Bridging Peak Oil and Climate Change Activism

silverharp

http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/177

It's a long article but I have posted the conclusion below. As someone who follows Peak Oil more closely, I have wondered why PO does dot feature more in the global warming debate.


Conclusion

Common Ground

As we have seen, there are understandable reasons for some climate activists to ignore the arguments and priorities of depletionists, and vice versa. Dealing with only one of the two problems is much easier than confronting both. But our goal must be to deal with reality (rather than merely our preferred image of reality), and reality is complicated. Our world faces the interacting impacts not only of Peak Oil and Climate Change, but also of water scarcity, overpopulation, over-fishing, chemical pollution, and war (among others). In the end, there are too many of us using too much too fast, while competing for dwindling resources.

What would it take to solve all of these problems at once? A good start would be to require a global across-the-board 5 percent per year reduction in fossil fuel consumption and the provision of substantial financial and technical aid by industrialized nations to less-industrialized nations in creating a renewable energy infrastructure. But to the patient (the primary fossil fuel users) this medicine might seem worse than the disease. A grand plan like this has almost no chance of gaining political backing.

Realistically, we are left with the customary policy tools aimed to ameliorate the world’s ills piecemeal: emissions and depletion protocols, tradable quotas, emissions rights, import and export quotas, carbon taxes, and cap-and-trade mechanisms.

Thus for practical reasons it is probably inevitable that emissions and depletion activists will continue to pursue their separate policy goals. But it makes sense for the two groups to be informed by one another, and to cooperate wherever possible.

It is fairly obvious why such cooperation would benefit the depletionists: Climate Change is already a subject of considerable international concern and action, whereas Peak Oil is still a relatively new topic of discussion.

But how would such cooperation aid emissions activists?

In a word: motivation. As discussed earlier, emissions activists appeal to an ethical impulse to avert future harm to the environment and human society, while the Peak Oil issue appeals to a more immediate concern for self-preservation. In extreme circumstances, the latter is unquestionably the stronger motive. Strong motivation will certainly be required in order for the people of the world to undertake the enormous personal and social sacrifices required in order to quickly and dramatically reduce their fossil fuel dependency. Sustainability and equity are issues that are hard enough to campaign on in times of prosperity; when families and nations are struggling to maintain themselves due to fuel shortages and soaring prices, only a mobilization of public support through massive education and persuasion campaigns could possibly summon the needed support.

Taken together, Climate Change and Peak Oil make a nearly air-tight argument. We should reduce our dependency on fossil fuels for the sake of future generations and the rest of the biosphere; but even if we choose not to do so because of the costs involved, the most important of those fossil fuels will soon become more scarce and expensive anyway, so complacency is simply not an option.

What would cooperation between the two groups look like? It would help, first of all, for activists on one issue to spend more time studying the literature of the other, and for both groups to arrange meetings and conferences where the intersections of the two issues can be further explored.

Both groups could work together more explicitly to promote proactive, policy-driven reductions in fossil fuel consumption.

Climate activists could start using depletion arguments and data in tandem with their ongoing discussions of ice cores and melting glaciers, but to do so they would need to stop taking unrealistically robust resource estimates at face value.

For their part, depletionists—if they are to take advantage of increased collaboration with emissions activists—must better familiarize themselves with climate science, so that their Peak Oil mitigation proposals are ones that lead to a reduction rather than an increase of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Perhaps, for both groups, with a stronger potential for motivating the public will come the courage to tell a truth that few policy makers want to hear: energy efficiency and curtailment will almost certainly have to be the world’s dominant responses to both issues.