Fossil fuels, the principal driver of global warming, must be phased out

Bob Sheak, August 7, 2023

The Climate Crisis

We are in an unprecedented global warming crisis. It is affecting some parts of the U.S. and world more than others, but, not too long from now in the absence of sufficient responses, it will harmfully impact all aspects of life – people, societies, economies, agriculture, oceans, and virtually everything. Scott Dance captures this dire situation, writing “the earth is at its hottest in thousands of years” (https://washingtpost.com/weather/2023/07/08/earth-hottest-years-thousands-climate). Dance continues:

“Observations from both satellites and the Earth’s surface are indisputable — the planet has warmed rapidly over the past 44 years. As far back as 1850, data from weather stations all over the globe make clear the Earth’s average temperature has been rising.

“In recent days, as the Earth has reached its highest average temperatures in recorded history, scientists have made a bolder claim: It may well be warmer than any time in the last 125,000 years.”

If the carbon emissions from fossil fuels are not greatly reduced, the future of life on earth is threatened. In the meantime, there will be extensive damage to societies and ecosystems.  

Fossil fuels at the center of the climate crisis

Fossil fuel emissions are not the only cause of global warming, but they are the principal cause. Jake Johnson points out that “fossil fuels made up 82% of global energy consumption in 2022 (https://commondreams.org/news/fossil-fuels-global-energy-consumption).

“Data published Monday shows that fossil fuels made up 82% of global energy consumption in 2022, another indication that the global transition away from planet-warming sources is moving far too slowly as rich nations continue burning oil, gas, and coal at an unsustainable pace.”

Johnson continues.

“Juliet Davenport, president of the Energy Institute, said in a statement that ‘2022 saw some of the worst ever impacts of climate change—the devastating floods affecting millions in Pakistan, the record heat events across Europe and North America—yet we have to look hard for positive news on the energy transition in this new data.’

“‘Despite further strong growth in wind and solar in the power sector, overall global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions increased again,’ said Davenport. ‘We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris Agreement.’”

 “Meanwhile, according to the new Energy Institute data, oil consumption continued to increase in 2022—up 2.9 million barrels per day compared to last year—and global coal use rose to its highest level since 2014.”

Johnson does see some bright spots in the growth in new wind and solar capacity, reaching 12% of power generation in 2022.

Fossil fuel consumption in U.S.

The University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems provides the following figures (https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-renewable-energy-factsheet).

“About 79% of the nation’s energy comes from fossil fuels, 8.4% from nuclear, and 12.5% from renewable sources. In 2019, renewables surpassed coal in the amount of energy provided to the U.S. and continued this trend in 2021. Wind and solar are the fastest growing renewable sources, but contribute just 5% of total energy used in the U.S.”

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More evidence

Jeff Goodell, the author of the book “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet,” gives us a glimpse of the future” under a rapidly warming planet with the example of how Texas and other places are now being affected  (https://nytimes.com/2023/07/08/opinion/heat-texas-climate.html). He writes:

“…in mid-June…a heat dome settled over the entire Southwest as well as Mexico, breaking temperature records and turning asphalt to mush. I [Goodell] had recently moved to Austin, Texas. Yes, Texas is a hot place. But this was different. We’re talking about a heat index — the combination of temperature and humidity — as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Events disturbingly similar to what I had reported on in other places several years earlier were playing out in real time around me, like hikers dying of heatstroke and thousands of dead fish washing up on Gulf Coast beaches (hotter water contains less oxygen, making it difficult for fish to breathe). The red-faced desperation on the faces of homeless people living beneath an overpass near me was spookily evocative of the red-faced desperation I’d seen on the faces of people in India and Pakistan.”

Goodell continues.

“You can argue that Texas has done this to itself. The planet is getting hotter because of the burning of fossil fuels. This is a simple truth, as clear as the moon in the night sky. No state has profited more from fossil fuels than Texas. Revenues from oil and gas production have long been central to the Texas economy and are at least partly responsible for the more than $32 billion projected surplus in the state’s 2024-25 budget. And Texas is also responsible for emitting more than 600 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year, more than twice as much as any other state.”

