In all the media reports about the US becoming the world’s second largest producer of hydrocarbons thanks to fracking, an inescapable factor is being ignored: No matter how we calculate it, fossil fuels are a sunset industry. The same thing goes for the Alberta oil sands, which are touted as having the potential for making Canada a big league hydrocarbon producer.
The new technologies and the newly accessible hydrocarbon deposits only move the sunset horizon a little further down the road. The logic of this scenario could not be clearer, but we continue to act as if it were not the case despite the potentially catastrophic consequences for the habitability of the planet. If we open up and pump out all the oil and shale gas we can find, the deposits will eventually play out and we will likely cook the planet in the process.
The fact that most us presently alive will not be around for the full effect of the fossil fuel burnout, places an unprecedented moral responsibility squarely in our laps. We now live on a unique and temporary subsidy of hydrocarbon energy that has produced a unique and temporary economy of affluence and convenience.
Nothing like this has happened before. When it is over, civilization will have moved to a renewable energy platform. Renewable energy is the only platform that makes sense for the long run and the faster we move to it the better off our descendants will be. We are in the middle of a momentous moral decision about energy use and the future of the planet.
Civic and political leadership, by definition, is morally responsible for the consequences of present societal action on future human wellbeing. Governments have an “in trust” responsibility to safeguard the environmental assets on which we all depend, and that means especially Earth’s atmosphere.
On the one hand, substantial evidence from earth-system science shows that pushing the fossil fuel economy for all its worth will decrease the planet’s overall habitability and severely compromise the future wellbeing of human communities.
On the other hand, business leaders in the fossil fuel industry, along with their political allies, are pushing back against the science by pointing out that curtailing the exploitation of fossil fuels would result in a subsidence of the consumer economy. So what are civic and political leaders supposed to do? What are we supposed to do?
t depends on whether you think the primary moral responsibility is to keep the consumer economy going as long as we can, even if it shortens the future; or whether you think a higher moral responsibility is to change course in order to give our descendants a better chance of having an environment in which they can live in a secure and reasonably prosperous way. This divide in moral vision is at the heart of the shale gas and land use battle now erupting in NB.
The current federal government is squarely in the first camp, and is determined to make Canada a hydrocarbon cornucopia. The current NB government sees things the same way. But it is clear from the opposition to shale gas mining in NB that a large number of citizens do not support this approach to the future. And much to the consternation of shale gas proponents, an increasing number of jurisdictions are putting the brakes on the rush to shale gas fracking.
If we change course, and muster up the moral leadership to deliberately and systematically gear down the fossil fuel economy, leaving most remaining oil, gas, and coal in the ground, we have a different kind of problem – the consumer economy will go into subsidence, and we all know that means recession or even depression. What terrible options.
But there is a clear middle ground for a way out: As the fossil fuel industry is systematically geared down, all forms of renewable energy can be ramped up as rapidly as possible. Will there be an “energy gap?” Probably. The transition may well require a controlled subsidence of the consumer economy, but that hardship can be managed.
What likely cannot be managed will be the severe ecological repercussions, climate chaos, and economic breakdown that can be foreseen as the consequence of pushing the hydrocarbon economy for all its worth for as long as we can.
We have everything we need to make the transition to a conserver economy based on renewable energy. We already know from the evidence that investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy creates far more jobs than investment in fossil fuels. It may take 30 years to make the transition, but the growth of renewable energy can help create a sustainable and prosperous conserver economy. Moral leadership invested in this transition will pay long-term dividends.
Keith Helmuth is a member of the Woodstock Sustainable Energy Group.