the problems of a hotter daily life will dominate politics; less water, more illness, lower productivity, unlivable regions, and in Europe a permanent cordon of ships in the Mediterranean to stop climate refugees from the Middle East and Africa. All other political issues, from healthcare to housing, will come secondary.23 Thus, France. Imagine Greece or Spain or Mexico or Pakistan. If a book were to be written not on the advances in clean energy but on actual, manifest, preparations for climate change rather than on talk of limitation or fantasies about remediation, what would it include? Something about banning plastic shopping bags or straws or taxing the drivers of lumbering suvs for their emissions? Maybe taxing businesspersons and civil servants as they fly to conferences around the world – teams of university professors going to raise money in Hong Kong or the Gulf, civil servants going to pass resolutions in Prague, schoolchildren going on educational visits to Moscow or Jerusalem. And what might it say about the opening of new coalmines in Germany or Australia or the discovery of new forms of concealment of toxic gas emissions or the building of a new pipeline to carry bitumen or lng? Or the role of bp America in blocking the referendum on carbon fees in Washington State?24

meanwhile back on earth So far in the world of political and economic narratives, the world of think tanks and political journals, conferences and commentators, climate change has hardly been framed as an inescapable force in our destiny. For instance, it has been less of a perceived concern than the question of relative Great Power status. Here, as I have mentioned, we have a cottage industry contemplating the decline of Western Civilization, or at least America, and the rise of Asia, or at least China, and the demise of the eu. We have only the

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most restrained mention of the effects of climate change on trade of a diminution of polar ice or of thermohalene circulation or of a continuation of huge migrations from baking Africa or on agricultural exports of wildfires and flooding. True, we might be distracted by the simple circulation of good news; America may actually become great again, thanks in part to new supplies of tight oil.25 In any case, the buzz up to now concerns hegemony and strategic and economic decline rather than the virtually certain consequences of global warming. Nevertheless, higher temperatures have actually led to intolerable despair. “Climate change has already caused more than 59,000 suicides in India over the past 30 years” according to a recent study published in the Proceeds of the National Academy of Sciences. In Tamil Nadu state (pop. 80m.) in the south of India, the increase in heat during the growing season has led to some districts becoming uninhabitable. At the same time the population of the state is growing by some two million a year. There is reason to believe that the increase of heat is a demonstration of what the imf chief Christine Lagarde means when she says that if nothing is done about climate change we will be “toasted, roasted and grilled.”26 The global contribution of CO2 in 2016 was a total of 36,000 million metric tonnes, of which China produced 28.21 per cent, the US 15.99, India 6.24, and Canada, 1.71. And twenty years on, in 2036, one scenario “envisages fossil fuels having a 77% share of the global energy demand – versus 79% in our base case.”27 By 2100 we will have added at least two to four trillion tonnes of CO2 to the upper level of the oceans. A number of Asian cities will be entirely or largely submerged – I have mentioned Osaka, Shanghai, and Alexandria. In Singapore they are worried, too. In the predictions of the noaa, sea levels will have risen between 0.3 metres (eight inches) and two metres (six-and-a-half feet) by 2050. “Full melting of the West Antarctic sheet would add another 3.3 meters (11 feet) [to sea levels].”28 Miami, Ft Lauderdale, and New Orleans, all rich cities with money to spend, after huge wasted investments, will have been evacuated; even New York – where as one mayor pointed out, “[W]e have 100 year floods every two years now” – will have shifted to safety up the Hudson River. As Elizabeth Kol-

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bert and Peter F. Sale have predicted, coral reefs will not have survived, and many other marine organisms will also be gone. Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province, may become little more than an offshore reef.29 Is it not remarkable that like Martin Wolf of the Financial Times and Eric Reguly of The Globe and Mail, neither papers being normally alarmist, have both taken up the cause of environmentalism in at least fitful terms? Yet as Reguly writes: Global warming and climate change have become clear and present dangers to the health of the planet. Some scientists argue that we’ve already reached the point of no return: others say that we can still spare ourselves from crispy bacon status if we make radical cuts in carbon output in the very near future. Is escape from a frying-pan future likely? The energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie has doubts: “2 degree world out of reach even under accelerated energy transition” is the title of one of its reports.30 Readers may judge for themselves the progress made so far in mobilizing support for environmentalism. But note that, according to Manne, “climate change denialism had influenced Americans more than elsewhere” and that America remains, at least for now, the foremost global polluter and the most powerful engine driving the world economy. Of the major investors in carbonintensive tight oils, most, including Suncor, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Conoco-Phillips, are American.31 The election of Donald Trump and his appointment of climate deniers at the Environmental Protection Agency is unlikely to modify this.

another world? The future has already begun to arrive but it is murky – like the air in Victorian Manchester, contemporary New Delhi, or even California. No matter how expert we are at reading tea leaves, we cannot bring ourselves to tell the truth publically about what quite plausibly lies ahead. Our politicians offer little enlightenment, since it was their parties that have facilitated what one writer has

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called “the big stall.”32 Perhaps we should just wait and see – maybe there have been gross miscalculations by scientists (as there often have been by pollsters) or there will be some quite miraculous technological breakthrough. But William Nordhaus, whose climate change model first articulated in 1992 is still top of the charts in his field, doesn’t think so: People will naturally wonder how to respond to [the] vast uncertainties when making climate-policy. Isn’t 100 years a long way off? One reaction is to postpone action – to assume that because life is uncertain, we should wait until we know more. Sometimes, if the stakes are low and we will soon learn the right answer, waiting until the wheel stops spinning is a reasonable approach. But for climate change, waiting for the wheel of climate change to stop is a perilous course. It is like driving one hundred miles an hour with your headlights off on a foggy night and hoping there are no drunks on the road. Yet, we are unlikely to resolve the uncertainties soon. Waiting for many years to act is costly because of the delayed responsiveness of the economy and the climate system to our actions. It is less costly to spread our investments over time than to cram them all into a short time when the fog lifts and we see disaster right in our path.33 For the near future, political parties on the right, like the American Republicans, the Canadian Conservatives, and Australia’s Liberals will probably still be blocking and even reversing the passing of any kind of effectively mitigating climate change legislation. In the US, as we have seen, the present-day ruling party has actually closed down the Environmental Protection Agency. In Canada, the incoming Conservative government of the most populous and richest government has abandoned carbon pricing and a program to plant more trees. So we were just getting off the ground nicely on climate change mitigation when our propulsion systems shut down. Not that they were pushing us ahead at dizzying speed. Mann and Wainwright, for instance, are unalterably pessimistic about the effectiveness of carbon pricing. They write:

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Despite the advice from economists (not to mention the demands of many concerned citizens), only a few capitalist states have any carbon tax, and the carbon taxes in place have proven too low to make a difference in global patterns of energy consumption.34 If we are lucky, the climate change deniers will remain stalled below the curve of the more far-seeing elements of capitalism and their spokesmen, like the governor of the Bank of England and his erstwhile colleague the deputy governor of the Bank of Canada.35 Goldman Sachs, the titan of finance capitalism, for instance, has published a statement acknowledging the scientific consensus, led by the ipcc, “that climate change is a reality and that human activities are responsible for increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere.” Further, the bankers have accepted that “Climate change is one of the most significant environmental challenges of the 21st century. Delaying action on climate change will be costly for our natural environment, to humans and to the economy, and we believe that urgent action by government, business, consumers and civil society is necessary to curb greenhouse gas emissions.”36 But capitalism saved by the wolves of Wall Street – how likely is that? As several authors have pointed out, elements within capitalism have benefitted unconscionably from climate change disasters.37 Yet hope may survive bad dreams. Take California, long-time pioneer in the battle against climate change. In an article by the editorial board of The New York Times, California has been celebrated for extending to 2010 its cap-and-trade program that puts a price on carbon emissions. The cap-and-trade program, which had been set to end in 2020, is the most important component of California’s plan to reduce planet-warming emissions by 40 percent (from1990 levels) by 2030. The extension, along with a companion bill to reduce local air pollution, was passed by a two-thirds majority of the State legislature, including eight crucial votes from Republicans. They defied a Republican president who has not

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only reneged on America’s global climate commitments, but has tried to undo every climate policy put in place by former President Barack Obama. California does not stand alone in its opposition to the climate denial policies of the government of President Trump and the interests, voiced among others by the leaders of Congress, which argue that policies like cap-and-trade will disastrously and, above all, expensively, impact on local economies. In the northeast of the United States, nine states including New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts have formed the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (rggi) a cap-and-trade program that resembles that passed by California. According to one public interest and research group, the initiative has contributed to the reduction of emissions from power plants in the region by 40 per cent between 2008 and 2016.38 And even in Florida, where mention of climate change by civil servants was once forbidden, “[I]f you talk to voters right now and you go door to door, environmental issues are foremost” recounts the former co-chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 Florida campaign. Some Republican voters in coastal states have even switched parties because of concern about climate change.39 Yet Scandinavian countries have been pricing carbon for well over two decades, the European Union Emissions Trading Systems (eu ets) has been pricing it for a decade, and several US and Canadian jurisdictions have been pricing carbon for nearly as long. As their forests turn into bonfires, the minds of Scandinavians, if not Canadians, are likely to be even more inflamed about climate change. So back, if not to Wall Street, then to central banks. Adam Tooze, the historian of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, has composed a persuasive essay on what, in the very near future, might be the role of central bankers as well as certain others in legislating a new set of rules to reduce global carbon emissions. Tooze begins with a September 2015 speech by Mark Carney, whose idea of stranded assets we have met above, which led to the creation by central bankers and legislators of the Network for Greening the Financial System (ngfs). The object of this

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organization is to throw the weight of central banks behind the Paris climate agreement by assuring the acceptance of a set of regulations that deter the financial risks, especially to insurance firms, associated with an otherwise inevitable climate emergency. And the wolves of Wall Street? At the One Planet Summit in New York City in 2018, “23 leading global banks, eight of the top 10 global asset managers, the world’s leading pension funds and insurers and other major financial firms together responsible for managing almost $100 trillion in assets” committed themselves to some of the principles of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, launched by Carney and chaired by Michael Bloomberg. The US Federal Reserve, the most powerful central bank in the global financial system, was conspicuous by its absence. How this will play out of course remains to be seen.40 Finally, let us imagine then that good intentions prevail, not immediately, but by sometime after 2020, say 2030, and carbon emissions level off and, like population growth, even go into a gradual decline. Just in time? Maybe. By 2050, however, if the trend in fossil fuel extraction continues as it has over the previous years, then global temperatures will have risen by around 40C. Arctic temperatures will have risen even more. What will our world, encroached by tepid seas and scorched by wildfires, beastless and beeless, be like then? As heat waves push temperatures in Europe towards 50°C, the climatologist Jean Jouzel writes, “This is to enter into another world … This is a world that France and Western Europe are not used to.”41 As we move on, we might recall the sentiment of one of the characters in Linden MacIntyre’s 2017 novel, The Only Café: “The future is a harvest of consequences.”42

Epilogue

antons lied

anton’s song

Politiker hört mal her! Denn wir brauchen Euch wirklich sehr Denkt wirklich mal ans Klima Das wär’ einfach prima

Politicians, please pay attention – Your involvement is truly vital! We need a healthy climate That is the crucial goal!

Leute, jetzt is aber Zeit Denn die Klimakrise macht sich breit Alle müssen helfen, Alle müssen helfen.

Friends, it is now urgent, As the climate crisis grows, Everyone must help – Everyone must help.

Leute, diese schöne Welt Retten keine Steuern und kein Geld. Der Sinn der muss sich wandeln Dann ändert sich das Handeln.

Neither taxes nor wealth Can save our lovely Earth We must change our ways For the solution to be found.

This is a free translation, without the rhyming couplets. The original was written by Anton Keppel, 8 years old, with help from his father. Anton sang the song at a climate rally in Oldenburg, Germany, in October 2019 to the tune of a German folksong.

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Chronology

1947

1955 1956 1960

1962 1963 1964

1965

establishment of the International Union for the Protection of Nature (later the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (iucn)). US federal government passed the Air Pollution Control Act. UK Clean Air Act passed in response to toxic fogs. opec founded; Los Angeles County passed Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Act. The act regulated catalytic converters that would work with leaded gas and were required to be installed in all new cars sold in California from June 1965. Catalytic converters “represented the first emissions control requirements for automobiles in the United States; Congress approved legislation to study effect of car exhaust on public health.1 Silent Spring published. US Clean Air Act passed. Further acts and amendments passed in 1970, 1972, and 1990. the Wilderness Act was passed in Washington; more than nine million acres were set aside to be protected; California became the world’s first jurisdiction to establish emission standards for pollutants from motor vehicles. scientists deliver a paper to US President Lyndon Johnson (1963–69) called “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” The burning of fossil fuels, the paper explained, “may be

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sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in the climate that could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings” including global warming, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels.”2 1967 Torrey Canyon oil spill off the coast of Cornwall (March). 1968 California enacted Pure Air Act, which established first emission standards for nitrogen oxides (NOx). 1969 Union Oil Platform A-21 blew out in the Santa Barbara Channel (January). The spill soaked thirty miles of California beaches. 1970 President Nixon (1969–73) signed National Environmental Policy Act creating the Environmental Protection Agency (epa); Friends of the Earth formed; Earth Day proclaimed on 22 April; Cyclone Bhola in Gulf of Bengal, 300,000 killed; Robert Heilbroner wrote,“the ecological issue is not only of primary and lasting importance [and] it may indeed constitute the most dangerous and difficult challenge that humanity has ever faced;3 Beginning of West African drought. In the Congressional elections, for the first time in American politics environmentalism played a leading role. 1971 Greenpeace founded. 1972 Club of Rome published Limits to Growth, which argued that our civilization was exhausting the resources on which human existence depends; President Nixon signed Clean Water Act; un Conference on Human Environment. 1973 President Nixon signed Endangered Species Act, himself unwittingly soon to become one of its subjects. 1973–74 Arab–Israeli (“Yom Kippur”) War; Arab states embargoed oil exports to the US in protest of its support for Israel. 1975 “Climate change” idea invented by geoscientist Wallace Broeckner. 1976 Canadian scientists document extinction of fish in acidified lakes around Sudbury, Ontario.

Chronology

1979

1980

1981

1982

1983

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Charney Report. Conclusion: “If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study finds no reason to doubt that climate change will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible; Exxon created its own carbon dioxide research programme; President Carter imposed embargo on Iranian oil and prices doubled in the US; second energy crisis due to embargo. accepting that more than half of US-produced acid rain was falling on Canada, President Carter signed the Acid Rain Precipitation Act; Ronald Reagan elected president on platform of reducing environmental regulations; discussion of acid rain by US government became almost forbidden; at a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the industry lobby group, the climate scientist J.A. Laurman explained that the likely impacts of increased CO2 in the atmosphere would have the following effects globally – a 1°C rise (likely by 2005) would be barely noticeable; a 2.5° rise (likely by 2038) would have major economic consequences, and a 5° rise (likely by 2067) would have globally catastrophic effects.4 election of President Ronald Reagan (1981–89); Reagan “would begin to shift the Republican Party away from both environmental preservation and environmental regulation, a position that would separate the party from its historic environmentalism, and put it on a collision course with science”;5 the question of dealing with acid rain was shelved. a memo from one of Exxon’s major science laboratories explained that “over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has emerged … that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from its pre-industrial revolution value would result in an average global temperature rise of 3°C … there is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate.”6 Canadian Green Party formed.

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1986

1987

1988

1989

Chronology

Fortune magazine published “Hysteria About Acid Rain”; other media outlets claimed that acid rain was not a problem; in Canada acid rain was on the decline; still “the average pH rain in Ontario’s Muskoka–Haliburton area is about 4.5 – about 40 times more acidic than normal” (Government of Canada, “Environment”). Brundtland Report, properly World Commission on Environment and Development, introduced the term “sustainable development”; “Black Dragon” wildfire in China and Siberia; more than 18 million acres burned, ten per cent of the world’s coniferous forests; Montreal Protocol signed by President Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney to protect stratospheric ozone layer. United Nations established ipcc; James Hansen testified before the US Senate that a minute additional percentage of CO2 in the air was “changing our climate now”; US senator Tim Wirth argued that “Earth is warmer in 1988 than in any time in the history of instrumental measurements … with 99 per cent confidence we can state that the warming during this period is a real warming trend,” (Mann, Wizard, 326–7). Denialist Global Climate Coalition formed. Members included Exxon, Shell, bp, Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute, the National Coal Association, and other corporations and associations. “[I)ts strategy was to disrupt progress on enacting solutions [to climate change].” Bill McKibben published the first popular account of climate change, The End of Nature. From this date, articles on “climate change” and “global warming” increased steadily: 55 in 1989, 138 in 1990, 348 in 1991, 1,340 by 2000, 16,576 in 2015. At the end of June (1988) the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere was held in Toronto. This was the first international gathering of scientists and politicians dedicated to global warming. Many academics and others, however, remained sceptical, (Mann, Wizard, 326–8).

Chronology

1990

1991

1992

1993 1994 1996 1997

1998 1999 2000 2001

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President George H.W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act Amendments; cap-and-trade system adopted; Kuwait invaded by Iraqi army. Americans launched “Operation Desert Storm” after Iraqi army had invaded Kuwait; retreating Iraqi army set several hundred oil wells ablaze. un Conference on Environment and Development (aka the Rio Earth Conference or “Earth Summit”) initiated a search for an international agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The secretary-general of the summit was the Canadian, Maurice Strong. The conference has sometimes been seen as the beginning of a global environmental movement. Union of Concerned Scientists along with other scientists issued “Warning to Humanity” about climate change. A second warning was issued in 2017. Nigeria privatizes first oil field; Great Flood along Mississippi in American Midwest. Friends of Nature, China’s first environmental ngo, launched. Our Stolen Future published. Kyoto, a modest agreement reached; it had little or no effect on emissions. In a speech in Beijing, Lee Raymond of Exxon argued that the evidence suggested global warming was not taking place at all. He did advocate that the government impose higher taxes on oil and gas use, to reduce the risks posed by climate change. He favoured a carbon tax.7 ExxonMobil merger. Canadian Environmental Protection Act; cyclone hit Indian leaving 10,000 dead. George W. Bush elected in November; took office in January 2001. Kyoto agreement rejected in April by spokesperson for newly elected George W. Bush; 9/11 took place in September.

