Ending the Fossil Fuel Era

Ending the Fossil Fuel Era

edited by Thomas Princen, Jack P. Manno, and Pamela L. Martin

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ending the fossil fuel era / edited by Thomas Princen, Jack P. Manno and Pamela L. Martin.

   p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-02880-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-262-32708-4 (retail e-book)

1. Fossil fuels. 2. Energy security. 3. Energy–Governmental policy. 4. Environmental degradation. I. Princen, Thomas, 1951- II. Manno, Jack. III. Martin, Pamela, 1971-

TP318.E54 2015

553.2–dc23

2014034211

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

d_r1

Contents

Preface

Part 1    The Fossil Fuel Problem

1    The Problem

Thomas Princen, Jack P. Manno, and Pamela L. Martin

2    The Biophysical: The Decline in Energy Returned on Energy Invested, Net Energy, and Marginal Benefits

Jack P. Manno and Stephen B. Balogh

3    The Cultural: The Magic, the Vision, the Power

Thomas Princen

4    The Ethical: A Fossil Fuel Ethic

Thomas Princen

Part 2    Keeping Them in the Ground

Introduction to Part 2

5    Leaving Oil under the Amazon: The Yasuní-ITT Initiative as a Pospetroleum Model?

Pamela L. Martin

6    Appalachia Coal: The Campaign to End Mountaintop Removal Mining

Laura A. Bozzi

7    El Salvador Gold: Toward a Mining Ban

Robin Broad and John Cavanagh

8    Slowing Uranium in Australia: Lessons for Urgent Transition beyond Coal, Gas, and Oil

James Goodman and Stuart Rosewarne

9    The Future Would Have to Give Way to the Past: Germany and the Coal Dilemma

Tom Morton

10    Heating Up and Cooling Down the Petrostate: The Norwegian Experience

Helge Ryggvik and Berit Kristoffersen

Part 3    The Politics of Delegitimization

11    The Good Life: (Sumak Kawsay) and the Good Mind (Ganigonhi:oh): Indigenous Values and Keeping Fossil Fuels in the Ground

Jack P. Manno and Pamela L. Martin

12    Exit Strategies

Thomas Princen and Adele Santana

13    On the Way Down: Fossil Fuel Politics in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Princen, Jack P. Manno, and Pamela L. Martin

Contributors

Index

Preface

Throughout our academic careers, we coeditors have tackled issues of global environmental politics from the perspective of those who seek social and ethical transformation. At times we have put these efforts under the rubric of sustainability or sufficiency or decommoditization or buen vivir (the good life). All aim at building good lives while living lightly on the earth. In Rio in 1992 at the Earth Summit, the UN Conference on Environment and Development, Jack and Tom participated in the work of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and documented their role in global environmental politics. In the early 1990s, Pam worked in Latin America, investigating how transnational networks for social change also changed world politics, all centering on oil and the Amazon. By 2010, the beginning of this project on the fossil fuel era, all three of us had turned to questions of diminishing energy resources and a post–fossil fuel future. Tom saw a localizing trend in the Global North—a shift in attention and action from the global, the abstract, the placeless to the local, the concrete, the place based. Jack and Pam both worked with Indigenous peoples (Indigenous as a capitalized term refers to groups of peoples, like European peoples or North American nations, with a common identity that involves historic claims to sovereignty and nationhood). Jack worked with Onondaga Nation in New York State as they strategized to prevent hydrofracking on their ancestral territory. Pam encountered conflict in the Amazonian rain forest as she came to know the people and their place, and the politics of the Yasuní National Park and the oil beneath it.

When the three of us came together for the long talks that eventually became shared writing, we realized that from our respective vantage points, each of us saw that a fundamental shift, at once biophysical and social, moral and spiritual, is underway. With every extreme weather event, every economic bubble bursting, every excuse for inaction on a host of critical environmental and social issues, the call for a concomitant cultural shift is gaining momentum. This book is our contribution to accelerating that momentum.

With some trepidation, we admit, we began to advance an argument that not so long ago would have been considered extreme: imagining and building a case for keeping fossil fuels in the ground. We no longer see anything at all extreme in this argument, this possibility, this hope. What is extreme is extreme extraction, beyond anything remotely sustainable ecologically, let alone just; extreme wealth and power for the few, which is hard to imagine is socially sustainable; and extreme weather, which will absorb increasing amounts of resources, capital, and attention in the coming years and decades. As we conceptualized and sought empirical grounding for the possibility of deliberately keeping fossil fuels in the ground, we gradually came to believe that a transition out of fossil fuels will occur one way or another. So we asked, What might that shift look like? What possibilities are there for positive transition? What would be the cultural shift that parallels the energy shift? These are among the questions that prompted this study.

