Michael Lind - Fossil Fuel Shill Or Unwitting Dupe?

By Steve Hynd

Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation, a heavyweight pundit at a heavyweight left-leaning thinktank. At Salon yesterday, he attempted to make the case that "everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong" (H/t Kat). In the process, he becomes a shill, willing or duped, for the entrenched energy lobby. An extended quote, with my emphasis, is in order.

As everyone who follows news about energy knows by now, in the last decade the technique of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," long used in the oil industry, has evolved to permit energy companies to access reserves of previously-unrecoverable �shale gas� or unconventional natural gas. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these advances mean there is at least six times as much recoverable natural gas today as there was a decade ago.

Natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, can be used in both electricity generation and as a fuel for automobiles.

The implications for energy security are startling. Natural gas may be only the beginning. Fracking also permits the extraction of previously-unrecoverable �tight oil,� thereby postponing the day when the world runs out of petroleum. There is enough coal to produce energy for centuries. And governments, universities and corporations in the U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries are studying ways to obtain energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane with ice in high-density formations under the seafloor. The potential energy in gas hydrates may equal that of all other fossils, including other forms of natural gas, combined.

If gas hydrates as well as shale gas, tight oil, oil sands and other unconventional sources can be tapped at reasonable cost, then the global energy picture looks radically different than it did only a few years ago. Suddenly it appears that there may be enough accessible hydrocarbons to power industrial civilization for centuries, if not millennia, to come.

So much for the specter of depletion, as a reason to adopt renewable energy technologies like solar power and wind power. Whatever may be the case with Peak Oil in particular, the date of Peak Fossil Fuels has been pushed indefinitely into the future. What about national security as a reason to switch to renewable energy?

The U.S., Canada and Mexico, it turns out, are sitting on oceans of recoverable natural gas. Shale gas is combined with recoverable oil in the Bakken "play" along the U.S.-Canadian border and the Eagle Ford play in Texas. The shale gas reserves of China turn out to be enormous, too. Other countries with now-accessible natural gas reserves, according to the U.S. government, include Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, France, Poland and India.

Because shale gas reserves are so widespread, the potential for blackmail by Middle Eastern producers and Russia will diminish over time. Unless opponents of fracking shut down gas production in Europe, a European Union with its own natural gas reserves will be far less subject to blackmail by Russia (whose state monopoly Gazprom has opportunistically echoed western Greens in warning of the dangers of fracking).

The U.S. may become a major exporter of natural gas to China -- at least until China borrows the technology to extract its own vast gas reserves.

Two arguments for switching to renewable energy -- the depletion of fossil fuels and national security -- are no longer plausible. What about the claim that a rapid transition to wind and solar energy is necessary, to avert catastrophic global warming?

The scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming are low probability outcomes -- a fact that explains why the world�s governments in practice treat reducing CO2 emissions as a low priority, despite paying lip service to it. But even if the worst outcomes were likely, the rational response would not be a conversion to wind and solar power but a massive build-out of nuclear power. Nuclear energy already provides around 13-14 percent of the world�s electricity and nearly 3 percent of global final energy consumption, while wind, solar and geothermal power combined account for less than one percent of global final energy consumption.

There's just so much wrong with this and I've tried to flag up the key mis-statements in bold. Let's take those bolded sections and see why Lind is only considering a carefully chosen picture.

Fracking does indeed free up new oil and gas resources. But it comes at a heavy cost - one probably too heavy to pay in a world where "water wars" are already a reality. Fracking relies on injecting millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals, many of them toxic, into the earth at high pressures to fracture the strata and release the fossil fuels. The trouble is that most of the world's shale deposits also constitute valuable ground water resources, used to provide irrigation and water for both animal and human consumption. As Texas - which has the worst water quality in the U.S. -has already discovered, fracking increases contamination of those ground water resevoirs with heavy hydrocarbons and heavy metals, making them unuseable without carbon-heavy, money and energy intensive treatments. Pennsylvania has the same problem.

The real shock that Dimock has undergone, however, is in the aquifer that residents rely on for their fresh water. Dimock is now known as the place where, over the past two years, people�s water started turning brown and making them sick, one woman�s water well spontaneously combusted, and horses and pets mysteriously began to lose their hair.

Linn may be dismissive about the prospect of radical climate change, with dry places getting dryer as wet areas get wetter, but others aren't. More of that later, suffice to say for now that fracking is unlikely to be the complete and perfect panacea that Lind wants it to be, for a variety of reasons to do with poisoning the very people it is supposed to provide energy to. Oh, and then there's the little thing about it possibly causing earthquakes in some areas (H/t Kat). How well that would go down in Lind's "nuclear heavy" world doesn't have to be imagined.

But even if all the problems with fracking could be ressolved satisfactorily, we're not out of the woods and into Lind's fossil fuel Utopia yet. Lind correctly states that burning methane produces less carbon than burning coal or oil. He just doesn't say exactly how much less. However the EPA figures (PDF) show that methane has half the carbon emmissions for a given heat content of coal and threequarters that of fuel oil. Coal is far and away the most carbon-heavy way to "power industrial civilization" and can't be done heavily for another decade, let alone "centuries", without tipping the world into catastrophic climate change. Burning methane is only going to put off that problem for a little while.

