The Reckoning - Global Warming's Terrifying New Math (long)

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe - and
that make clear who the real enemy is

By Bill McKibben

Rolling Stone
July 19, 2012
This story is from the August 2nd, 2012 issue of Rolling
Stone.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado
haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this
summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change:
June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the
United States. That followed the warmest May on record for
the Northern Hemisphere - the 327th consecutive month in
which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-
century average, the odds of which occurring by simple
chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than
the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest
ever recorded for our nation - in fact, it crushed the old
record by so much that it represented the "largest
temperature departure from average of any season on record."
The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained
in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest
downpour in the planet's history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the
world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary
reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished
nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first
conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was "a ghost
of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British
journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much
attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once
thronged by multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first
books for a general audience about global warming way back
in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades
working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with
some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and
quickly - losing it because, most of all, we remain in
denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments
tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to
grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to
do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful
bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial
analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of
environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet
broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends
most of the conventional political thinking about climate
change. And it allows us to understand our precarious - our
almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless - position with three
simple numbers.

The First Number: 2° Celsius

If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen
climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination
of the global fight to slow a changing climate. The world's
nations had gathered in the December gloom of the Danish
capital for what a leading climate economist, Sir Nicholas
Stern of Britain, called the "most important gathering since
the Second World War, given what is at stake." As Danish
energy minister Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the
conference, declared at the time: "This is our chance. If we
miss it, it could take years before we get a new and better
one. If ever."

In the event, of course, we missed it. Copenhagen failed
spectacularly. Neither China nor the United States, which
between them are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon
emissions, was prepared to offer dramatic concessions, and
so the conference drifted aimlessly for two weeks until
world leaders jetted in for the final day. Amid considerable
chaos, President Obama took the lead in drafting a face-
saving "Copenhagen Accord" that fooled very few. Its purely
voluntary agreements committed no one to anything, and even
if countries signaled their intentions to cut carbon
emissions, there was no enforcement mechanism. "Copenhagen
is a crime scene tonight," an angry Greenpeace official
declared, "with the guilty men and women fleeing to the
airport." Headline writers were equally brutal: COPENHAGEN:
THE MUNICH OF OUR TIMES? asked one.

The accord did contain one important number, however. In
Paragraph 1, it formally recognized "the scientific view
that the increase in global temperature should be below two
degrees Celsius." And in the very next paragraph, it
declared that "we agree that deep cuts in global emissions
are required... so as to hold the increase in global
temperature below two degrees Celsius." By insisting on two
degrees - about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit - the accord ratified
positions taken earlier in 2009 by the G8, and the so-called
Major Economies Forum. It was as conventional as
conventional wisdom gets. The number first gained
prominence, in fact, at a 1995 climate conference chaired by
Angela Merkel, then the German minister of the environment
and now the center-right chancellor of the nation.

Some context: So far, we've raised the average temperature
of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has
caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A
third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans
are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more
water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a
shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for
devastating floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many
scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too
lenient a target. "Any number much above one degree involves
a gamble," writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority
on hurricanes, "and the odds become less and less favorable
as the temperature goes up." Thomas Lovejoy, once the World
Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, puts it like this: "If
we're seeing what we're seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius,
two degrees is simply too much." NASA scientist James
Hansen, the planet's most prominent climatologist, is even
blunter: "The target that has been talked about in
international negotiations for two degrees of warming is
actually a prescription for long-term disaster." At the
Copenhagen summit, a spokesman for small island nations
warned that many would not survive a two-degree rise: "Some
countries will flat-out disappear." When delegates from
developing nations were warned that two degrees would
represent a "suicide pact" for drought-stricken Africa, many
of them started chanting, "One degree, one Africa."

Despite such well-founded misgivings, political realism
bested scientific data, and the world settled on the two-
degree target - indeed, it's fair to say that it's the only
thing about climate change the world has settled on. All
told, 167 countries responsible for more than 87 percent of
the world's carbon emissions have signed on to the
Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two-degree target. Only a
few dozen countries have rejected it, including Kuwait,
Nicaragua and Venezuela. Even the United Arab Emirates,
which makes most of its money exporting oil and gas, signed
on. The official position of planet Earth at the moment is
that we can't raise the temperature more than two degrees
Celsius - it's become the bottomest of bottom lines. Two
degrees.

The Second Number: 565 Gigatons

Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more
gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury
and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two
degrees. ("Reasonable," in this case, means four chances in
five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette
with a six-shooter.)

