Goals for Ending the Climate Emergency: A Letter to My Friends
By Peter Montague, SEHN Fellow
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” –Yogi Berra
President Biden’s climate plan aims for “net zero by 2050,” which means every ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted into the air will be canceled out by a ton removed from the air. If the plan succeeded, we wouldn’t be adding any CO2 to the atmosphere after 2050. Many other countries share the “net zero by 2050” goal, as do many large corporations. On the other hand, many environmentalists call, instead, for “real zero”—true zero emissions from fossil fuels, requiring no removals.
If they work as advertised, will “net zero” or “real zero” by 2050 stabilize the climate? Unfortunately, no. Not at all.
What is causing climate instability? It is the legacy CO2 that humans have pumped into the atmosphere since 1750. As James Hansen has said, “CO2 is the principal determinant of the Earth’s climate state, the radiative ‘control knob’ that sets global temperature.”
In round numbers, since 1750 humans have added one trillion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. (See the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, Table 5.1, pg. 699.) According to NASA, even if we humans cease all new emissions, those trillion tons of CO2 will remain in the air for somewhere between 300 and 1000 years, keeping the Earth dangerously warm, melting glaciers, eliminating ice from the Arctic, the Antarctic and Greenland, continually raising the sea level, causing new floods, droughts, crop failures, massive wildfires, larger and more frequent storms, the death of forests, heat waves that make working outdoors dangerous or impossible with temperatures reaching 125°F in places like the Middle East, North Africa, the American South, Southwest and Midwest, causing mass migrations of a billion or more people seeking food, water, and cooler temperatures, naturally creating conflict… all together imposing the cruelest harm on the people who are least responsible for creating the problem. In short, a colossal injustice.
Worse, there is a real (though not yet quantifiable) probability that continued elevated global temperatures will initiate one or more “tipping points”—meaning a series of events that cause global heating to become self-reinforcing, a positive feedback loop running beyond human control. One such “tipping point” might entail melting of permafrost in the Arctic and Antarctic, releasing billions of tons of methane gas and CO2, causing further warming, melting more permafrost, causing further warming—an unstoppable, self-reinforcing doom loop. Permafrost holds twice as much carbon as the atmosphere presently holds and it has already started to melt.
According to the 2023 report from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), to avoid catastrophic and irreversible damage from climate change, we must cut global carbon emissions 45 percent by 2030 and fully by 2050. Given that emissions are presently rising year after year, this is a daunting prospect.
In addition, to return the climate to stable conditions sooner than 300 to 1000 years, we will have to remove the trillion tons of CO2 that are causing the climate emergency. To assure young people a livable future, we (the rich nations) will need to restore the climate to pre-industrial conditions. Therefore, we can set our goal as “Climate restoration by 2050,” not merely “Net or Real Zero by 2050.” [See, for example, Peter Fiekowsky and Carole Douglis, Climate Restoration; The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race (2022)].
At first blush, doing both things simultaneously—ending fossil fuels and removing a trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere—seems impossible, until we recall the U.S. response to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, which woke our sleeping industrial giant. That giant can wake again.
Eleven days after Pearl Harbor, Congress enacted The First War Powers Act of Dec. 18, 1941, which granted President Franklin Delano Roosevelt extensive authority to mobilize the nation’s industries to support the war. It allowed FDR (and later Harry Truman) to regulate or take over private industries deemed necessary for national defense and war production. Under the act, the president could direct the production, distribution, and use of materials, facilities, and labor.
To cut greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by 2030, we could mobilize our industrial capacity on the scale of a beneficent Manhattan Project aiming to cut U.S. energy use in half, electrify almost everything that is now powered by fossil fuels and provide the electricity from solar, wind, hydropower, and perhaps geothermal sources with sufficient multi-day energy storage to assure a reliable system. Eventually we could insulate every building nationwide and replace all inefficient uses of lights, heat and motors with high-efficiency devices available now off the shelf. The necessary technologies already exist but most families and businesses can’t afford to shift, so government loans will be essential, to be repaid from energy savings. Such an effort would entail a real large-scale recycling program to recover and re-use all metals and other materials. All goods would be designed and manufactured with recycling in mind. The ultimate goal would be to end economic growth, which is what’s killing the planet (with climate change just one symptom). (See William Catton’s essential book, Overshoot [1982].)
Further, the existing electrical grid—the complex system of cables, wires, substations, transformers, and control equipment that distributes electricity nationwide—could be upgraded to a “smart” grid that operates like the internet today, allowing anyone to hook into the system and draw energy from it and contribute energy to it from their local power source. At present, attaching new sources to the grid is painfully slow and subject to political interference by utility companies that have a vested interest in coal and methane-gas power plants.
Climate restoration: Removing a trillion tons of CO2 from the air
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) means extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and permanently storing it where it can’t return to the atmosphere.
