The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change

by Al Gore

  During the hot summers of 2011 and 2012, the evening newscasts often resembled a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. But each time, the droughts and fires and windstorms and floods were covered as lead stories, the explanation was often something like, “a high pressure area” or “La Niña.”

  On the few occasions when global warming is discussed, the coverage is distorted by the tendency of the news media to insist on including a contrarian point of view to falsely “balance” every statement by a climate scientist about global warming—as if there was a legitimate difference of opinion. This problem has been worsened by the shrinking budgets for investigative reporting.

  For someone who grew up believing in the integrity of the American democratic process—and who still believes that its integrity can be redeemed and restored—it is profoundly troubling that special interests have been able to capture control of decision making and policy formation in the nation that Abraham Lincoln eloquently described as “the last best hope of earth.” But the fight is far from over. Its epicenter is in the United States, simply because the U.S. remains the only nation capable of rallying the world to save our future. As Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.” That is what it now comes down to: will good men and women do nothing, or will they respond to the emergency that is now at hand?

  In the last few years, the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events connected to the climate crisis have begun to have a significant impact on public attitudes toward global warming. Even in the U.S., where the denier propaganda campaign is still in full force, public support for actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has gone up significantly. Proposals to do more have been supported by a majority for many years, although the intensity of the majority’s feeling has been too low to overcome the efforts of the carbon polluters to paralyze political action. More recently, however, support for action has been building steadily.

  At the beginning of President Barack Obama’s administration in 2009, hopes were high that U.S. policy on global warming would change—and for a time, it did. His stimulus bill put a major emphasis on green provisions, including measures to accelerate the research and development, production, and use of renewable energy systems in the United States. His appointment of the extremely able Lisa Jackson as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency set the stage for a series of breakthrough rules and initiatives that have contributed to the reduction of CO2 emissions and the cleaning of pollutants from the environment.

  The EPA rules requiring a reduction of CO2 emissions from new power plants and automobiles were courageous, and the EPA’s ruling that mercury emissions from coal plants must be sharply reduced has contributed to the decisions by many utilities to cancel planned construction of new coal-fired generating plants. The success by Jackson, her cabinet colleague, transportation secretary Ray LaHood, and White House adviser Carol Browner in reaching an agreement with U.S. carmakers to require significant improvements in auto mileage—eventually almost doubling the current average to 54.5 miles per gallon—was described by one environmentalist, Dan Becker, who runs the Safe Climate Campaign for the Center for Auto Safety, as “The biggest single step that any nation has taken to cut global warming pollution.”

  But several things happened over the last few years to make the political challenge more difficult than Obama expected. First, the economic crisis and Great Recession he inherited made the administration reluctant to confront a longer-term challenge when the economic distress of the present was so pressing. The effects of the recession lingered because of its unusual depth, the massive deleveraging (repayment of debt) it triggered, the collapse of the housing market, and the inadequate size of the fiscal stimulus that injected some—but not enough—demand back into the economy.

  Second, China surprised the world with its massive commitment to dominate the production and export of windmills and solar panels, heavily subsidized with government-backed cheap credit and low-wage labor—which allowed them to flood the global market with equipment priced well below the cost of production in the United States and other developed countries.

  Third, even though his climate legislation passed the House of Representatives while it was still under his party’s control, the obsolete and dysfunctional rules of the U.S. Senate empowered a minority to kill it in that chamber. Senators in both parties said privately that passage of the climate plan might have been within reach but that it seemed to them that President Obama was not prepared to make the all-out effort that would have been necessary to build a coalition in support of the plan. Earlier, he had chosen to make health care reform his number one priority, and the badly broken U.S. political system produced a legislative gridlock on his health plan that lasted until the midterm campaign season began, leaving no time for even Senate discussion of the climate change issue.

  By then, Obama and his political team in the White House had apparently long since made a sober assessment of the political risks involved in states where the power of the fossil fuel industries would punish him for committing himself to the passage of this plan. So instead, when his opponents in Congress took up the cry “drill, baby, drill,” the president proposed the expansion of oil drilling—even in the Arctic Ocean—and opened up more public land to coal mining. For these and other reasons, the positive impacts of the energy and climate proposals with which he began his presidency were nearly overwhelmed by his sharp turn toward a policy that he described as an “all of the above” approach—one that has contributed to the increased reliance on carbon-rich fossil fuels.

  Fourth, the discovery of enormous reserves of deep shale gas depressed electricity prices as more coal-fired generating plants switched to cheaper gas—thus pushing the price of kilowatt hours below the level needed for wind and solar to be competitive at their present early stage of development. Shale gas has flooded the market since the discovery and perfection of a new drilling technology that combines horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Although most of the debate about fracking has involved its use in the production of shale gas, it is used in the production of oil as well, opening previously inaccessible supplies and increasing the yield of oil from fields previously nearly depleted.

