Foolish to have expected anything else.

Playing Chicken With Hothouse Extinction — Obama’s Shameful Shell Drilling Approval

18 August, 2015

Earlier this week President Obama made one of the worst decisions of his presidency. He decided to ignore the concerns of thousands of protesters and more than 60 percent of the American public over the issue of climate change. He decided to approve a dangerous plunging of new wells into unstable, clathrate-laden seabeds in the Arctic. Effectively, he’s deciding to play a dangerous game of chicken with a natural world that’s been riled and wounded by climate change. And in this game he puts us all at risk.

It’s a bad move that sends all the wrong signals. It demonstrates an attachment to the old, limited resource dominance based, policies that cause so many problems and that keep us dependent on fossil fuels for far too long.

(Shell is now approved to poke holes into the Arctic seabed in a mad, climate-destroying, quest for oil. The Arctic, overall, is a terribly risky place for drilling. Ice, storms, and drilling regions laden with explosive and warming clathrate all result in increased risks for blow outs, destruction of equipment, loss of life and related oil spills. But the worst threat of all comes from the resource itself. The future of a life-sustaining world and the future of continued fossil fuel burning are completely incompatible. Image source: Greenpeace/Mark Meyer.)

To this point, each new productive well, each new coal plant, each new gas fired plant, each new internal combustion engine extends the lifespan of fossil fuel burning. And that’s something we shouldn’t be investing in at the moment. We are pushing well past the dangerous 400 parts per million CO2 threshold. Adding all other greenhouse gasses together, the gross heat trapping is now equivalent to nearly 485 parts per million CO2e. Even maintaining these thresholds will raise the world’s temperatures by as much as 3.8 C over 500 years (and possibly break the 2 C threshold this Century). And that’s if the world’s carbons stores, long buried in ice beneath glaciers, permafrost and cooler seas, long kept safe within healthy forests, do not release through the warming and burning that will come under such a major jump in temperatures.

We have a window now. A brief window where we can draw down carbon emissions fast enough to allow some of that excess of heat trapping gasses to fall out. To give our ailing oceans and biosphere the chance to take up some of that carbon and prevent this very high risk scenario. But taking advantage of that window involves saying farewell to the age of fossil fuel burning.

So it’s the height of shame and short-sightedness for Obama to have approved the Shell project, especially after so many worked so hard to put his feet to the fire. So many people — who put their necks on the line in acts of noble, nonviolent protest to protect their children and loved ones from more carbon spewing oil wells sunk into the warming Arctic seabed — just got the message loud and clear from Obama: ‘we’re not really too concerned about our future.’

(During late July and early August, protesters in Portland managed to briefly delay Shell’s drilling expedition. It was a loud and clear signal from the public to Obama — we don’t want the future climate wreckage Shell is attempting to help lock in. It was a noble plea Obama has now blithely ignored. Image source: Greenpeace/Tim Aubrey.)

Playing Dangerous Games of Climate Chicken

Obama has done many good things with regards to climate change. Many things madcatter, drill, baby, drill republicans would have never done. He’s using the EPA to regulate carbon, he’s committed to cutting overall carbon emissions by more than 30 percent through 2030 (which is, I have to say a good move, but not fast enough), he’s pushed CAFE standards through the roof, and he’s helped to drive solar energy prices lower even faster than they would have been lowered otherwise. He’s at least helped to delay the Keystone Pipeline.

But, sometimes, as with fracking, as with other new pipeline construction, and as with the Shell Arctic drilling expedition, his policies cut against the grain of a necessarily rapid reduction in carbon emissions. Such backsliding is shameful and there is, at this time when human caused climate change is displacing people, on average at the rate of 8,000 each day, when heatwaves are now killers that stretch hospitals to the breaking point, when we have crossed or are crossing the Eemian boundary which implies a 20-25 feet of sea level rise for our cities and islands, when James Hansen’s storms are brewing in the North Atlantic, and when a monster El Nino is cracking wide the Pacific to ooze out yet more heat, there is absolutely no excuse for it.

Obama is not like republicans. He, unlike that mad beyond nightmares political set, is at least influenceable, at least somewhat sensitive to the great dangers we’ve stoked to new life. For his support relies, in large part, on those of us who are very concerned about climate change. And for the backward action of the Shell approval our appropriate response is shaming. We need a leader who’s a climate hawk — not someone who’s going to risk our future and our children’s future in a dangerously irresponsible game of climate chicken.

Links:

Obama Gives Shell Final OK to Drill in the Arctic

Portland Activists Force Shell to Turn Around

Greenpeace

Mark Meyer

Tim Aubrey

Hat Tip to Caroline