This idea of a global "carbon budget" emerged about a decade
ago, as scientists began to calculate how much oil, coal and
gas could still safely be burned. Since we've increased the
Earth's temperature by 0.8 degrees so far, we're currently
less than halfway to the target. But, in fact, computer
models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 now,
the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees,
as previously released carbon continues to overheat the
atmosphere. That means we're already three-quarters of the
way to the two-degree target.

How good are these numbers? No one is insisting that they're
exact, but few dispute that they're generally right. The
565-gigaton figure was derived from one of the most
sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been
built by climate scientists around the world over the past
few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by
the latest climate-simulation models currently being
finalized in advance of the next report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Looking at them
as they come in, they hardly differ at all," says Tom
Wigley, an Australian climatologist at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research. "There's maybe 40 models in the
data set now, compared with 20 before. But so far the
numbers are pretty much the same. We're just fine-tuning
things. I don't think much has changed over the last
decade." William Collins, a senior climate scientist at the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agrees. "I think the
results of this round of simulations will be quite similar,"
he says. "We're not getting any free lunch from additional
understanding of the climate system."

We're not getting any free lunch from the world's economies,
either. With only a single year's lull in 2009 at the height
of the financial crisis, we've continued to pour record
amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, year after year. In
late May, the International Energy Agency published its
latest figures - CO2 emissions last year rose to 31.6
gigatons, up 3.2 percent from the year before. America had a
warm winter and converted more coal-fired power plants to
natural gas, so its emissions fell slightly; China kept
booming, so its carbon output (which recently surpassed the
U.S.) rose 9.3 percent; the Japanese shut down their fleet
of nukes post-Fukushima, so their emissions edged up 2.4
percent. "There have been efforts to use more renewable
energy and improve energy efficiency," said Corinne Le
Quéré, who runs England's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change
Research. "But what this shows is that so far the effects
have been marginal." In fact, study after study predicts
that carbon emissions will keep growing by roughly three
percent a year - and at that rate, we'll blow through our
565-gigaton allowance in 16 years, around the time today's
preschoolers will be graduating from high school. "The new
data provide further evidence that the door to a two-degree
trajectory is about to close," said Fatih Birol, the IEA's
chief economist. In fact, he continued, "When I look at this
data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature
increase of about six degrees." That's almost 11 degrees
Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of
science fiction.

So, new data in hand, everyone at the Rio conference renewed
their ritual calls for serious international action to move
us back to a two-degree trajectory. The charade will
continue in November, when the next Conference of the
Parties (COP) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate
Change convenes in Qatar. This will be COP 18 - COP 1 was
held in Berlin in 1995, and since then the process has
accomplished essentially nothing. Even scientists, who are
notoriously reluctant to speak out, are slowly overcoming
their natural preference to simply provide data. "The
message has been consistent for close to 30 years now,"
Collins says with a wry laugh, "and we have the
instrumentation and the computer power required to present
the evidence in detail. If we choose to continue on our
present course of action, it should be done with a full
evaluation of the evidence the scientific community has
presented." He pauses, suddenly conscious of being on the
record. "I should say, a fuller evaluation of the evidence."

So far, though, such calls have had little effect. We're in
the same position we've been in for a quarter-century:
scientific warning followed by political inaction. Among
scientists speaking off the record, disgusted candor is the
rule. One senior scientist told me, "You know those new
cigarette packs, where governments make them put a picture
of someone with a hole in their throats? Gas pumps should
have something like that."

The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons

This number is the scariest of all - one that, for the first
time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our
dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon
Tracker Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and
environmentalists who published a report in an effort to
educate investors about the possible risks that climate
change poses to their stock portfolios. The number describes
the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal
and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and
the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like
fossil-fuel companies. In short, it's the fossil fuel we're
currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this
new number - 2,795 - is higher than 565. Five times higher.

The Carbon Tracker Initiative - led by James Leaton, an
environmentalist who served as an adviser at the accounting
giant PricewaterhouseCoopers - combed through proprietary
databases to figure out how much oil, gas and coal the
world's major energy companies hold in reserve. The numbers
aren't perfect - they don't fully reflect the recent surge
in unconventional energy sources like shale gas, and they
don't accurately reflect coal reserves, which are subject to
less stringent reporting requirements than oil and gas. But
for the biggest companies, the figures are quite exact: If
you burned everything in the inventories of Russia's Lukoil
and America's ExxonMobil, for instance, which lead the list
of oil and gas companies, each would release more than 40
gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is
such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal
drinking limit - equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level
below which you might get away with driving home. The 565
gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay
below that limit - the six beers, say, you might consume in
an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-
packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already
opened and ready to pour.

