On the other hand, if we want to keep this glorious global civilization we've got, we will need lots of energy to run it, let alone expand it. The usual suspects are accusing Obama of being in denial about climate change, urging him to leave all those fossil fuels in the ground . Those people cling to a fantasy which says that we can keep (and even expand) global civilization without burning fossil fuels.

Let's review the craziness, shall we? This post was spurred, in part, by the unsurprising revelation that Obama's Interior Department will permit Royal Dutch Shell to drill in the Chuchki Sea off the north coast of Alaska. Those of you who have been around for awhile will remember a post I wrote called JFC! (you know what that stands for). That post dealt with the absurdity of drilling in the warming Arctic to get more fossil fuels which will be used to further warm the Arctic—this is a positive feedback, if you view humans as part of nature, not separate from it.

Although nothing I see concerning climate issues surprises me from a Flatland point of view, I do find it very disconcerting to actually observe it day in and day out. I have always found it disconcerting. Talk about feeling alienated and helpless! Wow.

I will quote Ben van Beurden, chief executive officer of Royal Dutch Shell, speaking to the Washington Post in September, 2014. You will say that anything van Beurden says is self-serving, and that is clearly true. On the other hand, it seems to me that just about everything humans say is self-serving in one way or another. In this case, however, I find it hard to argue with what van Beurden says (emphasis added).

Let me be very very clear, for us climate change is real and it's a threat that we want to act on. We're not aligning with skeptics. Let's talk about the carbon bubble theory [i.e., we need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground.] It's a very seductive argument, but it is also not necessarily in line with the reality that the world will have to go to a tremendous growth in supply of energy simply because demand will double in the first half of the century for very strong fundamental reasons. First of all growth in population but even more importantly growth in living standards in places like Africa and India and China and Latin America where the energy intensity is a fraction of what it is in the Western world. We cannot deny very very large parts of the global population the sort of standards that we enjoy. And therefore it's just going to happen whether we like it or not. You can say "don't worry it will all be supplied by renewable resources." Well that's a fantasy.

Yes, it is.

I'm not against renewable resources. We're very much invested in research and other ways of participating in it. But if you look at the most optimistic scenario, we think we are looking at still 75 percent of that energy demand by the middle of the century coming from fossil sources, down from probably 85 percent. At the moment we're about 11 percent of renewables, 10 percentage points of which is hydropower, which doesn't have an awful lot of growth. So 1 percent is wind and solar. So how on earth do we think that one percent is going to become 90 percent of a system twice as big as what it is by the middle of the century? Whether you like it or not, it won't happen.

Right, won't happen.

That might be a gloom and doom type picture. But I think the real challenge is not so much how do we accelerate renewables but more about how do we decarbonize the system we have. How do we take coal out and replace it with gas? That's half the CO2 already. How do we fit carbon capture and storage on electricity generation where you can bring the carbon emissions of a third of the energy system down by 30 percent? To just demonize a number of international oil companies that collectively make up 2 or 3 percent of the total world resource base and say 'disinvest yourself from that' is not going to be a solution. I think what has happened over the past few years is that the discussion has become dysfunctional.

No kidding!

I think energy companies like us have retreated because there was no reputational upside in it, so better keep your head down. So the discussion has gone into la-la land a little.

Just a little? There is it — humans are living in La-La Land. I never thought I'd quote a Big Oil executive to make this point, but reality has forced my hand. There are far more people living in la-la land than is commonly accepted. The IPCC lives in la-la land. Lots of scientists live in la-la land too, as we shall see below.

A guy named Oliver Geden wrote a commentary in Nature called Climate advisers must maintain integrity. That commentary was based on another one published in Nature called Climate policy: Ditch the 2°C warming goal, which is also worth reading. Geden could have called it Climate advisers should not live in la-la land.

Disenchantment has set in well ahead of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris in December. Scientists, policy-makers and the public already accept that progress will not be enough to keep global average temperature rise within the 2 °C limit set at the 2010 UN climate summit...

OK, we're talking about the 2-degree target. Here's the gist—

The global climate target is being watered down in the hope of getting any agreement in Paris. The 2°C warming limit need only be kept 'within reach'. The possibility of using 'ratcheting mechanisms' keeps hopes alive of more-ambitious policies, but such systems are unlikely to achieve the desired outcomes. Strict measuring, reporting and verification mechanisms are yet to be agreed. There is another casualty: scientific advice. Climate scientists and economists who counsel policy-makers are being pressured to extend their models and options for delivering mitigation later. This has introduced dubious concepts, such as repaying 'carbon debt' through 'negative emissions' to offset delayed mitigation — in theory.

Remember that happy phrase—negative emissions.

Scientific advisers must resist pressures that undermine the integrity of climate science. Instead of spreading false optimism, they must stand firm and defend their intellectual independence, findings and recommendations — no matter how politically unpalatable. ...Climate science advisers should use the time before Paris to reassess their role. Do they want to inform policy-makers or support the political process? The climate policy mantra — that time is running out for 2°C but we can still make it if we act now — is a scientific nonsense. Advisers who shy away from saying so squander their scientific reputations and public trust in climate research..

You would think it needless to say that humans will never meet the 2°C target, but this guy felt he needed to say it. And guess what? IPCC officials and supporting scientists gave this guy all sorts of grief for daring to tell the truth. (No surprise there, Flatland-wise.)

I'll quote Little Chance to Restrain Global Warming to 2 Degrees, Critic Argues (Scientific American, May 7, 2015). Here's the set-up.