The more we delved into this topic, the more we wondered why so few scholars in the environmental sciences deal explicitly and directly with fossil fuels. Certainly there is plenty of work being done on the impacts, from health and ecosystem effects to cleanup and efficiencies. Looking at our own practices and work environments, we suspect the reason is that most of us enter this field because we like green plants and blue water, free-roaming animals and wide-open spaces. We steer away from gooey and sooty substances and the noxious smells they give off. And we steer away from that messiest of all human activities—politics.

We coeditors came to realize that there is a price to be paid for such neglect: the very substances most implicated in environmental degradation and the very actors who so effectively convert concentrated physical power to concentrated economic and political power get a free pass. Put differently, the fossil fuel complex—that network of independent and national oil companies and their enablers in finance and government—can hide in the shadows, pull the levers, write the rules of the game, displace many true costs, all while others fret about the consequences and seek fixes. What we coeditors came to realize in this project is that an environmental science of transformation, of transition out of that which is demonstrably unsustainable and unjust, requires going to the source—physically, culturally, ethically, even spiritually. It requires conceiving of a politics of extractive resistance, of exiting the industry before compelled by circumstances, of imagining the good life after fossil fuels.

So this book is about transitional politics. Insofar as modern industrial society is only beginning the transition away from fossil fuels, barely showing an awareness of it, little that we offer here is definitive. Rather, our hope with this book is to provoke a conversation and offer some language and some examples of arguments made with the language. Few wish to speak of the end of the fossil fuel era, let alone the end of material growth. Here we speak of it, and speak differently from the prevailing discourse of bounteous growth (conflating economic, material, and so many other forms of growth), efficiency, consumer prerogative, technological proliferation, pollution cleanup, commercial diffusion, and financial mastery.

Philosopher Richard Rorty once said, to paraphrase, that fundamental cultural change occurs not when people argue well but when they speak differently.¹ In this book, we attempt to speak differently, to create a language of positive transition out of fossil fuels. We presume that fundamental cultural change occurs when relevant cultures and their languages change—the organizational culture of ExxonMobil, for instance; the industry culture of oil and gas; the sectoral culture of energy (dominated as it is by fossil fuels); the high-finance culture of economic policy (which dominates the fossil fuel industry); the economic culture of growth (which derives in part from the history of fossil fuel growth and in part is a necessary condition for growth); the consumer culture of goods seen as good so more goods must be better (until recently supported by cheap energy and costless waste deposition).

What do we mean by language here, and how does it engage a politics? First, language is more than words, grammar, and syntax. It is concepts and ideas, principles and norms, metaphors and stories, all that help steer societal change in a particular direction, here away from fossil fuels and toward a sustainable world. That steering, then, is the politics, the influencing, the changing of images of the possible and definitions of the good life. It is framing that escapes the dominant frames of empire, machine, laboratory, commerce, consumption, freedom, comfort, speed, and power and makes normal living within our means, with attention to all peoples, not just the powerful and the privileged. For ending the fossil fuel era—that period when fossil fuels dominate all other energy sources worldwide—there is a distinctive politics that we try to capture through, yes, argument, but also story. A major task of this book is to articulate those politics. In a nutshell, they are the politics of resistance, exit, and the imaginative.

Until recently, resistance politics played out only in isolated cases—the coal mining operation that ignores safety warnings, the offshore oil rig that hurries the drilling, the natural gas fertilizer plant that inexplicably explodes. As subjects of academic study, policy analysis, and policymaking, these politics have paled against those of climate change, conservation, ecological modernization, and other topics of mainstream environmental debate. The resisters were indeed isolated, working against both negligent, secretive operators and a growth-manic, cheaper-is-better commercial norm. What is different today, we have found, is that resisters have collaborators and colleagues, some next door, others on the other side of the globe, all connected by media that make operating in the shadows increasingly difficult. And part of what they are communicating is that the commercial norm is no longer hegemonic, that their lives and those of future peoples matter as much as anyone else’s, and certainly more than an incremental bump in an earnings ratio, more than a check to a political campaign. Their politics is globalization from below. It is local—and hence the charge of not in my backyard (NIMBY)—and global—and hence the reality of not on Planet Earth (NOPE). Their politics is bringing to an end that which destroys both the local and the global; it is ending the fossil fuel era. But it is more.