And this is where Lind really shows his hand. he may well state, blithely, that "scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming are low probability outcomes" but he gives no additional evidence for this statement -- and the vast majority of experts disagree. In 2008, an equally auspicious thinktank, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) which has provided the wonk thinking and many appointees for the Obama administration's foreign and defense policy, had this to say about a mere 2.6 degree Celsius (4.7 degrees Farenheit) global temperature increase:

In the case of severe climate change, corresponding to an average increase in global temperature of 2.6�C by 2040, massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events. In this scenario...nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervor to outright chaos. In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature.

And just on Friday, new figures on carbon emmissions were released which made the idea of keeping global temperature increases under 2 degrees Celsius a utopian one, according to the chief economist of the International Energy Authority. CNAS' scenario is the one we're already facing. It can get worse, if we keep burning fossil fuels at profligate rates as Lind suggests.

Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. "These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a 'business as usual' path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path ... would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100," he said.

At a 5.6 degree Celsius (10 Farenheit) rise, according to CNAS:

The catastrophic scenario, with average global temperatures increasing by 5.6�C by 2100, finds strong and surprising intersections between the two great security threats of the day� global climate change and international terrorism waged by Islamist extremists. This catastrophic scenario would pose almost inconceivable challenges as human society struggled to adapt. It is by far the most difficult future to visualize without straining credulity. The scenario notes that understanding climate change in light of the other great threat of our age, terrorism, can be illuminating. Although distinct in nature, both threats are linked to energy use in the industrialized world, and, indeed, the solutions to both depend on transforming the world�s energy economy�America�s energy economy in particular. The security community must come to grips with these linkages, because dealing with only one of these threats in isolation is likely to exacerbate the other, while dealing with them together can provide important synergies.

Lind, in his position as a senior director at New America, must have read the CNAS reports. Apparently he just wanted to ignore them. He's likewise ignoring the evidence when he writes that "the rational response would not be a conversion to wind and solar power but a massive build-out of nuclear power". As Andrew Simms notes in the Guardian today (H/t Kat): "A comprehensive, favourable assessment by MIT concluded that even under an almost unimaginably positive scenario, containing several major unsolved problems, nuclear would only increase its global share of electricity generation by 2%". As Simms also says:

Mobilise the same amount of money that was used to bail out states and banks in the wake of the financial market failures, and use it to invest in smart grids and mixed renewable energy systems. That scale of investment could, potentially, displace fossil fuels at a stroke.

But if there's anything on which Lind should know his stuff, it's foreign policy and international relations. Unfortunately, he drops the ball there too, with his predictions that shale oil and gas will finally free the US and Europe of the tyranny of Russian and Middle eastern energy blackmail, and enable the West to contemplate a more hands-off policy with regards to those regions. You see, he's also willfully ignoring the news that the climate-change driven food crisis (H/t Kat):

An Oxfam report published yesterday forecasts that a billion people will go undernourished this year. It is not the only one to sound the alarm: last week the UN warned that spiralling food prices could well lead to riots, as happened in 30 countries three years ago. Then there is Christian Aid, which recently put out its own report on hunger, and the World Bank, which has talked more and more of late about food poverty. However alarming Oxfam's predictions this week about the future of food might be � that the average price of staples will more than double in the next couple of decades, hitting the world's poorest hardest � few of the other NGOs working in this field would sharply disagree with them. Nor would Oxfam's description of the food-supply system as "bust" be too controversial. Any system that produces enough food for the entire world and yet fails to feed one in seven people, which is subject to rampant speculation and land-grabbing, and where crops and land that could be used to feed people are instead turned into fuel for Hummers, is patently not working.

Add famine to water wars, mass migrations and disease epidemics, not to mention climate-fuelled natural disasters, and one can see why no nation can remain untouched or above dealing with societal changes driven by global warming, even if it wanted to take an "I'm alright, Jack" stance due to its own massive fossil fuel reserves now made accessable. back to CNAS again:

A few countries may benefit from climate change in the short term, but there will be no �winners.� Any location on Earth is potentially vulnerable to the cascading and reinforcing negative effects of global climate change. While growing seasons might lengthen in some areas, or frozen seaways might open to new maritime traffic in others, the negative offsetting consequences�such as a collapse of ocean systems and their fisheries�could easily negate any perceived local or national advantages. Unchecked global climate change will disrupt a dynamic ecological equilibrium in ways that are difficult to predict. The new ecosystem is likely to be unstable and in continual flux for decades or longer. Today�s �winner� could be tomorrow�s big-time loser.

Climate change effects will aggravate existing international crises and problems. Although a shared sense of threat can in some cases promote national innovation and reform as well as induce cooperation among governments, the scenario authors found that climate change is likely to worsen existing tensions, especially over natural resources, and possibly lead to conflict. Indeed, this magnifying of existing problems by climate change is already taking place, from desertification in Darfur, to water shortages in the Middle East, to disruptions of monsoons in South Asia and attendant struggles over land and water use. These and other effects are likely to increase and intensify in the years ahead.

Lind's combination of climate denialism and fracking triumphalism is entirely wrong-headed. I'm not sure whether he, like 9 out of 10 climate denying scientists, was paid by Exxon (or Shell) to deliver his timely Salon vision of utopia - but I almost wish he were simply a paid shill rather than grading his expertise a total F for Fail.