Oliver Geden, a senior research fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, makes the case that the accord expected to be signed in Paris in December won’t even put the world within reach of keeping global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. He contends that scientists and economists must level with the public and stop spreading what he calls “false optimism” that the target can ever be reached. The piece is the latest salvo in the many-faceted war over the 2-degree target. The debate ranges from whether the so-called guardrail is sufficient (ClimateWire, May 4) to whether it is even an appropriate metric for measuring planetary health. Some question whether Paris will keep the world below 2 degrees (ClimateWire, Aug. 21, 2014); others contend we’ve already blown our chances... Specifically, Geden takes aim at studies like the U.N. Environment Programme’s (UNEP) “gap” report that each year looks at the space between what nations are doing to cut emissions, what they say they have plans to do, and what is actually needed in order to stay within 2 degrees. He argued that the report originally used 2020 as the benchmark of emissions growth to measure whether achieving the goal is reachable. But in recent years, he said, it has “shifted the goal post” to 2030. He writes that economists got around the original “make or break point” by adding what he describes as negative emissions—the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere during the second half of the century by things like carbon capture and storage.

OK, let's go to la-la land.

Bill Hare, who leads a group of top climate scientists and economists at Berlin-based Climate Analytics who helped produce the UNEP gap report, said Geden’s accusations “could not be more wrong” and lumped the researcher in with climate skeptics and other naysayers “who systematically downplay the risks of climate change and argue against action to reduce emissions on spurious and ill-founded grounds.”

Speaking for myself, surely I am also a "naysayer" (or worse, "skeptic") because I believe the 2°C target is a fantasy born of human optimism and faith in technology. What an asshole this Hare guy is!

It gets worse.

“Geden fails to understand the energy system modeling literature, and seems not to have read the IPCC assessment on transformation pathways. All mitigation scenarios he refers to represent technologically and economically feasible pathways. Making statements about their plausibility for the real-world is an expression of political, not scientific, opinion,” Hare wrote.

He and other climate scientists say they stand firmly by their analyses that 2 degrees is still within reach.

And what are these "technologically and economically feasible pathways?" Well, there are lots of them, but the main "hope" propping up Hare's fantasy is BECCS. Don't know what that is? I'll let New Scientist explain.

It is a beguiling idea: grow crops that suck carbon dioxide from the air, burn them to generate electricity, then bury the resulting CO2. The result? Less CO2 in the air, and less climate change. This idea's time has come. The new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published on Sunday in Berlin, Germany, says "widespread" use of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) will probably be needed to stop the world warming by 2 °C, the politically agreed danger threshold.

That's your "negative emissions" in a nutshell. We humans will grow biomass everywhere we can on Earth, and then we will harvest it, burn it for energy, and capture the carbon emitted during the burning. And then we will bury that carbon. And we will do all this over and over again forever, and live happily ever after.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the "technologically and economically feasible pathway" humankind will follow in the 2nd half of the 21st century to make up for the highly embarrassing fact that humans have been able to do basically nothing to mitigate global warming.

And thus we get bullshit like this.

“It is physically possible,” said Michael MacCracken, chief scientist for climate change programs at the Climate Institute. “It would take a major change of society around the world to do it. It may not be likely in the political sense, but engineering-wise, if we chose to do it and invest in it, we could.”

Physically possible? That's pretty crazy right there, but why does political impossibility count for nothing? I will return to this.

McCracken argued that keeping to the 2-degree target will take not just a concerted effort to cut carbon but a serious effort in other areas, like reducing short-lived climate pollutants. “It’s too depressing to think we can’t find a path,” he said. “We’re trying to make clear, I think, that you’ve got to do a lot, you’ve got to do it early, and it just can’t be one approach. A great deal has to go on, and the countries aren’t yet near showing they’re committed to doing enough.”

Ah, we get the real reason—it's too depressing to think we can't find a [mitigation] path. To avoid debilitating depression, it is necessary to invent a pathway to the 2-degree target.



And finally there is Princeton's Michael Oppenheimer, whose thinking was critical to the original adoption of the 2-degree target. What does he have to say now?

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, said he also believes scientists have been clear about what sticking to 2 degrees will entail and how far nations are from getting there. “Most scientists are realistic about it. It’s going to be hard, and if we don’t move firmly on emissions reductions, it ain’t gonna happen,” he said. But, Oppenheimer added, it’s way too early from a physical science standpoint to admit defeat on 2 degrees. “The reality is, it depends partly on what human beings choose to do from here on out,” he said. “Part of it is out of our control, because it depends on gases already emitted into the atmosphere,” he said. Of Geden’s piece, he said, “What does he want us to say? That it can’t be done? That would be unscientific.”

I see. It would be unscientific to admit defeat on the 2-degree target, at least from a "physical science standpoint." You will recall all those future "negative emissions" we're going to get from BECCS.

As I said above, the human behavioral science standpoint counts for nothing. I guess we can simply dismiss as irrelevant all the behavioral research which might help us figure out what is possible for humans and what is not, including all work in the following disciplines:

neuroscience

cognitive science

evolutionary biology

general psychology

social psychology

etc.

Michael Oppenheimer's inability to take human behavior into account is Flatland. Unrealistic expectations about humankind's happy future must be maintained at all costs, especially when your reputation is on the line.

I will give Oliver Geden the last word.

Geden, meanwhile, said he believes that island nations and other vulnerable countries demanding that politicians raise the bar and stick to a maximum 1.5-degree rise of global mean temperatures are “morally right.” But, he said, it’s time to stop living in a “fantasy world.” “It’s only credible to say the chances are really, really low that we can make it,” he said. “I do not think we will stay in the carbon budget associated right now with the 2-degree target.”

There it is. But don't say it out loud, because humans will give you lots and lots of shit if you try to tell them the truth.