Carbon Ideologies Approached

Life as we know it is not limitless in its capacities . . . Actually, its manifestations are confined to a small range on the thermometer.

Loren Eiseley, 1969

Was this Earth in any sense entrusted to us, or merely, coincidentally, made our available prey?

Once upon a time, the issue under contention between these opposing views was moral, spiritual, aesthetic. Hence in my youth I heard environmentalists called elitist, sentimental, selfish and racist, while loggers, miners and trawler-fishermen were accused of insensitivity; their ways of making a living deprived us of “wilderness” which hypothetically enriched our secret “natures.” So the pleasures of a forest trekker got weighed against the projected needs of power generation; the practical advantage of situating an observatory atop a certain mountain might be litigated against by the Indian tribe to whom that mountain was sacred; jobs offered by the local paper mill did or did not measure up against tourist dollars driven off by the stink. And as usual, money generally weighed greater than anything, and competing moneys confused us all.

What a country it must have been before the lumber men came! Sherwood Anderson is writing about Appalachia. He goes on: . . . The mountain men were always talking of the spruce forests of former days. Many of them worked in the lumber camps. They speak of soft moss into which a man sank almost to his knees, the silence of the forest, the great trees. Meanwhile the coal men investigated the ground where the great trees had been. Wherever it paid them, they sliced off mountaintops, choking the hollows and streams with poisonous rubble, and if the result was uglier than before, well, at least somebody made a profit.

Presently arose two sharper queries. The first was: Were humans guilty of outright ecocide? If so, to what extent might this be a crime? What “value” was, for instance, the life of the spotted owl?—This got easily settled in economic terms; the owl’s worth was zero.

However, the issue of financial value failed to go away. Hence the second query: What if unregulated taking were damaging somebody’s investment? In 1876 John Muir warned: Strip off the woods with their underbrush from the mountain flanks, and the whole State, the lowlands as well as the highlands, would gradually turn into a desert. This effect being so evident, at least to him, toward century’s end he drew an optimistic conclusion: The slow-going, unthrifty farmers, also, are beginning to realize that when the timber is stripped from the mountains the irrigating streams dry up in summer, and are destructive in winter; that soil, scenery, and everything slip off with the trees: so of course they are coming into the ranks of tree-friends.

The pleasures of electricity in Hiroshima

But were they? And if they were, was that good enough to meet a future-dweller’s definition of stewardship?

More decades of happy material accumulation passed by, until the issue further sharpened itself: Might our actions actually be imperiling us? Who could believe such a ridiculous thing? And yet this worry asserted itself ever more pressingly—although we wriggled to avoid it.

In 1968 a scientist wrote: Increasingly, there is but one way into the future: the technological way. The frightening aspect of this situation lies in the constriction of human choice. In fact we had more choices than ever before.

What mainly fretted us about our fossil fuels was that they might run out. In 1981, a good decade after my biology textbook noted that highways, gas stations and parking lots now cover more of the surface area of the U.S. than do homes, stores and schools, a report on automobiles in America’s urban zones advised:

Transportation is heavily dependent on the use of oil derivatives* . . . In contrast, a variety of energy sources can generate electricity. A rational allocation of energy resources, therefore, might be to limit the use of liquid hydrocarbons in electric power generation and place major reliance instead on coal and uranium, augmented by hydroelectric and solar energy.

Yes, that was the “rational” way to get by, all right! By then several dozen of us had heard about contamination in “some ecosystem somewhere,” but we had to get on with our lives. Don’t say we didn’t try to be good; several commuters even rode “rail rapid transit” powered by electrical energy! (More than 30 years later, as I flittered from Poza Rica to Oklahoma City to Dubai for Carbon Ideologies, I kept meeting people who thought we should abandon fossil fuels in favor of “electricity”—as if electricity emerged new and clean from nowhere all by itself!) To tell the truth, our lives were unthinkable without internal combustion engines—whose fuels polluted the atmosphere as follows: With respect to both carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide pollution, not to mention sulfurs and particulates, coal came out the worst in grams emitted per car-mile, followed by residual oil, then natural gas. As for carbon dioxide, how could that be a pollutant? In its “rail rapid transit” report (1979) the U.S. Department of Transportation did not mention it. For in those days there were so many other ways that we could have done for ourselves that climate change hardly stood out!—In 1972, in a science-fiction novel called The End of the Dream, the saturnine Philip Wylie asked what our work was for and expressly disliked the answer: It was politically impossible in the late 1970s to compel even part of industry to suspend production for a mere twelve to eighteen months to make essential changes in its techniques, even to save the environment. The American citizenry . . . was addicted to consumerism. So were other nationalities.—What happened next? As Wylie imagined it, children got cooked to death when an overheated nuclear reactor had to cool itself with massive quantities of river water (the “power interests” hushed it up because so far it involves, mostly, a small number of slum kids, most of them Negro or Puerto Rican); then came the nitrogen oxide inversion layer in Manhattan that killed 1,200,000 . . .—and then, because the seas were like a chemical warehouse factory, with a million compounds in stock that were stirred together, outcome unknowable, and because certain manufacturing processes used world-wide in the making of cheap dyes killed some obscure marine protozoa that had kept them in check, came the vibes:

A great shadow, lightish, goes under my boat and past it for, maybe, a hundred feet . . . And the vibes start squirming out by the million. Looks like macaroni—. . . a vibe gets Amy while she’s just ready to scram . . . Then the follow-upper types arrive and you can’t see nothing, no dress, even, for the white wriggling mess is all over her.

They struck all over the world:

Japan managed fairly well, its population already reduced to a tenth of its peak by the Rice Blast . . . Some cities, such as Cincinnati, where it was believed the invasion could not occur, were hit at night and virtually depopulated before dawn, amidst scenes of incredible panic and rout.

But never mind the vibes, who were presently undone by other pollution; for by 2010 the seas had risen more than two hundred feet . . . Meanwhile the atmosphere, staggering under a cloak of coal-mine-fire pollution, began to deposit a rising volume of toxic compounds produced by volcanic activity.*

Near the end of my life the predictions in that final paragraph seemed likeliest. We had been using the oceans for sewers; we polluted land and air left and right . . . and for all I know, you from the future will conclude that climate change was not the worst of it. (From The Japan Times, 2013: Dense clouds of yellow dust from China were forecast to begin reaching Japan on Friday. From the same paper, 2014: Yellow dust linked to more emergency room trips. Maybe you’ve even met the vibes.)—In that era we used to entertain ourselves with all kinds of post-apocalyptic visions. George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides imagined a plague that wiped out most of us; Neville Shute’s On the Beach described our extinction after a thermonuclear war; John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up retailed the destruction of America from pollution, greed and technological incompetence. A Stanford University biologist says the race between food production and population growth needs is already lost: by 1985 hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.—One or more of these events could still happen in your time. As for other scenarios, they mostly derived from our failure to answer that question: What was the work for?

A hazy reply did come from the advertisements in Inc.: The Magazine for Growing Companies (you see, our companies had to grow). Trying to sell us a 1985 Toyota cargo van (2,500-pound payload), some genius urged: Pack it full. Fuller. Pile it high. Higher. Why not? We’d let carbon do the work! Meanwhile some other Pied Piper was peddling computers: COMPAQ could have stopped here . . . but we didn’t. Introducing the new COMPAQ DESKPRO 286. More features, more speed, more power—courtesy of a fossil or nuclear plant in some ecosystem somewhere.—We liked that; we piled it all higher.

As climate change progressed, for a very long time it masked itself. The “coal-mine-fire pollution” imagined by Wylie would have been immediately unpleasant; but those wide white plumes I saw rising from the skirt-shaped smokestacks of the John E. Amos coal-fired power plant in Nitro, West Virginia, did not so much as tickle my throat; and a lady who lived with them nearly in her back yard said: “Well, I been here all my life and it never bothered me.”* And for a long time it did not bother the rest of us, either.

What “it” was the 17th-century seeker Van Helmont used to call gas sylvestre, while Black a century later referred to it as “fixed air.” Of course “it” was carbon dioxide.

In my 1976 Encyclopaedia Britannica lay two adjoining entries. The one on “climatic change,” which presented our planetary situation much as would the literature at the Kentucky Coal Museum almost 40 years later, spoke of warming and cooling cycles. Then it told our fortunes:

The cool-moist trend of the 1960s was of sufficient magnitude and universality to suggest that the next few decades will continue to be on the cool side in high latitudes and on the moist side in the tropics. Winters will more often than not be colder and snowier than average, and more summers will be either cool or wet.