There are two basic approaches to CDR: nature-based solutions (planting more trees, for example) and mechanical solutions (powering machines to extract CO2 from the air). Trees, of course, turn CO2 into plant mass where it remains until the trees die or burn. Mechanical systems can store their CO2 by pumping it a mile or so below ground, hoping it will stay there forever, or by turning it into a stone (a process called “mineralization”).
Pumping CO2 into a deep hole is the oil industry’s idea of a solution; it is called carbon capture and storage, or CCS. Unfortunately, deep underground storage can never be reliably permanent. Compressed CO2 is buoyant, constantly trying to rise upward toward the surface of the Earth. When it hits a barrier that prevents upward movement (a so-called “cap rock”), the CO2 can move sideways. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has reported (pg. 322) that buried CO2 will remain “potentially mobile for thousands of years.” As it moves, CO2 may encounter undetected faults, fissures, fractures, cracks, or crevices in the rocks underground, providing a pathway back to the atmosphere, with potentially deadly consequences. For this reason, CO2 burial can never be certified as “permanent” (or even “safe”) because leakage could always begin shortly after “permanence” is claimed. CCS is a massive waste of effort and resources, a diversion from what really needs to happen. Our government is generously subsidizing CCS, which the oil industry sees as a license to sell more oil and gas for decades to come.
Nature-based solutions for CDR also cannot be considered permanent because they are subject to reversal by human actions (cutting forests) or by natural events like wildfires. Nature-based solutions are valuable for many reasons, but not for permanent CO2 storage. Preserving or expanding forests, wetlands, and sea grasses can provide ecological and biodiversity benefits in addition to capturing and holding some CO2 for a time. Agricultural techniques for capturing more CO2 in soil can help, too. However, on the scale needed, nature-based solutions run up against ecological limits and cannot, by themselves, be counted on to extract and permanently sequester a trillion tons of CO2.
Nature-based solutions will need to be supplemented by mechanical methods for extracting CO2 from the air. And the only absolutely certain way to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere permanently is to combine the CO2 with naturally-occurring minerals, turning the CO2 into stone via “mineralization.” When today’s young people decide the climate emergency demands full-on climate restoration, mechanical CDR technologies had better be ready to deploy. Otherwise, it’s curtains. This means research is needed now to scale up these systems and lower their costs.
At pilot scale (and high cost), all the necessary hardware, software, and know-how exist now to accomplish these two mammoth tasks—convert the global economy from its fossil-fuel base to a renewable-energy base and extract a trillion tons of CO2 out of the air and keep it out permanently. There are, however, four things missing: (i) a mass movement created and led by young people (assisted and supported by elders) to champion and pursue these goals relentlessly, whatever it takes; (ii) a commitment from the White House and Congress; (iii) a government agency dedicated to organizing and completing this vast enterprise; and—most important—(iv) a foolproof way to prevent fossil fuel executives from sabotaging the whole effort with their vast wealth, and their murderous 40-year strategy of denial, deception, and delay. Although the political obstacles are obviously enormous, preventing sabotage by fossil fuel executives is probably the toughest problem because they are so rich, powerful, and deceitful.
For more than four decades, fossil fuel executives have used their power to corrupt and paralyze the political system, preventing Congress and the Supreme Court from confronting the climate emergency. One way to reduce fossil executives’ power would be for the attorneys general of one or more states of the U.S. to bring criminal charges against a few fossil executives for the crime of climate homicide, as described by David Arkush and Donald Braman, writing for the Harvard Law Review. Many fossil executives have, without doubt, organized campaigns of denial, deception, and delay that have killed many thousands of humans—an ongoing RICO scheme resulting in mass murder. Bringing charges of mass murder against a few fossil executives—particularly in a jurisdiction that supports both imprisonment and the death penalty—could concentrate the minds of all fossil executives wonderfully and would unravel the corrupt relationship between those executives and the political system they have, so far, managed to paralyze.
We know what needs to be done
To reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels at the astonishing rate required (nearly 10 percent per year), and to extract a trillion tons of CO2 from the air by 2050, fossil fuel corporations would have to be managed in entirely new ways and our federal government would have to remember 1941.
Christian Parenti has said (see Sapinski [2020] chapter 9), “If civilization is serious about saving itself, powerful and wealthy states [nations] would treat the climate crisis like a massive military emergency and do the following: euthanize the fossil fuel industry while rapidly building out a clean energy infrastructure so as to eliminate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; and, more controversially, nationalize existing technologies for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and immediately commence massive crash programs of atmospheric CO2 drawdown.”
Andreas Malm and Wim Carton suggest, “Private producers of fossil fuels could be nationalised and converted into organisations for capture and storage [of CO2 via permanent mineralization]. This would, as Buck has argued [Buck (2019) and Buck (2020)], be the most logical solution: compelling the polluters to clean up their own mess; making good use of their geological and chemical expertise; transferring workers in a doomed industry to new jobs, without having them move one mile. The company formerly known as ExxonMobil: a public utility for drawing down all the emissions it has caused and then some.”
