ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Think the world is making any progress in tackling global warming?  Think again: 2010 set a record high for greenhouse gas emissions.

Energy-related carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2010 were the highest in history, according to the latest estimates by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

After a dip in 2009 caused by the global financial crisis, emissions are estimated to have climbed to a record 30.6 Gigatonnes (Gt), a 5% jump from the previous record year in 2008, when levels reached 29.3 Gt.

In addition, the IEA has estimated that 80% of projected emissions from the power sector in 2020 are already locked in, as they will come from power plants that are currently in place or under construction today.

44% of the estimated CO2 emissions in 2010 came from coal, 36% from oil, and 20% from natural gas.

The IEA’s 2010 World Energy Outlook set out the 450 Scenario, an energy pathway supposedly consistent with achieving the goal of limiting average global temperature increase to 2°C. The IEA believes this pathway can be achieved if global energy-related emissions in 2020 are not be greater than 32 Gt. Achieving this would require that over the next ten years, emissions would have to rise less in total than they did between 2009 and 2010.

Of course, 450 ppm CO2 is much too high to avoid catastrophic consequences.

The conclusion that limiting CO2-equivalent to 450 ppm will succeed in limiting temperature increase to 2°C is based on the assumption that no feedback loops will kick in, an assumption that is already proving unfounded – for example, Arctic amplification is already kicking in and thawing permafrost will further accelerate global warming.

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO₂ will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm. To be safe, we’ll likely have to get back to pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm, and rather quickly.

So how are we doing?

393 and counting.

Dr Fatih Birol, Chief Economist at the IEA, isn’t sounding optimistic.

Our latest estimates are another wake-up call. The world has edged incredibly close to the level of emissions that should not be reached until 2020 if the 2ºC target is to be attained. Given the shrinking room for manœuvre in 2020, unless bold and decisive decisions are made very soon, it will be extremely challenging to succeed in achieving this global goal agreed in Cancun.

The IEA sees the challenge as squaring the circle: “improving and maintaining quality of life for people in all countries while limiting CO2 emissions.” The phrase “improving and maintaining quality of life” translates as business as usual: continued economic growth, growth that depends on increased energy consumption and results in the greenhouse gas emissions which are threatening to destroy Earth as we know it. More of what got us into this mess is not going to get us out.

High prices at the pump are once again starting to hurt, if indeed the hurt caused by the 2008 spike has ever ceased.

As fuel prices take a bigger slice of people’s incomes, sales at retailers including Walmart, Home Depot,  and Lowe’s are taking a hit. The housing sector has been the biggest victim of high gas prices, as home prices continue to fall. Existing home sales are again lagging, as shown in this chart from Calculated Risk.

New home sales are seeing record lows.

Jim Kunstler call of suburbia as the biggest misallocation of resources in human history is proving prescient.

As prices at the pump rise, people are again beginning to drive less. The EIA reports that demand for oil products over the last 4 weeks is down by nearly 3 percent as compared to last year, and the recent rise in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is beginning to falter. VMT remains well below the previous peak, as seen in this chart of the rolling 12-month VMT going back to 1971, posted at Calculated Risk.

In the early ’80s, miles driven (rolling 12 months) stayed below the previous peak for 39 months – a record that will soon be eclipsed.

High gas prices are depressing traffic on the Ohio Turnpike, which recently upped its top speed from 65 mph to 70 mph in April in an attempt to lure more traffic onto the highway. Less traffic, less income from tolls. a portion of the cost of the Columbia River Crossing is projected to be covered by user fees (i.e., tolls). That source of funds will prove fantasy if projected increases in vehicle traffic fail to materialize due to soaring gas prices, leaving taxpayers on the hook.

Beginning this month, Transition United States is publishing a three-part series of papers titled Economic Resilience, authored by Joanne Poyourow. The first of the series is Economic Contraction.

Poyourow sets out to confront the the “triple crisis” of global warming, peak oil, and economic collapse. Any long-term plan we come up with is futile unless we anticipate that it will unfold amidst a world of economic contraction:

We have to plan for it, and put alternative financial tools in place to weather it, or it will undermine all of our other efforts.