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2002

2003

2004

2005 2006

2007

2008

Chronology

un World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg; California became the world’s first jurisdiction to restrict tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gasses. European heat wave; “Fire Siege” burned across California killing twelve people and blackening 275,000 acres of land. Naomi Oreskes noted in Science the result of an examination of every article published between 1993 and 2003 concerning global climate change. There were 928 articles. Not one challenged the core consensus. East Asian tsunami ravaged the shores of the Indian Ocean; fires in Alaska consumed 6.38 million acres of timberland. Hurricane Katrina; four-fifths of New Orleans flooded, 1,833 deaths and $125 billion damages. Review by Nicholas (Lord) Stern of UK regarding the impact of climate change (The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review). Later he said, “I now realise that I underestimated the risks. I should have been much stronger in what I said in the report about the costs of inaction. I underplayed the dangers.” Canadian Energy Efficiency Act and Motor Vehicle Fuel Consumption Standards Act passed; California passed the Global Warming Solutions Act that required the state to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. A bp pipeline broke, dumping 200,000 gallons of oil in Alaska. Australia ratified Kyoto agreement; Big Turnaround Fire in Georgia (US) burned nearly 400,000 acres; in November Cyclone Sidr killed at least 3,000 people in Bangladesh. In September the investment banker Lehman Brothers crashed and the Great Recession soon eclipsed all other preoccupations. In the words of Adam Tooze (Crashed, 13) the recession soon exposed the fact that “we inhabit a world dominated by business oligopolies.” Knowing this is essential to understanding that the mitigation of climate change has made very little progress. The

Chronology

2009

2010

177

province of British Columbia passed a carbon tax on emissions, ultimately a great success, widely praised on the centre-left but deplored on the right. Carbon was priced at C$30 a tonne with $.667 (i.e., nearly 7 cents) a litre for gas and $.767 for diesel; Quinet report in France proposed carbon tax of €100 per tonne of CO2 in 2030. In Washington and London, the first references to a Green New Deal were voiced. At Copenhagen an attempt to improve on Kyoto was undertaken; it was deemed by most advocates of intervention to prevent climate change to be an abject failure. Two of the most polluting governments, the US and China, signed a nonbinding agreement to keep temperatures from increasing more than 2°C. Two scientists from the University of Chicago circulated a survey of climate scientists who had published recently in the field. Some 97.4 per cent agreed with the proposition that “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.” On “Black Saturday,” 9 February, wildfires in the Australian state of Victoria killed 173 people and destroyed 2,029 houses. In Washington, the Clean Energy and Security Bill passed the House but died before reaching the Senate. Climate scientist Stephen Schneider disclosed that 195 of the 200 most published climate scientists were convinced of anthropogenic climate change. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway published Merchants of Doubt, which argued that a handful of right-wing scientists had banded together in the Reagan years to oppose federal health and safety regulations. Two of these had previously argued on the side of the tobacco industry against health warnings. On 20 April the bp offshore drilling platform Deepwater Horizon exploded. Eleven crew members died and almost 5 million barrels of crude oil gushed out of the drill pipe for eighty-seven days. Despite public outcry, bp executives were given annual bonuses. The disaster cost bp more than $50 billion and almost broke the

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Chronology

company. Ten days later a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline dumped about a million gallons of oil along the eastern coast of Nigeria. Floods in Pakistan killed 2,000 people and left 10 million displaced. “One of the worst climateinduced agricultural disasters in recent years.”8 James Painter published Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate Skepticism. This was a study of climate change denial in quality newspapers representing both left and right viewpoints in the press of six countries, the US, the UK, France, Brazil, India, and China over the period of 2007 to 2010. In France, Brazil, and India there was almost no climate change denial. In the US and the UK there was discussion of the question of denial. In the right-wing papers denial was uncontested. In the left-wing papers it was contested or dismissed. In Canada, which was not included in Painter’s survey, of the major “quality newspapers” serving large readerships, two left-of-centre newspapers, the Toronto Star and Le Devoir, and two centre-right papers, The Globe and Mail and The Ottawa Citizen, supported the view of human agency in climate change while one right-wing national paper, The National Post, supported the deniers. Several metropolitan papers like the Vancouver Sun were equivocal. On television, the cbc/Radio Canada criticized denial, while Sun tv reflected the same view on the environment as Rupert Murdoch’s Fox tv.9 The entire climate change division within the government department of foreign affairs was axed. “Canada was pilloried by France, India, Japan, China, and South Africa for reneging on the only international agreement that had a hope of reducing carbon emissions.” Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party, suggested that Harper was turning Canada into “the North Korea of the Environment.”10 The Atomic Energy Agency reported that global temperatures were likely to rise by 6°C. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm, indicated that an

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increase in temperatures by 4 to 6 degrees was not impossible.11 In a national election, Stephen Harper, who had previously headed minority governments, won a majority government in Canada. The Enbridge pipeline from Calgary ruptured spilling diluted bitumen into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan “in one of the largest inland spills in US history.” The World Bank announced that, “As global warming approaches and exceeds 2-degrees Celsius, there is a risk of triggering nonlinear tipping elements. Examples include the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet leading to more rapid sea-level rise, or large-scale Amazon dieback drastically affecting ecosystems, rivers, agriculture, energy production, and livelihoods. This would further add to 21st-century global warming and impact entire continents.”12 James Hansen, former director of nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, together with Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway, issued a report suggesting that we were heading for an unprecedented emergency. Gary Stix, senior editor of Scientific American, undertook to explain his view that “Effective World Government Will Be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe.”13 Bill McKibben published “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” in Rolling Stone (12 July). The government of Stephen Harper passed Bill C-38, which repealed the Kyoto Protocol, and Bill C-45, which weakened standards in both the Navigation Protection Act and the Environmental Protection Act. “According to Gallup’s annual opinion polls on global warming, in 2008, 35 per cent of Americans thought the media was exaggerating the threat from global warming. By 2010, the number had risen to 48%. In 2008, 58% blamed human activity and 46% blamed nature. A 20-point difference had been reduced to four. It had taken 20 years of work but the triumph of doubt over reason had been secured.”14

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Annual un climate summit held in Warsaw: “[P]rospects for substantive progress [towards ameliorating climate change] have never seemed weaker.” Canada’s Conservative government budgeted several million dollars for a tar sands advocacy fund: “In its 2013 budget, the government invested $30 million over two years on public relations advertising and domestic and international ‘outreach activities’ to promote Alberta’s tar sands.”15 Record heat in Australia. Typhoon Haiyan (also called “Yolanda”), “the strongest recorded hurricane ever to strike land,” swept across the Philippines in November, killing more than 6,000 and costing $15 billion. Cyclone Phailin hit the Indian coast: nearly 500,000 homes evacuated. Sudden collapse of oil prices; Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything published and remained on the top dozen best sellers list in The Globe and Mail for ten weeks. It was reviewed broadly both inside Canada and across the US and overseas. Mark Carney, Canadian governor of the Bank of England, warned that most fossil fuel reserves could not be burned if the environment was to be protected. Oil, gas, and coal, thus, might be bad investments. Carney’s advocacy was known as the “stranded assets” argument. Bill McKibben noted that, “We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate.”16 Quebec joined California in a cap-and-trade carbon market. New polling data from Gallup showed that a record number of Americans believed that global warming would pose a threat to their way of life; this was a 4 per cent increase over 2015. A record 64 per cent of Americans said that they worried about global warming, the highest level of warming since 2008.17 Against a background of collapsed oil prices, in early May the Conservative government of Alberta, in power for forty-four years and an unshakeable friend of the “oil patch,” was

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roundly defeated by the social democratic ndp. Every seat in Edmonton, the province’s capital and the city nearest to the tar sands, went to the ndp. Writers of business news warned that the situation for investors in Alberta was “extremely dangerous.” According to the US Energy Information Administration, prices for wti Crude in 2015 were expected to be $55.35 per barrel and $60.53 for Brent Crude.18 They had been at $97.98 and $108.56 respectively in 2013. Jeff Rubin’s The Carbon Bubble was published, together with Tim Flannery’s second book, Atmosphere of Hope. On 3 August, President Obama announced the Clean Power Plan. In mid-September Tony Abbott, Stephen Harper’s antipodean twin, was replaced as Australia’s prime minister, and a month later, on 19 October 2015, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper was defeated in a federal election and Harper himself resigned as party leader. The governor of the Bank of England explained the concept of “stranded assets.” Complaints followed that a government employee should not have such opinions. At the beginning of November it was announced that the New York attorney general would investigate ExxonMobil for having lied to the public about the risks of climate change. At end of the same month, the un conference on climate change was opened in Paris. Prime Minister Trudeau proclaimed at the conference, “Canada is back, my friends.” The conference closed on 12 December with an accord that committed nearly all of the participating 195 nations to lowering greenhouse gases. “This is truly a historic moment,” said the un secretary general. Ontario joined Quebec in a cap-and-trade carbon market. In September, US authorities discovered deception by German automakers that allowed unacceptable emissions of nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. Volkswagen ultimately paid fines amounting to $25 billion, a world record for fines paid by an auto manufacturer. The ceo of vw resigned, taking with him a pension of nearly €30 million. His lifetime earn-

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ings were more than €100 million. This might be compared to the pension package of Lee Raymond, head of ExxonMobil 1993–2005, which was nearly $400 million. The lesson: merchandising denial pays. In December of this year the Paris Agreement on Climate Change was signed near Paris. Officially this agreement was known as the “Conference of the Parties” or “cop 21.” Its object was, to cite many commentators, “to save the planet.” Its central proposal was to establish a carbon neutral world sometime after 2050 but before 2100. Heads of state and diplomats from most Western countries celebrated it as a major leap for mankind. George Monbiot in The Guardian, however, wrote, “by comparison to what it could have been [cop21] was a miracle. [But] by comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.” James Hanson commented, “Paris is basically a fraud. It’s just wishful thinking.” These views were repudiated as being inexcusably negative by climate change meliorists who echoed the sentiments of heads of states. In an article in The New York Times, it was estimated that the chance of the climate change agreement succeeding was one in twenty. Oil output from Alberta’s sands increased from one million barrels per day in 2005 to 2.5 million barrels in 2015.19 In January it was disclosed that 2015 had “shattered” global temperature records by a wide margin. For the first half of the year, the price of oil from the Alberta tar sands languished at around C$50 or less, hitting $40 in early August. With the courts overturning the Conservative government’s approval of the Northern Gateway pipeline, the debate over pipelines to export tar sands oil was stalled.20 Several oil companies closed down their operations and laid off their crews. Esso and Shell sold off their gas stations in Alberta. On 1 May the Fort McMurray fire broke out, reaching its height in May when it burned over nearly 6,000 square km. Brave, if nervous, talk about rebuilding followed. On 3 October

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Prime Minister Trudeau announced a national “floor price” on carbon that would require all provinces and territories to have some form of carbon pricing by 2018. On 8 November Donald Trump won the election for the presidency of the US; he had said during his campaign that climate change was a plot devised by the Chinese to undermine America; the leader of the Conservative opposition in Ottawa claimed that carbon tax was “madness” now that Donald Trump had been elected. The head of Exxon, who had worked to conceal the evidence that the consumption of oil produced greenhouse gas, was appointed as US Secretary of State. California passed legislation requiring greenhouse gas emissions to decline 40 per cent below their 1990 levels by 2030. President Trump withdrew the US from the Paris climate change agreement. October was the warmest month in global history. At the end of November Prime Minister Trudeau approved the building of a new pipeline from Alberta to Vancouver along the route of the Trans Mountain pipeline, which was owned by Kinder Morgan of Houston. In March, the prime minister gave a speech to cheering oilmen in Texas claiming that,“No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave it there.” This was taken to mean that although he was sympathetic to the environment, his money was on Big Oil. Writers in The New York Times referred to Trudeau’s “balancing act,” and one in the same paper referred to “Justin Trudeau’s Two-Faced Climate Game.”21 In May, heavy spring rains swelled Lake Ontario to highest levels in nearly a century; closure of the St Lawrence Seaway was mooted. In June the “Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures” was submitted to the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. In July massive wildfires in bc, Washington State, and Oregon spread, continuing through August; torrential rains fell in Ontario. In early August there was a record heat wave in bc. On 4 August Tesla launched its

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Model 3 all-electric car. Its ambition was to sell 150,000 Model 3s by the end of the year. Earlier in the month, John Naughton, longtime correspondent of The Guardian, headlined an article “The car is dead, long live the car, thanks to Tesla.”22 bc suffered the worst wildfires in its history and Southeast Asia (India, Bangladesh, and Nepal) was flooded in monsoon rains causing hundreds of deaths; unicef claimed that 16 million children were affected. In the last weekend of August, Hurricane Harvey struck, and on its tail came Hurricane Irma. Whereas Texans had been discomfited, many people in the Caribbean were devastated. As correspondents for The New York Times comment, quoting the mayor of Los Angeles, “We look at this [the Houston disaster] and realize that while they might be under water, we someday will be under crumbled buildings … And it will take years, if not decades, to rebuild.”23 The cbc and other Canadian media concentrated on reporting effects of hurricanes and wildfires but were reserved regarding any discussion of climate change. Perhaps this situation is commonplace, although the German state broadcaster, Deutsche Welte, featured an article explaining that the earth was on track towards a 2°C rise in temperature, rather than the 1.5° hoped for at the 2015 Paris Agreement. A contributor to an article on the wildfires in the Northwest in The New York Times lamented, “We’re upset that mainstream media hasn’t touched on this story until now. We’re upset that mainstream media won’t address these … natural disasters in relation to climate change. Our states are burning up, our beautiful backyard ‘playground’ is disappearing.”24 In autumn, the Atlantic was hit with a 124-year record of ten hurricanes, while wildfires burned in Brazil and Portugal. The Trump administration released a report finding “no convincing alternative explanation” for climate change. A few days later Trump named Kathleen Harnett White to run the White House Council of Environmental Policy.

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Ms White “has dismissed carbon dioxide as a ‘harmless trace gas’ but a useful ‘plant food’ and described as ‘paganism’ the belief that man-made pollutants are warming the atmosphere.” (Recall that John Howard, the Australian prime minister, had referred to the cause of global warming as a “substitute religion.”25) Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Sequel was shown in July. The cost to the US of wildfires and other extreme weather exceeded $100 billion. The Bonn Climate Change Talks (known as “the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” or “cop 23”) began on 6 November, two years after the Paris talks. Washington sent representatives from energy firms to promote coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. Their presentations were jeered by protestors. A shadow American delegation was headed by Michael Bloomberg and Governor Jerry Brown of California. Bloomberg was quoted as saying that “Promoting coal at a climate summit is like promoting tobacco at a cancer summit.”26 The delegates to the conference were greeted with the news that although CO2 emissions had fallen in 2015–16, in 2017 they had risen. The conference ended early Saturday, 18 November without any farreaching decisions. The leaders of vulnerable island countries had hoped that wealthy countries would compensate them for their losses, but this didn’t happen. The main good news came from the International Energy Agency’s report that declared that coal’s boom years were over. “Everyone at the Bonn talks conceded that nations were still way off course [which aimed at keeping the rise of global temperatures below 2°C].”27 Health Canada approved of Atrazine, which had been banned in the European Union. In January, bc announced proposals that would ban increased shipments of diluted bitumen off its coasts until clean up was guaranteed by shippers. Alberta premier Rachel Notley, furious, called the bc position unconstitutional and promised to suspend electricity

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talks; “We have been let down,” she protested. In February, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau justified the Kinder Morgan pipeline. The tmx pipeline would triple the capacity of oil to the coast and increase the number of tankers in Georgia Strait from five to thirty-four a month. Mark Jaccard, energy economist, wrote that Trudeau’s logic was “Orwellian,” that is, it “makes no sense [and] … is economically and socially irresponsible.” In The Star (Toronto) David Cornish of the David Suzuki Foundation argued that,“2018 is the year of environmental decisions.” The pipeline’s vendors were jubilant. In June, for the first time, a member of the Green party was elected to the Ontario legislature. In Ontario, the head of the victorious Conservative government cancelled the carbon tax. A survey of Canada’s high Arctic on Ellesmere Island (Nunavut) revealed that glaciers were in danger of disappearing completely. In July, wildfires consumed the forests of Scandinavia. The same month in Europe was reckoned to be a scorcher with temperatures in Spain and Portugal reaching low 40°C and all-time heat records being shattered in Scandinavia. At the end of August the federal appeals court shut down the expansion of the 1,150 km Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion that ran from Edmonton to Vancouver. The Trudeau government paid C$4.5 million for the pipeline which was worth a fraction of that price. On 17 September, cbc News announced in a leading article that, “the great oilsands era is over.” In October, Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England “warned that climate change will lead to financial crises and falling living standards unless the world’s leading countries do more to ensure that their companies come clean about the current and future carbon emission.” Carney added that “there was a growing evidence of the role of humans in climate change, noting that since the 1980s the number of registered weather-related loss events had tripled.

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Inflation-adjusted losses for the insurance industry had increased five-fold to $50 bn … a year.” A report from ninety-one scientists convened by the un’s Climate Change Conference (cop 24) at Katowice, Poland, predicted that the earth was likely to heat up by 3°C above its pre-industrial temperature – that is, that the hope for a mere 1.5° increase was forlorn.28 Major newspapers in the US, Britain, and Canada took up the story stressing that the earthlings had but a dozen years before unnamed catastrophes would eventuate. Also in October, the bc Green party ran ten candidates in Vancouver’s city elections. Nine won seats. No government in North America, at any level, had ever seen so many environmentalists elected. In November, the ballot on the inclusion of a carbon tax in the state of Washington was defeated. The fossil fuel fraternity, led by British Petroleum (bp), invested some $30 million in preventing the ballot. Wildfires in California broke previous records for acreage burned and lives destroyed. “The link between climate change and bigger fires is inextricable,” a correspondent in The New York Times wrote.29 In November crude oil from Alberta, wcs, which had sat at around $40 a barrel, suddenly plummeted to a record low, dropping below $14 a barrel. The industry and governments, provincial and federal, were flummoxed.30 The blame game was unboxed: no responsibility for any aspect of the oil crisis was admitted by the petroleum barons or their underlings or associates in Calgary. The Extinction Rebellion (xr) was launched and spread. On 4 March tropical hurricane Ida struck Mozambique inflicting billions of dollars in damage over a period of several weeks. On 7 February members of the American Democratic Party announced the Green New Deal. In the Globe and Mail’s “Report on Business” of Thursday, 7 March 2019, the analyst Tim Kiladze announced, “The oil sands have lost their lustre.” He described how fifteen

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years before, Canada’s oil sands “were one of the hottest resource plays in the world.” Recently, he pointed out, a number of leading American and other oil companies were “cutting and running” out of Alberta.31 Just eight days later, on 15 March, protest mainly by high school and college students against climate change exploded across the Western world. Conspicuous for its numbers was that in Montreal which cbc News claimed involved 150,000. German students carried signs that claimed simply “Es gibt keinen Planeten B” (“There is no Planet B”), the title of Berners-Lee’s book.32 The protests were almost immediately swept from cbc television’s news headlines by a massacre of fifty Muslims in New Zealand on the same day. Within forty-eight hours, news of the mobilization of students and their concerns virtually disappeared from the mainstream press. The Nation, however, predicted, “Climate Kids are Coming,” while in the Financial Times one writer explained that “Climate change protesters are telling us the deadly truth.” An Extinction Rebellion protest in London on 15 April was attended by thousands of people.33 Floods in eastern Canada led Conservative politicians to admit existence of climate change and to promise remedial measures. In mid-May, the un released its “extinction report” predicting that one million plant and animal species were at risk due to human behaviour. In an interview with The New Yorker in response to this report, Bill McKibben explained that CO2 in the atmosphere should not exceed 450 parts per million (ppm). By 8 May, according to readings from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai’i, CO2 emissions reached 414.50 ppm. A year earlier they were at 407.05 ppm. (At the rate of 8.0 ppm per year they would reach 450 in thirty-six years, that is, in the mid2050s). On 16 May, the Canadian Green Party announced a plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2030. On 31 May the ndp announced a similar plan. Along the Mississippi there was fear that the

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Great Flood of 1993 would be repeated. 25 July was the hottest day in much of western Europe. In Paris the temperature reached a record 42.6°C. Over 600 wildfires in California in mid-October and 50,000 people evacuated from north of Los Angeles. Court cases against Big Oil opened in New York. In Vancouver at a climate change rally, a group of students from across Canada announced that they were suing the federal government over its failure to protect them from climate change.