Affecting everywhere

“But living under the Texas heat dome has reinforced my view [Goodell’s] that we have to be cleareyed about the scope and scale of what we are facing. The extreme heat that is cooking many parts of the world this summer is not a freakish event — it is another step into our burning future. The wildfires in Canada, the orange Blade Runner skies on the East Coast, the hot ocean, the rapidly melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica and the Himalayas, the high price of food, the spread of vector-borne diseases in unexpected places — it is all connected, and it is all driven by rising heat.”

Will there be meaningful action?

“We need to start seeing hot days as more than an invitation to go to the beach or hang out at the lake. Extreme heat is the engine of planetary chaos. We ignore it at our peril. Because if there is one thing we should understand about the risks of extreme heat, it is this: All living things, from humans to hummingbirds, share one simple fate. If the temperature they’re used to — what scientists sometimes call their Goldilocks Zone — rises too far, too fast, they die.”

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The current situation

There has been too little constructive change while the problem of global warming steadily increases. The time for mitigating, adapting to, or reversing this dire existential problem is running out. Here’s some of the evidence highlighting the obstacles to reducing the problem.

#1 – We have long known that fossil fuel emissions are the principal cause of global warming

Bill McKibben, the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org, has long warned us of the unfolding climate crisis (https://commondreams.org/opinion/i-told-you-so-on-climate-emergency).

“I [McKibben] wrote the first book on what we now call the climate crisis way back in 1989, and it feels like I’ve spent the subsequent three-and-a-half decades warning that eventually we’d get to this particular July: the hottest day and week and month on record. And long before records too: It seems almost certain that this is the hottest weather on our planet in 125,000 years; Jim Hansen made a quite reasonable case Friday that it is already or soon will be hotter than it’s been for a million years, which is to say before the evolution of homo sapiens.”

McKibben continues.

“And here’s The Washington Post today, reporting on the heat in Phoenix, which will soon break its record of 18 straight days of heat above 110°F. (The average temperature forecast for all next week, across all 24 hours, is 104.6°F, which would crush the city’s previous warmest week on record, which had an average temperature of 102.9°F.) What happens when it gets that hot? People get savage burns when they walk a few barefoot steps across a patio, or let a seatbelt buckle touch bare skin. They scald themselves with water that’s been sitting in a garden hose soaking up the sun.”

“The current horrors are not a reason to stop working. We know from a recent study that every 10th of a degree in temperature rise that we prevent keeps 140 million of our brothers and sisters in habitable zones on this planet. And nothing has changed my basic conviction about the key: We need to keep building huge movements to finally break the political power of the fossil fuel industry and force the emergency conversion to clean energy. When we’ve made progress—the Paris accords, say, or the Inflation Reduction Act—mass mobilizing is how we’ve done it; we have to give good politicians the room they need, we have to give bad politicians the boot, and we have to hold corporations accountable for killing us and our world. We have to keep on changing the zeitgeist.”

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#2a – Fossil fuel companies spent decades lying about the unfolding climate crisis

They knew

Nicholas Kusnetz, a reporter for Inside Climate News and winner of numerous awards for his work, reports on how big oil companies like ExxonMobil knew for many decades before scientists reported on it that burning fossil fuels produced climate-heating emissions (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12012023/exxon-doubt-climate-science). He writes:

“For climate activists, the term ‘Exxon Knew’ has settled deeply into the lexicon of climate accountability, shorthand for the contradiction between the oil giant’s long campaign to publicly question climate science and its internal understanding that the science was sound.” 

New research confirms they knew and lied about it

“Now, new academic research lends statistical rigor to this concept by showing that the company’s own climate projections, dating back decades, consistently predicted the warming that was to come primarily from burning fossil fuels.

“The peer-reviewed paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, analyzed all known climate predictions produced or reported by scientists at ExxonMobil and its predecessor from 1977-2003, and found that they were ‘at least as skillful’ as those by independent experts (Exxon merged with Mobil in 1999). Like those independent models, most of Exxon’s proved to be accurate.