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books
as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to
keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to
avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had
been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it
seems certain.

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the
soil. But it's already economically aboveground - it's
figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money
against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed
returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big
fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the
regulation of carbon dioxide - those reserves are their
primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their
value. It's why they've worked so hard these past years to
figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada's tar sands, or
how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the
Appalachians.

If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking
the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the
value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a
former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the
Capital Institute, calculates that at today's market value,
those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27
trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the
scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be
writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren't
exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing
bubble look small by comparison. It won't necessarily burst
- we might well burn all that carbon, in which case
investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will
crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or
a relatively healthy planet - but now that we know the
numbers, it looks like you can't have both. Do the math:
2,795 is five times 565. That's how the story ends.

So far, as I said at the start, environmental efforts to
tackle global warming have failed. The planet's emissions of
carbon dioxide continue to soar, especially as developing
countries emulate (and supplant) the industries of the West.
Even in rich countries, small reductions in emissions offer
no sign of the real break with the status quo we'd need to
upend the iron logic of these three numbers. Germany is one
of the only big countries that has actually tried hard to
change its energy mix; on one sunny Saturday in late May,
that northern-latitude nation generated nearly half its
power from solar panels within its borders. That's a small
miracle - and it demonstrates that we have the technology to
solve our problems. But we lack the will. So far, Germany's
the exception; the rule is ever more carbon.

This record of failure means we know a lot about what
strategies don't work. Green groups, for instance, have
spent a lot of time trying to change individual lifestyles:
the iconic twisty light bulb has been installed by the
millions, but so have a new generation of energy-sucking
flatscreen TVs. Most of us are fundamentally ambivalent
about going green: We like cheap flights to warm places, and
we're certainly not going to give them up if everyone else
is still taking them. Since all of us are in some way the
beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change
has been like trying to build a movement against yourself -
it's as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed
entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition
movement from slaveholders.

People perceive - correctly - that their individual actions
will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric
concentration of CO2; by 2010, a poll found that "while
recycling is widespread in America and 73 percent of those
polled are paying bills online in order to save paper," only
four percent had reduced their utility use and only three
percent had purchased hybrid cars. Given a hundred years,
you could conceivably change lifestyles enough to matter -
but time is precisely what we lack.

A more efficient method, of course, would be to work through
the political system, and environmentalists have tried that,
too, with the same limited success. They've patiently
lobbied leaders, trying to convince them of our peril and
assuming that politicians would heed the warnings. Sometimes
it has seemed to work. Barack Obama, for instance,
campaigned more aggressively about climate change than any
president before him - the night he won the nomination, he
told supporters that his election would mark the moment "the
rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to
heal." And he has achieved one significant change: a steady
increase in the fuel efficiency mandated for automobiles.
It's the kind of measure, adopted a quarter-century ago,
that would have helped enormously. But in light of the
numbers I've just described, it's obviously a very small
start indeed.

At this point, effective action would require actually
keeping most of the carbon the fossil-fuel industry wants to
burn safely in the soil, not just changing slightly the
speed at which it's burned. And there the president,
apparently haunted by the still-echoing cry of "Drill, baby,
drill," has gone out of his way to frack and mine. His
secretary of interior, for instance, opened up a huge swath
of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming for coal extraction:
The total basin contains some 67.5 gigatons worth of carbon
(or more than 10 percent of the available atmospheric
space). He's doing the same thing with Arctic and offshore
drilling; in fact, as he explained on the stump in March,
"You have my word that we will keep drilling everywhere we
can... That's a commitment that I make." The next day, in a
yard full of oil pipe in Cushing, Oklahoma, the president
promised to work on wind and solar energy but, at the same
time, to speed up fossil-fuel development: "Producing more
oil and gas here at home has been, and will continue to be,
a critical part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy."
That is, he's committed to finding even more stock to add to
the 2,795-gigaton inventory of unburned carbon.

Sometimes the irony is almost Borat-scale obvious: In early
June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled on a
Norwegian research trawler to see firsthand the growing
damage from climate change. "Many of the predictions about
warming in the Arctic are being surpassed by the actual
data," she said, describing the sight as "sobering." But the
discussions she traveled to Scandinavia to have with other
foreign ministers were mostly about how to make sure Western
nations get their share of the estimated $9 trillion in oil
(that's more than 90 billion barrels, or 37 gigatons of
carbon) that will become accessible as the Arctic ice melts.
Last month, the Obama administration indicated that it would
give Shell permission to start drilling in sections of the
Arctic.

