This is no time for climate complacency--let alone more drilling

[Celerity]

Too many of us are oblivious to the dangers we face

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/environment-news/climate/73734/this-is-no-time-for-climate-complacencylet-alone-more-drilling

https://archive.ph/HxdMU


On the beach in Lyme Regis, on 30th May. Image: Alamy

Two frogs in a saucepan. “Nice warm water we’re getting, isn’t it?”, says one. “Yeah, can’t get hot enough for me, I say!”, says the other. A little while later, they’re cooked. Two people on Facebook. “We used to call it summer back in the day”, says Matt during last week’s record-smashing May temperatures. “Actually shocked it’s not been named something stupid like solar storm Glenda”. “It’s summer shop [sic] moaning”, says Vickie. Only, it wasn’t summer—it was still May. A May that was only 0.7°C cooler than the hottest day last summer—the warmest summer since records began in 1884. And a May that reached 35.1°C, 2.3°C hotter than the previous May record (32.8°C set in 1944). There is nothing normal about what just happened. In a little while, we’ll all be cooked.

As a society, we are ignoring the urgency of this crisis. As Alan Rusbridger wrote in these pages last week, we missed the year’s biggest story because it was hidden in the papers among “pictures of joyful kids leaping into lidos to celebrate the warmest May on record! Beachgoers basking in the glorious sun! Hotter than Barbados! RUM-BELIEVABLE!”. Tony Blair chose the same week to release an essay and 10-point agenda urging the government to “use what is left of our North Sea oil and gas resources” because it is “essential for our competitiveness and for taking advantage of AI”. And on 24th May, as the heatwave struck, Robert Colvile used his Sunday Times column to bemoan “our neglect of the North Sea” oil fields, and the decline in our number of oil refineries. “Industry figures suggest that the new field at Jackdaw could be pumping out gas by Christmas, with oil from Rosebank following in the new year,” he said. The message being, drill baby, drill!

Colvile’s limp coup-de-grâce was that net zero (a phrase which, as Simon Sharpe writes for Prospect, is an easier political punchbag than its synonym “tackling climate change”): “would be all very well if we weren’t importing a quite staggering volume of fossil fuels, and fossil fuel-derived products, to run our cars, our kitchens, our industries and our agriculture. In short, our lives.” But there are immediate fossil-fuel-free alternatives to all of these. For our cars, there are EVs. For our kitchens, induction hobs. For our industries, electrification (yes, even steel smelters). And in agriculture, there are organic regenerative methods. In short, our lives can avoid being cooked.

Of course, our past pollution is already having dire real-world climate consequences. Last week, India and Pakistan saw temperatures top 46°C, with some areas running between 5 and 8°C above seasonal norms—extremely likely to have been caused by manmade climate change. India Today reported that a five-day heatwave could now be “associated with nearly 30,000 deaths, many times the number the government records in an entire summer”. More than 60 per cent of the United States was officially in drought by mid-May. Meanwhile, the coming 2026 El Niño—defined by a sustained warming of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific which disrupts global weather patterns—is expected to be the strongest in decades, if not ever. The conditions it creates “will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” warned UN Secretary-General António Guterres on 2nd June, adding that we “must treat it as the urgent climate warning it is.”

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Even when we Democrats are in power we too often go all drill baby drill, like this, from 4 and a half years ago:

Revealed: Biden administration was not legally bound to auction gulf drilling rights

Justice department admits a previous ruling did not force the detonation of what environmentalists call ‘huge carbon bomb’

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/dec/13/revealed-biden-administration-was-not-legally-bound-to-auction-gulf-drilling-rights


A file picture from 2010 shows the explosion at the mobile offshore oil drilling unit Deepwater Horizon, located in the Gulf of Mexico. Photograph: Us Coast Guard/HANDOUT HANDOUT/EPA

The Biden administration admitted that a court decision did not compel it to lease vast tracts of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling, shortly before claiming it was legally obliged to do so when announcing the sell-off, the Guardian can reveal.

Last month, the US government held the largest-ever auction of oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico’s history, offering up more than 80m acres of the gulf’s seabed for fossil fuel extraction.

The enormous sale, which took place just four days after crucial UN climate talks in Scotland, represented a spectacular about-turn from Joe Biden’s previous promise to halt offshore drilling and was denounced by outraged environmental groups as a “huge carbon bomb”.

The president’s administration insisted it was obliged to hold the lease sale due to a court ruling in favor of a dozen states that sued to lift a blanket pause placed on new drilling permits by Biden. But a memo filed by the US Department of Justice before the lease sale acknowledges that this judgement does not force the government to auction off drilling rights to the gulf.

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