Poyourow says it takes “raw courage” to confront the end of growth on a personal level, and even more to violate social and political taboos by doing so in public. But in the end, we have no choice – and our options are severely constrained:

Whether it will be a full-scale collapse into chaos like Jared Diamond writes about or Stoneleigh forecasts, or whether we will be successful in creating locally-managed “surge breakers” in time, remains to be seen.  But either way, we’d better try our best to get something in place.

The “techno-fantasy” conceptualized in the chart below – continued growth, “business as usual” – is just that, a complete fantasy. And the “green-tech stability” projection is also a fantasy: it represents a form of bargaining with rather than accepting the reality that renewable .

The uncomfortable reality is, no renewable energy sources are on hand that approach the energy density of fossil fuels. That leaves us with two options. We can choose to accept and deal with reality, with all the creativity, wisdom, and grace we can muster. Or we can continue to deny and resist reality,  destroy the land, the oceans, and the atmosphere and in the end suffer collapse as a consequence of our obdurateness.

The reality is, we  can’t force or cajole a finite world to accommodate infinite growth. As available energy and other resources become more scarce and expensive, there must be a descent.  A a severe contraction in our economic systems is inevitable. And we will have to adapt, voluntarily or involuntarily.

Against the backdrop of this reality, it’s no wonder that our politics – for example, Obama’s nonspeech outlining an energy nonpolicy – are nothing less than an absurdity.

Huge Bardi observes that we can learn an important lesson from the Japaneses – the pre-modern, pre-Fukushima, Edo period Japanese, that is. Like Japan, Earth is an island. To live sustainably and successfully on that island, the winning strategy is adaptation. We need to adjust our needs to what this planet can give us.

Michael Panzer at Financial Armageddon posts this most telling chart:

Ain’t free market fundamentalism grand?

Writer and homesteader Ellen LaConte has a new book titled Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it.

The book first diagnoses our condition . . .

Economic and polar meltdowns, inept, corrupt and bankrupt governments, long-term double-digit unemployment, climate instability, failing social services, collapsing ecosystems, a widening wealth-poverty gap, unprecedented species extinctions, mass migrations, peak fossil fuels, religious, ethnic and resource wars, spreading hunger, poverty, chaos and disease. . .

Why is so much going wrong everywhere at once? The global economy has gone viral. It is ravaging Earth’s immune system, triggering a Critical Mass of mutually reinforcing environmental, economic, social, cultural and political crises that are compromising the ability of Earth’s human and natural communities to provide for, protect and heal themselves.

The prognosis? If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, Life will last but Life as we know it—and a lot of us—won’t.

. . . and then offers a course of treatment:

What should we do instead? We should remember that Life rules, we don’t. The global economy operates as if it were larger than Life. It isn’t. As if it had multiple Earth’s to supply its appetites. It doesn’t. . .

Among the rules written into Life’s Economic Survival Protocol are local self-reliance, intercommunity and regional functional cooperation, non-carbon energy sourcing, resource conservation, sharing and recycling, and organically democratic methods of self-organization and governance. . .

We can learn Life’s rules and adopt lifeways that are at once authentically conservative, deeply green and profoundly liberating.

Robert Jensen interviews LaConte at Energy Bulletin. She reminds us something we seem to have forgotten – that humans are but bit players in a much bigger system.

The largest context – the largest high-functioning complex system within which we live our lives – is not the nation, nation-state system or global economic system but Life itself, the whole-earth, emergent and self-maintaining system of natural communities and ecosystems. That system, the ecosphere, teaches us the physical laws, the relationships and behaviors discovered in physics, biology and ecology and exemplified by the so-called “mystical” spiritual teachers, that we have to obey if we want to remain viable as a species.