Ending the fossil fuel era is also about beginning a new one. While this book is not a blueprint for the future (despite what various readers of earlier drafts wanted), we came to realize in the course of this study that an effective politics, one that aspires to effect a positive transition—peaceful, democratic, just, and ecologically sustainable—is one that sees opportunities in dramatic change (and we believe that with 80 to 90 percent reductions in greenhouse gases, change will be dramatic). A full range of actors can capitalize on those opportunities, from governments to investors, Indigenous people to transnational corporations. So throughout these pages, we flag signs of positive transition and offer language for this imaginative politics of ending the fossil fuel era. And we entertain the possibility that the fossil fuel industry itself can play a positive role, with companies designing their own exit.

So this book is about ending an era that will end one way or another no matter what anyone does. Our intuition tells us that the world will be better off accelerating that end. By the end of an era, we must stress, we mean the end of fossil fuel dominance, not of fossil fuel use entirely—not, as some early readers and listeners insisted on believing, stopping cold all fossil fuel use and watching people scrounge for morsels of food and shiver in the dark. Following climate science, ending fossil fuel dominance means, again, some 80 to 90 percent reductions worldwide, especially in the Global North, the primary focus of transition in this study. Whatever the physical amount, the political effect clearly will be dramatic. Better to start stopping now, we argue, better to follow the lead of some early pioneers and carefully, openly, and explicitly end the fossil fuel era.

As a brief overview of the structure of the book, in part 1, we set up the problem, and then take three conceptual cuts at that problem—biophysical, cultural, and ethical. Part 2 is a collection of case studies that illuminates the struggles of and the possibilities for resisting extractive, exploitative modes of resource use, suggesting in the process how to delegitimize and start stopping fossil fuel use. In part 3 we conclude in three very different ways, imagining paths out of the fossil fuel era. There, in chapter 11, Manno and Martin elucidate the potential of Indigenous thought contributing to both fossil fuel resistance and to a politics of the good life. In chapter 12, Princen and Santana posit corporate strategies to promote fossil fuel exit from within the industry. And in chapter 13, Princen, Manno, and Martin draw on previous chapters to develop several themes for a fossil fuel politics of resistance and exit, of imagination and restoration, of realism and reality.

In this work we raise many questions and provide all too few answers. We hope, instead, to provoke constructive thought and useful language for a fundamental shift, for easing a fossil fuel–dependent world out of its dilemma and into the next era.

Acknowledgments

In this study, spanning some five years of writing papers, conducting workshops, interviewing, and observing, we owe debts of gratitude to many people. Perhaps foremost are those working on the ground to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Many of these people must remain anonymous, but otherwise they are noted in the pages that follow, especially in part 2. For specific comments on draft chapters, we thank Kristin Bartenstein, Raymond De Young, Paul Hirsch, Gert Jan Kramer, Seth Peabody, Nicole Seymour, Adele Santana, Andrea Parker, and members of the Works in Progress seminar of the Rachel Carson Center on Environment and Society at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and of the Sustainability Ethics seminar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

We are deeply appreciative of the leadership of Clay Morgan, senior editor at MIT Press, now retired, in the building of the field of global environmental politics. We thank him for his continued support and masterly editorship of this book, one of his last at MIT Press. We also thank his successor, Beth Clevenger who, with Miranda Martin, Bev Miller, and Marcy Ross, expertly shepherded the manuscript to completion. For research assistance we thank Kenneth Fahey and Dominique De Wit.

We thank Coastal Carolina University for hosting a workshop in 2012 on its campus and the International Studies Association for supporting another at its 2013 annual meeting in San Francisco. And Tom Princen gives a special nod to a gentleman (in the truest sense of the term) who, across a table, over many cups of coffee, made normal much of the thinking that Tom put into this book—Raymond De Young. Pamela Martin thanks Alberto Acosta for his constant support and commentaries on the good life and the road ahead toward it.

Note

1. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

Part 1

The Fossil Fuel Problem

1

The Problem

Thomas Princen, Jack P. Manno, and Pamela L. Martin

Fossil fuels—can’t live without them, the lifeblood of modern industrial civilization.

Fossil fuels—can’t live with them, the fire in the oven destined to bake civilization beyond recognition.