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Notes

introduction 1 For a useful reference to words used in this study from “emissions” to “carbon footprint,” including “fracking,” “greenwash,” “neoliberalism,” “ocean acidification,” and “renewables” see Berners-Lee, No Planet B. 2 Halford, “Ballard”; Kaplan, Climate Trauma for film and fiction. 3 For recent examples of climate disasters, broadcast on the front pages of mass circulation papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post, see Davenport et al, “US Climate Report” in the Times and Dennis and Mooney, “Major Trump administration” in the Post and Los Angeles Times. See also, Vollman, Alternative and Speth, Bridge. A sample from Speth: “In sum, global environmental problems have gone from bad to worse.” 4 For panics, see Wallace-Wells, Panic and for cli-fi, Robinson, New York and Lanchester, The Wall. Lanchester’s novel has an unusual immediacy since it is about the attempts of a national political regime to ban refugees, some of whom it might be assumed are climate refugees. 5 To anticipate: carbon dioxide, produced by the burning of fossil fuels like coal and petroleum, causes global warming, the heart of my story here. Weart, Discovery, chapter 1; summarized in Scientific American, “Discovery.” 6 Scientific American, “Discovery.”

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7 Acid rain had been discovered in North America as early as 1963. Its existence was however disputed. In 1976 Canadian researchers discovered the extinction of fish species in the acidified lakes around Sudbury (Oreskes and Conway, Doubt, 66, 70). For a happy ending to the Sudbury story, Carmichael, “Vale.” 8 Oreskes and Conway, Doubt, 183–4. 9 The origins of the movement for the protection of the environment in the United States have been charted by Taylor, Conservation Movement. 10 Nuccilelli, “Scientists Warned.” 11 The monthly Nature Climate Change is the premier journal bringing cutting-edge scientific research by professionals to the public view; McGrath, “Slowing Gulf Stream”; Schwartz, “Like a Terror Movie.” 12 Union of Concerned Scientists, “Cars.” Other sources, like Ewing (“Car Industry”), put this at one-fifth and have suggested that agriculture, especially belching cows, would be especially significant. 13 Plumer, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions”; “US Carbon Emissions”; Pierre-Louis, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” The quote is from Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable Earth, 4. Kilograms of CO2 equivalent can be expressed as CO2e. The average person in the UK has a carbon footprint of around 15 tonnes of CO2e per year; the average American, double that. Berners-Lee, “No Planet B,” 243. 14 Kynge, “China.” This author explains how the Chinese energy revolution may save the world but condemns petroleum-based economies like Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Russia. He explains that already, in eleven Chinese provinces solar power is cheaper than coal and that by next year wind power is likely to be cheaper. Davies, “Electric Car”; Leahy, “Electric Cars”; Ward and Hook, “Oil Majors”; Sheppard, “Peak Oil”; Wood Mackenzie, “New Scenario.” 15 In 2017 the average car in Canada consumed nine litres of gas per 100 km. In China between 2006 and 2017 the consumption per vehicle per 100 km. fell from 8 to 7 litres. ev sales in Canada in 2018 reached 93,091, 90 per cent over 2017. For estimates of the increase of plug-in cars by 2040 and the displacement of oil they would yield, O’Sullivan, Windfall, 53. Electric car batteries require lithium (Li) an alkali mined in Chile and Bolivia previously used as a psychiatric medication. 16 For a prediction of the replacement of ice by ev vehicles, see

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Nightingale, “Forget Tesla.” This article argues that it is e-buses, especially in China, that will put a major dent in oil demand. Together with ev cars, as much as 6.4 million barrels of oil a day (mbd) of demand could be displaced. Fuel efficiency improvements will erase another 7.5 mbd. On the wrong side of automotive history, the Trabant (“Trabi”) was the standard car manufactured in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (ddr). Its body was a form of fibreglass. Its production ceased soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 17 Davis, “Ark,” 39–40. The un population figures (2017) are 7.6 billion in mid 2017, rising 2 billion to 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100 (United Nations, “World Population”). Berners-Lee (Planet B) provides an efficient fifty-page introduction to the food question. 18 Not before time, in June (2019) cbc News, always on the front lines of topicality, ran an article titled “Why cbc News is doing a series on climate change” (Hamson “cbc News”). This was thirty years after Hanson’s address to Congress. 19 Canadian conservative politicians remain obsessively concerned with repudiating carbon tax without putting anything in its place or admitting that the effects of climate change will be more expensive than the costs of carbon tax. For a comment on this, Balkissoon, “Climate Change”; Ibbitson, “Floods.” Some Canadian schools still teach that human-caused climate change remains “up for debate among experts” (Owen, “Canadian High Schools”).

chapter one 1 For the role of steam power and the rise of industrial capitalism, Malm, Fossil Capital. 2 Malm (Progress, 19–20) gives the example of the discovery of coal on the otherwise unimportant island of Labuan, off the coast of Borneo. Labuan was positioned right on the highway between India and China and fit into the circuit of global exchange. The bases that were established to sustain the British maritime empire were often known as “coaling stations,” ie, centres for steamships to replenish their stores of fuelling coal. Pearl Harbor, later a naval base bombed by the Japanese, was an American coaling station conveniently half way across the Pacific.

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3 Nitrogen and normal oxygen (O2) are the major atmospheric gases. Life on earth only became possible when carbon dioxide blocked heat escaping from the earth’s surface. This exemplified the “greenhouse effect.” 4 In 1994, “a national survey of air quality revealed that Manchester had the dirtiest air in Britain ... By the early 1880s, after a century of rapid urban and industrial growth, the name of Manchester had become synonymous with leaden skies, dirt and smoke.” Mary Hallard, who grew up on the outskirts of Manchester, recalls coming home from school one day in November 1955 and not being able to see in front of her for the smog. In 1872 the term “acid rain” was invented to describe the pollution caused by Manchester’s industries. Mosley, Chimney, 1, 4. C02 emissions from the United Kingdom are graphed in Malm, (Progress), figure 11.2, 252. Comparative emissions measuring the UK against other industrial countries in 1850 are graphed on 253. In 1853 the UK was the world leader producing just less than 35,000 metric tonnes of C02 emissions. The US and France tied for second with around 5,000 metric tonnes each. Germany and Belgium followed. The song, Dirty Old Town sung by Peggy Seeger and The Pogues and written by Ewan McColl, was about Salford, part of Greater Manchester. 5 The 12,000 figure is repeated in Dawson, Death, 281, a popular study of the Great Smog of 1952 and of the British Conservative government’s attempt to stifle and even deny the report on its causes and effects. Whereas the normal level of sulphur dioxide (SO2) in the air of London was between 0.05 and 0.15 parts per million, during the Great Smog reached between 0.16 and 0.72 (239). The main cause of the SO2 pollution was the burning of a form of cheap, low-grade coal called “nutty slack.” The term “smog” was first used in 1905 and emerged on the pages of the British Medical Journal in January 1953 (41, 187). 6 Evans, “Analysis”; Clark, “UK carbon emissions”; Helm, Burn Out, 55; Eddy, “Germany.” 7 Butler, “Germany’s Coal”; for the eu discussions on cutting carbon emissions, Hook, “Cutting.” 8 Appunn and Wettengel “Germany’s Greenhouse Emissions.” 9 Gore, Earth, 81.

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10 Raval and Mooney, “Money Managers.” The authors explain this remarkable epiphany: “The turnaround is stunning in an industry that for years was reluctant to take responsibility for its broad contribution to global warming, while spending millions of dollars on lobbying to counter efforts to cut emissions.” The governors of the Bank of England and the Banque de France, Mark Carney and François Villeroy de Galhau, have warned that if some companies and industries fail to adjust they could be wiped out. The Bank of England has estimated that as much as $20 trillion could be lost if climate change is not effectively addressed (Partington, “Mark Carney”). For bottom lines, Plumer, “Companies.” 11 The subtitle of Helm’s Burn Out is “The Endgame for Fossil Fuels”; chapter 9; for 2050, 244. He quotes Wood Mackenzie, the energy research consultancy, which suggests that coal use will decline by half by 2040. Global coal demand is expected to decline from 27 per cent in relation to other fuels in 2016 to 26 per cent in 2022 (International Energy Agency (iea), “Coal”). The World Energy Annual Report (Coyne, “World Energy”) estimates global coal peak c.2030. 12 The growth rate (sometimes called the “trend line”) for CO2 emissions over the past 160 years has been 1.8 per cent a year. In 2018 the rate was above 2 per cent (Berners-Lee, “No Planet B,” 220). 13 For a clear discussion of coal and its future, iea, “Coal.” In his “A Look Ahead to 2019,” Ed Crooks of the Financial Times points out that “[a]fter declining over 2014–16, global coal demand started to pick up in 2017, and rose again last year [2018]” (Crooks, “Energy”). Sam Arie (“Too Late”) stresses that it is too late to stop “an increase in average surface temperatures of 2,3,4 degrees Celsius or more.” 14 Sengupta, “World.” 15 For Eastern Europe, China, India, and Australia, see below. Indonesia, which had 261 million people in 2016, has seen coal production jump almost 50 per cent since 2010. Altogether, renewables account for only 5 per cent of energy production. China’s support for more coal-fired power stations in Pakistan (population 201 million in 2018) has yet to be realized. For Indonesia, Palma, “Indonesia”; for Pakistan, Stacey, “Pakistan’s Pivot.” 16 Williams, “Great Barrier Reef”; Cave and Gillis “Great Reef”; Murphy, “Scott Morrison,” for the coal lump brought into parliament in Feb-

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18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25

Notes to pages 13–16

ruary 2017. Morrison became prime minister in August 2018. By mid-2018, a time of the worst Australian drought in a century, a third of the corals of the Great Barrier Reef had died due mainly to rising sea temperatures. In late November and December (2018), the Australian summer, wildfires in Queensland were described as a “terrifying new reality.” Smee, “Bushfires.” For coal-fired power stations as a part of China’s “Belt and Road” policy, Ford, “Extinction Rebellion.” Goodell, Big Coal, back cover; Worland, “Coal’s Last Kick”; Mufson, “Coal Revival”; Dennis and Mufson, “Coal-fired Power.” Helm, Burn Out, 55. Goodell, chapter 1, describes Gilette, Wyoming, the American Saudi Arabia of coal, where about 40 per cent of coal burned in America was mined in the early twenty-first century. Natural Resources Canada, “Canadian Mineral Production”; Natural Resources Canada, “Coal Facts”; Quigley, “Coal in Canada.” The value of Canadian gold production in 2017 was C$8.7 billion, of coal, C$6.2 billion). While coal output declined in 2017, its value increased due to higher prices. Leahy, “Ontario’s Electricity.” fti“Thousands Protest”; Safi, “Adani.” For the 2018 drought, see below. Helm, Burn Out, 44, 46; Malm, Fossil Capital, 331–3. Wood Mackenzie, “New Scenario”; bnef “New Energy Outlook, 2018.” Vaclav Smil is Canada’s most renowned though unknown scientist. His warnings about the Chinese environment were first published in The Bad Earth (1984) and repeated in China’s Environmental Crisis (1993). For an interview of Smil by Margaret Wente, see Wente, “The Man.” For a later commentary on the subject, see the World Bank report Clear Water, Blue Skies: China’s Environmental Crisis (1993) and Elizabeth Economy, The River Runs Black (2004). For Ye Qi and Jiaqi Lu’s report to the Brooking Institution, “China’s Coal Consumption.” Bernard and Hornby write about “China’s Polluted Skies.” Gowen, “Likely to Die.” When ozone links up with other chemicals at ground level it is harmful, even fatal. Canada’s population for 2050 is forecast at just over 44 million, 50 million by 2100.

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26 Crooks, “Look Ahead to 2019.” 27 The 58 per cent figure comes from Sengupta, “World.” For annual deaths by pollution, Dennis, “Pollution.” On 31 October 2017 levels of the most dangerous air particles reached 700 micrograms per metre in part of the city. Kumar and Schultz (“Delhi”) write, “[P]rolonged exposure to such a high concentration [of dangerous air particles] is equivalent to smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day.” 28 Mishra, “Coal.” 29 A graph in Helm’s Burn Out (figure 2.2, 43) shows German’s CO2 emissions dropping from 2000 to 2009 and then rising sharply between 2009 and 2013. Germany’s emissions in 2017 were predicted to rise again. For India, Nick Butler, “India.” 30 Bhalla, “Climate Change.” 31 For the development of the irrigation based on the Indus system by the British and then the Americans during the Cold War, McNeill and Unger (eds.), Environmental Histories, 154–6. Shrikanth (“India”) explains how the Indian government has had to lower baseline expectations for monsoon rains. 32 Postel, “India’s Food Security.” 33 Editorial board, The New York Times, “Water Crisis”; Biswas, “Water Crisis”; Varma, “Groundwater”; Singh, “Water Table.” Maharashtra state, in which both Mumbai (formerly Bombay, as in “Bollywood”) and Pune are located, has a population of 114.2 million (2012). Orissa = 42 million.

chapter two 1 Daniel Yergin’s, The Prize (1990) is the acknowledged standard history of the Western imperialist struggle for oil in the Middle East. Highly readable, it is told from the point of view of a triumphant America. Steve Coll’s Private Empire, published two decades later in 2012 and focussed on the activities of the greatest of the American oil companies, is its successor. The most thorough recent account of the postwar struggle for the return of Middle Eastern oil to its national owners is Dietrich, Oil Revolution (2017). 2 Judt, “Facts,” 32.

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3 The British, in a reckless panic over Nasser’s nationalization of the company that controlled the Suez Canal, invaded Egypt in 1956. The Americans, who were not consulted on the invasion, threatened to undermine sterling if London did not withdraw the invasion force. The British and their French and Israeli allies took the hint. The affair was seen as such a blow to British prestige that Prime Minister Anthony Eden was forced to resign. The Egyptian leader, Col. Abdul Gamal Nasser, was triumphant and his message of nationalism spread throughout the region. Thereafter the Americans called the shots in the Middle East while the British tagged along, concerned with their substantial stake in the region’s oil. From this point onward this region, rather than either Europe or East Asia, was to become the centre of America’s foreign policy concerns. But from 2008 and in the period of energy abundance that followed, the importance of the Middle East as a source for energy declined rapidly (O’Sullivan, Windfall, 254–6). British influence persisted and even expanded, however, according to Stevenson (“What Are We There For?”). 4 The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of April 2010 saw the accidental release of 3.19 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico (Ocean Portal Team, “Gulf Oil Spill”). 5 Mason, Turbulent Empires, 181. Muttitt, Fuel, xxi. Note that this author’s argument differs from that of Coll. 6 Coll, Private Empire, 574–5. 7 Ibid., 573. 8 The predecessor of opec was the First Arab Petroleum Congress in 1959. The role of the national elites and the rise of opec are discussed in Dietrich, Revolution, especially chapter 2. Venezuela nationalized oil production on 1 January 1976, forming Petróleos de Venezuela SA (pdvsa). In December 2018 Qatar announced that it would withdraw from opec in order to concentrate on gas exports. A minor oil producer, its gas reserves were claimed to be the largest in the world. 9 Cole, Engaging, 214. 10 Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, used arguments for human rights “to enable the counteroffensive against the sovereign

Notes to pages 25–6

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rights program and the New International Economic Order (nieo).” Both the sovereign rights program and the nieo were used by Third World countries as means to counter the dominance of the US and other western countries (Dietrich, Revolution, 290). Coll, Private Empire, 51. The extent of Saudi control over national petroleum resources is questioned by the title of Robert Vitalis’ history of Saudi Arabia, called America’s Kingdom. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) was founded in 1960 by Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait with other states joining later. Preceding opec was the First Arab Petroleum Congress in 1959. The rise of opec is discussed in Dietrich, Revolution, especially chapter 2. cnpc bought the Calgary-based company Nexen (not “Nexus”), “a spectacular mistake” (Helm, Burn Out, 194). Calgary, along with Denver and Houston, remains one of the major oil centres in North America. McCarthy, Auto Mania, 214. For the calculation of $39 in 1970 being the equivalent of $140 today, Helm, Burn Out, 114; for the Japanese opportunity, McCarthy, Auto Mania, 224. Oil prices did not recover fully until 1986. The commodity super-cycle refers to the period from as early as 1980 to 2014 when Chinese demand for coal, oil, and other raw materials drove commodity prices up right across the world. China’s success depended on cheap labour and cheap energy to produce cheap commodities that everyone loved. China’s demand for oil rose from less than 2 mbd in 1980 to more than 9 mbd in 2012 (Helm, Burn Out, chapter 1, “The End of the Commodity Super-cycle” and 148). With the decline of Chinese demand, oil prices, predicted to rise to $200 bbl, slumped to $40 (the historic average, 1861–2016) and were predicted never to rise again above $50–60 bbl. (Helm, Burn Out, 21). Chapter 9 in Helm’s study is titled “The Gradual End of Big Oil.” wti crude prices on 24 December 2018 were at a low of $42.53 bbl; on 29 May 2019 they were at $58.46. O’Sullivan (Windfall, 291) roots for the decline of opec’s influence although oil prices have gone up in 2019 compared to 2018 due at least in part to US sanctions on Iran and Venezuela.

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chapter three 1 Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 27–8. Mackenzie King, a Liberal, was prime minister of Canada for just over twenty-one years intermittently between 1921 and 1948 (Dictionary of National Biography, “King, William Lyon Mackenzie”). The Grand Teton National Park is in Wyoming, near Yellowstone. For the Rockefeller’s philanthropy, Taylor, Conservation Movement, 341. 2 Stevenson, “What Are We There For?” 3 Crude oil production, US Energy information Administration (eia), “US Field Production.” Adjusting prices to inflation would mean that the average US price for a barrel of crude at $2.77 in 1950 would become $29.11 in 2019. Every major oil source has its own price, this being in part determined by cost of refining. Thus, Illinois crude and Alberta crude both cost more because they require more refining. Each US state has one or more sources. Standard American crude is referred to as “wti,” West Texas Intermediate. For a 2019 report, us eia, “Today in Energy.” 4 Bakx, “Oilsands Era”; Crooks, “Canada’s Oil”; Cunningham, “Oil Prices.” 5 It was Joseph Stiglitz (Roaring Nineties) who called the 1990s “the world’s most prosperous decade.” For Russia, newly liberated from communism and subject to western “shock therapy,” it was a decade of catastrophic decline, economic and even demographic. The role of American economic advisers and the World Bank in this decline was significant, (Mason, Turbulent Empires, 66–9). 6 Klare, Blood and Oil, 14. 7 Sanger, Confront, 418; Stevenson, “What Are We There For?,” 11. 8 Bacevich, America’s War, 3; also his America’s Empire; McCoy, Shadows, for an overview of the American imperium and some of its practices, like surveillance and torture. One key element in the American success to dominate oil in the Middle East was the subordination of the British role. The story of the British withdrawal from the Gulf, that is, the abandonment of the prize that it had won with the Sykes-Picot agreement at the end of World War One, is the theme of Barr, Lords. British involvement in the Middle East, while diminished, nonetheless continued, hence the term “Anglo-Arabia.”

