ON NOT QUITE GETTING IT

Bill McKibben

Late last summer, dozens of scientists aboard a trio of icebreakers visited a submerged mountain range in the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole. They drilled core samples 1,400 feet beneath the sea’s surface along the Lomonosov Ridge, recovering sediments that revealed clues to the planet’s past: a period 49 million years ago, for instance, when for several hundred thousand years "so much fresh warm water apparently topped the Arctic’s oxygen-starved salty depths that the polar sea became matted with tiny Azolla ferns, resembling the duckweed that can choke suburban ponds."

What the new cores show, Dr. Henk Brinkhuis, a geobiologist from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told the New York Times, is that "you can get a really strong cascade" of events toward global warming that can then last for eons.

That’s interesting—and it accords with a thousand other puzzle pieces that pile up weekly in the scientific journals, all showing that we stand on the brink of changing the planet’s climate so abruptly that the world into which we were born will be thrown into wild chaos.

But what was more interesting was the reaction to the news. It wasn’t: Oh my gosh, let’s get to work on global warming. It was: Let’s find out if there’s oil down there. If sandstone and clay formed a lid over all those dead ferns, then perhaps they’ve been cooked into petroleum in the intervening years. "This could be a promising sign for oil and gas prospectivity in the Arctic Ocean," a former exploration geologist for Shell told the Times. "Oil prospectors will be very excited, and will be watching the results of analyses with keen interest." Indeed, the Times editors chose the headline "Under All That Ice, Maybe Oil."

Which, if you think about it, is an almost classically insane way of thinking. The Arctic is warming rapidly right now because we are burning so much fossil fuel. Arctic ice is 40 percent thinner than it was 40 years ago, allowing, among other things, scientific teams to go drill core sediments. Those core sediments offer additional warnings about the tightrope we’re all walking—but the thing that really excites everyone is the chance that there might be more oil there. Which, if we burned it in our cars and factories, would release yet more carbon dioxide, accelerating the warming cycle.

But if it’s insane, it’s also understandable, and not just because there’s money to be made drilling for that oil. We tend to focus on whatever problem is closest at hand, ignoring the huge issues looming just behind. For instance, the Times article noted that "with demand for oil skyrocketing and known reserves dwindling, even the subtlest hint" of a new field somewhere "is significant." Indeed, we’re about to enter a period when the dwindling supply of oil will be almost constant news.

One analysis after another over the last 18 months—most recently Ken Deffeyes’ new book Beyond Oil: The View from Hubberts Peak—has made it clear that the limits-to-growth types had it right, at least with respect to oil. World petroleum production has already hit its zenith or will soon do so (Deffeyes predicts Thanksgiving Day 2005, give or take six weeks), and as it slowly declines, gas prices will spike higher and higher.

Now, the smart thing to do would be celebrate that fact, and use it as the impetus to push toward a world that runs on renewable energy. What we should have done two decades ago when we first realized the implications of global warming we should now do because we’re running out of oil, and because an economy predicated on cheap energy is in dire danger.

What we’re more likely to do is cast about desperately for every last drop of oil, delaying the inevitable as long as we can. So—drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, even though the most fantastically optimistic estimates show that the oil there would delay our reaching the peak of world oil production by about five months (that would be Easter 2006). Or drill at the North Pole, even as the rigs are surrounded by the indisputable open-water evidence of the folly of interfering with the planet’s climate.

This is how we evolved, of course. There was great Darwinian pressure to pay attention to the tiger roaring in front of you. You solved one day’s problems, and moved on to the next day. It’s no wonder that we find it hard to concentrate on something like global warming that plays out over decades, not news cycles.

Consider, for example, how California is reacting to climate change. On the one hand, its government is saying all the right things. Arnold Schwarzenegger has even backed the push for higher gasoline mileage for cars, something his Republican colleagues in Washington have prevented for a generation. The governor’s environment secretary, Terri Tamminen, is reportedly at work on a book about ending the use of oil entirely. All of which befits a state that believes it is on a slightly higher evolutionary plane.

But when the rubber literally meets the road, it’s another story. As more Californians began to drive fuel-efficient hybrid cars, the people charged with collecting state gas taxes began to notice that they weren’t taking in as much money. Revenues from the tax will have declined 8 percent between 1998 and 2005, even as the number of miles traveled by cars on California roads has increased 16 percent. Instead of celebrating that as a small nugget of hope in the dismal global picture (as a sign that California is heading, ever so slightly, in the direction of western Europe), officials in the state’s transportation department are viewing the news with great alarm.

Why? Because they may not have the money from the gas tax to repair as many roads. And to them, and doubtless many Californians, that seems like the real problem. Their response? According to the Los Angeles Times, it’s a proposal to place a box in every car that will record how many miles each vehicle drives and then to tax the owners accordingly, rather than tax them for how much gas they use. In other words, they’re talking about removing one of the strong incentives for Californians to behave responsibly—under the new scheme, owners of a Hummer and a Prius who drove an equal number of miles would pay the state the same fee each year for the privilege of using its roads.

This is precisely the type of blind alley that humans drive down when they focus on the wrong issue. Here you have a proposal that solves the lesser of two problems (road repair) by making the larger one (climate change) worse. Not to mention raising truly wild privacy issues—do you want a GPS-connected box in your car that reports your movements to the government? Anyone giving it 10 minutes’ thought could come up with wiser solutions. What about raising the gas tax, for instance, so that revenues went up and the incentive to buy a Hummer was further reduced?

But since that would require selling the idea of a "tax hike" to voters, it’s easier to invent a whole Rube Goldberg system of trunk-mounted boxes and GPS satellites and so forth. It’s like the astronomers who spent a thousand years trying to repair the impossibilities of the Ptolemaic cosmology—adding epicycles to orbits to explain away the actual observation of how the planets moved—until Copernicus finally stood up and said what was going on.

Where the future of this planet is concerned, we’re not quite there yet, not even in the blue states. Take, for instance, the conclusion of an Oregon panel working on the same issue of fuel-tax revenues: "While it is good policy to preserve our environment and our resources, it is not good policy to let transportation revenues decline."

When the day comes that a statement like that is laughed out of the room, you’ll know we’re finally beginning to evolve.

—Bill McKibben lives with his wife and daughter in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, where he is a Sunday school superintendent of the local Methodist church. He is author of The End of Nature (Knopf, 1990) and many other books and articles.