The global economy has become pathological and is undermining the ability of human and natural communities to provide for, protect, defend and heal themselves – and here’s where LaConte invokes the analogy of AIDS/HIV:

I think we are presently at the HIV stage of the disease; it hasn’t quite yet become full-blown planetary AIDS. But I insist in the book that doing more of what we’ve been doing to exceed Earth’s physical means as well as our own fiscal ones — in other words, trying to heal and grow the very kind and scope of economy that caused this disease — is akin to injecting a patient who already has HIV with more HIV. That’s precisely what we’re doing.

Lynn Margolis argued in Symbiotic Planet that much of evolution on Earth is better explained by symbiosis – “the living together in physical contact of organisms of different species” – than by competition. LaConte similarly sees life on Earth as a cross-species, communitarian phenomenon. We’re not the “masters of the universe” we’ve come to believe we are, but rather a small part of a larger system. The most important and hardest lesson we will need to learn as a species is self-limitation. We have to stop behaving as if we were larger than or apart from Life and become constructive participants in it. If we fail to do so – if we don’t choose to transform ourselves and our lifeways – Life will force us to. Life rules, we don’t, and Life will not hesitate to rule harshly and even rule us out.

How can we possibly give up on economic growth? LaConte suggests focusing on what we need, as human beings.

Like everyone else, I need food, clean air and water, clothing, some sort of shelter, preferably warm in winter, occasional medicine or medical care, spiritual and physical exercise, colleagues, friends, family, if possible books, lots of quiet, a garden to work in, woods and wild not too far off. To love and be loved. To carry no debt. To believe there is some sort of livable, desirable future for the next seven generations. . . . To be happy, I need good work to do, work that I feel is, in my late mentor Helen Nearing’s terms, “contributory.”

We could all agree to get to work to fulfill that vision.

The Little Book of Life’s Rules for Surviving Critical Mass, a pocket version of key economic survival principles and practices culled from Life Rules, is soon to be serialized in posts at LaConte’s website.

Crude Oil EROEI in the U.S.

The Environmental Law Institute recently conducted a review of U.S. government fossil fuel and renewable energy subsidies for Fiscal Years 2002-2008. The findings are presented in the paper, Estimating U.S. Government Subsidies to Energy Sources: 2002-2008 – and illustrated in the graphic “Energy Subsidies Black, Not Green.”

Key findings include:

• The vast majority of federal subsidies for fossil fuels and renewable energy supported energy sources that emit high levels of greenhouse gases when used as fuel.
• The federal government provided substantially larger subsidies to fossil fuels than to renewables. Subsidies to fossil fuels – approximately $72 billion over the study period, as opposed to $29 billion for renewables.
• Almost half of the subsidies for renewables went to corn-based ethanol [which at best has a barely positive EROEI, and whose climate and environmental consequences are questionable].
• The largest subsidies to fossil fuels were written into the U.S. Tax Code as permanent provisions. By comparison, many subsidies for renewables are time-limited initiatives implemented through energy bills, with expiration dates that limit their usefulness to the renewables industry.
• The vast majority of subsidy dollars to fossil fuels can be attributed to just a handful of tax breaks, such as the Foreign Tax Credit ($15.3 billion) and the Credit for Production of Nonconventional Fuels ($14.1 billion, though this credit has since been phased out).

A new study by Eben Fodor shows that growth doesn’t pay off – communities are better off without it.

The study, titled Relationship between Growth and Prosperity in 100 Largest U.S. Metropolitan Areas, examines the relationship between growth and economic prosperity in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. finds that faster growth rates are associated with lower incomes, greater income declines, and higher poverty rates. Unemployment rates tend to be higher in faster growing areas. The 25 slowest-growing metro areas outperformed the 25 fastest growing in every category and averaged $8,455 more in per capita personal income in 2009.

Conventional urban planning and economic development strategies, which pursue growth of metro areas to supposedly advance the economic welfare of the general public, may be misguided. Our “growth is good” ideology presumes the negative impacts of growth to quality of life – such as increased traffic congestion, environmental destruction, loss of farm and forest lands, and loss of amenity values (such as tranquility, sense of community, or open space), and higher taxes to fund the cost of the new public infrastructure (roads, schools, sewer and water systems, etc.) – are outweighed by the new jobs and economic prosperity that come with growth.