“They didn’t just vaguely know something about global warming decades ago, they literally knew as much as independent academic scientists did,” said Geoffrey Supran, the paper’s lead author, who recently left a research position at Harvard University to become an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science. ‘We now have this airtight, unimpeachable evidence that Exxon accurately predicted global warming years before it turned around and publicly attacked climate science.’

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This core understanding—that Exxon executives knew climate change was real, but publicly cast doubt on the science anyway—was first revealed in a 2015 investigation by Inside Climate News and has since been supported by reporting and research by other news organizations, activists and academics.” 

The accumulating evidence documents Exxon’s culpability  

“The new article is the latest in a series by Supran and Naomi Oreskes, a co-author and professor of the history of science at Harvard, about Exxon’s messaging on climate change. In 2017, Supran and Oreskes published a peer-reviewed article that applied quantitative analysis to Exxon documents, statements and peer-reviewed papers from the late 1970s into the 2000s. The work concluded that while internal documents largely acknowledged that global warming was caused by humans, public-facing statements from the same period instead stressed doubt and uncertainties about the science.

“In 2021, the researchers published an article showing that Exxon’s public statements began to shift in the 2000s away from directly questioning the science and towards more subtle messaging on climate change that minimized the severity of climate impacts and transferred responsibility for action to consumers.

“The article published Thursday, like those before it, drew on internal corporate documents, including some first published by Inside Climate News, and peer-reviewed papers. This time, however, Supran and Oreskes worked with Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, to analyze all the climate projections included in those documents.

“The researchers found that company scientists predicted overall warming with a degree of certainty that left no doubt that the burning of fossil fuel was warming the planet. They also accurately predicted that human-induced warming would be detectable by 2000, a fact confirmed that year by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

Despite the evidence, Exxon and its allies “want the public to think the scientific findings on the unfolding climate crisis is ‘uncertain.’ Kusnetz points out, ‘As late as 2013, the article notes, then-chief executive Rex Tillerson said ‘the facts remain there are uncertainties around the climate… what the principal drivers of climate change are.’” 

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#2b – Exxon and other big oil companies must be investigated and held accountable by the Department of Justice, according to some Senate Democrats, as reported by Sharon Zhang on July 31, 2023 (https://truthout.org/articles/sanders-warren-doj-must-sue-big-oil-for-decades-of-lies-on-climate-crisis).

“A group of senators is urging the Department of Justice to file lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry over its decades-long campaign to deny its impact on the climate crisis on the last day of what scientists predict will be the hottest month on Earth on record.

“On Monday [July 1, 2023], Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) told Attorney General Merrick Garland that it is clear that the fossil fuel industry has for years broken a wide variety of laws in perpetuating climate denial, and that the DOJ must hold the industry accountable.

“‘The actions of ExxonMobil, Shell, and potentially other fossil fuel companies represent a clear violation of federal racketeering laws, truth in advertising laws, consumer protection laws, and potentially other laws,’ the lawmakers wrote in a letter.

“Since at least the 1970s, fossil fuel giants like Exxon have known that a dependence on fossil fuels would lead to climate catastrophe, with company scientists predicting with surprising accuracy how much their products would warm and destabilize the planet. Rather than heeding these warnings, the corporations worked in tandem to bury this research, and, borrowing from Big Tobacco’s strategy of lying about lung cancer, have spent decades sowing climate denial in order to enrich themselves and their shareholders.

“The lawmakers say that these companies should, at long last, be held responsible for their lies. They cite research on the climate crisis that Shell, Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute were aware of, but chose to discredit.

“While many states and climate advocates have brought lawsuits seeking to expose the industry’s lies or mandate an end to fossil fuels, the DOJ has not itself brought a lawsuit against the industry, though it did file a legal brief in support of a Colorado climate lawsuit earlier this year.”

Zhang continues.

On July 31, Sanders said “it is time to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable. It is time for the DOJ to join the fight. The future of our planet depends on it.’”

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#3 – Republican climate plan is “a manual for destroying the planet,” as reported on July 18, 2023, by Jake Johnson, a staff writer for Common Dreams.