Almost every government with deposits of hydrocarbons
straddles the same divide. Canada, for instance, is a
liberal democracy renowned for its internationalism - no
wonder, then, that it signed on to the Kyoto treaty,
promising to cut its carbon emissions substantially by 2012.
But the rising price of oil suddenly made the tar sands of
Alberta economically attractive - and since, as NASA
climatologist James Hansen pointed out in May, they contain
as much as 240 gigatons of carbon (or almost half of the
available space if we take the 565 limit seriously), that
meant Canada's commitment to Kyoto was nonsense. In
December, the Canadian government withdrew from the treaty
before it faced fines for failing to meet its commitments.

The same kind of hypocrisy applies across the ideological
board: In his speech to the Copenhagen conference,
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez quoted Rosa Luxemburg, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and "Christ the Redeemer," insisting that "climate
change is undoubtedly the most devastating environmental
problem of this century." But the next spring, in the Simon
Bolivar Hall of the state-run oil company, he signed an
agreement with a consortium of international players to
develop the vast Orinoco tar sands as "the most significant
engine for a comprehensive development of the entire
territory and Venezuelan population." The Orinoco deposits
are larger than Alberta's - taken together, they'd fill up
the whole available atmospheric space.

So: the paths we have tried to tackle global warming have so
far produced only gradual, halting shifts. A rapid,
transformative change would require building a movement, and
movements require enemies. As John F. Kennedy put it, "The
civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's
helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln." And enemies are what
climate change has lacked.

But what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully
clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy - one far
more committed to action than governments or individuals.
Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel
industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry,
reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy
Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.
"Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their
business - pay terrible wages, make people work in
sweatshops - and we pressure them to change those
practices," says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein,
who is at work on a book about the climate crisis. "But
these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry,
wrecking the planet is their business model. It's what they
do."

According to the Carbon Tracker report, if Exxon burns its
current reserves, it would use up more than seven percent of
the available atmospheric space between us and the risk of
two degrees. BP is just behind, followed by the Russian firm
Gazprom, then Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell, each of
which would fill between three and four percent. Taken
together, just these six firms, of the 200 listed in the
Carbon Tracker report, would use up more than a quarter of
the remaining two-degree budget. Severstal, the Russian
mining giant, leads the list of coal companies, followed by
firms like BHP Billiton and Peabody. The numbers are simply
staggering - this industry, and this industry alone, holds
the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet,
and they're planning to use it.

They're clearly cognizant of global warming - they employ
some of the world's best scientists, after all, and they're
bidding on all those oil leases made possible by the
staggering melt of Arctic ice. And yet they relentlessly
search for more hydrocarbons - in early March, Exxon CEO Rex
Tillerson told Wall Street analysts that the company plans
to spend $37 billion a year through 2016 (about $100 million
a day) searching for yet more oil and gas.

There's not a more reckless man on the planet than
Tillerson. Late last month, on the same day the Colorado
fires reached their height, he told a New York audience that
global warming is real, but dismissed it as an "engineering
problem" that has "engineering solutions." Such as? "Changes
to weather patterns that move crop-production areas around -
we'll adapt to that." This in a week when Kentucky farmers
were reporting that corn kernels were "aborting" in record
heat, threatening a spike in global food prices. "The fear
factor that people want to throw out there to say, 'We just
have to stop this,' I do not accept," Tillerson said. Of
course not - if he did accept it, he'd have to keep his
reserves in the ground. Which would cost him money. It's not
an engineering problem, in other words - it's a greed
problem.

You could argue that this is simply in the nature of these
companies - that having found a profitable vein, they're
compelled to keep mining it, more like efficient automatons
than people with free will. But as the Supreme Court has
made clear, they are people of a sort. In fact, thanks to
the size of its bankroll, the fossil-fuel industry has far
more free will than the rest of us. These companies don't
simply exist in a world whose hungers they fulfill - they
help create the boundaries of that world.