But this study suggests the presumed link between growth and prosperity is nothing more than a myth. The real consequence of growth is degradation of our quality of life.

Dan Weintraub argues at The Automatic Earth that the folks in charge really know better. They’re embracing “extend and pretend” fiscal policies in the present because they are deathly afraid of the alternative. They’re kicking the fiscal can down the road for a while longer so as head off the discontent and civil strife that always accompanies increases in austerity along with its attendant human suffering. The ruling elite understands all too well that present fiscal and monetary policies will fail to fix the underlying and most fundamental and socially destructive of all economic ills – those of an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, and the absolute disaster caused by an ever-shrinking, formerly self-sustaining American middle class. According to Weintraub, Krugman advocates for, and Bernanke is pursuing, policies whose aim is to keep civil strife from destroying, in the near term, the very fabric of American society. Weintraub errs, I think, only in failing to include Obama in his circle of conspirators.

As Tom Whipple observes, what we’re experiencing isn’t a routine downturn in the business cycle which can be cured by Keynesian stimuli favored by the Democrats or tax cuts favored by the Republicans. Rather, it’s the ending of a period of 200 years of abundant energy that allowed us to build an extremely complex civilization based on dozens of interrelated systems without which we can no longer live. The most important and the most overlooked system is the global biosphere. The consequences of its devastation for humans and all life on Earth are only now, too late, beginning to become evident.  At the same time our very complex civilization has begun to exhaust the sources of energy and numerous other raw materials that built and maintained it.

In our politics, we are struggling to return to a civilization which is no longer possible – and the inevitable failure of that effort is likely to be explosive. Whipple seconds Weintraub’s warnings of impending social chaos:

If anyone thinks the employment situation is difficult, wait a few years until the very high priced motor fuels makes discretionary car travel unaffordable. Millions upon millions of jobs in the retail, travel, hospitality, recreational, and dozens of other industries will be lost.The current efforts by various levels of government to stimulate job creation or save people from home foreclosures will prove to be ridiculously inadequate. A completely new paradigm of what we do to sustain life is going to have to emerge or things will become far worse than most of us have ever known. Modern civilization simply cannot stand a situation in which a substantial share of its people is destitute. The potential for social disorder is too great.

“A completely new paradigm” – doesn’t that sound lovely? Carolyn Baker is more blunt: what we are experiencing is the collapse of industrial civilization. And while we we can wax eloquent about rebirth, we absolutely refuse to acknowledge the death that makes it possible.  We don’t dare talk about the pain and suffering that collapse will entail. Any transition to a new paradigm of resilience and self-sufficiency won’t be accomplished without great suffering and painful loss. The path leads where it will, whether we like it or not. As Baker reminds us, transition requires an internal journey as well – a journey of the human spirit, the hero’s journey. And each of us is being called.

Gail Tverberg at the Energy Bulletin lays out three possible scenarios for our energy and economic future. First, there’s business as usual: growth will continue practically indefinitely, as shown in the chart below.

Under this scenario, people in the U.S. would expect to be twice as wealthy in 2050 as in 2005.

Then there’s the slow decline scenario, as oil supplies and other fossil fuel sources peak and then gradually decline.

In this scenario oil production starts dropping off about now by about 2% a year. Natural gas production doesn’t drop off as quickly. The big concern is adapting to having a little less oil and gas each year.

Then there’s a third possibility – a very rapid drop off in fossil fuels of all types, resulting from a financial crash, or a major disruption of international trade, affecting world economies.

Tverberg also has another chart showing the historic correlation between oil production and GDP growth.

If history is any guide, there’s a good chance that if oil production stops growing and even starts declining, our expectations we’ll be wealthier in the future than we are today may be dashed. We could even face a systemic collapse, finding ourselves faced with having to conjure up news ways to carve out a living in the world.