  THE IMPACT OF FRACKING

  Experts have cautioned that the world can expect a steady increase in the price of shale gas as liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports transfer the gas from low-priced markets like the United States to much higher-priced markets in Asia and Europe, with the average cost of shale gas going up significantly in the process. Nevertheless, the size of the new reserves opened up with fracking have at least temporarily overturned the pricing structure of energy markets. And the resulting enthusiasm for the exploitation of these reserves has obscured several crucial questions and controversies that should, and over time will, inspire caution about shale gas.

  To begin with, the fracking process results in the leakage of enormous quantities of methane (the principal component of natural gas), which is more than seventy-two times as potent as CO2 in trapping heat in the atmosphere over a twenty-year time frame. After about a decade, methane breaks down into CO2 and water vapor, but its warming impact, molecule for molecule, is still much larger than that of CO2 over shorter time scales.

  The global warming potency of methane has led to proposals for a global effort to focus on sharp reductions in methane emissions as an emergency short-term measure to buy time for the implementation of the more difficult strategies necessary to reduce CO2 emissions. Similarly, others have proposed a near-term focus on sharply reducing black carbon emissions, or soot, which trap incoming heat from the sun and which settle on the surface of ice and snow to increase heat absorption and magnify melting. Taken together, these two actions could significantly reduce warming potential by 2050. Given how long the world has waited to get started on controlling emissions, we need both and more.

  There are huge leakages of methane in the frackin
g process before the equipment is put in place to capture the gas at the surface. After the underground formation is fracked by the injection of high-pressure liquids, there is a “flowback.” That is, when the fracking water, chemicals, and sand used to do the fracking flow back to the surface and out of the well, this material contains large amounts of methane, which is either vented into the atmosphere or burned. Although many of the largest drilling operators take steps to prevent this leakage, the majority of smaller “wildcat” drillers do not. Additional methane is typically leaked into the atmosphere during the processing, storage, and distribution of gas. The total volume of methane leakage is so large that multiple studies—including a recent lifecycle analysis by Nathan Myhrvold, formerly of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, and Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology—have now found that virtually all of the benefit natural gas might have because of its lower carbon content compared to coal is negated.

  In its ongoing operations, the fracking process also requires the continuing injection of huge amounts of water mixed with sand and toxic chemicals into the shale where the gas is confined. The requirement of an average of five million gallons of water for each well is already causing conflict in regions suffering from droughts and water shortages. In many communities, particularly in arid areas of the American West, the competition for scarce water resources was acute even before the spread of the thirsty fracking process. In parts of Texas, fracking wells are being drilled in communities where water supply limitations are already constraining usage for drinking water and agriculture.

  The fracking process sometimes also inadvertently contaminates precious underground aquifers. Although the gas-bearing rock is typically much deeper than the aquifers supplying drinking water, the upward migration of liquids underground is not well understood and is difficult to predict or control. Many of the deposits where fracking is taking place are found in oil and gas fields that are dotted with old abandoned shafts drilled decades ago in the search for reserves that could be produced through conventional means. These old wells can serve as chimneys for the upward migration of both methane and drilling fluids.

  Some have speculated that abandoned drill holes and other poorly understood features of the underground geology may be responsible for the fact that numerous existing water wells located far above the ongoing horizontal drilling have already been poisoned by fracking fluids. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that the fluids used to drill for gas in Wyoming are the likely cause of pollution in the aquifer above an area that was fracked there. Reports of similar pollution from fracking in other areas have been made, but the EPA has been hampered in its investigations because of an unusual law passed in 2005 at the behest of then vice president Dick Cheney, which provides a special exemption for fracking activities from U.S. government oversight under the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act.

  The industry disputes most of these reports, and believes that in any case the pollution of some water wells is a small price to pay; the CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, for example, said recently, “The consequences of a misstep in a well, while large to the immediate people that live around that well, in the great scheme of things are pretty small.” Nevertheless, political resistance from landowners has been growing in several regions.

  Once the fracking fluid has been used, it must be disposed of as toxic wastewater. Often, it is reinjected deep underground in a manner that has caused multiple small (usually harmless) earthquakes and, on some occasions, is alleged to have infiltrated water aquifers. Indeed, the disposal of used fracking fluids is a more common source of complaints than the initial injections that begin the fracking process. In other locations, this used fracking fluid has been stored in large open-air holding ponds that sometimes overflow following heavy rainfalls. It has also at times been spread on roads, ostensibly for dust control.