Two existential positions, poles apart. Will the twain ever meet? Will their opposition, the crux of the contemporary energy dilemma, ever be resolved? Or will we, the industrialized and consumerized denizens of a material system thoroughly out of sync with the self-correcting biophysical system in which this system is embedded, just have to play it out? So far, those who cannot imagine life without fossil fuels have the upper hand. Notions of progress and technological determinism and the magic of the market sustain a belief system that says this world, this industrial, growth-oriented, consumer-serving, fossil fuel–driven world, is the best of all possible worlds. There is no reason to exchange it for an uncertain one—no reason to reorganize, to build a world without fossil fuels. Why? Because the next energy transition, like previous transitions—from human power to animal power, animal to wood, wood to coal, and coal to oil—will make life better for all.¹ As happened before, there will be less drudgery, greater convenience, higher speeds, and more consumer choice—material progress forever. The bridge to this improved state is new technologies, including technologies to extract and burn—albeit cleanly—every last bit of affordable oil, coal, and gas. This is the dominant worldview, which we dub the industrial progressive view.²

Those who see the world and the coming transition differently are in a distinct minority. There are the doom-and-gloomers—scientists, popular writers, and filmmakers—who get people’s attention but, like the progressive faithful, can’t imagine the good life being other than some green and clean variation of business as usual. There are the rejectionists—back-to-the-landers, localists, survivalists—who are hunkering down, getting ready for collapse. And then there are those, a distinct minority within this minority, who dare to imagine a different order, a different transition, indeed a different politics, one that is peaceful, democratic, just, and biophysically sustainable. To the extent this minority is even noticed, they are readily dismissed as idealists, not realists.³

In this book, we imagine a different kind of realism, one that starts with the sheer brevity of the fossil fuel era, defined as that period when fossil fuels have dominated all other energy sources, which began in the United States and worldwide only in the 1890s.⁴ Until recently, that era can be characterized by two unassailable facts: easy-to-get, cheap, high-density energy and ever-increasing amounts of such energy.

To put numbers to these two facts, humans have extracted and burned roughly 1 trillion barrels of conventional oil to date. There’s another 1 trillion available. And there’s some 4 to 5 trillion, some say as much as 18 trillion barrel equivalents, in other fossil fuels.⁵ The first trillion has been enough to disperse toxic substances to every corner of the globe, erode soil on a global scale, permanently deplete underground aquifers, and disrupt the climate and acidify the oceans, all this possibly irretrievably and with huge human costs. Extracting, refining, combusting, and dispersing the by-products of another trillion or more will only compound those effects (not just add to them or continue them) and will almost certainly be catastrophic.

To use more and more fossil fuels would thus be irrational, to say the least. Morally it would be a global crime of negligence. Politically it would be a policy failure to dwarf all others. The response, rational and moral, is to drastically reduce such use. The question industrial societies face at this historical juncture is how to navigate the transition and how to do so given that the fossil fuel era will end and that these fuels will be rationed, although on the current path, not soon enough to avert catastrophic environmental and social impacts. And because the pollutants will be emitted, soils degraded, water sources depleted if the oil, coal, and natural gas are taken out of the ground, a reasonable premise given the history of fossil fuel management (see chapter 3), the only feasible means of stopping such use is to leave these fuels in the ground.

This is the realism of this book—what we call twenty-first century realism. It is not the dominant view by far, not in mainstream policy debates, not in the media, not even in academe, where one would think that such trends are well discussed. But those who live in the energy world—oil companies and power utilities, for instance—and those who study the trends—energy analysts and historians, for instance—seem to agree. The former president of Shell Oil Company US put it this way: "The resources are there. The question is: do we want to continue to use these fossil fuels at current—or increasing—rates until they are eventually exhausted? The answer, unequivocally, is no. The economic, social, and environmental costs of such an approach are becoming ever clearer and ever higher."⁶ Resource geographer Vaclav Smil puts it this way: Ours is an overwhelmingly fossil-fueled society. … This grand solar subsidy, this still-intensifying depletion of an energy stock whose beginnings go back hundreds of millions of years, cannot last, and the transition to a non-fossil future is an imperative process of self-preservation for modern high-energy civilization.⁷

For all the concern about fossil fuels, the predominant approach to both ground-level air pollution and high-level climate change is to manage emissions. In climate, it is to reduce a couple of centuries of history to one chemical element, carbon, to, in effect, seek end-of-pipe solutions when the real problem is upstream, in a global infrastructure and power structure that is extremely adept at laying new pipes. So we ask, What exactly is `the problem’? We start with climate change in part because it has dominated environmental discourse for a couple of decades now. But we must emphasize that the problem of fossil fuels is much more than climate change; climate change is but one symptom of a larger systemic problem. That problem can be described as a system of extraction, expansion, and exploitation that even if it were ethically and politically justifiable, would still require another planet or two to continue.⁸ It is, in short, a system of excess that a focus on fossil fuels affords and, we assert, warrants much more examination.