Energy expert Carey King of The University of Texas at Austin thinks an overlooked cause of the economic recession in the U.S. is a decade long decline in the quality of the nation’s energy supply.  In a new study titled Energy intensity ratios as net energy measures of United States energy production and expenditures, King compares two measures of energy quality for the fossil fuel consumption and production of the United States: energy return on energy invested (EROI), and a new measure he’s developed – the energy intensity ratio (EIR). EIR is easier to calculate, is highly correlated to EROI, is in some ways more powerful than EROI – and the basic data behind the EIR calculations come out annually as opposed to every five years for EROI.

The higher EIR becomes, the higher the value of the resource to the overall economy. The corollary is that low EIR presents a higher burden to economic growth. He shows the EIR and EROI of oil and gas as well as coal were all in decline for two time periods within the last 40 years, and both time periods preceded economic recessions.

He concludes by pointing out the main challenge for new, “sustainable” sources of energy:

It is also likely insufficient to have energy resources with EROI just greater than unity, and researchers to date have given very little attention to the minimum EROI that may be required for a modern complex society.

This should be no surprise: the U.N. World Meteorological Organization reports that greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere reached record levels in 2009. Concentrations of carbon dioxide rose in 2009 by 1.6 parts per million, to 386.8 parts per million. The preindustrial carbon dioxide average was about 280 parts per million.

And emissions are set to increase again in 2010, after a 1.3% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in 2009 due to the global financial crisis. The increase in greenhouse gas emissions is now being driven by developing countries like China and India.

The chart below shows the trend in atmospheric CO2 only, measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory.

Here’s the executive summary from the WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin:

The latest analysis of observations from the WMO Global Atmosphere Watch Programme shows that the globally averaged mixing ratios of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) reached new highs in 2009, with CO2 at 386.8 ppm, CH4 at 1803 ppb and N2O at 322.5 ppb. These values are greater than those in pre-industrial times (before 1750) by 38%, 158% and 19%, respectively. Atmospheric growth rates of CO2 and N2O in 2009 are consistent with recent years, but are lower than in 2008. After nearly a decade of no growth, atmospheric CH4 has increased during the past three years. The reasons for renewed growth of atmospheric methane are not fully understood, but emissions from natural sources (from northern latitudes and the tropics) are considered potential causes. The NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index shows that from 1990 to 2009, radiative forcing by all longlived greenhouse gases increased by 27.5%, with CO2 accounting for nearly 80% of this increase. The combined radiative forcing by halocarbons is nearly double that of N2O.

Permafrost, which contains organic carbon, and methane clathrates are two large northern reservoirs of carbon that are susceptible to the effects of climate change. A rapidly warming high-latitude region has the potential to release large quantities of methane into the atmosphere from these carbon reservoirs, which would provide a strong positive feedback on climate. The map below shows Arctic soil organic carbon content.

A new assessment has estimated that there are 1,650 gigatonnes – 1.65 trillion tons – of carbon stored in the northern circumpolar permafrost region. That’s more than twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. But this carbon is stored as methane, a greenhouse gas that is much more powerful than CO2 (~25 times more potent than CO2 over a 100 year time horizon but 72 times as potent over 20 years). Awareness of methane leaks from permafrost is so new that it was not even mentioned in the 2007 IPCC report. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in its 2010 Arctic Report Card issued last month, said the average temperature of the permafrost has been rising for decades, but noted “a significant acceleration” in the last five years at many spots on the Arctic coast.

What’s all this mean for the world’s climate? The graph below extends the McShane and Wyner hockey stick graph, using a simple average of the IPCC’s low-end (1.1 degrees C) and high-end estimates (6.4 degrees C) for 21st century temperature increase.

Leaking methane isn’t the only bad news. As Joseph Romm points out at Climate Progress, every day seems to bring another study suggesting we’ve been too blasé about coming climate impacts.

A new paper in Journal of Climate, (subs. req’d), reconciles observed cloud variations in the tropical and subtropical eastern Pacific region with climate models — and finds that, if their results are correct, “they provide support for the high end of current estimates of global climate sensitivity.”