(https://commondreams.org/news/gop-climate-bill).  Here’s some of what Johnson reports.

“While Americans take refuge from record-setting extreme heat and suffer from wildfire smoke, the House majority proposes slashing environmental funding to the lowest level in 30 years.”

“Legislation that the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee is set to mark up on Wednesday would take an axe to U.S. climate spending, cutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by a staggering 39% while promoting fossil fuel development as huge swaths of the planet face devastating heatwaves.

“Kyle Jones, director of federal affairs with the Center for Policy Advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said in a statement Tuesday that the Republican bill is ‘historically bad… the worst of its kind we’ve ever seen.’

Jones went on to say that the legislation—one of a dozen appropriations bills currently moving through the House—’reads like a ‘how-to’ manual for destroying the planet.’”

“Made public last week amid record-shattering heat and other extreme weather across the U.S., the GOP’s Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies funding bill calls for $4 billion in total cuts to the EPA budget—slashing the agency’s clean water funds, emissions-reduction grants, and other programs.

“The bill would also cut the Interior Department’s budget by $721 million, remove the Gray Wolf from the list of endangered and threatened wildlife, and prevent the EPA from considering the social cost of carbon in any regulatory action.

“Meanwhile, the Republican legislation aims to bolster the industry fueling climate chaos by requiring the Interior Department to hold at least two offshore oil and gas lease sales in both the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska each year.

“‘The bill includes an exhaustive list of anti-environment riders that seek to derail any effort to combat climate change and undermine clean water and clean air protections,’ Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), the top Democrat on the House Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, said during a hearing on the measure last week.”

Republicans “give an open invitation to exploitative oil, gas, and mineral leasing by blocking environmental regulations and even overriding judicial review,” Pingree added. “At the same time, the bill suppresses clean energy production.”

“The NRDC’s Josh Axelrod and Valerie Cleland wrote in a blog post that the legislation marks ‘the Republican majority’s latest in a series of attempts to hand over our public lands and waters to Big Oil.’”

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#4 – Rising temperatures are causing productivity to fall

Coral Davenport reports on evidence on how the unprecedent warming is “costing the US economy billions in lost productivity” (https://nytimes.com/2023/07/31/climate/heat-labor-productivity-climate.html).

Here are some of her examples.

“From meatpackers to home health aides, workers are struggling in sweltering temperatures and productivity is taking a hit.

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As much of the United States swelters under record heat, Amazon drivers and warehouse workers have gone on strike in part to protest working conditions that can exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

“On triple-digit days in Orlando, utility crews are postponing checks for gas leaks, since digging outdoors dressed in heavy safety gear could endanger their lives. Even in Michigan, on the nation’s northern border, construction crews are working shortened days because of heat.

Rising temperatures will continue going up

“Now that climate change has raised the Earth’s temperatures to the highest levels in recorded history, with projections showing that they will only climb further, new research shows the impact of heat on workers is spreading across the economy and lowering productivity.

“Extreme heat is regularly affecting workers beyond expected industries like agriculture and construction. Sizzling temperatures are causing problems for those who work in factories, warehouses and restaurants and also for employees of airlines and telecommunications firms, delivery services and energy companies. Even home health aides are running into trouble.”

“A study published in June on the effects of temperature on productivity concludes that while extreme heat harms agriculture, its impact is greater on industrial and other sectors of the economy, in part because they are more labor-intensive. It finds that heat increases absenteeism and reduces work hours, and concludes that as the planet continues to warm, those losses will increase.

“The cost is high. In 2021, more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure, according to data compiled by The Lancet. Another report found that in 2020, the loss of labor as a result of heat exposure cost the economy about $100 billion, a figure projected to grow to $500 billion annually by 2050.”

No national standards for protection against hot workplaces

“Still, there are no national regulations to protect workers from extreme heat. In 2021, the Biden administration announced that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would propose the first rule designed to protect workers from heat exposure. But two years later, the agency still has not released a draft of the proposed regulation.