The Problem: Extraction, Not Emissions; Fossil Fuels, Not Carbon

Climate change deliberations have centered on two primary realms of activity—state action and science—and associated actors—diplomats and scientists. If this were the sole locus of action, then the implicit theory of social change would be something like this:

Climate change is a global problem. Like global security and global trade, it must be managed globally. Global managers are of two sorts—those with the authority—states—and those with the requisite knowledge—scientists. Only global managers can work at the global level. Only they can perceive the problem (through their instruments) requiring, as it does, vast data sets, sophisticated modeling, and the funds to support the science. Only they can marshal the resources to tackle such a gargantuan problem. Only they can reach the agreements that overcome the global collective action problem and arrange the incentives so their respective publics behave correctly.

Curiously missing from this global management formulation of the problem and the rightful actors who would solve it are those actors who organize to pull fossil fuels out of the ground— private and state oil, gas, and coal companies and the industrial development arms of governments. Missing are the complex networks of actors who accomplish the remarkable transformation of raw materials to usable products (for example, shippers, refiners, manufacturers, distributors, petrochemical companies), ensure the flow of such materials (domestic security and court systems, international security forces), and finance it all (bankers, investors, consumers). Our experience is that the great bulk of the attention in academe is on the first set of actors. Certainly nearly all the funding goes to the science, some to the economics and intergovernmental relations, but next to nothing to an understanding of the political economy of extraction and combustion.⁹

In this book, we formulate the problem differently. We hold that the central problem is not about what is done after extraction and combustion; it is about extraction itself. Put differently, it is not about carbon but about "fossil fuels.

A carbon focus is reductionist, possibly the greatest and most dangerous reductionism of all time: a 150-year history of complex geologic, political, economic, and military security issues all reduced to one element—carbon. This chemical framing implies that the problem arises after a chemical transformation, after fuels are burned. It effectively absolves of responsibility all those who organize to extract, process, and distribute, state and nonstate. It leaves unquestioned the legal requirements to extract created by the selling of fossil fuel reserves in futures markets and the widespread use of reserves for collateral in financial transactions. So constructed, extraction is called production, and the burden of harm and responsibility for amelioration falls on governments and consumers rather than extractors. This is a situation presumed to be given—normal or inevitable or desirable. Finally, carbon portrays the global ecological predicament as completely one-dimensional: solve the climate change problem—that is, deal with carbon—and everything else follows.

To focus on fossil fuels, by contrast, is to ask about the status of oil, coal, and natural gas in the ground and how and why these complex hydrocarbons come out of the ground. It does not take such how-and-why questions as self-evident (consumers want the energy; producers get it). A fossil fuel focus directs attention, analytic and eventually political attention, upstream to a whole set of decisions, incentives, and structures that conspire to bring to the surface hydrocarbons that otherwise sit safely and permanently in the ground. It forces one to consider that once fossil fuels are extracted, their by-products—petrochemical endocrine disrupters, sulfur dioxide, atmospheric greenhouse gases—inevitably and unavoidably move into people’s bloodstream, into ecosystems, and into the atmosphere and oceans.

So the difference, both analytic and rhetorical, between carbon and fossil fuels is the difference between reductionism and complex systems, between global management and deliberative decision making, between management and elimination, between end of pipe and prevention, between cleanup and abstention, between technocracy and democracy. To question extraction is to consider deliberately limiting an otherwise valuable resource, rationing and setting priorities for its uses. It is to take renewable energy, conservation, equity, and environmental justice seriously and create the institutions, local to global, capable of doing so. It is to delegitimize excess rates of use and make special modest rates of use (chapter 3). It is to ask what the implicit ethic of fossil fuels has been and what a twenty-first-century ethic of fossil fuel use might be (chapter 4). It is to view fossil fuel resistance and abolition as more than NIMBY (not in my backyard). It is to deliberately choose a post–fossil fuel world (chapter 12). All told, it is to imagine a politics that challenges excess and disavows exploitation by confronting extraction.

In this book, we choose fossil fuels as our primary analytic lens in part because, like any analytic premise, our intuition tells us that end-of-pipe and cleanup approaches do not work, that complex networks of fossil fuel actors have had a free ride, presumed innocent by analytic omission. We do so because to question extraction, not just emission, is to ask about the meaning of fossil fuels and how that meaning varies across cultures and subcultures (chapters 3 and 11). It is to ask what would be a politics of resistance, on the one hand, and imagination (of a post–fossil fuel world) on the other (part 2). It is to entertain what, in mainstream policy and academic debate, heretofore has been unthinkable: keeping fossil fuels in the ground.