Left to our own devices, citizens might decide to regulate
carbon and stop short of the brink; according to a recent
poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans would back an
international agreement that cut carbon emissions 90 percent
by 2050. But we aren't left to our own devices. The Koch
brothers, for instance, have a combined wealth of $50
billion, meaning they trail only Bill Gates on the list of
richest Americans. They've made most of their money in
hydrocarbons, they know any system to regulate carbon would
cut those profits, and they reportedly plan to lavish as
much as $200 million on this year's elections. In 2009, for
the first time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce surpassed both
the Republican and Democratic National Committees on
political spending; the following year, more than 90 percent
of the Chamber's cash went to GOP candidates, many of whom
deny the existence of global warming. Not long ago, the
Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA urging the agency
not to regulate carbon - should the world's scientists turn
out to be right and the planet heats up, the Chamber
advised, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via
a range of behavioral, physiological and technological
adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we change our
physiology seems right up there.

Environmentalists, understandably, have been loath to make
the fossil-fuel industry their enemy, respecting its
political power and hoping instead to convince these giants
that they should turn away from coal, oil and gas and
transform themselves more broadly into "energy companies."
Sometimes that strategy appeared to be working - emphasis on
appeared. Around the turn of the century, for instance, BP
made a brief attempt to restyle itself as "Beyond
Petroleum," adapting a logo that looked like the sun and
sticking solar panels on some of its gas stations. But its
investments in alternative energy were never more than a
tiny fraction of its budget for hydrocarbon exploration, and
after a few years, many of those were wound down as new CEOs
insisted on returning to the company's "core business." In
December, BP finally closed its solar division. Shell shut
down its solar and wind efforts in 2009. The five biggest
oil companies have made more than $1 trillion in profits
since the millennium - there's simply too much money to be
made on oil and gas and coal to go chasing after zephyrs and
sunbeams.

Much of that profit stems from a single historical accident:
Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed
to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free. Nobody
else gets that break - if you own a restaurant, you have to
pay someone to cart away your trash, since piling it in the
street would breed rats. But the fossil-fuel industry is
different, and for sound historical reasons: Until a
quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was
dangerous. But now that we understand that carbon is heating
the planet and acidifying the oceans, its price becomes the
central issue.

If you put a price on carbon, through a direct tax or other
methods, it would enlist markets in the fight against global
warming. Once Exxon has to pay for the damage its carbon is
doing to the atmosphere, the price of its products would
rise. Consumers would get a strong signal to use less fossil
fuel - every time they stopped at the pump, they'd be
reminded that you don't need a semimilitary vehicle to go to
the grocery store. The economic playing field would now be a
level one for nonpolluting energy sources. And you could do
it all without bankrupting citizens - a so-called "fee-and-
dividend" scheme would put a hefty tax on coal and gas and
oil, then simply divide up the proceeds, sending everyone in
the country a check each month for their share of the added
costs of carbon. By switching to cleaner energy sources,
most people would actually come out ahead.

There's only one problem: Putting a price on carbon would
reduce the profitability of the fossil-fuel industry. After
all, the answer to the question "How high should the price
of carbon be?" is "High enough to keep those carbon reserves
that would take us past two degrees safely in the ground."
The higher the price on carbon, the more of those reserves
would be worthless. The fight, in the end, is about whether
the industry will succeed in its fight to keep its special
pollution break alive past the point of climate catastrophe,
or whether, in the economists' parlance, we'll make them
internalize those externalities.

It's not clear, of course, that the power of the fossil-fuel
industry can be broken. The U.K. analysts who wrote the
Carbon Tracker report and drew attention to these numbers
had a relatively modest goal - they simply wanted to remind
investors that climate change poses a very real risk to the
stock prices of energy companies. Say something so big
finally happens (a giant hurricane swamps Manhattan, a
megadrought wipes out Midwest agriculture) that even the
political power of the industry is inadequate to restrain
legislators, who manage to regulate carbon. Suddenly those
Chevron reserves would be a lot less valuable, and the stock
would tank. Given that risk, the Carbon Tracker report
warned investors to lessen their exposure, hedge it with
some big plays in alternative energy.

"The regular process of economic evolution is that
businesses are left with stranded assets all the time," says
Nick Robins, who runs HSBC's Climate Change Centre. "Think
of film cameras, or typewriters. The question is not whether
this will happen. It will. Pension systems have been hit by
the dot-com and credit crunch. They'll be hit by this."
Still, it hasn't been easy to convince investors, who have
shared in the oil industry's record profits. "The reason you
get bubbles," sighs Leaton, "is that everyone thinks they're
the best analyst - that they'll go to the edge of the cliff
and then jump back when everyone else goes over."

So pure self-interest probably won't spark a transformative
challenge to fossil fuel. But moral outrage just might - and
that's the real meaning of this new math. It could,
plausibly, give rise to a real movement.