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Stevenson (“What Are We There For?,” 11) argues that British involvement in the Gulf increased after Suez. In mid-2019 British warships were again patrolling the Gulf. 9 A brief discussion of “the Great Moderation” may be found in my Turbulent Empires, 12–13, 179, 244. By a macabre coincidence, “9/11” (ie. 9-1-1) is the widely used North American emergency number as well as being the date of the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York in 2001. Bear Stearns, the investment bank, collapsed in March 2008 and Lehman Brothers, another bank, on 15 September, taking the entire global financial system to the brink of meltdown. The present crisis is conventionally said to have begun with the crash of Lehman Brothers. John Lanchester (“After the Fall”) provides a stimulating short history and Adam Tooze (Crashed) a full-throated account. 10 The term Big Oil usually includes the independents and the national oil companies, the nocs. The independents included the “supermajors,” Anglo-Dutch Shell (headquartered in Rotterdam); bp, originally Iraqi Petroleum Company; Exxon and Mobil (merged in 1998); Total; French; and eni, Italian. All of these oil companies were founded and expanded during the era of empires. The biggest nocs are Chinese, Saudi (Aramco), and Equinor (formerly Statoil) (Norwegian). It is apparent that Big Oil as well as the independents will continue to move at least tentatively out of oil into renewables. For a May 2018 update of the oil majors move into renewables, Reed, “Shell”; Ward and Hook, “Oil Majors.” 11 But even with the founding of opec, the taxes on oil by European countries gave them greater profits than the producers themselves (Mitchell, Carbon, 169). The future of oil has been a recurrent nightmare for certain producing regimes, even those in Europe. The Norwegians are celebrated for having invested part of their oil incomes in sovereign wealth funds, that is, state-owned savings accounts. At $1 trillion, their fund is the largest in the world. In certain other jurisdictions, notably Britain and Alberta, royalties from oil have been spent to avoid tax increases. Stokes and Raphael (Global Energy Security) discuss the role of oil in American hegemony. Note that despite huge oil exports, the per capita gdp in Venezuela actually dropped after the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s (196–7).

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12 Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 226–30. His conclusion, “No More Counting on Oil” (230–54) would have been nothing if not alarming for those who had invested in and become dependent upon any form of income from oil. 13 Two main types of oil companies form Big Oil: the national oil companies (nocs) and the independents like Shell and Exxon (after 1 December 1999 ExxonMobil, “the largest corporation of any kind headquartered in the United States” (Coll, Private Empire, 66)). The nocs include all of the national companies in the Middle East and Maghreb, led by Saudi Aramco, as well as those of Brazil, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Norway. 14 One oil economist estimated that in the 1960s the oil companies were producing oil at $.10 a barrel and earning a profit above that return of $68 a barrel. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 168. 15 Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 167. 16 Helm, “The End of the Commodity Super-cycle” in Burn Out, chapter 1. Oil prices were driven mainly by Chinese demand and collapsed suddenly in 2014. Helm (Burn Out, 27) suggests that if it had not been for China’s extraordinary growth spurt from the 1980s until c.2014, oil prices would have continued at around $10–30 a barrel for the 2000s. For the game changing influence of the new energy abundance, see Butler, “Winners.” 17 Helm, Burn Out, 30. For a revealing graph, Helm, Burn Out, 32, figure 1.9 “US Crude Oil Production, 2000–15.” 18 Reed, “America’s Renaissance.” 19 According to Gutstein (Big Stall, 33–6, 51) Strong had an essential role in promoting the role of “business leaders” in managing the Canadian reaction to climate change. Before becoming a major international figure, Strong worked for Calgary-based Dome Petroleum and for Power Corp., one of Canada’s great family-owned oligopolies. Even earlier, like Mackenzie King, Strong had a close relationship with the Rockefellers. Gutstein (Big Stall, 158, 154) notes that, “Strong set in motion [the process of] giving the corporate sector an inside track on climate change negotiations. This may explain why the unfccc [the 2015 un Paris conference] was unable to establish mandatory emission levels that could slow down temperature increases.”

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20 For the origins of Greenpeace, Darnell, “How did you begin?” Accounts of some Greenpeace activities, including French state terrorism against Rainbow Warrior in 1985, are given in Woodhouse, Ecocentrists, 230, 289. 21 MacDowell, Environmental History, 260. 22 Struzik (“Broad Assault”) discusses Harper’s Bill C-38 “which guts or significantly weakens rules relating to fisheries protection, environmental assessment, endangered species, and national parks.” For the comparison to North Korea, Visser, “Harper”; to Japan, Monbiot, “Canada’s Image.” 23 Globe and Mail editorial, “Alberta” and for the Heritage Fund, Giovanetti et al, “Cash Stash.” The Alberta sovereign wealth fund, known as the “Heritage Savings Trust Fund,” was worth C$17.7 billion in 2016. The Norwegian fund was worth C$1.1 trillion, sixtyfive times greater. 24 The history of Alberta oil is told by MacDowell, (Environmental History, 170–5), Hern and Johal, (Global Warming, 41–114), and Stringham in Percy (ed.), (Alberta Oil Sands, chapter 2). The cheerful upbeat account of Stringham, which takes almost no account of the role of oil exploitation in climate change, may be explained by his being a hired pen for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. Note especially the discussion in MacDowell of the scrapping of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Policy by the Conservative Party led by Brian Mulroney. McDowell is unhesitant about the effects of the exploitation of tar sands oil: “From an environmental perspective, the Athabasca oil sands are an ecological disaster” (174). 25 For US imports of Canadian crude, US Energy Information, see Coll, Private Empire, 544. For an unsurpassed study of Koch industries and their struggle to deny the truth about climate change, Leonard, Kochland. 26 Mayer, Dark Money, 49–50. Charles Koch, an admirer of Frederich von Hayek, the Abraham of neoliberalism, bankrolled the Washington-based Cato Institute, a major right-wing, antienvironmentalist, think tank Mann and Toles (Madhouse, 111) list the eminent Republicans funded by the Kochs in the presidential election of 2016. “Fundamentally,” writes Mayer (Dark Money, 88), “Cato was devoted

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to espousing Charles Koch’s vision: that government’s only legitimate role was to ‘serve as a night watchman, to protect individuals and property from outside threat, including fraud. That is the maximum.” For more on Cato, Leonard, Kochland, 395, 400, and 459, which refer to the Greenpeace paper on Koch Industries report on the “Climate Denial Machine.” These two parties united in July 2017 to form the United Conservative Party. The most reliable recent account of Alberta politics and the capture of governments is Kevin Taft’s, Deep State. “Bible Bill” Eberhart was premier of Alberta from 1935–43. His party was Social Credit, which was founded on an economic doctrine called “funny money.” The ndp won 26 per cent of the provincial vote in 1986 and 29 per cent in 1989. In the 2015 elections they won a remarkable 41 per cent and took over the government. For a quick summary, Global News, “Alberta’s Election History.” Sale, Dying Planet, 13. For photos of tailing ponds, Taylor, “Alberta Tar Sands” and MacDowell, Environmental History, back cover. Alberta Official Statistics, “Bitumen Production.” In a 2015 estimate, Alberta’s tailing ponds were assumed to hold enough liquid to fill the equivalent of 390,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools and cover 176 square kilometres (Steward, “Tailing Ponds”). The Government of Canada website (“Crude oil facts”) claims that the tailing ponds covered 220 square kilometres, that is the equivalent to a lake just over ten kilometres by twenty kilometres. Kevin Taft (Deep State, 218) has estimated that the cost of reclaiming the 400,000 oil and gas wells drilled in Alberta would be an average of C$200,000 to C$300,000 each. “The final bill seems certain to exceed [C]$100 billion, far more than any province can afford.” The Calgary Herald took up the issue in early 2018 (Orland, “Battle”). Jones (“Cleanup”) suggests that the cleanup would cost “up to [C]$70 billion.” Stringham (“Energy Developments,” 29) explains that only about 715 square kilometres has been disturbed by oil sands mining operations. Ten per cent of this area has already been reclaimed. The question of toxic tailings was brought to my attention at a lecture given to the British Columbia Institute at ubc in the winter of 2009.

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32 According to John Vidal, more oil has been spilled in the Niger Delta of Nigeria every year than has been spilled in the Gulf of Mexico. One spill in Nigeria dumped an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 barrels. Even if Shell is to blame for the immediate situation, the local oligarchy is ultimately responsible. Sarah Chayes describes how the Nigerian National Oil Company could not account for $20 billion in revenue in 2012 and 2013. Chayes, “Hidden Cost,” and Vidal, “Nigeria’s Agony” and “Shell Nigeria.” 33 Government of Canada, “Crude Oil Facts.” ghg emissions per barrel of oil sands oil have fallen 29 per cent since 2000. 34 Quigley, “Coal.” Healing, “Nowegian Fund.” 35 Sale, Dying Planet, 13, “[T]he Canadian government appears determined to focus on tar sands extraction as the only motor for the economy.” For a list of the aboriginal groups through which the Western Gateway pipeline had to pass to reach tidewater, McCarthy and Lewis, “Court Overturns.” To riotous protest, at a meeting in Nanaimo, bc, in early February 2018 Prime Minister Trudeau reiterated his government’s belief that “[I]t is in the national interest to move forward with the Kinder Morgan pipeline” (Meissner, “Pipeline”). Mark Jaccard, who has done energy-climate analysis for all of Canada’s political parties, has exposed what he calls “Trudeau’s Orwellian logic,” by saying that black is white and that the Liberal government is committed to ghg emissions while supporting the expansion of bitumen (Jaccard, “Trudeau’s Orwellian Logic”). Margaret Wente (“Trudeau’s Climate Mess”) argues that, “the Liberals’ environmental ideals are compromised by messy reality.” She goes on to advocate fracking and nuclear power. 36 A critical view: Woynillowicz et al, “Fever.” 37 The first fracturing took place in the US in 1947. For a contemporary technical article on fracturing, Zborowski, “Exploring.” 38 For US tight oil production, O’Sullivan, Windfall, 24–5. But as one writer has pointed out, the oil in the Bakken shales has been shown to be quickly depleted and may last for only another decade, (Anke, “All’s Well”). Bakken production peaked at 1.26 mbd in 2015 and then dropped down in 2016. It revived after the Gulf hurricanes of August 2017. Two other shale deposits, the Upper Devonian shale and the Marcellus shale are shown on a map in the preface to Gris-

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wold’s Amity. Both shales stretch into southern Ontario. The Bakken shales reach into Saskatchewan and Manitoba. US eia, “North Dakota Bakken.” Kleinman, “Oil Demand”; Crooks, “US Energy Revolution.” Griswold, Amity, 289; Minkow, “Need to Know.” Fracked wells in Saskatchewan increased from sixty-three in 2005 to 725 in 2015 (Carter and Eaton, “Saskatchewan”). While there are hundreds of drilling rigs in Alberta and bc, fracking is banned in Quebec and most Maritime provinces as well as New York, Vermont, and Maryland. It is banned or restricted in several European states, including France (O’Sullivan, Windfall, 172). Shale gas in the form of lng will be exported from in and around Kitimat, on the northern bc coast. A week after his government announced a “climate emergency” in the House of Commons, the Liberal minister of Finance pledged C$275 m. to support the Kitimat lng project (cbc News, “Feds”). Government of Canada, “Canadian Crude Oil Exports.” Campbell, “Lac-Mégantic.” Jeff Rubin is at his best discussing the profits made by Warren Buffet in freighting oil across the country. cn hauled 60,000 tanker loads a day (b/d) in 2013 and cp, 70,000. By June 2018, 204,000 b/d were being freighted from Alberta to the US. On account of the increased profits of cp, the head of the firm, Hunter Harrison, regarded as an icon in the Canadian business press, had a total compensation package of $49 million in 2013. For more on tanker cars, Campbell, “Lac-Mégantic”; for Warren Buffett and Hunter Harrison, Rubin, Bubble, chapter 6; for rail cars, Ljungren, “Alberta.” Seth Miller (“Big Oil”) has predicted that the pipeline would cost $7 billion and consume 800,000 tonnes of steel. At its peak it would carry 500,000 barrels, earning about $5 million per day. Manning, “Bakken,” 33–5. Reguly, “Climate Change.” McCullough, “What Happens.” Austin, “Oil Sands.” Mintz, “Ottawa.” Henton, “Notley”; Cattaneo, “Notley Demands”; Gillis, “Climate Game.” Varcoe, “Deafening Silence.”

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51 The amount of ghg emissions produced by the tar sands is controvertible. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (capp) says Alberta’s production is a mere 9.3 per cent of the Canadian total, (capp, “Statistics”). 52 For Canada, Government of Canada, “Greenhouse Gas”; for Ontario, Environmental Commissioner “Greenhouse Gas”; Merten-Kirkwood, “Index.” The amount of emissions from the tar sands is controvertible. The capp says 9.3 per cent. (capp, “Statistics”). 53 cbc News, “Climate Change Denial”; McCarthy, “ndp.” 54 McCarthy, “Keystone.” 55 Austen and Krauss, “For Justin Trudeau.” Bill McKibben (Falter, 69) referred to Trudeau as “the handsomest, most progressive, most apparently ‘woke’ leader on the planet” before pointing out that he spent $10 million on a new pipeline to the bc coast. 56 Tasker, “Trudeau Cabinet.” An unusually lucid video presentation of the question of oil tanker traffic in the waters from Vancouver to the North Pacific Ocean may be found in The Globe and Mail’s “Weigh Anchor,” authored by Hunter and Prystupa. This video shows an Aframax-sized tanker in bc’s coastal waters. It speculates on the consequences of such a tanker driving into the second Narrows railway bridge near the Westridge Marine Terminal to which bitumen is piped. The bridge had been knocked out of commission five times by cargo ships since its construction in 1925. The video also draws attention to the ownership and crew of the featured Aframax tanker, a tanker registered in the Marshall Islands with an international crew that presumably had little experience in bc’s coastal waters. It also draws attention to the hazards of sailing without a pilot between the Gulf–San Juan archipelago on the way to the Pacific. It may be relevant to recall that in early November 2018, a Norwegian warship collided with a Maltese oil tanker in Norwegian waters. Although little oil was spilled, the warship almost sank (Auer, “Norwegian Warship.” “Aframax” refers to a category of mid-sized oil tankers. 57 For instance by the British government as elucidated in a speech by the prime minister in late June 2019 (Pickard and Hook, “Teresa May”). No Canadian government has specified, as the British have, the date at which zero emissions would ideally be attained.

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58 For McKay and McKenna, Daub and Carrol, “Banking.” This article focuses on the involvement of the Royal Bank of Canada with pipelines. In March 2019 the ceo of the Bank of Nova Scotia echoed a similar sympathy: “[T]he world need’s Canada’s energy. We have to get it to tidewater, get it to the people that need it, whether it’s Korea, Japan, China, India.” (Jones, “Scotiabank”); Mason, “Sorry, Vancouver.” Later, Mason seems to have shifted his sympathies (Mason, “Pipeline”). 59 Bakx, “Oil Sands”; Cunningham, “Oil Prices.” A different calculation suggests that the claims of the Government of Alberta are seriously flawed and that only 10 per cent of Alberta’s bitumen is subject to the full differential (Acuña, “Seven Questions”). 60 Wildau and Jia, “Chinese Data.” 61 For the green media, King, “Tar Sand Pipelines”; for the role of tar sands as a contributor to national and provincial gdp, Saxifrage, “Climate Snapshot,” and Conversations for Responsible Economic Development (cred) “Canada’s Economy” and “What’s Fuelling Our Economy.” Saxifrage argues that the tar sands contribute only 2 per cent to Canada’s gdp. Some 94 per cent of benefits would go to Alberta; other provinces would benefit to the tune of less than one half of one per cent. cred claims that in 2015 the oil and gas sector was responsible for 6 per cent of the national gdp and Alberta oil sands contributed just 2 per cent of gdp, a number that has been falling steadily. Nationally, the beer economy is responsible for 163,200 jobs and the oil sands economy, 112,000 jobs. We wait to see how many jobs the marijuana economy will provide. 62 City of Vancouver, “Not Worth the Risk.” For a general estimate of the “social costs of carbon,” United States Environmental Protection Agency (epa), “Social Costs.” 63 Other oil spills in the harbour and off the coast of Vancouver include a collision in September 1973 that saw the dumping of 200 tonnes of fuel oil. Bratishenko and Zardini (eds.), Happening, 191–3. 64 Assurances that the pipeline would never be built have come from other quarters including Jessica Clogg, senior counsel at West Coast Environmental Law, who cited community opposition, and even from the interim leader of the Conservative Party Rona Ambrose who noted that the Kinder Morgan project had “very little chance of

Notes to pages 47–8

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being built” (Tasker, “Trudeau Cabinet”). A poll result in bc in February (2018) disclosed that those polled were split roughly in half (48 per cent for the pipeline, 44 per cent against), (Hébert, “Justin Trudeau”). In a poll conducted in mid-August (2018) 34 per cent of Canadians polled favoured the Trans Mountain pipeline, 20 per cent were against and 46 per cent had no strong views. For bc the figures were 33, 39, and 28. Hébert, “Pipeline” and “Justin Trudeau.” One question, mentioned by Trudeau but not always confronted by the opponents of pipelines, is to what extent oil would continue to be transported by rail. There seemed to be little remembrance of the Lac Mégantic disaster. In August (2018), 229, 544 bbl/d were exported by rail from Alberta (Government of Canada, “Crude Oil Exports”). For the East China Sea oil spill, Myers and Hernández, “Oil Spill.” The previous record offshore spill in Newfoundland was from the Terra Nova platform in 2004 (McKenzie-Sutter, “Newfoundland”). Austen and Krauss, “For Justin Trudeau.” In 2018 Canada was the leading exporter of oil to the US shipping a total of 4.28 million barrels a day (mbd). Mexico was the main consumer of US oil, importing 1.21 mbd for 16 per cent of the total. Canada was second, taking 0.96 mbd or 13 per cent of US oil, US Energy Administration “Questions.” It has been assumed that US imports of oil will fall in the coming decades. (American Geosciences Institute, “Oil”). Nikiforuk, “Expanding Tar Sands.” Hoberg “Unsustainable Development” in Ditchburn and Fox (eds.), Harper, explains the role of Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan in the energy politics of Harper’s Conservative government. He refers to these policies as the “self-inflicted wounds by the Harper government” and quotes Harper as saying Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program (nep) of 1980 “was designed to screw the West and really damage the energy sector” (255, 258). Kirby et al, “Life at $20.” In January 2016 the benchmark West Texas Intermediate (wti) fell below $30. Morgan Stanley predicted $20 oil in the future. Kirby et al, referred to Alberta as “ground zero for the oil crash.” In early 2017, the price of wti oil stood at between $53 and $56 a barrel, and then, just as spring sprung, it dropped sudden-

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ly to $47 a barrel. The Canadian Energy Research Institute (ceri) has estimated that the break-even point for oil sands production is $43.31 a barrel and for “stand alone” wells, $70.08 (Millington, “Oil Sands”). On 14 January 2019 wcs stood at $43.74. Morgan, “Oilpatch”; Cunningham, “Oil Prices”; Statista, “Average Monthly”; Tertzakian “No Sugarcoating,” for falling profits for Exxon, Chevron, and Royal Dutch Shell. One cause for the decline of profits was “increased pressure from investors related to climate change” (Meyer et al, “Exxon”). As far as the national interest is concerned, David Hughes (“Trans Mountain”) has pointed out that royalties paid by the oil industry fell 44 per cent between 2000 and 2017, a period during which oil production increased by 77 per cent. “The effective Canadian royalty rate decreased from 18.3% … to 6.2%. The situation in Alberta is even worse, where the effective royalty rate decreased from 19.5% to 5.1%.” For the speech, Maclean’s “Justin Trudeau’s Speech”; Yedlin, “Trudeau Charms”; Gillis, “Climate Game.” Trudeau’s speech was parroted by Wells Griffith, President Trump’s international energy and climate adviser who announced at the Katowice climate change conference (cop 24) in December 2018 that, “The United States has an abundance of natural resources and is not going to keep them in the ground … We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice their economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability” (Editorial Board, New York Times, “Trump Imperils the Planet”). MacDowell, Environmental History, 321. MacDowell is unhesitating about the effects of the exploitation of tar sands oil: “From an environmental perspective, the Athabasca oil sands are an ecological disaster,” (174). Cryderman, “Notley”; McCarthy et al, “Alberta.” The federal government had already committed to $3.3 billion (C$4.35 billion) in oil and gas subsidies, making it the leader among G7 countries. In 2017 the auditor general had criticized the federal government “for failing to provide information on inefficient fuel subsidies” (Chin, “Canada Leads”).