Beyond End of Pipe

If the predominant approach to ground-level air pollution, high-level climate change, persistent toxic substances, and a host of other environmental ills is to manage fossil fuel emissions, how could one go beyond end of pipe?

First, consider the implications of end of pipe. From an economic perspective, end of pipe effectively says the problem occurs at the end of a long chain of production and consumption decisions. Pollutants emerge after the goods are produced, as a by-product, an unfortunate yet unavoidable side effect. All previous steps in the production-consumption-disposal chain are indeed about goods, that which can be presumed beneficial or benign. Exploration, testing, drilling, transporting, securing, processing, manufacturing, distributing, advertising, and lobbying are all given—given, that is, by a combination of entrepreneurial spirit, extraordinary risk taking, technological innovation, capital investment, managerial choice, and, once all this is instituted, consumer demand and political imperative. So construed, emissions are merely an unfortunate and inconvenient side effect. But because the goods come from all that is given and captured by those actors so engaged and the bads come from the emissions that nobody wants, a society (read government or taxpayers) is obligated to ameliorate the bads. This division of goods and bads is terribly convenient for those who actually make the key decisions and reap so much of the rewards. It is an ethic in its own right, one that says producing goods is inherently good. But in the larger scheme of things, in that system that incorporates both the extraction and the disposal over geologically long periods of time—the only system that could legitimately be called an ecosystem—it is hardly ethical when downstream vulnerable populations now and in the future face the bads. And it is hardly realist if the interests of all these populations are of account.

From a political economy perspective, what we know to be the natural order of things is actually deliberately constructed, an order whose rules have evolved over time to suit well those who benefit most. In the fossil fuel order, certainly all players—rule makers and rule followers—benefit in some fashion (investors gain returns on their investments, risk-taking employees are paid well, consumers have cheap and abundant energy), but such benefits are time constrained, as are all mining operations. Boom times may last years, even a century or two, but the bust is perfectly predictable (chapters 2 and 3). The fossil fuel binge may be hugely profitable, amazingly stimulating, not to mention convenient and fun; it may transport, heat, and feed billions, but it is not sustainable. It will end. The only question is how: how peacefully and democratically, how planfully and equitably. This, once again, is twenty-first-century realism.

End of pipe is also problematic from a material flow and systems integrity perspective. Material systems, whether ecosystems, hydrologic systems, agricultural systems, or financial systems, have integrity when, among other things, negative feedback loops kick in to modulate positive feedback loops. In a mining economy, positive feedback during boom times is ubiquitous and immediate (return on investment, low consumer prices, political favors), whereas the negatives are delayed and often diffuse (years of safe digging and drilling are followed by mine disasters and oil spills; decades of economic growth fueled by fossil fuel combustion are followed by decades and centuries of respiratory, endocrine, oceanic, and climate disruption). The fossil fuel mining system is thus unstable. It grows rapidly, even exponentially, then collapses.¹⁰ All the wishful thinking about new energy sources doesn’t change the fact that the energy density and ease of extraction and transport of fossil fuels cannot be replicated (chapter 2).¹¹ Although all players lose in the collapse, those with the fewest options and the least decision-making authority (generally the poorest) lose the most (part 2). This takes us to an ethical, and no less realist, perspective on end-of-pipe solutions and the industrial progressive view.

Boom-and-bust mining operations papered with end-of-pipe fixes are inherently inequitable. By taking the system as given and hence perpetuating a system that will ultimately fail, proponents of new sources and end-of-pipe management, cleanup, and technical fixes are, at best, delaying the inevitable. At worst, they are exhibiting ever-increasing complexity, creating new and unnecessary problems (deepwater drilling, stratospheric aerosols for global cooling), and making ever more difficult the transition away from fossil fuel dominance.¹² What’s more, it is becoming apparent that the bottom fifth or two of the world’s population will bear the brunt of the adapting. In the process, fossil fuel proponents invoke consumer sovereignty (we just produce what consumers want), absolving themselves of responsibility for the plethora of harms—personal, societal, and environmental—these fuels and their fixes cause.

