This is a guest post by Chris Vernon, who is based in the UK where he edits the European edition of The Oil Drum, a popular weblog hosting discussions about energy and our future. This post is based on an article first published at The Oil Drum.
The key objective in the face of climate change is to reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuel. Certainly there are other aspects, it would be useful not to cut down forests for example and there are other greenhouse gasses but for this analysis we’ll focus on fossil fuels and CO2.
The entire debate when it comes to fossil fuels and climate change is focused on demand, the consumption of fossil fuels and the resultant emissions. This is not the only approach. Here I propose a supply-side approach that totally ignores emissions but instead focuses on the extraction of fossil fuels from the ground.
Last month I was at an event where George Monbiot (www.monbiot.com), the environmentalist writer for The Guardian newspaper and energetic campaigner on climate change gave a speech. The speeches and Q&A sessions were interesting enough but as the event wore on I grew more and more uneasy as it dawned on me that the
speakers and several hundred people in the room were missing what seemed to me to be the key issue.
People were only talking about demand. About aviation expansion, food miles, road construction, China’s coal power stations etc.. This created an unwieldy monster with 6.5 billion individuals and millions of corporate and government stakeholders. The way forward seemed impossible.
This observation characterises the whole climate change debate – it only considers demand. The solution is identified as behavioural and technological change delivering reduced demand and resulting emissions. The Kyoto Protocol, whilst its objective is:
“stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”
…attempts to achieve this by signatories all reducing their emissions by agreed percentages. The language of the climate change debate is emissions, national and per person. Carbon trading and offsetting is presented as a way of using the market to achieve cost effective emission reductions.
I think there are problems with such a demand focused approach.
Let’s go back to first principles. Climate change is largely caused by increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. This comes about from the combustion of carbon rich fossil fuels pumped or mined from the Earth. To be successful, any action that hopes to reduce the atmospheric CO2 concentration from what it would otherwise have been must result in reduced fossil fuel extraction from the Earth (one exception to this rule is post-combustion sequestration). When considering action the following simple test should always be applied:
- Will considered action leave fossil fuels in the ground that would otherwise be extracted?
This seems blindingly obvious however I don’t see anyone asking or evaluating this question, certainly nobody did in the meeting last month. When I started looking at this I realised it was not at all obvious that the current approaches to climate change would pass that test. The difficulty is that the relationship between demand and supply is anything but absolute.