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75 Allen, “Commercial Viability”; Willis, “Ottawa”; Ibbitson, “Trudeau’s Troubles.” 76 Jaccard, “Trudeau’s Orwellian Logic”; Healing, “Kinder Morgan.” 77 Boychuck, (“Who Should Pay”) mentions “many billions of dollars of environmental liabilities.” The lobbyists from the Petroleum Services Association, some of whose members would profit from the cleanup, were supported by the Government of Alberta. 78 Lewis et al, “Hustle.” 79 The story of the Alberta Energy Regulator was exposed by the National Observer, The Star (Toronto), Star Metro (Calgary), and Global News. The Globe and Mail had carried out an in-depth investigation over six months that pointed a finger at the complicity of the Alberta Energy Regulator with firms that easily circumvented the regulations, especially the abandoning of tens of thousands of depleted wells. See Da Sousa, et. al., “Alberta Regulator”; McIntosh, “What Would it Cost”; Lewis, “Alberta Regulator”; Boychuck, “Who Should Pay” and “Damage Control.” The Globe did its own lengthy report noting that there were 140,000 inactive wells in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and bc, few of which had been cleaned up, (Lewis et al, “Hustle”). The National Observer accused the Alberta government of complacency (McIntosh and Bruser, “Alberta Officials”). Commentary by cbc News on the Alberta scandal has been notably emaciated. The toxic waste site in Nova Scotia cost $400 million to clean up, of which the federal government contributed $280 million (Meyer, “May Warns Ottawa”). In October (2018) the question of the release of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) from gas wells in Saskatchewan had been raised by the National Observer (Cribb et al, “Saskatchewan”). The effect on the environment of hydrogen sulfide gas is central to the story of fracking in Pennsylvania as told by Eliza Griswold in Amity (34–5). 80 Boychuck, “Who Should Pay”; Nikiforuk, “Alberta’s Problem.” Having axed the building of the Northern Gateway oil pipeline from Alberta to Kitimat in 2017, in July 2019 Ottawa pledged C$275 towards a lng project (cbc News, “Feds”).

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chapter four 1 Nordhaus, Climate Casino, 19–20, 31. The average US growth rate between January 2015 and December 2017 was 2.6 pa. Actual per capita world gdp between 1913 and 2012 was 1.6 per cent; eia, “US Energy.” 2 For French autos, Wikipedia “Manufacturers of France.” 3 Freeman, Behemoth, 363, n42. Giovanni Agnelli who founded the Italian automaker Fiat visited Ford’s Highland Park factory in Detroit and reproduced it in Turin where the first Fordist factory opened in 1923 (Freeman, Behemoth, 136). 4 “Donkeys” are the above ground oil pumps. Yergin, Prize, 80; Grandin, Fordlandia, 181, 78; Vollmann, Alternative, 409. 5 For a table showing “Relative Share of World Wealth, 1830–1940,” Mearsheimer, Tragedy, table 6.2, 220. Between 1910 and 1940 when the automobile explosion took place, America possessed nearly 50 per cent of the world’s wealth. By a similar calculus, Britain, which had 59 per cent of the world’s wealth in its 1850 heyday, had between 11 and 16 per cent. 6 Most of what follows on Henry Ford’s miracle and on American auto manufacture is from McCarthy, Auto Mania; Freeman, Behemoth, 118–68; Rhodes, Energy, 229–31; Grandin, Fordlandia, especially chapter 16, “American Pastoral,” provides a telling critique of Ford’s admiration of fascism. 7 Henry Ford reputedly said that, “buyers of his automobiles could have any color they wanted so long as it was black,” (McCarthy, Auto Mania, 80). 8 Grandin, Fordlandia, 1, 35. 9 McCarthy, Auto Mania, 50–1. 10 Kitman, “Lead,” 14; Rhodes, Energy, (236–48) explains the rise and fall of tetraethyl lead. Dauvergne (Shadows, 67–77) provides a different chronology, arguing that the death of lead was foretold when the chairman of Mobil Oil announced in 1970 that, “lead must go.” 11 McCarthy, Auto Mania, 50–1; Kitman, “Lead,” 14, tells a similar story expanding it to explain the “breathtaking greed and deceit” on the part of gm, Du Pont, Standard Oil of New Jersey (later ExxonMobil), and Dow Chemical.

Notes to pages 56–64

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12 Vollman, Alternative, 23–4, discusses the various uses of benzene, including in insecticides, detergents, plastics, and aniline dyes; Griswold, Amity, 93. 13 Coll, Private Empire, 381–2. 14 Davenport and Tabuchi, “epa.” A day later The Los Angeles Times reported that the Trump administration was moving on two fronts to challenge California’s environmental protection” (Halper and Tanfani, “Trump”). 15 McCarthy, Auto Mania, 45. 16 Dauvergne, Shadows. 17 McCarthy, Auto Mania, 46. 18 Wikipedia, “Trafford Park.” 19 Dobbs, “Ford.” 20 Butler, “Batteries.” 21 McCarthy, Auto Mania, xvii. America was vw’s first successful overseas market. “Ugly is only skin deep” was one of vw’s first advertising taglines. The movie “Love Bug” (1968) focused on the remarkable qualities of the vw and transformed it into a recognizable, if cutesy, brand. 22 Sivak and Schottle, “Climate Change”; Ewing, “Car Industry.” 23 California: 14.5 million cars for nearly 40 million people. 24 Much of the argument that follows is taken from two articles in Die Spiegel that deal with the German aspect of the car scandal and cartel collusion and one article in the New York Times that outlines the American aspects of the scandal. For the former, see Dohmen and Hawranek “Cartel Collusion” and Amann et al, “Made in Germany.” For the latter, Ewing, “Campaign of Trickery.” At the time of writing this I had not seen Ewing’s Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal (May 2017). For global ranking, Helm, Burn Out, 155. Volkswagen is 90 per cent owned by two families and two states: the Porsche and Piesche families and the states of Lower Saxony and Qatar. 25 McKie, “Air pollution”; Becker and Traufelter, “How Officials Ignored.” 26 Amann et al, “Made in Germany.” 27 Monbiot, “Eco-vandal.” 28 Ibid. Biofuel imports are banned by Norway and restricted in

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France. Kodas (Megafire, 16) reports that in 2015 some 100,000 fires were intentionally set in Indonesia to clear forests for plantations such as palm oil. Bonnebas, “Renault”; Torgemen and Benezet, “Pollution.” Renault’s emissions were probed, but with a nudge and a wink (Williams, “Renault”). Carrington, “mps”; McKie, “Air Pollution.” Dohen and Hawranek, “Cartel Collusion.” Schmitt, “Report,” “Dieselgate,” and “Volkswagen’s Dieselgate.” The most scathing condemnation of German automakers in English is by the Spiegel staff: “Made in Germany.” For the cartel collusion between Germany’s biggest carmakers, Dohmen and Hawranek, “Cartel Collusion.” For the disastrous consequences of the German automakers’ dependence upon diesel and their duplicity together with the argument that a social stigma now attaches to diesel car ownership, Wellengel, “Diesel Summit.” The Koreans as well as other Asian consumers are also on vw’s case (Song Jung-a, “vw”) while in Canada environmental groups sued the federal Environment minister for foot dragging. (Miller, “Dieselgate”; Wyld, “Activist Groups”). In late September (2017) the Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change charged vw under the province’s Environment Protection Act. It alleged that vws had emitted thirty-five times Canada’s legal limit of nitrous oxides. In Canada 105,000 vws with rigged emissions computers had been sold (Canadian Press, “Ontario Ministry”). In early 2018, Volkswagen reached a C$290 million Canadian diesel settlement (Canadian Press, “Volkswagen”). Some 20,000 3.0 litre vws, Audis, and Porsches were involved. For the accusation against the head of Audi for fraud, Ewing, “Diesel Scandal.” In 2015, 463,736 bmws; 373,459 Mercedes; 570,889 Audis; and more than 2.5 million vws were sold in China, making it the world’s biggest market for cars. “China increasingly rules the global auto market and determines its course,” writes Jack Ewing. Chinese consumers bought 24 million cars in 2018 (Ewing, “Car Industry”). Sales of vws in Germany itself amounted to 685,669. Carrington, “UK Air Pollution”; Clark, “Rising Air Pollution.” US car sales broke all records in 2015 with more than 17 million cars sold.

Notes to pages 66–71

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Gas-guzzling trucks, suvs, and crossovers were in the lead. Even in the smallish and congested British Isles, records were broken with over 2.6 million cars sold. Transportation accounts for about 20 per cent of CO2 emissions with aviation, shipping, and railways accounting for 12 per cent, 10 per cent, and 4 per cent of emissions respectively, (Ewing, “Car Industry,”; Statistics Canada, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions”). Ewing, “Campaign of Trickery.” An account of the investigators, all foreign students, is in Oehmke “Three Students.” Ewing, “Campaign of Trickery.” The $2.8 billion figure comes from McGee et al, “sec Sues Volkswagen.” It is not clear how much vw paid to the 100,000 owners in Canada (cbc News, “Volkswagen”). Dohmen and Hawranek, “Cartel Collusion.” Ibid.; Tartler and Kreijger, “bmw Accused.” Ewing, “Monkeys.” The sum of $25 billion is mentioned in McGee (“vw v. Siemens”) who quotes one vw official as saying that if another suit of similar magnitude were to be brought against vw “this company is dead.” Schuetze, “Martin Winterkorn.” Behrmann, “Teslas”; Leggett, “vw.” For vw’s policy of promoting those complicit in the scandal, McGee, “vw v. Siemens”. For Winterkorn’s indictment, Schuetz, “Martin Winterkorn.” McGee, “Car Emissions Scandal.” Carrington, “Dirty Diesels”; Hancock, “China’s Automarket”; Ewing, “Car Industry.” The paragraphs that follow are dependent on Vogel, California, the standard history of the struggle to safeguard the environment in California. Vogel, California, 184–5. By 2016 California had a population of nearly 40 million and just over 14.5 million cars. See also Das Auto below for Germany with a population of nearly 82 million (2016) and 48 million cars. Nealer, “Gasoline vs Electric.” Ewing, “Car Industry.” Campbell, “Carmakers Forced.”

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51 Butler, “Batteries”; Campbell, “Nissan.” 52 In a poll in “Green Car Reports” asking the question as to when would global sales of electric cars equal those of gas driven cars, 38 per cent of those polled estimated 2025; 30 per cent, 2030; and 15 per cent, 2035 (Volker, “Sales”). Yet Ed Crook, writing in the Financial Times (“A Look Ahead to 2019”) predicts that, “[O]n any plausible projection there are likely to be hundreds of millions of petrol and diesel fuelled vehicles on the roads for decades to come.” 53 Hunter-Tilney, “Riding.” 54 O’Sullivan, Windfall, 50; Maugouber and Doherty, “Three Shifts.” There are thirty-four of the world’s richest countries within the oecd group.

chapter five 1 The Times noted, “The earth has been warmer in the first five months of this year than in any comparable period since measurements began 130 years ago and the higher temperatures can now be attributed to a long-expected global warming trend linked to pollution” (Shabacoff, “Global Warming”). The continuum linking climate change denial to the acid rain, ozone, and tobacco lobbies is spelled out in remarkable detail in Oreskes and Conway, Doubt. The same gallery of mercenary deniers turns up in practically all of the campaigns of repudiation attempting to limit the damage done to public health. Even the saintly Rachel Carson was a victim of their slanders. One of the most bizarre oddities of the denialists’ arguments is that “the money was coming from Russia,” that is, at first from the communists and later their Putinesque successors. The Russians were said to be backing both Rachel Carson and the antifracking environmentalists for over half a century later. For Carson, Oreskes, and Conway, Doubt, 216–39. 2 Weart, Discovery, 88. The standard source linking the push back of the tobacco companies to the deniers of climate change are Oreskes and Conway, ibid., and Mann and Toles, Madhouse. 3 McKibben, “What Exxon Knew”; Hall’s Scientific American article (“Exxon Knew”) was published a month later. The larger picture is offered by Oreskes and Conway (Merchants of Doubt), amplified by

Notes to pages 74–6

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Oreskes’ “Exxon’s Climate Concealment.” Also, McKibben, Falter, 72–80, and 74–6 for Shell’s involvement in denial. Since Exxon knew about global warming in 1977 and was active in blocking legislation to impose carbon pricing in Washington State in 2018, that is, over a period of forty years, it may be considered the champion of the health villains of our time. It is quite possible to calculate the number of deaths, in America and globally, caused by Exxon’s deceit. “Infomercials,” also known as “branded content” or “native advertising” were articles, intended to sound like genuine news, written on behalf of the major oil companies to advance their interests. They were published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico (Westervelt, “Sleeping”; Rich, Losing Earth, 47–51), 188. Coll, Private Empire, 624. The following account is dependent upon Coll, Private Empire, “Prologue.” Coll, Private Empire, 3–9; Taylor, “Remembering.” This article contains thirty-nine photos of the tanker, the oil spill, and the dead and doomed animals; Ahearn, “25 Years.” The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was renamed Anglo-Iranian in 1935 and bp in 1954. For a brief summary of bp’s search of new opportunities, Helm, Burn Out, 134. Coll (Private Empire, 223–6, 612–14) stresses Exxon’s antipathy towards bp and how cost cutting had undermined bp’s “safety culture.” Coll lists how, one after another, bp had authored catastrophes right across America. Exxon capitalized on this although just ten days after the Deepwater Horizon disaster an ExxonMobil pipeline dumped about a million gallons of crude into the coastal waters of Nigeria. bp had often tried to rebrand itself as other than an oil company, for instance by suggesting bp stood for “Beyond Petroleum” and making greenish gestures, sometimes called “greenwashing,” and miniscule investments in clean energy. In late 2018 bp America was the main contributor in the campaign against carbon fees in Washington State (Lavelle, “Big Oil”). Laville, (“Top Oil Firms”) quoting a report by the UK group Influence Map writes that “[F]ive publicly listed oil majors – ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron,

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bp, and Total – now spend about $195 million a year on branding

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campaigns suggesting they support action against climate change.” Shell has rejected this report. Coll, Private Empire, 561. In April 2010 came the Deepwater Horizon disaster that led to eleven deaths and many more injuries. The disaster cost bp around $50 billion in damages and remediation. “The company was nearly broken as a result and dramatically diminished in size” (Helm, Burn Out, 192). The effects of the oil spill were still evident in 2019. Coll, Private Empire, 132. This account is said to be in Coll, Private Empire, although I have not been able to find it. It is mentioned in Moisés Naim’s review of Coll (“Review”) and in Broakes and Berger, “Tiger Trap.” Coll, Private Empire, “Prologue,” 19–20, 624; Malm, Fossil Capital, 361. According to Mann and Toles (Madhouse, 65–6), Tillerson raised the question “What good is it to the planet if humanity suffers?” Franta, “Shell and Exxon.” The 2017 sequel to An Inconvenient Truth, called An Inconvenient Sequel, opens with shots of melting Arctic ice. Andreas Malm (Progress, 106–7) glosses Tillerson’s position in relation to the general undertaking of big business to dominate and, of course, deflect, the arguments about the causes of climate change. In the 2008 election, ExxonMobil contributed only 11 per cent of its campaign contributions to the Democrats. That Tillerson and his confederates lied in the interests of profit is beyond doubt: “With its ideological allies, ExxonMobil funded the promotion of public confusion about climate science by means that future employees and executives of the corporation are likely to look back on with regret” (Coll, Private Empire, 347, 495–6, 620). Nicholas Stern had been commissioned by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to write a report on the damage to the economy of the UK of climate change. The report, “The Stern Review,” was explosive, pointing out that the cost to the British economy would be the equivalent of losing at least 5 per cent of gdp. While the report was roundly dismissed by the lobbyists for Big Oil, Donald Gutstein points out that it was taken seriously by Big Business generally and may be seen as launching the current alarm, apparent in such busi-

Notes to pages 79–82

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ness papers as the Financial Times and Bloomberg Businessweek, regarding the costs to capitalism of inertia. For the review, Gutstein, Big Stall, 113–15; for business opportunism, organized in Canada by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the rise of Harper, ibid., 124–35. For a later warning about the effects of climate change on the bottom line of business, Plumer, “Companies.” New Yorker, “Bill McKibben.” For a contemporary account of Stern’s presentation in Toronto, Mittelstaedt, “Climate Change”; for a comment on the reaction to the presentation, Gutstein, Big Stall, 125. Gutstein, Big Stall, chapter 8, “The New Gospel.” McCullough, “What Happens.” Coll, Private Empire, 498–500. There is a Himalaya of literature on Exxon’s deliberate deceit: besides Coll (Private Empire, chapter 3); Goldenberg, “Exxon”; McKibben, “Exxon’s Climate Lie”; Schwartz, “Exxon Mobil Fraud.” For the divergent views of Republicans and Democrats, Berke, “Republican denial.” For the rollback, Popovich and Schlossberg, “23 Environmental Rules.” For Pruitt, an avalanche of denunciations. Pruitt was succeeded by Andrew Wheeler, formerly a lobbyist for Murray Energy, the largest American coal mining company. Marshall, “bbc.” The Chancellor is the British minister of finance. Nor, explained Sarkozy, was climate change explained by man (Goulard, “Nicholas Sarkozy”). Tett, “Trump’s position.” This scoop does not seem to have caught on in the major American media. Davere, “Schwarzenegger.” “Mr Olympia” is the world’s top men’s bodybuilding title. The interview of Schwarzenegger by Politico was carried by most liberal media outlets in the Anglophone world including Newsweek and cbc News. Vogel, California Greenin’, 206, for Schwarzenegger; for Louisiana, Hochschild, Strangers, especially chapter 7 for the unwavering acceptance by the state of polluting industries and the hopelessness of any attempts at reform. For Ontario, Canadian Press, “Ontario.” For a detailed discussion, Banerjee et al, “Exxon”; McKibben, “Exxon’s Climate Lie”; The Guardian, “Climate change”; Gillis and Kraussnov, “Exxon Mobil”; Schwartz, “Exxon Mobil Fraud”; Kaiser