All this leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (for fossil fuel proponents) that the only realistic means of stopping fossil fuel emissions is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. The only safe place for fossil fuels is in place, where they lie, where they are solid or liquid (or, for natural gas, geologically well contained already), where their chemistry is mostly of complex chains, not simple molecules like carbon dioxide that find their way out of the tiniest crevices, that lubricate tectonic plates perpetually under stress, that react readily with water to acidify the oceans and float into high places filtering and reflecting sunlight, heating beyond livability the habitats below. Again, this is realism in a biophysical and political sense. This, we argue further in chapter 13, is twenty-first-century realism.

A Politics of Urgent Transition: Putting Power Front and Center

Global management schemes may derive their legitimacy from their very rationality and scientific soundness (including economic calculations), creating the impression of being realist, but their appeal—to environmentalists and oil companies alike, it seems—derives from a different source: they are essentially apolitical; they don’t attempt to rewrite the constitutional rules of the game—namely, that extraction proceeds full speed ahead. It is not a politics of urgency, of fundamental transition. It is a politics of accommodation. Instead of confronting extraction and the power of the fossil fuel complex—independent and national oil companies and their enablers in finance and government—the global managers create their own politics, a tame politics, one that ruffles few feathers but keeps everyone pointed in the same direction. It is a politics that diverts attention from that which the fossil fuel complex knows all too well—the politics of ensuring access and stable prices—which is to say, the politics of total extraction (chapter 4).¹³ For that politics, everything else—distributing carbon credits, assigning liabilities for oil spills—is a convenient distraction, a great diversion.¹⁴

A new politics is needed, one of urgency, of transitioning out of fossil fuels, of confronting extremely powerful actors, of being realist across cultures and generations.¹⁵ A normative shift as monumental as any other in human history will define the politics of the end of the fossil fuel era. The project of leaving fossil fuels in the ground, is one approach, one that presumes that the fossil fuel era will come to an end and, with it, the fossil fuel industry—private and state. The consequences, however, will persist for generations, and vast quantities of oil, coal, and natural gas will remain in the ground. The central question is: With great cause-effect time lags between extraction and combustion on the one hand, impacts on the other, will fossil fuel use drop soon enough?

More specifically, what will be, or can be:

1. The exit strategies of the fossil fuel industry (explicit or implicit; intended or inadvertent)?

2. The resistance strategies of those who are dumped on (directly or indirectly)?

3. The adaptation strategies of publics and societies as a whole, from the local to the global, both to declining energy availability and to rising defensive expenditures?

This book explores these three questions. It does so as a futuring exercise (What, given the trends, will happen?) and as a normative exercise (What should happen given a goal such as a peaceful, democratic, just, and ecologically sustainable transition?). Where the preponderance of work is descriptive (What are the trends?) or critical (What is the distribution?) and key actors are reluctant to engage issues of power (concentrated and highly unequal power), we feel this is precisely where a realist research agenda should be located.¹⁶

So if the natural exit and adaptation strategies are not fast enough to avert catastrophic change, the normative question is: How can fossil fuel exit and societal adaptation be accelerated? The positive questions (regarding knowledge of trends and power disparities) and normative (regarding acceleration) combine into a politics of urgent transition.

For such a politics, the current state of affairs can be summed up thus: if fossil fuel use could be presumed net beneficial in its first century, it cannot in its second and third centuries. Current technologies, market demand, and geopolitical strategic imperatives are sufficient to drive the extraction and burning of catastrophic amounts of fossil fuels.¹⁷ Given this and the state of global management schemes to date, it is reasonable to assume that when fossil fuels are extracted, their by-products will enter people’s bloodstream, water supplies, the oceans, and the atmosphere. Consequently, a normative shift on the order of abolition, industrialization, democratization, international peace, suffrage, and civil rights will be needed for an early exit. Moral entrepreneurs will have to find leverage points in current material systems even if they cannot imagine, let alone offer, a plan for the post–fossil fuel era.¹⁸ That normative shift will define the politics of the end of the fossil fuel era.

If accelerating the end of the fossil fuel era is ultimately a moral question, and we are convinced it is, then the ultimate strategy for bringing the fossil fuel era to an early end may well be delegitimization, a topic we explore in different ways throughout this book and conclude with in chapter 13. For now, suffice it to say that by delegitimization, we do not mean a vilification of the fossil fuel industry. The industry has a century and more of vilification starting with charges against Rockefeller’s Standard Oil (the Octopus) and continuing to today (a former Shell president titled his book Why We Hate the Oil Companies). Nor do we mean a repudiation of the industry’s antidemocratic, antienvironmental tactics.