  Advocates of shale gas argue that there are safety measures that can mitigate many of these problems, although most claim disingenuously that the industry will adopt them voluntarily, in spite of the expense involved. By contrast, the oil and gas industry veteran who pioneered the fracking process, George P. Mitchell of Houston, Texas, has publicly called for more government regulation. “They should have very strict controls. The Department of Energy should do it,” Mitchell told Forbes magazine. “If they don’t do it right, there could be trouble.… It’s tough to control these independents. If they do something wrong and dangerous, they should punish them,” he added.

  But even if new safety regulations worked as planned and even if the leakage of methane is tightly controlled, the burning of natural gas still results in an enormous volume of CO2 emissions. The fact that these emissions can in theory be brought down to a level that represents only half of the emissions from coal has been used by some advocates of shale gas as a new twist on the old question: is the glass half full or is it half empty? They make the seductive case that switching to gas means we can bring emissions halfway down in the sectors that now rely on coal. But here is the rub: the atmosphere itself is already full. The concentrations of global warming pollution are already at dangerous levels.

  GETTING REAL

  As a result, solving the climate crisis requires reducing emissions not by a little, but by a lot. We have to begin reducing net additions of greenhouse gases by at least 80 to 90 percent—not 50 percent—in order to ensure that overall concentrations do not exceed a potential tipping point before starting to decline. Continuing to add additional amounts of greenhouse gases at a rate that far exceeds the slow rate at which CO2 is drawn out of the atmosphere by the oceans and the biosphere would push far into the future any possibility of reducing the overall concentration levels. Reliance on gas to “bridge” the time needed to convert to renewables can help, but a longer commitment would, in fact, be tantamount to surrendering in the struggle to ensure that civilization survives.

  In some ways, this challenge is similar to what is happening with the depletion of groundwater and topsoil. The natural replenishment of those resources takes place on a timescale far slower than the rate at which they are being depleted by human activities. The natural rate of CO2 removal from the atmosphere takes place far more slowly than the rate at which we are adding to the overall concentrations. In all three cases, human activities are causing changes far faster than nature can adjust to them.

  The underlying problem is that the new power and momentum of Earth Inc. is colliding violently with and overwhelming the environmental balance of the Earth. The overconsumption of limited resources and the production of unlimited pollution are both inconsistent with the continued functioning of the Earth’s ecological system in a manner that supports the survival of human civilization. As noted earlier, the CO2 contained in the “proven reserves” of oil, coal, and gas already on the books of carbon fuel companies and sovereign states exceeds by many times the amount we could safely add to the atmosphere—and the unconventional reserves now starting to be drawn on are potentially even larger.

  The shale gas boom in the United States has led to a frenzy of exploration for shale gas in China, Europe, Africa, and elsewhere, raising the specter of a long-term global commitment to gas at the longer-term expense of renewables. Nevertheless, production of this resource outside the U.S. has thus far been limited. In China, where geologists believe that the supply may be two and a half times the size of U.S. shale gas reserves, the underground geology requires technologies that are different from those being used in the U.S., which complicates the option of simply transferring the U.S. horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies to China. Also, as in the Western United States, the profligate use of water in fracking may impose a limitation on use of the process—particularly in northern and northwestern China, where water shortages are endemic.

  Even so, momentum is building in the global economy toward the full exploitation and production of shale gas. Some analysts m
ake a persuasive case that if “fugitive emissions” are tightly controlled, the substitution of gas for coal might produce a temporary but still significant net reduction in the emissions of greenhouse gasses. In 2012, in what most analysts described as a surprising development, U.S. CO2 emissions dropped to their lowest level in twenty years—in part because of the economic slowdown, because of a mild fall and winter, because of more renewable energy use and increases in efficiency, but also because of the switch from coal to natural gas by electric utilities.

  Years ago I was among those who recommended the greater use of conventional natural gas as a bridge fuel to phase out coal use more quickly while solar and wind technologies were produced at sufficient scales to bring their price down even more. However, it is increasingly clear that the net effect of shale gas on the environment may ultimately be inconsistent with its use as a bridge fuel. Global society as a whole would find it difficult to make the enormous investments necessary to switch from coal to gas, and then turn right around and make equally significant investments to substitute renewable technologies for gas. It strains credulity. In other words, it may be a bridge to nowhere.

  Not only have the new supplies of shale gas temporarily depressed energy prices to the point where renewable energy technologies have more trouble competing, if the studies showing that there is no net greenhouse gas benefit to switching to shale gas are correct, this might lead to the worst of all possible worlds: huge investments in shale gas diverting money from renewable energy, and a worsening of the climate crisis in the meantime. The only virtue of shale gas is that it is leading to a faster phase-out of coal, at least in the United States.