But the entry on “climate” guessed in the other direction:

It seems that the 10 percent increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the 1890s to the 1960s should tend to maintain a somewhat warmer climate (on the average, the effect should be about 0.3° C or 0.5° F) than that of the last century.

When I happened upon this passage in 2016, I was disagreeably amazed. In 1976 we knew that CO2 concentrations had been increasing for seven decades—a long opportunity to have thought something and perhaps even done something.—Well, but as the first entry showed, even in 1976 we did not quite understand what those concentrations entailed.* The prophet of the cool-moist trend might not have been an ideologue at all; he resembled one of those period science-fiction writers who could penetrate Venus’s clouds only with speculations. Why shouldn’t Venus be warm and moist, rainy and jungly and crawling with, for instance, intelligent amphibians? Being an Earth-like planet with a thick atmosphere, Venus was presumably well endowed with oceans . . . Until the 1960s, the commonest picture . . . was one which resembled the primitive Earth: steaming coal forests, swamps and—sometimes—even dinosaur-like reptiles of great size. In many ways it is unfortunate that the concept of Venus as a new Earth had to die, as it did once we’d linked the microwave radiation emitted by Venus to hideous heat. Mariner 2 verified these readings; then came the Soviet landers, most relevantly Venera 7, which reported a surface temperature of nearly 900° Fahrenheit before falling silent.* Wondering and hesitating, the 1976 Britannica finally took a chance: Perhaps the most promising explanation for the high surface temperature is . . . the so-called greenhouse effect—for the Venusian atmosphere contained not only significant sulfur dioxide,* which can increase global warming, but also, coincidentally enough, carbon dioxide (to the tune of 96.4%). The clouds let the sunlight in, but not out, and so the planet became, whether or not it had ever otherwise been, unliveable. Preliminary calculations suggest that such a runaway greenhouse effect could have occurred on Venus but not on the Earth because of the difference in distance from the Sun of the two planets and the consequent difference in the rate of temperature buildup.* Well, then, we could go back to sleep—especially since our ordinary thermometers and shortlived terrestrial weathermen could prove no global temperature increase.

In 1980, when it happened to be said that the United States accounts for roughly one half of the world’s total consumption of energy and produces substantially less than it consumes, the United Nations and Petro-Canada held a symposium. They invited resource extractors from around the world, and even a few bleeding hearts. It must have been the end of November in Montréal, whose famous winter chill would have set reassuringly in, when the man who would soon publish all their papers under the happy title Long-Term Energy Resources addressed them:

“Very often the point is made that the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to a ‘greenhouse’ effect, an increase in temperatures worldwide, and the melting of the polar ice caps. This theory is frequently mentioned, including in some of the papers submitted to the Conference, but it is a theory that is out of date.”

And he invoked the climatologist Dr. George Kukla, who had opined that carbon dioxide may have a cooling effect. Unfortunately, Dr. Kukla could not be present (I would have loved to read his remarks), but his name must have been as good as gold—for thanks to him the greenhouse effect was now forever disposed of!—The moderator continued: “I mention the latest research . . . in order, if possible, to eliminate discussion of CO2 from the Conference.”

To eliminate discussion of CO2 from the Conference! To you from the future that must ring high-handed, and worse! You might accuse him of censorial ignorance, or of covering up for his petrochemical pals; in hindsight it does ring to his discredit that very often the point about CO2 was being made in his hearing, and yet he determined to eliminate discussion of it.

Well, please forgive him. In his defense, and ours, I would remind you that environmental change, which must be accelerating in your time, remained deniable to, and denied by, our multitudes who lived their own lives, being served by unseen sectors of a far-flung, hyper-specialized economy, whose unintended effects were correspondingly invisible; so that even in the second decade of the 21st century, when I was writing Carbon Ideologies, it seemed not at all preposterous to follow ancestral tradition, and make my own short life the measure. Had I done so, my daughter would have been happier—for how tedious I was, to go on and on about gloomy abstractions! Yes, cities were growing and forests were slimming out; we could see that, but how could we be expected to grasp these slower alterations, especially when our most ironclad climatological records went back only a century or so? As you will see when we get to the sixth-grade science standards of the West Virginia Board of Education,* such changes could be stoutly denied, and the denials maybe even believed in by some of the deniers. In 1969 a paleontologist who certainly tried to take the long view concluded:

If the cause of these glacial conditions . . . is directed by recurrent terrestrial or cosmic conditions, then man, unknowingly, is huddling memoryless in the pale sunshine of an interstadial spring . . . He is a survival from a vanished world, a denizen of the long cold of which he may yet be the returning harbinger.