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and Wasserman, “Rockefeller.” On Exxon’s propaganda offensive, Lamb and Litterman, “Tell the Truth.” Zengerie, “Rex Tillerson.” For scientists’ support of the tobacco lobby and climate change denial, Oreskes and Conway, Doubt, chapter 5 and “Using Tobacco to Defend Free Enterprise,” 162–8. A lengthy discussion of the stratagems of Exxon under the guidance of Lee Raymond is in Coll, Private Empire, chapter 3). Frank Luntz is profiled in Ball, “Agony.” The tobacco lobbyist Frederick Seitz received $45 million in funding “to obscure smoking’s risks and then, with funding from fossil-fuel companies, became the highest-profile climate denier in the US” (Hertsgaard and Pope, “Fixing the Media”). Milman, “Tipping Point.” The Gallup poll was carried out between 2 and 6 March 2016. Nuccitelli et al, “Climate Consensus”; Hochschild, Strangers, 48, 51. While this study appears to be centred on the influence of the Tea Party in Louisiana, its “keyhole issue” is environmental pollution (11). One of the main arguments of the Tea Party, that jobs trump environmental protection, should be familiar to anyone interested in the Canadian government’s arguments in favour of the bitumen-carrying Trans Mountain pipeline (tmx) from Alberta to bc. Hochschild, Strangers, 51. For a recent comment on climate change deniers in California, where a “hellish summer” has prevailed, Lopez, “Climate Change Deniers.” For a Pew Research Center poll on voters concerns in November 2018, Friedman, “Three Campaign Ads.” The Conservative government that swept away carbon pricing did not, however, deny man-made climate change. The 2018 poll was taken between 9 and 15 February and surveyed 2,250 Canadians. The 2019 poll was taken between 31 May and 10 June and surveyed 4,500. (Zimonjic, “Canadians”; Grenier, “Canadians”). Gutstein, “Fraser Institute”; Ball, “Fraser Institute”. For the Kochs, their money, and Albertan oil, Meyer, Dark Money. For business schools and corporate opposition to climate change legislation, Duff McDonald, Golden Passport. Atkin, “Median Failure”; “Media Matters for America” is a centrist, not-for-profit research and information centre. Pyne is the doyen of historians of American and Canadian wildfires.

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His most comprehensive work is Between Two Fires (2015). He argues (228) that in the 1980s it was discovered that there had been fewer disastrous (“bad”) fires in the past decade than ever before. Then “the first alarms over global warming” were sounded and with them the increased fear of wildfires. “Big fires joined hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes as part of the annual almanac of media expectations” (240). He connects this increased concern with the 1988 testimony of James Hansen (240, 322), lending credence to the climate change doubters that climate change was, “to some extent,” media manufactured.” Hansen (“Carbon-free Electricity”) himself has pointed out that “[s]cientists have not effectively communicated the [climate change] issue.” It is not evident to what extent the phrase “to some extent” should be considered. 40 Atkin, “Media Failure.” In early October 2017, The Globe and Mail reported that federal government agencies were criticized for being backward in their dealing with climate change (Newman and Bruce, “It’s Time”; McCarthy, “Speed Up”). Good (“Hurricanes”) explains “framing” the news about the environment; avoiding upsetting terms like “global warming” and “climate change” might be called “disframing.” The cbc online reporting on wildfires in bc in August 2018 still rarely mentioned climate change; it is unclear whether this is due to orders from Ottawa or to some kind of inherent feeling among reporters that Canadians should be protected from worrisome news. Then, in mid-2019, more than four decades after James Black’s warning to Exxon and a mere three after James Hansen’s shattering announcement that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now,” not to mention a dozen years after al Gore’s widely viewed movie, came the trumpeted shift on the part of the cbc announcing a new series on climate change (Hanson, “cbc News”). By contrast, The Guardian has never missed an opportunity to report on a real or potential climate change disaster while the Financial Times, a pillar of global capitalism, has shown itself unhesitant with news likely to disturb investor complacency. Some businesses, cities, and even countries, like Iceland, seem to have taken climate change seriously. Insurers and reinsurers, in particular, seem alarmed. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria in 2017 cost, variously, $125, $50, and $91.6 billion

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and $144 billion in insured losses (Ralph, “Insurers”). Wildfires in California in 2018 bankrupt the major San Francisco utility group, PG & E. 41 For a relevant May–June 2019 poll in Canada, Grenier, “Canadians.” 42 Cohen, “bbc.”

chapter six 1 For Rich’s argument, see his Losing Earth (2019). No less polemical or even fatalistic are Bill McKibben’s Falter and Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable Earth, published in the same season of the same year. 2 We are now emitting around 50 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere each year. For a graphic illustration of the rise of global CO2 1756–2016, see Statistia, “Historical Carbon Dioxide.” For updates, nasa, “Global Climate Change.” 3 For a report on the Katowice conference Watts, “12 years”; Plumer, “Climate Negotiators”; for grave doubts about effective action, particularly on the part of Canada, Wente, “Canada.” The twelve-year deadline has been widely established in the media – even though it is a journalistic, not a scientific, figure. Trek Magazine, alumni magazine of my alma mater, the University of British Columbia (Spring 2019), carried the banner headline, “Climate Change: 12 years to avoid catastrophe.” 4 Put in different terms, by 2017 the earth was 0.90°C warmer than the 1951–80 mean. The global surface temperature in June 2018 was 0.78ºC higher than normal. Vaughan, “Europe”; Hook, “Miss Paris Climate Targets.” 5 Rich, “Losing Earth”; Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable, 12–13, for a brief enumeration of consequences. Much of the report mentioned by Hook (“Miss Paris Climate Targets”) is a repeat of this article. The authorities in Singapore, contemplating “existential climate change,” predict that daily mean temperature on the island will increase by 4.5ºC in the next century (Palma, “Singapore”). 6 See below, n262. 7 For the Icelandic experience in real time, Alderman, “Iceland.” 8 Sengupta, “Scorching 2018”; Fountain, “July.” 9 Americans, presumably few in number so far, have already begun to

Notes to pages 89–92

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buy refuges in temperate states with small populations like Oregon and Maine. Back in the day of threatening nuclear war, these would have been called “survivalists.” For a contemporary commentary from The New York Times, Krueger, “Climate Change Insurance.” Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable, 286–7, n174. The portrait of the caricatural nabobs might be set against the representation of the more serious central bankers, as portrayed by Tooze (“Central Banks”). Regarding breathing, I shall mention Beijing and New Delhi elsewhere. The future of breathing offers little cause for comfort. The American Lung Association, for instance, has pointed out that the number of people in the US “exposed to unhealthy levels of air pollution increased to more than 133.9 million people, higher than the 125 million in the years covered by the 2017 report (2013–15). American Lung Association, “State”; Samenow and Livingston, “Drenched City.” Climate Central, “10 Hottest Global Years.” The four hottest global years were 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. Global temperature records began to be kept from 1880. Sengupta, “Record Heat.” Gillis, “2015.” Much of the following paragraph has been inspired by Edward Luce, “US Election.” For a different estimate of a global rise of 4º by the end of the century, Gabbatass, “Worst Case.” Campbell and Marsh, “Sleeping Problems.” nasa “Analysis”: “Earth temperatures were the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1885 …” McGrath “Climate Change.” The British Meteorological Office noted that 2015 was 0.75°C warmer than the long-term average between 1961–90. Samenow, “North America.” The article made no mention of climate change, attributing the warm autumn to El Niña, that is, a shift in warm ocean currents in the Pacific. For European heat waves Mortillaro, “40C.” Peritz and Hauen, “Six Die”; Samenow, “Red-hot Planet.” Robert Watson, a former director of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc), has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees, however, would be disastrous, with droughts and flooding ubiquitous, and especially destructive in areas with high populations (Rich, “Losing Earth”). For the March 2019 un report on devastating temperature rise in the Arctic,

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Strong, “Arctic.” For the report on Canadian warming, cbc News, “Canada Warming”; Lewis and Dickson, “Report.” “Humidex” is a Canadian invention, first used in 1956 and commonly applied by many, but not all, climatologists in Canada. In some quarters it has been viewed as unscientific. Delamont, “Ottawa.” Watts and Hunt, “Halfway to Boiling.” Hanrahan “Chart.” Average annual rainfall, 1961–90 was 102.3 mm. Financial Times, “Energy”; Cox, “Extreme Heatwave.” Watts and Hunt, “Melting Point.” McKie, “Big Heatwave.” The ideal body temperature is 37°C. See Ward and Brownlee, Rare Earth, mentioned at n369 below. Cowell, “Heat Wave.” Battacharya, “European Heatwave.” The most thorough source is that of the United Nations Environment Program (unep) which estimates more than 30,000 deaths and a cost of €13 billion (unep, “Impacts”). Other estimates go as high as 35,000 deaths. For the un estimate of 1.5°C. of warming, Hook and Hope, “Scorched Earth.” Lancet, “Impact of Our Pollution.” The un Migration Agency notes that in 2017 there were 171,635 refugees who arrived in Europe after crossing the Mediterranean; 70 per cent of these arrived in Italy and the remainder divided between Greece, Cyprus, and Spain. Migration from Central to South Africa and to Australia has also been a source of conflict (Polakow-Suransky, Go Back, especially chapters 14 and 15). 1 Brahic, “Africa trapped.” Charlebois, “Dirty Thirties” and “Prairies.” Malm, Progress, 225. Gore, Earth, 72–3. Editorial board, Los Angeles Times, “California”; Davis, “El Diablo”; for wildfires as the new normal, Kohli, “New Normal.” noaa, “2013 News Archive.” Bond, “California”; Associated Press, “Search.” Gelardi, “Numbers”; Pierre-Louis, “California.” Mervosh, “Mendocina Complex Fire”; for the bc fire, Pyne, Awful Splendor, 468; and Wynn, “Mon pays” in Pyne, xv.

Notes to pages 98–101

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Canadian Press, “By the Numbers.” Flannery, Atmosphere, 15. Crawford, “B.C. Wildfires”; Lindsay, “Climate Change.” Turkewitz and Richtel, “Air Quality.” For the desolation of the forests of Southeast Asia, Dauvergne, Shadows; for the Brazilian Amazon, Hecht and Cockburn, Fate of the Forests and Cowie, “Brazil’s Worst Month.” Williams, Deforesting, 433–4. “Albedo” means “reflectiveness.” Greenhouses, which reflect light back into space, also cool the planet. Whereas Spain in general is getting hotter, in the Almería area in the south, the proliferation of greenhouses has decreased temperatures by 0.3°C. (Flannery, Atmosphere, 137). Van der Werf, “CO2”; Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable, 76–7. Popovich et al, “Arctic Sea Ice”; Marshall, “Melting Tundra”; Gray, “Unexpected Future.” Methane is the main constituent in natural gas. US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, “2016 Ties.” Taylor, “Antarctic Ice.” Miodownik, “Cities Will Sink,” points out that Antarctica has lost 3 trillion tonnes of ice in the last twenty-five years and that the consequences of Antarctic ice disappearing before Greenland ice will be different than Greenland ice disappearing first. If Greenland ice melts before the Antarctic ice sheet then “the whole of North America’s eastern coast will go under water first.” Perhaps surprisingly, in East Antarctica, due to increased rainfall, the mass of ice has actually continued to grow. While this has stimulated the arguments of climate change deniers, it has not altered the global picture of shrinking glaciers or even that the Antarctic ice sheet, overall, is melting (Hall, “What to Believe”). The following paragraph is largely derived from Meyer, “Greenland.” Vidal, “Arctic Sea Ice”; for the un report, Strong, “Arctic Now Locked.” Kolbert, “Climate” and “Greenland”; Joselow, “‘Last-chance’ Tourists”; Filkins, “End of Ice”; Hume, “Disintegrating Rockies Glacier.” “Lastchance tourism” a term invented by Canadians, resulted in backlash a decade ago but now has become accepted (Joselow, “‘Last-chance’ Tourists”). The shrinking of alpine glaciers as temperatures rise 10° higher than normal in Switzerland has led to the fear that the Rhine

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will become too shallow for shipping (Wilkes and Perkin, “Blazing Heatwave”). For lucid maps of ocean circulation, Rahmstorf, “Exceptional.” Also US National Ocean Service, “Currents.” The above explanation depends on Nordhaus, Climate Casino, 57. The famous subtropical garden at Inverewe on the west coast of Scotland is at 57.819° N. latitude. Fort McMurray is 56.724° and Magadan, on the Pacific coast of Siberia opposite the Kamchatka peninsula, is 59.561 N. Carrington, “Gulf Stream current”; Rahmstorf, “Exceptional.” Kolbert, “Darkening Sea.” Pilkey et al, Rising Sea, xi. Jeff Goodell, a journalist specializing in climate change, has also focussed on the fate of Miami together with other centres on the east coast of the US. In common with other writers he writes Miami off as the Atlantis of the future. Goodell (Water) is also attentive of the effects of sea level rises on the west coast of Africa and island states in the Pacific. Acosts, “Billion Dollar Storms.” Pilkey et al, Rising Sea, xi. Alvarez and Robles, “Climate Change.” Other predictions mention a rise of fifteen or more feet with a 2°C warming of the atmosphere and 3.2 mm per year globally and a rise of 0.2 to two metres by 2100 (Pilkey, Rising Sea, 24; Sneed, “Worldwide Sea Level Rise”; Goodell, Water, 294) estimates that with immediate action we might get a rise of two or three feet by the end of the century; this prediction resembles others mentioned above. Pilkey et al, Rising Sea, 24, 27, 29. Goodell, Water, 303–4. Gillis, “Sea Level.” The author points out that worldwide “the average level of the ocean is rising at a rate of about a foot per century” as “a consequence of the warming of the planet caused by the human release of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.” Cape Hatteras is in North Carolina, north of Myrtle Beach, a favourite Canadian resort likely to be submerged in the future. Smiley, “Irma” and “Miami Mayor”; Union of Concerned Scientists, “Sea Level Rise.” Alvarez and Robles, “Climate Change,” 38.

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66 Alvarez and Robles, “Climate Change,” 35, 38–9; Bolstad, “Sea Rising.” 67 Sneed, Worldwide Sea Level Rising, 41–9; Mooney, “Seas Are Rising.” 68 cbc News, “New report”; Markan, “Halifax Sea Levels.” Erosion of the shoreline of Prince Edward Island is featured in a documentary published in Toronto’s The Star (Welsh, “Seige”). For flooding and coastal erosion in Gaspé and the Gulf of St Lawrence, including the Îsles de la Madeleine, Lowrie, “Rising Temperatures.” The flooding of Vancouver suburbs Richmond and Delta (pop. 300,000), both the creation of a system of dykes built in the early twentieth century, Lewis, “New Report.” 69 Pilkey et al, Rising Sea, 52–5. 70 Eltman, “New York City.” 71 New Scientist, “Pacific Islands”; Palma, “Singapore.” 72 For these victims of a “three-degree world,” Holder et al, “Threedegree World”; Kimmelman, “Jakarta”; Frazzetta, “Survival.” 73 Flannery, Atmosphere, 44, 46. 74 Kolbert, Sixth Extinction, 141; Sale, Dying Planet, 43. Reference to the Caribbean is a section of a longer chapter called “The Perilous Future for Coral Reefs,” which also deals with the Great Barrier Reef. Sale writes (132): “Think about this the next time your are enjoying a round of golf on one of those very green, ocean-side courses that dot the Caribbean – do you really think the herbicides and pesticides stay out of the water?” 75 Abraham, “Hurricane Michael.” 76 Holthaus, “Harvey”; Dewari and Schwartz, “Harvey.” 77 Becklumb, “Climate Change”; Banerjee, “Great Wall.” 78 The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review, a 700-page assessment of the wide range of consequences of climate change, was produced by Sir Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics. When it was released on 30 October 2006 the review provoked widespread concern but relatively little effective remedial action. Ten years later, Stern admitted that global warming was “worse than I feared.” Stern, Review; McKie, “Nicholas Stern.” 79 Goodell, Water, 182; Becklumb, “Climate Change”; Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan, 76. 80 Alvarez and Robles, “Climate Change.” 81 But in an article for bbc News (“eu Struggling,” 3 March 2016) that

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notes more than one million migrants, 80 per cent from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, crossed the Mediterranean into Europe in 2015, there is no mention of climate change as a propellant. It seems likely that the main cause for this immigrant stream was not climate but great power politics, notably the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union and then the US and its allies, the invasion of Iraq by the US and Britain, and the role in the Syrian civil war of the US and Russia. For these invasions, Mason, Turbulent Empires (2018). For Africa, Gettleman, “Loss of Fertile Land” and Taylor, “Refugee Crisis.” Sasha Polakow-Suransky (Go Back), a history of contemporary migration, mentions climate change only in passing (290). Filipovic, “Africa.” Abraham, “Mediterranean.” Barnes, “Climate Migrants.” World Bank, “140 Million.”

chapter seven 1 Oreskes and Conway, Doubt, 67. 2 The leadership of California in environmental protection is stressed in Vogel. In 1864, Yosemite Valley and an adjacent grove of giant sequoia trees became the first public protected wilderness area in the US. In 1964 California became the first state to establish emissions standards for motor vehicles (Vogel, California, 4–5, 57, 60–2). For the leading role of the Sierra Club, Woodhouse, Ecocentrists, chapter 2, “Crisis Environmentalism,” and Taylor, Conservation Movement, 306–7. Hummel, “Environmental and Conservation Movements,” provides a summary of the Canadian timetable. 3 The Sierra Club was founded in 1892. Its exclusive concern at first was “in preserving the forests and other features of the Sierra Nevada Mountains,” (Taylor, Conservation Movement, 306). 4 Vogel, California, 177; for origins, Taylor, Conservation Movement, 306–7. 5 Mason, “Jason Kenney.” 6 Rich, Losing Earth, 189. The author points out that articles on Plass appeared in Time, The New York Times, and Popular Mechanics. 7 Rich, Losing Earth, 188–9. 8 Rich, Losing Earth, 188–91, argues that “everyone knew” about cli-

Notes to pages 115–18

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10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17

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mate change since articles on the subject were published in the popular media like Time and Life (to which my father subscribed) since the 1950s. I can’t explain the difference between Rich’s perception and my own, except to say that the nuclear arms race, the Vietnam war, and the Cold War seemed to eclipse any concern with the environment from the 1950s to the 1990s. Bates, Citizen’s Guide. Bates later published Environmental Health Risks (1994). He cites (52) the example of Donora, Pennsylvania, where in 1948 air pollution killed twenty people and sickened 6,000 more. This fog of pollution, writes Rhodes (Energy, 293) “compelled public attention because it led the United States Public Health service to begin investigating air pollution.” Bates, Citizen’s Guide, 1, 5, 14, and 115 for his warning. Sources of SO2 for most major cities in the US as well as for several Canadian cities, including Montreal, are indicated. “Pollutants from Automobiles” is discussed on pages 17–25. He foresaw that global pollution would become severe “if presently underdeveloped nations of the world had a pollutant emission per capita similar to that of the western world.” He mentioned China specifically (85). Mann, Wizard, 384. Oreskes and Conway, Doubt, 67. Woodhouse, Ecocentrists, 54. McCarthy, Auto Mania, 24, 171–6. Rachel Carson’s story is found in Lear, Rachel Carson and William Souder, Farther Shore. Her “sea trilogy” books are The Sea Around Us (1951), Edge of the Sea (1955), and Silent Spring (1962). Translated into nearly a dozen languages, her sales have run to several millions. A recent appreciation of Carson’s work is Sandra Steingraber, Silent Spring and Other Writings. Carson died at age fifty-six just two years after the publication of Silent Spring. Even fifty years after the publication of Silent Spring, climate change deniers were attempting to discredit her (Zerbisias, “Rachel Carson”). Carson, Silent Spring, 96. The secretary general of nato, the former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of the centre-right Liberal Party, suggested that antifracking environmental groups were in the pay of Russia, (O’Sullivan, Windfall, 173). Guha, Environmentalism, 73; Souder, Further Shore, 16, 380.