Once, in recent corporate history, anger forced an industry
to make basic changes. That was the campaign in the 1980s
demanding divestment from companies doing business in South
Africa. It rose first on college campuses and then spread to
municipal and state governments; 155 campuses eventually
divested, and by the end of the decade, more than 80 cities,
25 states and 19 counties had taken some form of binding
economic action against companies connected to the apartheid
regime. "The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning
accomplishments of the past century," as Archbishop Desmond
Tutu put it, "but we would not have succeeded without the
help of international pressure," especially from "the
divestment movement of the 1980s."

The fossil-fuel industry is obviously a tougher opponent,
and even if you could force the hand of particular
companies, you'd still have to figure out a strategy for
dealing with all the sovereign nations that, in effect, act
as fossil-fuel companies. But the link for college students
is even more obvious in this case. If their college's
endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their
educations are being subsidized by investments that
guarantee they won't have much of a planet on which to make
use of their degree. (The same logic applies to the world's
largest investors, pension funds, which are also
theoretically interested in the future - that's when their
members will "enjoy their retirement.") "Given the severity
of the climate crisis, a comparable demand that our
institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying
the planet would not only be appropriate but effective,"
says Bob Massie, a former anti-apartheid activist who helped
found the Investor Network on Climate Risk. "The message is
simple: We have had enough. We must sever the ties with
those who profit from climate change - now."

Movements rarely have predictable outcomes. But any campaign
that weakens the fossil-fuel industry's political standing
clearly increases the chances of retiring its special
breaks. Consider President Obama's signal achievement in the
climate fight, the large increase he won in mileage
requirements for cars. Scientists, environmentalists and
engineers had advocated such policies for decades, but until
Detroit came under severe financial pressure, it was
politically powerful enough to fend them off. If people come
to understand the cold, mathematical truth - that the
fossil-fuel industry is systematically undermining the
planet's physical systems - it might weaken it enough to
matter politically. Exxon and their ilk might drop their
opposition to a fee-and-dividend solution; they might even
decide to become true energy companies, this time for real.

Even if such a campaign is possible, however, we may have
waited too long to start it. To make a real difference - to
keep us under a temperature increase of two degrees - you'd
need to change carbon pricing in Washington, and then use
that victory to leverage similar shifts around the world. At
this point, what happens in the U.S. is most important for
how it will influence China and India, where emissions are
growing fastest. (In early June, researchers concluded that
China has probably under-reported its emissions by up to 20
percent.) The three numbers I've described are daunting -
they may define an essentially impossible future. But at
least they provide intellectual clarity about the greatest
challenge humans have ever faced. We know how much we can
burn, and we know who's planning to burn more. Climate
change operates on a geological scale and time frame, but
it's not an impersonal force of nature; the more carefully
you do the math, the more thoroughly you realize that this
is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have met the enemy and they
is Shell.

Meanwhile the tide of numbers continues. The week after the
Rio conference limped to its conclusion, Arctic sea ice hit
the lowest level ever recorded for that date. Last month, on
a single weekend, Tropical Storm Debby dumped more than 20
inches of rain on Florida - the earliest the season's
fourth-named cyclone has ever arrived. At the same time, the
largest fire in New Mexico history burned on, and the most
destructive fire in Colorado's annals claimed 346 homes in
Colorado Springs - breaking a record set the week before in
Fort Collins. This month, scientists issued a new study
concluding that global warming has dramatically increased
the likelihood of severe heat and drought - days after a
heat wave across the Plains and Midwest broke records that
had stood since the Dust Bowl, threatening this year's
harvest. You want a big number? In the course of this month,
a quadrillion kernels of corn need to pollinate across the
grain belt, something they can't do if temperatures remain
off the charts. Just like us, our crops are adapted to the
Holocene, the 11,000-year period of climatic stability we're
now leaving... in the dust.

[Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the
environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, which
is regarded as the first book for a general audience on
climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate
campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in
189 countries since 2009. Time Magazine called him 'the
planet's best green journalist' and the Boston Globe said in
2010 that he was 'probably the country's most important
environmentalist.' Schumann Distinguished Scholar at
Middlebury College, he holds honorary degrees from a dozen
colleges, including the Universities of Massachusetts and
Maine, the State University of New York, and Whittier and
Colgate Colleges. In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Bill grew up in suburban Lexington, Massachusetts. He was
president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper in college.
Immediately after college he joined the New Yorker magazine
as a staff writer, and wrote much of the "Talk of the Town"
column from 1982 to early 1987. He quit the magazine when
its longtime editor William Shawn was forced out of his job,
and soon moved to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New
York.]

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