Meanwhile our lives ran on, as yours probably will, with little concern for someone else’s dark future.

That moderator of the Long-Term Energy Resources symposium was, as were we all, a devoted specimen of faith. And just before this he had recited our common creed:

“Modern industry cannot operate without electricity, and . . . electricity is today a necessity for our communications system and social life.”*

What was the work for?—I refuse to reply: Merely for consumerism, profiteering and reptilian greed! For when L. L. Nunn wrote so long ago of lessening man’s toil by the use of a wire,* his heart had been right. (Does that photograph of the old Bangladeshi woman sweatily and wearily clutching her shocks of corn mean nothing to you?)—And at the symposium in Montréal another good man now rose to speak. He was the Chief Scientist of the United Kingdom Department of Energy. And he said: “Energy planners must never forget that hoped-for increases in the standard of living of the world’s poor will result in increased energy consumption to replace physical labor and prevent the exhaustion of limited wood resources.”

You from the future, are you listening? Please don’t say that we ruined you entirely out of selfishness! Now hear the pleadings of some altruists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published in 1982: Not to use oil and gas for as long as they are readily available would be an act of irresponsibility and inhumanity on the part of those governments struggling to provide for poor, expanding populations.

During the previous year, our planet’s citizens had produced 285 quadrillion BTUs of primary energy (we casually called them “quads”). Does that figure bear more weight in italics? I could truthfully equate it with 57 billion barrels of oil, but would that assist any merely human understanding? A single barrel of oil (42 gallons, 159 liters, 296 pounds internal weight) is barely comprehensible at something like 6.5 million BTUs*—just enough (supposing the impossibility of perfect efficiency) to have manufactured 95 pounds of titanium in 1952. Why not say that we refined Himalayan mountains of carbon-based substances, which our high priests offered up in smoke?

The Oak Ridge altruists now admitted: Burning fossil fuels will increase the level of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere. This could become a problem a half century from now . . . Intensive research is needed to increase our knowledge about the factors that affect accumulation of CO2.

(From the National Academy of Sciences, 1979: At present, the most serious man-made impact on climate in the next few centuries is believed to be produced by the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, as a result of burning fossil fuels . . . Fortunately, it appears that the temperature changes due to increased CO2 will not be detectable as such before the year 2000.)

So they knew! Reader, when you get to the coal, oil and fracking chapters of Carbon Ideologies, where you will hear, for instance, a certain lobbyist expressing his “reservations as to man’s contribution” to climate change, which “has always occurred and will always occur; I’m intrigued and even find it a little humorous when I hear people say that the winters today are not what they were when I was a child,” please remember that more than 30 years before, back in 1982, these brains at Oak Ridge wrote in black and white: Burning fossil fuels will increase the level of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere.

In their defense, intensive research is needed to increase our knowledge.

(From a biology textbook published in 1967: The rapid, very voluminous release of CO2 by man-made combustions today may increasingly affect global climates . . . Carbon dioxide . . . has a “greenhouse effect,” which in some measure probably contributes to the present warming up of the earth. So even in 1967—49 years before I went to Oklahoma and found people still denying it—a professor at Brown University was referring to “present warming”—but in some measure probably did not equal certainly.)

To comfort us, the Oak Ridge boys now prepared two curves of projected carbon dioxide concentrations over time, the higher-sloping one (which would have thrilled the ideologues you will meet in West Virginia) labeled COAL USE TO MEET ALL ENERGY DEMAND and the lower one 1975 FUEL MIX. Even the all-coal curve stayed obediently below 400 parts per million in the year 2000—as in fact happened. The caption read: It is very improbable that atmospheric CO2 will reach 500 ppm before 2030.

(In 2030 I was by some definitions still alive, but 71 years old. So what did I matter?)

The Oak Ridge boys further calmed the waters: And even in the high CO2 case, a level of 700 ppm (which may prove to be acceptable) is not exceeded in 2050.*

(Translation: They did not care about anyone alive after 2050. You were not in their department.)

It is fairly clear that no serious climactic changes will result from fossil fuel use in this century. After that they would be safely off the job. For the present, fossil fuels will continue to be used while the potential consequences of the CO2 problem are investigated.

So we kept right on investigating. Then we died.