Climate complacency is killing us

Americans remain remarkably passive while the fossil energy industry steals our quality of life and prospects for the future. It’s happening in plain sight and with our full cooperation. Heat waves, floods, tornadoes, drought and other deadly weather assault us.

But rich and poor families alike are willingly paying big oil and gas companies billions in profits to produce the fuels that cause global warming.

In 2021, scientists concluded that the “vast majority” of the world’s proven fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground to have a 50 percent chance of preventing catastrophic climate change. And yet, the U.S. remains the world’s largest oil and gas producer, and the Biden administration is encouraging the industry to produce more.

“My administration has not stopped or slowed U.S. oil production; quite the opposite,” President Biden boasted last fall. “We’re producing 12 million barrels of oil per day. And by the end of this year, we will be producing 1 million barrels a day, more than the day in which I took office. In fact, we’re on track for record oil production in 2023.”

How does the president reconcile this with his administration’s goal to be carbon-neutral in 2050? Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm points out that even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects the world to still use fossil fuels in 2050. The administration wants these to be “abated fossil fuels” — in other words, decarbonized.

Unfortunately, there is no commercially viable way to remove carbon dioxide from the fossil fuels burned by power plants and factories. There is no market-ready technology to take CO2 pollution directly from the air. Climate change has reached so critical an inflection point that we can’t wait for speculative technical fixes.

Several oil and gas companies plan to pay others to reduce emissions – an arrangement called carbon offsets – but problems “pervade every major offset program,” according to Joseph Romm, a former U.S. Department of Energy official. He points out that there is no reliable substitute for polluters eliminating their own emissions, and for rich countries to help less developed countries do the same.

The president wants fossil fuel companies to diversify into renewable energy, Granholm explained. “We’re hoping that will happen…We would love to see (some of their profits) invested in diversifying their energy portfolios.”

But are hopes and incentives sufficient? The major oil companies earned record profits last year, but they used the money to increase shareholder earnings and buy back their own stock to raise its value. Granholm points out that the oil and gas industries have many of the skills to get involved in wind, solar and geothermal energy but show little interest or urgency in doing so.

Instead, several major oil companies have pulled back on plans to invest in renewables. Analysts question how sincere the companies are about joining the energy transition. Greenwashing is common. Some companies include natural gas in their green energy plans, although it is a fossil fuel with significant methane leaks in its infrastructure.

Four U.S. senators recently urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to take legal action against the fossil fuel industry “over its deliberate efforts to mislead consumers and discredit climate science in pursuit of massive profits.”

At last count, 26 U.S. states and municipalities have sued major oil companies for damages attributed to climate change. Some leading scientists say we can avoid catastrophic climate change only by taking extraordinary steps like dimming the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface.

Meantime, PBS News Hour reports that Republican presidential candidates have so far avoided talking about climate change on the campaign trail. Former President Trump apparently has not changed his view that climate change is a “hoax.” Some conservative groups have prepared a plan for the next Republican president to reverse the gains that the federal government has made in fighting climate change.

The adverse consequences of climate change are evident worldwide and escalating more rapidly than scientists predicted. There is no political movement sufficient to force government leaders to regulate CO2 pollution and price carbon, or even to develop a schedule for retiring fossil fuels from the economy.

Recent polling suggests that 68 percent of voters say the country should keep fossil fuels in its energy mix. And although solar and wind power are now less expensive than fossil fuels, 44 percent believe consumer prices would increase in an energy transition.

Climate change is not an inherently partisan matter. It is as damaging to the lives of Republicans as Democrats. But the fossil energy sector and its Republican supporters have contrived over the decades to make it a wedge issue. Only 23 percent of Republicans view climate change as a major threat, compared to 78 percent of Democrats.

Meantime, federal climate scientists report that billion-dollar weather disasters in the United States have increased from one every four months in the 1980s to one every three weeks today; the U.S. is experiencing some of the planet’s most severe sea-level rise; and all states except Alaska are warming two-thirds faster than the planet as a whole.

What should people be doing? We can take advantage of the clean-energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, but we should also be politically active. We should not elect any public official who denies climate change or remains on the sidelines of the debate.

Climate change is not only a matter of political urgency; it’s also a matter of life and death. Between 2015 and 2021, weather-related deaths in the United States rose 17 percent. In 2021 alone, more than 60,000 weather events killed 974 people and injured another 1,700. We can expect the fatalities to grow rapidly.

But amid the sweltering summer of 2023 and another presidential election season, we are still allowing complacency to kill us.

William S. Becker is co-editor and a contributor to “Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People,” a collection of more than 30 essays by American thought leaders on topics such as the Supreme Court’s perceived legitimacy. Becker has served in several state and federal government roles, including executive assistant to the attorney general of Wisconsin. He is currently executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP), a nonpartisan climate policy think tank unaffiliated with the White House.