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Notes to pages 118–24

19 Earth Day Network, “History.” 20 MacDowell, Environmental History, 250, traces the antecedents of Greenpeace. She notes that its headquarters was transferred to Amsterdam in 1979 (251). The Sea Shepherd society was founded in the same year. The Green Party was founded in 1983 and in the federal elections of October 2019 had three members elected to parliament. 21 Woodhouse (Ecocentrists, chapter 1), distinguishes between “mainstream” and “radical” environmentalism. Focussing on the Sierra Club he argues that the year 1969 saw its transformation (26). 22 Roderick Haig-Brown (1908–76) is the acknowledged literary pioneer of the bc environmental movement. Like the Brit Gilbert White and the Americans Thoreau and Gifford Pinchot, as his hyphen implies, Haig-Brown came from an upper middle class milieu and was especially interested in the gentlemanly pursuit of fly-fishing for salmon. His best-known books are lyrical anthems to nature and to his victims; Starbuck Valley Winter (1943) and A River Never Sleeps (1946). The latter is a paean to fish in the vein of Henry Williamson’s Salar the Salmon (1935). 23 Canadian ghg emissions (megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, 2016): Alberta 262.9, Ontario 160.6, Quebec 77.3, bc 60.1. Globe and Mail, “Alberta’s Election.” 24 Gillis, “Scientist”; Scripps, “Biography”; Rich, Losing Earth, 23. 25 Milburn, “Our Stolen Future.” 26 Most of the preceding paragraph is owed to Mazower, Governing, 335–6; Souder, Farther Shore, 394–5, discusses the question of Atrazine and the epa. Its approval by Health Canada came in March 2017. Syngenta, the European maker of Altrazine, was made to pay $105 million to a total of 1,000 Canadian water systems to cover “the cost of filtering altrazine from drinking water.” Syngenta’s pesticides, known as neonicotinoids “have been implicated in colony collapse disorder, the mass die off of bee populations, including a shocking 42 percent die-off of honeybees in the United States during 2014” (Mann and Toles, Madhouse, 80). 27 A summary: Rich, Losing Earth, 85–7. 28 Mazower, Governing, 341. 29 Max Paris, “Kyoto.” 30 For Gore, Weart, Discovery, 142–3.

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31 Rich, Losing Earth, 187. 32 For a consideration of Obama’s legacy, Bookbinder, “Obama”; Lavelle, “Obama’s Climate Legacy.” 33 Le Page, “CO2 forecast”; Crist, “Blight.” 34 Hurricane Sandy swept the east coast of the United States in 2012. It cost $65 billion, killed 159 people, and damaged or destroyed at least 650,000 houses and half a million motor vehicles; Samenow, “noaa.” The storm that swamped much of Toronto in July 2013 caused C$940 million in insurance claims according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada (Gray, “Toronto”). For Munich Re, Kolbert, “Sandy.” Alistair Gray (“Insurers Hit”) comments on the cost to insurance and reinsurance firms of US storms. A commentator on this article, signed “Mike Mason,” lists a number of sites in which reinsurers outline their concern with climate change, notably Lloyds, Munich Re, and Swiss Re. Ralph (“Insurers”) explains reinsurance and “retrocessions,” the insurance that reinsurers take out. 35 Crawford, “bc Wildfires.” The estimates for the 2017 bc wildfires was between C$563 and C$600 million. For Florence, Evans, “Hurricane Costs.” This article usefully graphs the rising cost of hurricanes from Hugo in 1989 ($9 billion) to Irma and Harvey in 2017 ($30 billion). It makes the point that the population of rich people on the Carolina coast has swollen uncontrollably since the 1980s. Munich Re has warned that premium rises could climb to the point of becoming a social issue with only the rich being able to insure their properties in some locations. Average annual wildfire losses were well below $5 billion until 2017 and 2018 when they leapt to more than $20 billion. “No insurer has linked wildfires to climate change before.” Neslen, “Climate Change.” UK wildfires, Cockburn, “Wildfires.” For 2018 losses, Ralph, “Chubb.” Lewis “New report” for Canada. 36 Plumer, “nasa.” 37 Olivier et al, “Trends.” America’s CO2 emissions in metric tonnes per person in 2014 amounted to 16.5; Canada’s, 15.1; France, 4.6; for UK, Hausfather, “Analysis.” 38 US Energy Information Administration (eia), “United States”; World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear Power.” 39 Davenport, “Climate Report.” 40 Semeniuk, “Carbon-Free”; Max Paris, “Kyoto” Speth, Bridge, 105–8.

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41 Tooze (“Central Banks”) has commented that coal has already been priced out of the market by much cheaper gas, oil, and renewables, but oil, by contrast, “remains too cheap and too convenient to forgo. Ending its consumption will require deliberate government action.” Of which in North America none seems to be likely. 42 Helm, Burn Out, 18–19; eia “Annual Energy Outlook.” 43 Reed, “America’s Renaissance”; World Energy Outlook 2017; O’Sullivan, Windfall, 110, 147 argues in favour of the benefits of oil and gas for America’s continued strategic “leadership” and that, counter intuitively, “the evidence suggests that there have already been modest benefits to the climate from more shale gas production.” For Bloomberg, Maugouber, and Doherty, “Three Shifts.” 44 World Energy Outlook, 2017; Federman, “Drilling.” 45 McKibben, “Stop Swooning” and Falter, 69–70 where Trudeau is said to be “woke.” 46 This argument is put succinctly in Roberts, “Clean Energy.” I prefer the less optimistic view espoused by the energy consultant, Wood Mackenzie (“A Zero-carbon World”). In this view oil will peak in 2031, the US, eu, and China will see evs account for 100 per cent of new vehicle sales by 2040, but natural gas will continue in its role as “a key bridge fuel” through 2040. 47 Anjli Raval (“Energy Producers”) discusses the hunt to “cleaner barrels” (of oil). “Dirtier projects such as Canadian tar sands developments have fallen out of favour in recent years” not only because of the search for “cleaner barrels” but also because dirty oil is more expensive to refine. 48 For insurance firms, Ralph, “Chubb,” and Tooze, “Central Banks.” For bottom lines, Plumer, “Companies”; for lng, Pitts, “‘Clean’ Natural Gas” and McKibben, Falter, 68 who quotes an “uncomfortable” story about natural gas (methane). Unburned natural gas, on the way to a pipeline or your stove, “traps heat in the atmosphere about eighty times more efficiently than carbon dioxide.” Studies have suggested that as little as 3 per cent of leaked natural gas would do more damage than coal does. Leak rates of methane from shale-drilling operations can be as high as 3.6 and 7.9 per cent. 49 Carney’s intervention was made at a speech he gave on 29 September 2015 in London (Clark, “Mark Carney”; Carbon Tracker, “Bank

Notes to pages 129–32

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of England”). More than any other political intervention in the carbon wars, this speech may be seen, in retrospect, as a kiss of death for investors in coal and perhaps even in oil and gas. Tooze (“Central Banks”) gives Carney credit for raising the larger question of the potential of climate change to trigger financial crisis. 50 Coal in many places has already become a stranded asset – that is, coal mining companies, like Peabody, the largest American miner, have gone out of business and coal mines are being abandoned. 51 McKibben, “Future.” McKibben cites several sources: first, the English think tank, Carbon Tracker, on the website of which the former financial analyst, now a “new energy strategist,” Kingsmill Bond, explains the demise of fossil fuel (Carbon Tracker, “2020 Vision”); second, “A New World,” a report by the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation; third, the Australian Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, “ieefa Report”; and finally David Roberts, “Clean energy” in Vox. For China’s lead in evs, lithium batteries, and nuclear power, Butler, “Chinese technology.” Wood Mackenzie (“Zero-carbon World”) assumes that by 2040 the US, eu, and China will see evs account for 100 per cent of new car sales.

chapter eight 1 For International Energy Agency (iea) statistics from 2016, iea.org/statistics/country=WORLD&year=2016. For statistics that compare production and consumption of the following sources of energy, conventional and renewable, bp Statistical Review, 2018. For the argument that the iea is too fossil-fuel friendly, Hook and Raval, “iea.” 2 Helm, Burn Out, 47–50. 3 Roberts, “Clean Energy.” These batteries like those used in electric vehicles require lithium. 4 For coal consumption; “bp Statistical Review” and “Primary Energy: Consumption by Fuel”; the measure here is million tonnes of oil equivalent. Stacey, “India.” The same source claims China consumed 3,132.2 million tonnes, the US 332.1, and Canada 18.6. 5 Wikipedia, “Poul la Cour.” 6 Office of Energy Efficiency, “Renewable Energy.”

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7 A kilowatt (kw) is the standard measure of individual or household electricity consumption. The average annual Canadian per capita energy consumption is nearly 15,000 kwh; the American, just over 12,000; the French, not quite 6,500. A megawatt is a thousand kilowatts. A megawatt hour (mwh) is a million watts or 1,000 kilowatts (kw) used or generated for one hour. mwh is the standard unit in which power is bought and sold at the wholesale level between power generators to utility companies. A tetrawatt is a trillion watts, a useful measure of Canada’s annual hydro production. 8 cbc “History of Windpower”; Kaygusuz, “Wind Energy”; Guardian, “Timeline”; Canadian Wind Energy Association (canwea), “Installed Capacity.” 9 Natural Resources Canada. Electricity Facts. www.nrcan.gc.ca./electricity-facts/20068. 10 Gabbatiss, “New National Record”; Stastica, “Total Installed Wind Power”; Reuters, “Nuclear” and “France’s Macron.” 11 Indian Wind Energy Association, World Economic Forum, “Indian State”; Stacey, “India” and “Pakistan.” Pakistan has a population of nearly 200 million. 12 “Solar” is often referred to as “solar photovoltaics” or pvs. See International Renewable Energy Agency (irena), “Solar Photovoltaics.” 13 Helm, Burn Out, 68. 14 In Dublin the sun shines on average some 1,424 hours per annum; in Alicante, Spain it is double that at 2,864 hours. 15 Helm, Burn Out, 70; irena, “Solar Photovoltaics.” 16 Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (ieefa) Report, “Advances.” 17 California Energy Commission, “California”; Dillon, “California.” By comparison, Shell, hitherto nominated as a major climate change perpetrator, has announced that it intends to half its footprint by 2050 (Raval and Mooney, “Money”). 18 Government of Canada, “Renewable.” Canada’s hydroelectric capacity was 80,859 megawatts in 2016. Canada produced 2 per cent of the world’s wind power in 2017; UK 3 per cent, China 35 per cent. 19 Wood Mackenzie, “New scenario.” 20 United States Department of Energy, “Nuclear Power.” For advocacy,

Notes to pages 137–44

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23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31

32 33

34 35

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see also Brown, “Nuclear Power” and more recently Thompson, “Nuclear Energy.” Watt, “Hinkley Point.” Windscale was used not for power generation but to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs, which the British government still assumes are essential to great power status. Ward, “Nuclear’s Hazards.” Ibid. Bloomberg, “New Energy.” Chung, “Next Wave”; World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear Power.” Reuters, “World News.” The American firm Westinghouse, a leading nuclear services firm that had been negotiating for years to sell nuclear reactors to India, was bought by Toshiba, which in turn sold it to Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management in August 2018 for $4.6 billion. Brookfield’s website (Brookfield, https://www.brook field.com) claiming to be “alternative” and immodest about its investments in renewable power, is silent about this. In contrast, it does mention its investments in wind and solar in India as well as coal exports from Australia. Butler, “Chinese Technology.” Yakabuski, “Muskrat Falls.” Lorinc, “Trump’s Rejection.” Voegele, “Zooshare.” Vettese, “Freeze,” 82–4. As a practiced alternative, Vettese reminds us of Cuba during the Special Period of the 1980s after aid from the Soviet Union had been withdrawn (84–5); Carrington, “Cheap Food” refers to the Countryside Commission. Mann, Wizard, 337–8, 342; Canadian Press, “Saskatchewan Government”; Saxon, “CO2.” Flannery, Atmosphere, 156. The Arbor Environmental Alliance claims that an acre of trees absorbs enough CO2 in a year to equal the amount produced by driving a car 26,000 miles (42,000 km). Arbor, “Carbon.” Vettese, “Freeze,” 77. A major source here is Vaclav Smil, Harvesting the Biosphere. Sanderson, “Coal Industry.” The coal lobby group is called “Coal 21” and is backed by the major firms in the Australian industry such as bhp Anglo-American, and Glencore.

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36 Adam, “Extreme and Risky.” 37 Krauss, “Blamed”; Adam, “Extreme and Risky”; Milulka, “Risky Distraction”; Berners-Lee (No Planet B, 224–5) describes “solar radiation management” which involves spraying sulphate into the atmosphere in order to reflect sunlight. 38 Economist, “Power.” 39 Uncritical discussion of pumping sulphur into the stratosphere via long hoses is entertained in Levitt and Dubner, Super Freakonomics, chapter 5. The attitude of levity in their arguments reduces the seriousness with which they might be taken. 40 There are nearly four litres in a US liquid gallon. 41 Wagner and Weitzman, Climate Shock, 98, 135. 42 Ambrose, “Flights.” 43 QS Energy, “US Military.” 44 Piketty, “Bankers,” 44–7. Piketty has taken a number of outspoken positions, many of them, like his book title Why Save the Bankers?, as stimulating as they are heterodox. Mortillaro (“What is Carbon Tax”) puts the question usefully in a Canadian context. 45 Canadian Press, “5 Things”; Fenton, “Trudeau’ Carbon Price.” 46 For the positions on carbon pricing of Canadian provinces, Tasker, “Carbon Prices.” 47 This calculation based on estimates for the US is from Wagner and Weitzman, Climate Shock, 21–2. 48 For Australia, Smyth, “Australia Rejects.” 49 New York Times, editorial board, “Midterm Climate Report”; Bernton, “Washington State.” 50 Buchanan, “Need to Know.” 51 Ibid.; Vettese, “Freeze,” 69–70. For the ExxonMobil estimate, Lamb and Litterman, “Tell the Truth.” For a negative view of California’s cap-and-trade program, Bland, “Jerry Brown.” Note the role of industry lobbyists in dictating the terms of the program. 52 Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan, 103. 53 Fuhr,” Radical Realism.” 54 Nordhaus, Climate Casino, 115. 55 For Canada and natural gas advocacy, Wilt, “Canada”; for clean energy undercutting the costs of natural gas, Roberts, “Clean Energy.” 56 For praise for Shell, Reed “Shell Spreads Its Bets” and Helm, Burn

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Out, 197, argues that “fossil fuel industries are doomed in the long run” but that “[m]ost [major oil companies] forecast demand growth for all the fossil fuels through to mid-century at the earliest [my italics]. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (Maugauber and Doherty, “Three Shifts”) predicts that global demand for oil and gas will hardly diminish between 2019 and 2040. Helm also mentions (190) what he calls “the great Shell reporting scandal in the 1990s,” referring to Shell’s exaggerations about its accessible oil reserves and makes the point that “[t]he temptation for any chief executive and finance director has always been to tell investors a good story.” Is the move to clean energy just another self-promoting greenwashing yarn, then? George Monbiot in The Guardian (“Shell is a Planetary Death Machine”). Anjli Raval (“Oil Majors”) points out that while in 2018 fossil fuel use had continued to rise, in reality only a very small amount of money allocated by Shell to R&D – some 10 per cent – has been put aside for green energy projects. Other oil multinationals have allocated even less.

chapter nine 1 Carrington, “Climate-heating.” 2 For origins, Kaufman, “Green New Deal.” The gnd was popularized in 2017 by the American socialists Bernie Saunders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and introduced in the US Congress on 7 February 2019. For the gnd, Roberts, “Green New Deal” and Klein, On. xr is discussed, perhaps surprisingly, in the Financial Times, the Anglophone world’s leading business newspaper (Green, “Extinction Rebellion”) and in Vice by Emily Goddard (“Climate Action Group”) who mentions xr’s apocalyptic vision. For the Green surge in European politics, Sandbu, “Green Surge” and Graham-Harrison, “Green Wall.” 3 For the influence of the 1930s New Deal on the Green New Deal and the criticisms of liberal Democrats, Baker, “New World.” 4 Goddard, “British Climate Action Group.” 5 For an abstract of Bendell’s paper, see “Deep Adaption.” 6 Mallet and Keohane, “Yannick Madot.” 7 The heads of banks, too, but not the leaders of the reinsurance

