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We really can live without tar sands, but don’t tell the oil patch
Opinion Featured | The Hill Times | Dave Martin | June 21, 2010
Read the full article on the originating site
TORONTO—The scariest thing for the oil industry right now is not the front page pictures of dying, oil-covered birds in the Gulf of Mexico, or pictures of dead, oil covered ducks in the Alberta tar sands. The most frightening spectre for them is a surging renewable energy industry united with environmentalists to destroy the myth of oil’s necessity.
Yet that is precisely what happened last week, when Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council released their ‘Energy®evolution’ blueprint for cutting carbon emissions while achieving economic growth. The simple solution is to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy and energy efficiency. The study was developed in conjunction with specialists from the German Aerospace Centre and more than 30 scientists and engineers from universities, institutes and the renewable energy industry around the world. It demonstrated that in a world taking serious action on climate change, there is no need for unconventional oil from the tar sands.
This is not a story the oil industry wants you to hear right now. The oil patch is already reeling from the twin black eyes of the tar sands (with their devastating human and environmental costs), and BP’s disastrous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. In the face of these public relations catastrophes, the oil industry has fallen back on an old familiar message track: “You may not like us, but you need us.”
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has aptly labelled this position “petrodeterminist.” These are the people who, since the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, have argued that we should not even try to break our addiction to oil—that it’s impossible. But the public is increasingly looking for leadership on climate change, and is leery of multinational companies telling them that they can’t live without fossil fuels, no matter what the cost.
Whether it is Shell’s presentation on the ‘hard truths’ of energy or BP’s defence of their investment in the tar sands before their most recent shareholders’ meeting, the oil industry points to a forecast of the International Energy Agency (IEA). This forecast shows the world demand for oil growing by 24 per cent over the next 20 years… apparently justifying a move into what BP calls the “energy frontier” of dirty, expensive, and risky unconventional oil.
What they conveniently neglect to mention, however, is that while the IEA’s 2009 World Energy Outlook included such a possibility, it was there as a cautionary tale. This possible future, which includes a tripling in size of the Canadian tar sands, is one which the IEA says has “alarming consequences for climate change and energy security.” This scenario “takes us inexorably towards a long-term concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in excess of 1,000 parts per million CO2 equivalent. The CO2 concentration implied by the Reference Scenario would result in the global average temperature rising by up to six degrees Celsius. This would lead almost certainly to massive climatic change and irreparable damage to the planet.”
The IEA was actually advocating for what they called a “low-carbon energy revolution,” which it said would have a 50 per cent chance of keeping the increase in global temperatures to below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the stated aim of the Copenhagen Accord that came out of the climate change summit in December 2009. This would dramatically cut air pollution and reduce fuel costs in the transport sector by $6.2-trillion over the 2010-2030 period, helping to pay for the cost of making the change.
This is not good news for tar sands investors, as even these relatively modest measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would slash the global growth of unconventional oil by 44 per cent, “with Canadian oil sands particularly heavily affected.”
Yet in order to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, we must do even better than the IEA’s low-carbon scenario. We have to keep the global temperature increase as far below 2°C as possible, rather than gamble on a 50/50 chance of missing this upper limit. The latest science shows that a warming of 2°C above pre-industrial levels would pose unacceptable risks to many of the world’s key natural and human systems. Even with a 1.5°C warming, increases in drought, heat waves and floods, along with other adverse impacts such as increased water stress for up to 1.7 billion people, wildfire frequency and flood risks, are projected in many regions.
The Energy®evolution scenario developed for Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council, on the other hand, accepts that since we can’t change the laws of atmospheric physics, we must change the politics. This more aggressive, but doable, plan has 80 per cent of global energy, and 95 per cent of our electricity, coming from renewable energy sources by 2050. It achieves the level of reductions in greenhouse gases that scientists say are necessary.
In this scenario, the demand for oil drops by 25 per cent. Dirty, expensive unconventional oil like the tar sands are pushed out of the marketplace, as we dramatically shift freight from road to rail, expand public transit, and improve vehicle fuel efficiency. The game-changer, however, is the switch to electric drive trains for vehicles so that the transport sector is not only more efficient, but increasingly powered by renewable energy.
Don’t tell the oil industry, though. They’re having a really bad year, and it would be cruel to tell them that we really can live without them after all.
Dave Martin is a policy adviser on climate and energy for Greenpeace Canada.
Tagged with: oil demand, greenpeace canada, energy revolution, european renewable energy council, hill times
