Dr. John Abraham on Global Climate Change
Frequent commenter Tim Kingston, who requested my response to climate change denier Anthony Watts the other day, just sent me this much more detailed and compelling response from Dr. John Abraham, a thermal sciences researcher and professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
Dr. Abraham is armed to the teeth in his support of the notion of global climate change, though presents himself with the calm pragmatism one would expect of a scientist.
I was particularly impressed with his response on the Keystone XL Pipeline. When asked if the project will eventually be green-lighted and if it’s really needed, he said exactly what I routinely do, only with greater eloquence:
In order to avoid the most serious and expensive consequences of climate change, we need to reduce carbon emissions. Expansion of Keystone is not consistent with that goal. The total amount of oil in the Alberta Tar sands is equivalent to six Saudi Arabia’s. Mr. Watts and others have claimed that the oil will be burned regardless but just because this statement is uttered doesn’t make it true. Approval of Keystone will increase production by about 35-40% and it will lock us into a long-term supply of the dirtiest of the dirty fossil fuels. Not only are Alberta tar sands dirtier than conventional oil, but their by-product (petroleum coke) is being used as a dirty replacement of coal.
Rather than approve this pipeline, and further contribute to driving society over the climate cliff, we should invest in long-term clean renewable energy production right here in the United States. If we did this, we would receive the economic benefits and the world’s climate would improve at the same time.
We don’t know what the Administration will decide: my personal belief is that it will be approved and the Obama Administration will propose a quid pro quo approach to the environment–approving Keystone but enacting other policies to reduce emissions. The problem is that a quid pro quo doesn’t help the climate. It changes a fast burn to a slow simmer. From a political standpoint, if the Obama Administration, with John Kerry as Secretary of State, cannot say “no” to the dirtiest of the dirty fuels, it would show that we cannot say no to anything. I hope I am wrong about this.
Shale gas, shale oil and tight oil are dirtier (from a GHG point of view) than the tar sands, but both the US and Canada are caught up in setting national priorities. Two wrongs don’t make right. We can either turn to better solutions (like seasonal storage of heat) or we can throw mud at each other.
In 2003, we here in the US ranked eleventh, with only 2 ⅓ % of the reserves in the top 16 oil nations – yet with only about 5% of the world’s population we use about 25% of world oil production. Those numbers haven’t changed much, except that a lot has been burned since then.
While we in America use about 20 million barrels of oil a day – and would exhaust our domestic reserve in less than four years without foreign supplies – Iraq possesses the second largest oil reserve in the world. If this huge Iraqi reserve were combined with the nearly equal reserve in its pre-WWI province now known as Kuwait, it would rival even the Saudi reserve – the largest in the world. In terms of oil strength, these three Arab states are followed by the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Nigeria, Libya and China. Note that this group is a veritable Who’s Who of 20th (and 21st) Century US ‘foreign intervention’.
From beginning of the 2000 election cycle to 2006 alone, the major oil corporations supplied $52 million in campaign contributions. Of this cash pile, 80% was given to Republican campaigns. Following the widely criticized “Energy Task Force” strategy meetings that Mr. Cheney held with oil company executives, the “public servants” in the Bush Administration refused to release the content of those discussions, citing “executive privilege”. These oil corporations pocketed an unprecedented 79% upsurge in profits since Mr. Bush took office in 2000. The biggest five alone have netted a record total of $254 billion in profits. One oily CEO got a $97 million pension, over and above his inflated pay and bonus plan. Talk about return on investment…
The 2005 Bush “Energy Plan” gave over $6 billion in “corporate welfare” to these wealthy major oil companies, allegedly to help them increase their oil refining capacity. However, these companies more recently confessed (after willfully closing a significant portion of their existing refineries over the previous ten years) that no amount of tax breaks and subsidies will induce them to build more refineries. While they closed plants that met environmental regulations, they now blame these same regulations for their lack of refining capacity. Internal memos have recently surfaced illustrating a premeditated tactic to deliberately reduce supply in order to seize a greater share of the average American’s “disposable income”. Astonishingly, the chief executives of the five largest US oil giants would not submit to testimony under oath at a recent congressional hearing (a motion by Senator Cantwell to place them under oath was roundly seconded, but the Republican chairman then defiantly squelched this motion). Much of their ‘testimony’ was later pronounced false and misleading.
William Rivers Pitt wrote this past February:
“[The Project for a New American Century (PNAC)] was the driving force behind the drafting and passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act in 1998, a bill that essentially turned their desire for war into American law. PNAC funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to a group called the Iraqi National Congress, and to the man they intended to be Iraq’s heir-apparent, Ahmed Chalabi, despite the fact that Chalabi was sentenced in absentia by a Jordanian court to 22 years in prison on 31 counts of bank fraud. Chalabi and the INC gathered support for their cause by promising oil contracts to anyone who would help overthrow Saddam Hussein and put them into power in Iraq.”
“…the war in Iraq cost more than three trillion dollars ($3,000,000,000,000.00) to execute. Every bullet fired, every bomb dropped, every MRE eaten, every helicopter shot down, every missile fired, every truck destroyed by an IED, every oil well guarded, every uniform worn, and every body bag filled translated into a slice of that money going to a company connected to the PNAC members of the Bush administration, who lied us into that war as an expression of their personal principles and in fulfillment of their dreams. Halliburton, KBR, United Defense, the Carlyle Group, independent military contractors like Blackwater and a crowd of American oil companies are still counting the riches they earned from their participation in the carnage.”
A decade ago, in February of 2003, 15 million people demonstrated against that war across the globe –a couple of millions of them were in the streets here in the US – before it even started. Nonetheless, our government went ahead with that war – against international law and the will of the UN, and in spite of the facts that Hussein was no threat to the US, had no WMD’s and wasn’t making them, and was politically and financially crippled by sanctions that already killed half a million Iraqi children (deaths that were “worth it” to Madeleine Albright).
In his long-awaited memoir Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve for almost two decades, wrote: ‘I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’
On February 18, 2013 Democracy Now reported, “Tens of thousands rallied on Washington’s National Mall on Sunday for what organizers dubbed the largest climate rally in U.S. history. The “Forward on Climate” event was held to urge President Obama to reject the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline and commit the U.S. to binding limits on emissions of greenhouse gases.”
Obama’s “All of the above” strategy is misguided window dressing. The history of both major political parties in this country reveals their deep bonds with oily interests. Our addiction to oil continues with unabated severity. If 15 million people in the world’s streets couldn’t stop an illegal $3 trillion war for oil that killed, wounded and displaced millions of innocent people, it seems clear that tens of thousands won’t stop a poorly conceived, poisonous and ultimately lethal pipeline from spanning our nation. More people, and more direct actions, are needed if this deadly error is to be prevented.