Read Online Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming by McKenzie Funk - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: McKenzie Funk
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the company Web site explains, “enables explorers to see through solid matter in the same way an ultrasound can see a baby inside its mother.” And in places like Alaska, governments allow oil drilling only during the ice-free summer, a season that is lengthening year after year. As a Shell vice president once told a crowd at yet another conference, “I will be one of those persons most cheering for an endless summer in Alaska.”
I caught up with Blaauw in the Arctic Frontiers coffee line one morning, and he voiced a similar thought. An eighteen-ship Shell armada had recently sailed to the Beaufort Sea, where the company had again acquired drilling leases in 2005, but it was blocked in court by a coalition of Native and environmental groups before summer exploration could begin. “It was such an abnormally low ice year,” Blaauw told me, “so it’s a pity we weren’t allowed to go forward with the drilling.” The Arctic wasn’t like Saudi Arabia. “If you lose your chance to drill in the Middle East,” he said, “you can go back in six weeks. But the Arctic is slow, very slow. You must wait an entire year until the ice is gone again.” I asked if talk of the high north as the world’s next oil elephant was overblown. It was not, he said. I should keep an eye on Alaska’s upcoming Lease Sale 193, the first offshore auction in the Chukchi Sea in seventeen years. “There are enormous hopes for the Arctic,” he said, “and I think you’ll see that reflected in the prices at this Anchorage lease sale.”
• • •
IN THE OPTIMISTIC WORLD of Blueprints, wrote Jeroen van der Veer in the booklet introducing Shell’s two scenarios to 2050, “growing local actions begin to address the challenges of economic development, energy security and environmental pollution. A price is applied to a critical mass of emissions giving a huge stimulus to the development of clean energy technologies.” There would be energy efficiency measures, electric cars, solar panels—“increasingly a world of electrons rather than molecules”—and, crucially, widespread adoption of carbon capture and storage, or CCS, the still embryonic process to catch carbon at power plants before it enters the atmosphere. CCS would keep greenhouse gases in the ground, and it would keep fossil fuel companies in business. Shell would prepare for either scenario, van der Veer wrote. “But in our view, the Blueprints’ outcomes offer the best hope.”
Blueprints, along with its counterpart, Scramble, was imagined as a plausible outcome of what Shell called the three hard truths: There would be a step change in global energy use. (“Developing nations, including population giants China and India, are entering their most energy-intensive phase of economic growth.”) There would not be enough conventional energy to keep up. (“By 2015, growth in the production of easily accessible oil and gas will not match the projected rate of demand growth.”) And climate change and other environmental stresses were real and getting worse. (“People are beginning to realise that energy use can both nourish and threaten what they value most—their health, their community and their environment, the future of their children, and the planet itself.”)
Change comes from the bottom up in Blueprints as people’s fears about their economy and quality of life lead to local action, which leads to regional, national, and eventually international action—“a critical mass of parallel responses to supply, demand, and climate stresses.” Carbon trading accelerates, the story goes, “and CO 2 prices strengthen early. Perceptions begin to shift about the dilemma that continued economic growth contributes to climate change.” Even in the developing world, “people make the connection between irregular local climate behaviour and the broader implications of climate change, including the threats to water supplies and coastal regions. After the Kyoto Protocol
I caught up with Blaauw in the Arctic Frontiers coffee line one morning, and he voiced a similar thought. An eighteen-ship Shell armada had recently sailed to the Beaufort Sea, where the company had again acquired drilling leases in 2005, but it was blocked in court by a coalition of Native and environmental groups before summer exploration could begin. “It was such an abnormally low ice year,” Blaauw told me, “so it’s a pity we weren’t allowed to go forward with the drilling.” The Arctic wasn’t like Saudi Arabia. “If you lose your chance to drill in the Middle East,” he said, “you can go back in six weeks. But the Arctic is slow, very slow. You must wait an entire year until the ice is gone again.” I asked if talk of the high north as the world’s next oil elephant was overblown. It was not, he said. I should keep an eye on Alaska’s upcoming Lease Sale 193, the first offshore auction in the Chukchi Sea in seventeen years. “There are enormous hopes for the Arctic,” he said, “and I think you’ll see that reflected in the prices at this Anchorage lease sale.”
• • •
IN THE OPTIMISTIC WORLD of Blueprints, wrote Jeroen van der Veer in the booklet introducing Shell’s two scenarios to 2050, “growing local actions begin to address the challenges of economic development, energy security and environmental pollution. A price is applied to a critical mass of emissions giving a huge stimulus to the development of clean energy technologies.” There would be energy efficiency measures, electric cars, solar panels—“increasingly a world of electrons rather than molecules”—and, crucially, widespread adoption of carbon capture and storage, or CCS, the still embryonic process to catch carbon at power plants before it enters the atmosphere. CCS would keep greenhouse gases in the ground, and it would keep fossil fuel companies in business. Shell would prepare for either scenario, van der Veer wrote. “But in our view, the Blueprints’ outcomes offer the best hope.”
Blueprints, along with its counterpart, Scramble, was imagined as a plausible outcome of what Shell called the three hard truths: There would be a step change in global energy use. (“Developing nations, including population giants China and India, are entering their most energy-intensive phase of economic growth.”) There would not be enough conventional energy to keep up. (“By 2015, growth in the production of easily accessible oil and gas will not match the projected rate of demand growth.”) And climate change and other environmental stresses were real and getting worse. (“People are beginning to realise that energy use can both nourish and threaten what they value most—their health, their community and their environment, the future of their children, and the planet itself.”)
Change comes from the bottom up in Blueprints as people’s fears about their economy and quality of life lead to local action, which leads to regional, national, and eventually international action—“a critical mass of parallel responses to supply, demand, and climate stresses.” Carbon trading accelerates, the story goes, “and CO 2 prices strengthen early. Perceptions begin to shift about the dilemma that continued economic growth contributes to climate change.” Even in the developing world, “people make the connection between irregular local climate behaviour and the broader implications of climate change, including the threats to water supplies and coastal regions. After the Kyoto Protocol
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