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14 15 16

17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24

Notes to pages 156–62

industry who have a great deal to lose from the devastations wrought by climate change. Hertsgaard, “Jerry Brown.” Pierre-Louis, “Greenhouse Gas.” In May 2019, greenhouse gas emissions exceeded 415 parts per million (ppm). Livingston, “12 Wettest Months”; Hoffman, “Rising Insurance Costs.” See above, Das Auto. Straits Times, “Australian Gov’t.” For developments, Smee, “Carmichael.” Smyth and Hume, “Australian Coal Industry.” bbc News, “Adani.” Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto is one of the world’s largest mining multinationals. Pierre-Louis, “California.” Ward and Brownlee, Rare Earth, ix. In 2005 one leading light in the industry noted that peak oil had been predicted thirty-six times between 1972 and 2004 (O’Sullivan, Windfall, 44). Semeniuk, “Profound Change”; McKie, “Crunch Point”; McKibben, “Grim Forecast.” Butler, “Climate Denial.” Fabians are intellectual reformists within the British left. indc stands for “Intended National Determined Contributions,” an acronym conceived at the 2015 Paris conference for the promises made by countries regarding climate remediation. Levin and Fransen, “indc Studies.” The normal deadline for indc undertakings is 2030. Jean Jouzel is quoted in Rubin, “Scorching Summer.” This article mentions temperatures in Europe being pushed toward “120 degrees” (Fahrenheit), that is, 49°C. “[I]t is still believed that no multicellular organisms (such as animals or complex plants) can tolerate temperatures above 50°C” (Ward and Brownlee, Rare Earth, 4). Deutsche Welle, the German bbc, cautions moderately: “Earth on track toward 2 degree global warming …” Fountain, “California Is Preparing” and “Warming California.” Fountain, “California Is Preparing.” Kuper, “Emission Impossible?” The largest contributor was bp, the champion greenwasher, which spent $11.6 million. The next largest contributor was Phillips 66

Notes to pages 163–6

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33

34

35

36 37

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which contributed $7.2 million. Lavelle, “Big Oil” and “Oil Firms”; Yoder, “Big Oil.” The windfall of tight oil in strengthening America’s power is the theme of O’Sullivan (Windfall). Maclay, “Climate Change”; Frangoul, “imf’s Lagarde.” Statista, “Historical Carbon Dioxide”; Wood Mackenzie, “2-degree World Out of Reach.” Wagner and Weitzman, Climate Shock, 56; Palma, “Singapore.” Walsh, “Seige.” Reguly, “Climate change”; Wood Mackenzie, “2 degree world.” The basis for this summary is Robert Manne’s “Dark Victory.” The influence on Americans is mentioned on 15. The Nation lists a dozen of the worst climate change villains: Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, 21st Century Fox (Fox News and The Wall Street Journal), the Republican Party, the US Chamber of Commerce, Berkshire Hathaway, Chevron, Shell, Duke Energy, Southern Company, bp, American Electric Power, and General Electric. (Mark, “Climate-Wrecking Industries,” 15). Gutstein, Big Stall. Nordhaus, Climate Casino, 34. Comment on his Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (dice) model may be found in Wagner and Weitzman, Climate Shock, 57. Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan, 107. For a survey of global carbon pricing, compiled in 2014 but updated in 2017, Eberhard, “Carbon Pricing Systems.” For the Bank of Canada see Timothy Lane, the deputy governor, who began a speech in early March 2017 with, “It is my privilege to speak to you about the economic implications of climate change – one of the biggest challenges facing Canada and the world in the 21st century” (Bank of Canada, “Thermometer Rising”). Goldman Sachs, “Goldman Sachs Environmental Policy Framework” and “Environmental Stewardship.” Mike Davis (“Ark,” 48) foresaw investment in safe refuges for the globe’s top economic decile when he wrote that it was not improbable that climate change mitigation would be tacitly abandoned “in favour of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for earth’s first-class passengers.” So everyone in the top few percentiles might

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Notes to pages 167–79

move uphill to Davos, Vail, and Banff, all ringed by paramilitaries overflown by drones. Davies writes (ibid.): “[W]ill the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted epicentres of drought and desertification – the Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia and Pakistan?” Lanchester’s The Wall (2018) is about a wall built around Britain to keep climate change refugees out. By 2030 there will be as many as 1.5 billion people on earth, most of them crowded into slums, many of them on the migrants’s road. Editorial board, “California”; Thomson, “Sunshine State.” Weaver, “Environmental Damage.” Tooze, “Central Banks.” Rubin, “Scorching Summer.” MacIntyre, Only Café, 149.

chronology 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

Vogel, California, 173–5. Nuccilelli, “Scientists warned”; Taft, Deep State, 14. Heilbroner, Twenty-First Century, 114. Taft, Deep State, 53. Oreskes and Conway, Doubt, 67. Taft, Deep State, 52. Coll, Private Empire, 81, 535. Malm, Progress, 193. The Sun tv commentator Ezra Levant published Ethical Oil, on which the Harper government relied for its environmental strategy. “[Ethical Oil] was an absurd proposition that was dead on arrival in any place where citizens still had a critical-thinking capacity and scientists were not under the government’s thumb” (Harris, Party, 220). Harris, Party, 219–20. Elizabeth May was elected as a Green in Canada’s October 2015 federal election. Klein, Everything, 15. Quoted in Klein, Ibid., 12–13. Klein, Everything, 24 and n31, 470. Manne, “Dark Victory,” 15.

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15 Neuman and Bruce, reporting from the Warsaw conference, in “Canadian Opinion”; Lukacs, “Revealed,” for tar sands advocacy. 16 McKibben, “New Math.” 17 Milman, “Tipping Point.” 18 US eia “Short Term.” 19 For Monbiot and other critics, Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan, 35–6. For the 1/20 argument, Rich, “Losing Earth”; Jaccard, “Trudeau’s Orwellian Logic” for the increase in the output from Alberta’s tar sands. 20 Belot, “Pipelines”; McCarthy and Lewis, “Court Overturns.” 21 Austen and Krauss, “Trudeau.” They referred to the need to balance the needs of capital (“investor confidence”) and the future of Liberal votes in bc as well as other provinces. There was no likelihood of gaining Liberal votes in Alberta; Gillis, “Justin Trudeau.” 22 Naughton, “Car.” 23 Nagourney and Bigood, “In Houston.” 24 Hana Jacover of Oregon, letter, in Wartik, “Lungs.” 25 Editorial, New York Times, “Warming World”; Deutsche Welte, “Earth on Track.” 26 Carrington, “Tobacco.” 27 Friedman and Plumer, “What Happened.” 28 Carney, “Carney warns.” 29 Pierre-Louis, “California.” 30 Clancy, “Dire Differential.” 31 Kiladze, “Oil Sands.” Western Canada Select (wcs) fell to below $20 a barrel in December 2018. In mid-March 2019, it was at $48.47. wti Crude was at $58.58. 32 Stevenson, “Tens of Thousands.” The origin of this slogan is discussed by Berners-Lee. 33 Hertsgaard, “Climate Kids”; Taylor and Gayle, “Extinction rebellion”; Cavendish, “Climate Change Protesters.”

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Bibliography

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Index

Abadan, 21, 23, 24 Acid Rain Precipitation Act (US, 1980), 173 acidification (acid rain), 107, 172–4 Adani, Gautam, 14, 158 Aframax, 207 Alberta, 14, 32–51 Alberta Energy Regulator, 50 American Petroleum Institute, 173–4 amine scrubbing, 141–2 Anglo-Dutch Shell, see Shell Oil Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (aioc), see Anglo-Persian Oil Company (apoc) Anglo-Persian Oil Company (apoc), 21, 23, 217n8; see also Anglo-Iranian Oil company (aioc), British Petroleum (bp) Antarctic, 100 Arab-Israeli war (1973), 172 Aramco, see Saudi Aramco Arctic, 91–2, 99–101 Arctic Sea, 100

Arrhenius, Svante, 4 Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (amoc), 6 atrazine, 122, 185 Australia, 90, 157–8, 177 automobile imports, into US, 25 Azerbaijan, 20 Baghdad, 23 Bakken shales, 40–1 Baku, 20, 22 Ballard, J.G., 4 Bangladesh, 109 Basra, 67 Bates, David, 115–16 batteries, 131 Beetle, see Volkswagen benzene, 44 Belt and Road, 13 bioenergy, see biofuel, biomass biofuel, 51, 105n175, 111–12 biomass, 140–41 bitumen, 38–9 Bonn Climate Change Talks (cop 23), 185

298

Index

British Petroleum (bp), 76, 162, 187. See also Anglo-Persian Oil Company (apoc) Brown, Gerry, 135, 156 Bruntland report, 174 Bush, George H.W., 175 Bush, George W., 30, 77, 125, 175 Cadillac, 60 California, 68–9, 97–8, 135–6, 158–9, 166–7 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), 85 cap-and-trade, 149–50, 166 Cap and Trade Cancellation Act (Ontario), 149–50 carbon capture and storage (ccs), 141–2 carbon dioxide (CO2), 4, 7, 8, 11, 52, 78, 88, 124 carbon pricing, 146–8, 157, 163, 165 carbon tax, 147–8 carbon tax (bc), 177 Carney, Mark, 12 n49, 166–7, 180, 185, 167 Carson, Rachel, 116–18 Cato Institute, 203–4n26 Charney Report (US, 1979), 6, 173 Cheney, Richard, 77 Chernobyl, 109 Chevrolet (incl. Bolt), 43, 54 Chevron, 9 China National Petroleum Corporation (cnpc), 19 Citroen, 55, 59 Clean Air Act (Canada), 33

Clean Air Act (UK), 11, 171 Clean Air Act, (US), 117, 171 Clean Air Act Extensions (US) 84, 117, 122, 175 Clean Power Plan, 111 Clean Power Act, 92, 181 Clean Water Act (Canada), 33 clean energy (see solar power, wind power) Climate Action Partnership, 73 climate change, 172 climate change conferences, see Conference of Parties Club of Rome. Limits to Growth (1972), 89, 118 Climate Action Partnership, 56 climate change (incl. ban on use of term), 3, 80 Clinton, Bill, 23 coal, 10–12, 16–17, 147 cod, 27, 33 Colborn, Theo, 91 commodities super cycle, 25, 28 Communities United Against the Dirty Energy Proposition, 53 Conference of Parties (cop), 12, 87, 182, 185, 187, 210n71 Copenhagen conference, 124 Congress on the Human Environment, 121 Climate Change Plan (Canada), 49 Club of Rome, 119 Conoco-Phillips, 114 cop 23 (un Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2017), 185

Index

cyclones, Bhola, Sidr, 118, 176 Deepwater Horizon, 38, 123, 177 deforestation, 99 Denmark, 105, 132 Detroit, 42, 43 diesel, 50, 64–5 Dieselgate, 62, 65, 68, 214n32 drought, 114 Earth Day (US, 1970), 6, 118–19 East China Sea (oil spill), 37 Eisenhower, President Dwight D., 84 electric vehicles (evs), 8, 70–1 Enbridge pipeline, 179 Endangered Species Act (US, 1973) 117, 172 Energiewende, 11 Energy Efficiency Act (Canada), 120 End of Nature, 119 energy regulator, Alberta, 50 Environmental Protection Agency (epa), (US, 1970), 56, 57, 80, 117, 120, 165, 172 Environmental Protection Act (Canada), 175 Ethyl Corporation, see tetraethel lead Extinction Rebellion (xr), 155 Exxon (after 1999, ExxonMobil), 56 ExxonMobil, 19, 23, 28, 74–8, 82, 175 Exxon Valdez, 3, 31, 32, 57 famine, 111

299

flooding, 108 Florida, 167 Ford, Henry, 53–4 Ford Motor Co., 53-58. Fort McMurray 37, 38, 43, 50, 98, 150–1, 182 Fourth National Climate Assessment (nca4), 7 fracking, 28, 31, 41 France, solar and nuclear power, 95 Fraser Institute, 84 Friends of the Earth (US, 1970), 133 Fukushima Dagshi, 64, 109 gas, see natural gas, 2 gas consumption, automobile, Canadian, 192 General Motors (gm), 44, 46 geoengineering, 143–4, 151 Global Climate Coalition (1989), 74 Global Warming Solutions Act (California, 2006), 176 Gore, Albert, 11, 78, 123, 185 Great Barrier Reef, 13, 14, 107, 158 Great Moderation, 23 Great Recession (2008), 176 Great Smog, 1952, 11, 13, 115 Green Party (Canada), 46, 147, 173, 178, 186, 187, 188, 230n20 Green parties, 154, 156 greenhouse gases, 5, 91, 154 Greenland, 100–1 Green New Deal, 154, 187 Greenpeace, 120, 172

300

Index

greenwashing, 110, 114 groundwater depletion, 17–18 Gulf of Alaska, 58 Gulf, of Persian, 28–30 Gulf Stream, 101–2 Haig-Brown, Roderick, 90 Halifax, 105 Hansen, James, 5,7, 73, 125, 174, 179 Harper, Stephen, 33–4, 42, 179 Haryana, 17 Heritage Savings Trust Fund (Alberta), see Sovereign Wealth Funds Hinkley Point (UK), 9 Honda, 25 Houston, 108 humidex, 70 hurricanes (Florence, Harvey, Hugo, Ida, Irma, Katrina, Maria, Matthew, Michael, Sandy) 9, 102, 104, 105, 108, 124, 125, 145, 176, 184 hydro power, 139 hydro power (Canada), 136 Hydro Quebec Research Institute, (ireq), 94, 133 Inconvenient Truth, An, 78, 123, 218n17 India, 16–17 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc), 7, 69, 75, 91, 104, 110, 122, 174 internal combustion engine (ice), 8, 53, 55

International Energy Agency (iae), 71, 160, 185 International Technical Conference on the Protection of Nature, (itcpn), 116 Iran, 20, 24 Iraqi Petroleum Company (ipc), 24 Johnson, President Lyndon B., 84 Joplin, Janis, sings “Mercedes Benz,” 60 Katowice un climate change conference, (cop 24) 87, 187 Keating, Charles David, 121 Keystone xl pipeline, 41, 47 Kinder Morgan pipeline, 44, 186, 189 Koch brothers, industries, 36–7 Kuwait, 19 Kyoto Climate Change Agreement, 123, 125, 178; Canada’s withdrawal from (2012), 34 Lac Mégantic, 41 La Cour, Poul, 132 Lawson, Nigel, 81 lead, see tetraethel lead Liberal Party (Australia), 14 liquid natural gas (lng) (Kitimat), 206–40 London, 11, 90 Los Angeles, 54, 69 Luntz, Frank, 82

Index

Mackenzie King, William Lyon, 27, 202n19 Maharashtra, 18 managed transition, 45 Manchester, 10, 54, 58 Mandates, 20 Mauna Loa, 188 May, Elizabeth, 34, 46, 178 Media Matters, 84 Mendocino, see California Merkel, Angela, 49 Mercedes Benz, 62 methane, 99 methyl tert-butyl ether (mtbe), 56 McLaughlin Motor Car Co., 55 Miami (incl. Miami Beach), 102–5 Micronesia, 106 Middle East, oil from, 29–31 Model T (Ford), 54 Montreal, 91, 160, 188 Mossadeq, Muhammed, 20 Motor Vehicle Fuel Consumption Standards Act (Canada), 120 Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Act (US), 120 Mouna Loa, 121, 188 Nasser, Abdel Gamal, 21 National Climate Assessment (Fourth), 89 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa), 163 national oil companies (nocs), 20, 25 National Public Radio (npr), 85 National Research Council of Canada (nrc), 94

301

National Atmospheric and Space Agency (nasa), 99 National Climate Assessment, 89 National Research Council of Canada (nrc), 133 National Snow and Ice Data Centre (nsidc), 100 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa), 70, 75 National Wind Technology Centre, 132 natural gas, 152 Nawabshah, 93 Nelson, Gaylord, 118 Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, 91 Network for Greening the Financial System (ngfs), 167 New Orleans, 105 New York, 11, 66, 75, 77 Nigeria, 38n52, 110, 175, 178 Nixon, Richard, 117, 172 NO2 (nitrous oxide), 62, 64, 66 Northwest Territories, 72 Nordhaus, William, 103, 109 Northern Gateway Pipeline, 182 Notley, Rachel, 185 Nova Scotia, 77 Nuclear power, 137, 139 Obama, President Barak, 19, 60, 89, 90 ocean acidification, 107 Organization for Economic CoOperation and Development (oecd), 56

302

oil sands (Alberta), 37–9 oil spill, 47 oil sands, 379, 42, 120 Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, 9 Ontario, 14, 157. Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, 51 Opel, 46 Operation Desert Storm, 175 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec), 24, 25, 26, 30–2, 61, 71, 198n8, 199n12, 201n11 Paris Climate Change Agreement (cop 21), 12, 88 particulate pollution, 69 Pine Bend refinery, 36, 51 pipelines: Keystone xl, Trans Mountain, bp in Alaska, 38–40, 63 Plass, Gilbert, 114 Pruitt, Scott, 80 Punjab, 17 Pure Air Act (California, 1968), 172 Qatar, 29. Quebec, cap-and-trade, 180 Queensland, 14 railway tankers, 206n42 Raymond, Lee, 77, 175, 182 reforestation, 142–3 Reagan, Ronald, 87, 119 reefs, 107 Reform Party, 33

Index

Reinsurers, (Munich Re, Swiss Re, Lloyds), 124 renewables, 130–6 Rio de Janeiro, Earth Conference, 175 rising seas, 102–6 Rockefeller, John D., 22 Rome, 68 rubber, 4, 20, 57 Russia, 11, 13, 16, 20, 28, 62, 76, 102, 138, 139, 140, 143, 200n5, 216n1 Saskatchewan, 11, 35, 99 Saudi Aramco, 23, 25 Sea Shepherd Society, 230n20 sequestration, 141 shale gas and oil, 32, 40 Shell Oil, 19, 78, 153 Sierra Club, 68, 113, 147 Silent Spring, see Carson, Rachel Sinopec, 25 solar power, 130–1, 134–6 Southeast Asia, 72 South Africa, 81, 82 sovereign wealth funds, 39 Standard Oil, 28 Statoil, 201 Stern, Nicholas, The Stern Review, 78–82, 109, 154, 176, 218n19, 227n78 Stockholm Environmental Institute, 87 stranded assets, 127, 167 Strong, Maurice, 32, 122, 175 sustainable development, 174 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 22–3

Index

tailing ponds, 38 tar sands, see oil sands Tamil Nadu, 95, 113 Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, 168 Tesla, 71, 183–4 tetraethel lead (tel), 55–6 Texas, 28 thermohalene circulation/ currents, (thc), 6, 101 tight oil, 163 Tillerson, Rex, 77 Toronto, 79–80, 91 Torrey Canyon, 172 Toyota, 25 Trabant (Trabi), 12, 60 Trans Mountain pipeline (tmx), 44, 49–50, 183, 186 travel, air, 145–6 trees, planting, 158, 161, 165 Trudeau, Justin, prime minister, 44–5, 48 Trudeau, P.E., prime minister, 183 Trump, President Donald, 80 Typhoon Haiyan, 180 Typhoon Mangkhut, 9 Tyvind windmill, 105 United Kingdom (UK), 95

un Climate Change Conference (Copenhagen, 2019), see Copenhagen un Convention to Prevent Desertification (uncpd), 27

303

un Environment Programme (unep), 32 un Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources (unsccur), 32, 116 un Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference (unfccc), see Conference of the Parties (cop) US Energy Information Administration (eia), 127 Vancouver, 187 Vietnam, 11 Volkswagen (vw), 25, 50, 59, 61, 62, 66–7, 181 Washington (state) carbon tax initiative, 148–9 Western Canada Select (wcs), 35, 45 Westridge Marine Terminal, 207n56 West Texas Intermediate (wti), 39, 59 Wilderness Act (US, 1964), 85, 118, 120 Wildfires, 96–9 Wind power, 130–4 World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere (Canada, 1988), 174

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Index to pages 000–000