Rather, by delegitimization, we mean the reconceptualization and revalorization of fossil fuels or, to be precise, humans’ relations with fossil fuels. We mean a shift from fossil fuels as a constructive substance to a destructive substance, from necessity to indulgence, even addiction, from a good to a bad, from lifeblood (of modern society) to poison (of a potentially sustainable society). We mean a shift from fossil fuels as that which is normal to that which is abnormal. In other words, fossil fuels will make a moral transition in parallel to the material transition. Much as slavery went from universal institution to universal abomination and as tobacco went from medicinal and cool to lethal and disgusting, the delegitimization of fossil fuels will flip the valence of these otherwise wondrous, free-for-the-taking complex hydrocarbons. And rather than pin blame on big bad oil and coal companies or, even worse, on all of us because we all use fossil fuels, delegitimization simply recognizes that a substance once deemed net beneficial can become net detrimental. All it takes is a bit of evidence (in the case of fossil fuels, a mountain of evidence already exists), some incisive critics, effective communication, and, for the moral entrepreneurs, a whole lot of persistence and willingness to themselves be vilified.¹⁹ It would start with the simple observation that there are some things humans cannot handle. Their level of understanding, their susceptibility to convenience or power, their inability to organize globally and for the long term all mitigate against having such things as ozone-depleting substances, lead, drift nets, land mines, rhino horns, and, someday perhaps, nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.

This, then, would be the essential politics of early fossil fuel exit. It would acknowledge that there is little to gain prosecuting agents of economic and political development of a bygone era (which persists to today), of a period in human history that, through the keep-them-in-the-ground lens, looks almost naive (How could they believe this would last and have no ill effect?). Delegitimization says that now, with today’s accumulated knowledge and with a complexity of threats that jeopardize human existence, it is time to banish the offending substance and the practices and impacts that go with it. It is time to fess up to the impossibility of marginal improvement: just as more humane shackles didn’t address slavery as an institution, nor filters on cigarettes the industrial tobacco culture, more efficient cars and high-technology cleanup technology won’t address the system-jeopardizing properties—physical and social—of fossil fuels (box 1.1).²⁰

Box 1.1

Technology to the Rescue: Or Not

Energy independence has always been a race between depletion and technologies to produce more and use energy more efficiently. Depletion was winning for decades, and now [with hydraulic fracturing, offshore platforms, and the like] technology is starting to overtake its lead.

—Bill White, former US deputy energy secretary under President Bill Clinton and former mayor of Houstona

From Houston to Washington, Caracas to Riyadh, this is the dominant view of the role of technology in energy production, especially high-capital, megaproject production. It is a powerful argument, with history on its side, not to mention a wished-for future with its bright new technologies. The history of oil development shows how each new technology (e.g., carbide drill bits, floating platforms) expanded the range, depth, and extent of production dramatically. With unlimited human ingenuity and virtually unlimited fossil fuels in the ground (between five and eighteen times what has been extracted so far), it will go on for a very, very long time.

The argument, indeed the rhetoric, is compelling. And a lot of people and quite a few countries have gotten fabulously wealthy following such logic.

But like many other utopian dreams, it neglects a few things. First, geologically and historically, the fossil fuel era has been brief, just a hundred years or so (even less from a cultural perspective). The game—the game of endless extraction, combustion and emission—has hardly played itself out. Positive feedback has overwhelmed the negative so far (mostly), but systems theory tells us the checks eventually kick in. Social theory tells us that when inequities intensify and people’s dignity is denied, social structures change.

Second, technologies never exist independent of resources. The steam engine required wood and coal, the Internet cheap electricity (still generated mostly from coal). Technologies do not produce energy any more than they produce education, health care, or national security. They do not create energy, only convert it to usable forms. The inexorable decline in energy return on investment (chapter 2) reveals this fact: for all the incentives for maintaining high energy returns, no technology or combination of technologies has yet succeeded in reversing the decline. The energy industry is effectively betting that before parity is reached (a unit invested returns only that unit), such a technology will come along. To the extent political leaders and publics go along with such a global bet, it may be the mother of all social bets.

Third, technologies are constrained by more than energy sources. Financial capital is limited, as any banker or businessperson will attest. Because financial capital flows to its best use—its highest short-term monetary return—at some point drilling for water to grow food and supply drinking water, not drilling for oil and gas, will be the best use for scarce capital. Social capital is also limited, especially when it rests on the legitimacy of the governance system and its leaders. To date social capital has flowed to fossil fuels: some 85 percent of energy consumed worldwide is fossil fuels. But this is true of any addiction. Eventually the body and the body politic degrade. Unquestioned faith in the net beneficence of fossil fuels controlled