“Seven states have some form of labor protections dealing with heat, but there has been a push to roll them back in some places. In June, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas signed a law that eliminated rules set by municipalities that mandated water breaks for construction workers, even though Texas leads all states in terms of lost productivity linked to heat, according to an analysis of federal data conducted by Vivid Economics.

Business opposes a national standard

“Business groups are opposed to a national standard, saying it would be too expensive because it would likely require rest, water and shade breaks and possibly the installation of air-conditioning.”

“‘OSHA should take care not to impose further regulatory burdens that make it more difficult for small businesses to grow their businesses and create jobs,’ wrote David S. Addington, vice president of the National Federation of Independent Business, in response to OSHA’s plan to write a regulation.”

An example of the conditions in slaughterhouses

“The National Beef slaughterhouse in Dodge City, Kan., where temperatures are expected to hover above 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the next week, is cooled by fans, not air-conditioning.

“Workers wear heavy protective aprons and helmets and use water vats and hoses heated to 180 degrees to sanitize their equipment. It’s always been hot work.

But this year is different, said one worker, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. The heat inside the slaughterhouse is intense, drenching employees in sweat and making it hard to get through a shift, the worker said.

The risk of food contamination

National Beef did not respond to emails or telephone calls [from Davenport] requesting comment.

“Martin Rosas, a union representative for meatpacking and food processing workers in Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, said sweltering conditions present a risk for food contamination. After workers skin a hide, they need to ensure that debris doesn’t get on the meat or carcass. ‘But when it’s extremely hot, and their safety glasses fog up, their vision is impaired and they are exhausted, they can’t even see what they’re doing,’ Mr. Rosas said.”

Difficult to breathe

Warehouse workers across the country are also feeling the heat. Sersie Cobb, a forklift driver who stocks boxes of pasta in a warehouse in Columbia, S.C., said the stifling heat can make it difficult to breathe. ‘Sometimes I get dizzy and start seeing dots,’ Mr. Cobb said. ‘My vision starts to go black. I stop work immediately when that happens. Two times this summer I’ve had heart palpitations from the heat, and left work early to go to the E.R.’”

“Many factories were built decades ago for a different climate and are not air-conditioned. A study on the effects of extreme temperatures on the productivity of auto plants in the United States found that a week with six or more days of heat exceeding 90 degrees Fahrenheit cuts production by an average of 8 percent.

Some companies are installing air conditioning

In Tulsa, Okla., Navistar is installing a $19 million air-conditioning system at its IC Bus factory, which produces many of America’s school buses. Temperatures on the floor can reach 99 degrees F. Currently, the plant is only cooled by overhead fans that swirl high above the assembly line.

Shane Anderson, the company’s interim manager, said air-conditioning is expected to cost about $183 per hour, or between $275,000 and $500,000 per year — but the company believes it will boost worker productivity.”

“‘The truth is that the changes required probably will be very costly, and they will get passed on to employers and consumers,’ said David Michaels, who served as assistant secretary of labor at OSHA during the Obama administration and is now a professor at the George Washington School of Public Health.

“But if we don’t want these workers to get killed we will have to pay that cost.”

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#5 – Fossil fuel companies register record profits

Jake Johnson reports on August 1, 2023, on the “hideous” $2.6 billion profits of Oil Giant BP Common Dreams (https://commondreams.org/news/bp-profit).

The London-based oil giant BP reported second-quarter profits of $2.6 billion on Tuesday and announced a 10% dividend raise for shareholders on the heels of what was likely the hottest month on record—a grim milestone that scientists say was made possible by the burning of fossil fuels.”

“While BP’s profits for the second quarter of 2023 were far lower than the massive $8.5 billion it logged during the same period last year—a drop caused by falling global oil prices—the company has still raked in $7.6 billion in profits so far this year. The company has paid out those profits to investors in the form of share buybacks and dividends.”

Other big oil companies also rack in huge profits

“BP’s earnings report comes after its rival, Shell, posted $5.1 billion in second-quarter profits last week and announced a dividend boost of 15% amid a deadly global heatwave.”