Parts of the oil and gas industry could be repurposed to locate, evaluate, and plug orphaned oil and gas wells. In at least 30 U.S. states, there are somewhere between three and ten million abandoned oil and gas wells. Most of them are leaking methane into the atmosphere, making the climate emergency worse, and many are threatening water supplies. They need to be located, evaluated, and remediated. Who better to do it than the oil and gas workers who have the necessary expertise and will need jobs when oil and gas production ends? Megan Milliken Biven has a plan for all this. Biven does not say so, but after nationalization (which has a long history in the U.S.), oil and gas company treasuries could support these efforts with their enormous ill-gotten profits.
Even without nationalizing fossil corporations, if the president were given emergency authority as was done in 1941, he or she could assert temporary ownership and/or management control of the oil and gas industry and then oversee a just transition to a new energy economy, creating millions of well-paid jobs in the process while saving every family $1500 to $2000 per year on their energy bill by cutting energy use in half or more.
The automobile industry could be retooled to manufacture millions of direct air capture (DAC) machines needed to extract CO2 from the air and turn it into stone.
Having the federal government remedy the climate crisis by taking control of oil, gas, and automobiles may sound outlandish to the modern ear, until we recall the history of World War II.
Between 1939 and 1946, the U.S. federal government seized control of about 60 privately-owned industrial facilities (Franklin Roosevelt oversaw three dozen takeovers and Harry Truman the other two dozen). The government did not take ownership of those facilities; it managed them, deciding what they would manufacture or services they would provide.
As historian Mark R. Wilson tells us in his 2016 book Destructive Creation; American Business and the Winning of World War II, “Among the prominent firms that experienced seizures in 1941-46 were a leading manufacturer of military aircraft (North American Aviation); a top warship producer (Federal Shipbuilding) that was itself a subsidiary of the world’s largest steel company (U.S. Steel); a plant of the world’s premier manufacturer of telecommunications equipment (Western Electric); one of the world’s largest retailers (Montgomery Ward); and the refineries of two large oil companies (Humble Oil [now ExxonMobil] and Cities Service). In 1944, the U.S. Army took over the transit system of Philadelphia, one of America’s largest cities. And between 1943 and 1946, the U.S. government seized and temporarily controlled the nation’s coal mines (repeatedly); its railroads (twice); and much of the oil industry.”
We should also recall that the U.S. devoted about 40 percent of annual GDP to the war effort, 1941 to 1945. Everyone sacrificed. Twelve million men and women served in the armed forces. Almost 419,000 died. Consumer goods were rationed, including automobiles, gasoline, tires, fuel oil, stoves, shoes, butter, sugar, coffee, processed foods, meat, canned fish, and cheese.
The annual income tax on the wealthy rose from 66 percent in 1939 to 94 percent in 1945. Income taxes covered 37 percent of the cost of the war, the other 63 percent was financed by the sale of war bonds to the public. Over 85 million citizens (63 percent of the adult population) purchased more than $185 billion worth of war-bond securities. (Allowing for inflation, in today’s dollars $185 billion equals $2.8 trillion.)
Here’s a thought experiment: U.S. GDP in 2020 was $20.9 trillion; 40 percent of that would be $8.3 trillion. If we earmarked 40 percent of GDP for five years, 2025-2029, we could invest nearly $42 trillion to stop (and even reverse) climate change.
With a national mobilization on that scale, we could muster the resources to eliminate half of all fossil fuel emissions by 2030, 100 percent by 2050, and extract a trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2050. (See Fiekowsky & Douglis, 2022)
Does this all sound too expensive? Christian Parenti reminds us that “There is, however, a scenario that is always more expensive, no matter the cost of CDR [carbon dioxide removal]. That is permanent global economic collapse cause by rapidly rising seas, flooded coastal cities, desertification of the globe’s key grain exporting breadbaskets, colossal settlement-ravaging wildfires, proliferating disease and attendant social breakdown.”
Yes, climate restoration will be politically difficult and very expensive. But the worsening climate emergency will soon generate new alarm and resolve among the populace. And the impending loss of their future won’t sit well with young people for long. Conditions are ripening for very rapid change.
As James Hansen told us fifteen years ago, to preserve a livable planet, we (the rich nations) must return atmospheric CO2 back “to 350 ppm but likely less than that.” Today it stands at 420 ppm and rising. As Hansen has said, this enormous task of climate restoration is young people’s burden, a burden bestowed by fossil executives whose scientific staff accurately and persuasively predicted the climate catastrophe 50 years ago.
Friends, let’s get real about our goals. Let’s commit to restoring the climate by 2050. Anything less is a betrayal of young people everywhere.
Photo credit: Kids call for climate justice at the Minnesota March for Science in April 2017. Credit: Lorie Shaull, CC BY–SA 2.0, via DeSmog.com
Editor’s note: There is a strong debate around DAC for many reasons, chief among them, the fossil fuel industry’s involvement, its profit motivations, and its intentions to use the technology in tandem with continued oil and gas extraction. While deeply cognizant of these serious concerns, Peter lays out a case for the necessity of appropriately executed DAC. Let us know what you think.