Plans to increase use of fossil fuels

“Like Shell and other oil giants, BP recently walked back some of its stated emission-reduction targets and announced plans to produce more fossil fuels than previously expected. Earlier this year, BP said it intends to cut fossil fuel production by 25% below 2019 levels by decade’s end instead of its previous goal of 40%.

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#6 – If Trump wins the presidency in 2024 and Republicans control one or both houses of the U.S. Congress, there will be a host of policies and programs to encourage the use of fossil fuels.

Kristoffer Tigue reports on the “Battle Plan” of the “far right” to “undo climate progress” (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01082023/far-right-battle-plan-to-undo-climate-progress-trump-win-2024).

“The proposal, called Project 2025, would gut environmental spending, stymie clean energy development and fundamentally shift how federal agencies regulate U.S. industries.”

“The 920-page proposal, if implemented, would not only undo any progress the Biden administration has made to reduce emissions and fund clean energy development and other climate-related efforts, but it would make it far more difficult for a future administration to pursue any policy that seeks to address global warming at all, according to a report last week by POLITICO. The plan would even make it challenging for federal agencies to carry out common environmental protections that have been practiced in the country for more than 50 years.

“Called Project 2025 and written by more than 350 right-wing hardliners—including former Trump staffers—the plan would block wind and solar power from being added to the electrical grid; gut funding for the Environmental Protection Agency; eliminate the Department of Energy’s renewable energy offices; prohibit states from adopting California’s tailpipe pollution standards, transfer many federal environmental regulatory duties to Republican state officials; and generally prop up the fossil fuel industry.

“‘Project 2025 is not a white paper. We are not tinkering at the edges. We are writing a battle plan and we are marshaling our forces,’ Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, which is leading the initiative, told POLITICO. ‘Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state.’

“The plan compiles a list of as many as 20,000 like-minded conservatives who could serve in the next administration to carry out the kind of deregulatory overhaul that became a hallmark of the Trump administration.”

“In fact, Project 2025 is part of a larger plan by Trump and his far-right allies to greatly expand the president’s authority over every part of the federal government. Their goals include ending the post-Watergate practice of shielding the Department of Justice from White House political influence; putting independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces antitrust laws and consumer protection rules, under direct presidential control; and reviving the practice of refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like—a tactic lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.”

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#7 – A trillion trees?

Maxine Joselow reports on the Republican plan to plant a trillion trees, as a proposed method for dealing with the climate crisis, while simultaneously encouraging more fossil fuel production and usage (https://washingtonpost.com/climate-enviornment/2023/08/02/trillion-trees-republicans-climate).

“The plan has some prominent backers. Then-President Donald Trump announced in 2020 that the United States would join a global initiative to plant a trillion trees, despite his antagonism toward climate science. The chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee has introduced legislation to plant a trillion trees as ‘a comprehensive, practical solution to the climate issues we’re facing today.’

Scientists are skeptical

“But in recent years, climate scientists have grown more skeptical about relying on tree-planting programs. They have warned that heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by the end of this century unless humanity swiftly phases out the burning of oil, gas and coal.

The tree-planting plan would at best have only minimal effect

Joselow writes,

“Now, new research finds that planting a trillion trees would have a minimal effect on halting global warming, partly because of the long lag time for trees to reach maturity and absorb large amounts of carbon. The analysis by John Sterman, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Andrew P. Jones, executive director of the nonprofit Climate Interactive, found that planting a trillion trees would only prevent 0.15 degrees Celsius (0.27 Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100.

“‘Trees are great. I personally love to be out in the forests as much as I possibly can,’ Sterman said. ‘But the reality is very simple: You can plant a trillion trees, and even if they all survived, which wouldn’t happen, it just wouldn’t make that much difference to the climate.’

“The analysis relied on a global climate simulator called En-ROADS, developed by Climate Interactive and the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative. It also found that planting a trillion trees would only sequester 6 percent of the carbon dioxide that the world needs to avoid emitting by 2050 to meet the goal of the Paris climate accord: limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

“‘Planting a trillion trees is not a serious solution to the climate crisis,’ Jones said. ‘It is too little, too late.’

“Trees do store vast amounts of carbon dioxide in their trunks, branches and roots. But old-growth forests sequester much more carbon than younger forests, and it usually takes 20 to 30 years for trees to reach full maturity. That means a tree planted today would do little to reduce emissions over the next crucial decades.

Trees are also especially vulnerable to drought, wildfires and pests, all of which are becoming more common as the world warms. In Montana, where the average temperature has increased by nearly 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, a mountain pine beetle infestation has damaged or killed hundreds of thousands of acres of forests.

Would require an enormous amount of the land

Joselow elaborates: “The researchers also highlighted that planting a trillion trees would require an enormous amount of land — 900 million hectares, or nearly three times the size of India. It would be nearly impossible to acquire that much land without disturbing grasslands or farmland, which already store carbon. Although producing renewable energy is also land-intensive, avoiding the same amount of carbon emissions by building more wind and solar farms would require only 15 million hectares by 2050, the authors found.”

Democrats willing to go along with targeted tree planting

“Although many Democrats favor a rapid transition to renewable energy, they also support a targeted approach to planting trees. The bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021 authorizes the U.S. Forest Service to plant more than a billion trees in national forests over the next decade. President Biden’s landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, also provides more than $1 billion to increase access to trees in urban neighborhoods experiencing the “heat island effect,” in which heat reflects off surfaces such as concrete and asphalt.”

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Concluding thoughts

The Republican Party and other far right forces in the U.S. continue to oppose any meaningful regulation of fossil fuel emissions, such as having government put a price on the sources of such emissions, vastly increasing support for less environmentally-destructive alternatives, such as, solar, wind, and geothermal energy, reducing dependence on gas-driven cars, busses, and trucks, and stopping the export of natural gas.

If Republicans are victorious in the 2024 elections, U.S. energy policy will be dictated by the big fossil fuel companies. Thom Hartmann sums it up in an August 3, 2023, article: “A 2024 GOP Victory Is an Existential Threat to Life on Earth” (https://commondreams.org/opinion/2024-gop-victory-threat).

Even if Trump is not the candidate, Hartmann contends, “Republican primary voters will demand a candidate with the same affection for Russian President Vladimir Putin and other dictators; the same disdain for racial, religious, and gender minorities; the same abusive attitude toward women and girls; the same faux embrace of Confederate and hillbilly values and hatred of city-dwellers and college graduates; the same cavalier attitude toward guns and fossil fuels.”

“Scientists tell us we may have as few as five years, and certainly not more than 20, to end our use of fossil fuels and fully transition to clean renewables. Even within the five-year window it’s technically feasible, but if Trump or another MAGA Republican is elected, civilization-ending weather and the death of much of humanity is virtually assured.”

A hopeful option

C.J. Polychroniou offers a hopeful option, proposing A Global Green New Deal as the best way to save the planet (https://commondreams.org/opinion/global-green-new-deal). It will require “radical collective social and political action.”

“What is urgently needed is building long-term progressive power around a vision of left-wing politics that is energized by the pressing need to tackle the climate crisis by radically accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels while at the same time pushing for a structural transformation of present-day economies. In other words, a political platform that embraces a sound climate stabilization plan which ensures a just transition, creates a plethora of new jobs, reduces inequality, and promotes sustainable growth.

Polychroniou sees some progress

“…the movement for the Green New Deal is growing and is making a positive impact on several fronts. Several states and over 100 cities in the United States have committed to 100% clean energy. The Inflation Reduction Act may not qualify as a GND [Green New Deal], but it is still a historical piece of legislation, especially given the existing political climate in the country.”

Need to do more

“Still, one might say that what we really need in order to save the planet is a comprehensive GND, formulated as a worldwide program. But we do have such a blueprint in place, courtesy of the American economist Robert Pollin, and fully endorsed by the world’s greatest intellectual alive, namely Noam Chomsky.”

Check out these books for in-depth analyses of what a global green deal would entail.

Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin, Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal

Robert Pollin, Greening the Global Economy

Stan Cox, The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can