Romm quotes from the University of Hawaii’s press release, headlined “Study could mean greater anticipated global warming.”

A new report titled Peak Energy, Climate Change, and the Collapse of Global Civilization: The Current Peak Oil Crisis concludes the convergence of peak energy resources and dangerous anthropogenic climate and environmental change will likely have a disastrous impact in the near- and long-term on the quantity and quality of human life on the planet. Energy resource shortages post-peak oil are bad enough, likely causing a systemic collapse of global industrialized civilization in the near-term as the abundant fossil fuel energy resources used to develop and support industrialized economies become increasingly scarce. At the same time, Earth will be becoming a less friendly place to live.

Energy analyst Chris Martenson observes that the release of the World Energy Outlook 2010 has now made it official: peak oil is in the rear-view mirror, and the economy is set to starve. There will be an energy crisis in the near future that will make anything we’ve experienced so far seem like a pleasant memory. The potential knock-on effects of less energy to the complex system known as our economy are unpredictable in their exact details and timing, but the broad outline is clear: the economy will become simpler and less ordered.

On top of energy and economic crises, add land, soil, water, and biodiversity loss and degradation; climate change impacts; ocean acidification; and the ongoing mass extinction event.

There’s no nice way to put it. The human carrying capacity of the Earth will soon be significantly reduced.

The fight to stop global warming is over – and we have lost.

George Monbiot faces the harsh reality in a piece in the U.K. Guardian:

But the harsh reality we have to grasp is that the process is dead. . .

In terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It’s not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and grand announcements we spiralled backwards. . . .

[N]one of [the cuts supposedly achieved so far] are real. Missing from the proposed cuts are the net greenhouse gas emissions we have outsourced to other countries and now import in the form of manufactured goods. Were these included in the UK’s accounts, alongside the aviation, shipping and tourism gases excluded from official figures, Britain’s emissions would rise by 48%. Rather than cutting our contribution to global warming by 19% since 1990, as the government boasts, we have increased it by about 29%. It’s the same story in most developed nations. Our apparent success results entirely from failures elsewhere.

Hanging over everything is the growing recognition that the United States isn’t going to play. Not this year, perhaps not in any year.

What all this means is that there is not a single effective instrument for containing man-made global warming anywhere on earth. The response to climate change, which was described by Lord Stern as “a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen”, is the greatest political failure the world has ever seen.

“The greatest market failure the world has seen” doesn’t quite get at the depth of the crisis we face. Global warming is not merely the result of a failure of the market. It’s a failure of capitalism itself: the destruction of the biosphere  is an inescapable conclusion of capitalism’s economic logic. With global warming, the time of consequences has arrived.

Frank Rotering writes at the Energy Bulletin that economics over the past five centuries has almost exclusively meant the study of production and consumption under capitalism, assuming without question a deep commitment to growth, blind to the natural world and any concept of limits. The commitment to growth spanned the political spectrum, on the right it was used to justify capital’s rule and to facilitate business and on the left to facilitate social justice. All who believe in or benefit from the gospel of growth, whether from the capitalist class or those on the left who seek only to modify the way wealth is distributed rather than to question the pursuit of wealth itself, will fiercely resist any changes that could threaten their power and privileges.

The ecological crisis is a crisis of capitalism. While we have proven incapable of even honestly confronting our predicament, Nature will solve the ecological crisis for us. Out of the ashes, if we are fortunate, we may be offered the opportunity to cobble together a new way of life based on humility and sound ecological principles.

Next time – if we’re lucky enough to get another chance – maybe we’ll get it right.

Conservation biologist and climate scientist Guy McPherson is guardedly optimistic:  the consequences of peak oil might, just might, bring the industrial economy to an overdue close, just in time. At least that’s what he told Kurt Cobb.

There’s no chance – zero – that humans will voluntarily do what is necessary to avoid climate catastrophe. Even Christiana Figueres, the UN’s new climate chief, admits that a comprehensive “big bang” global climate treaty is not possible.

For a graphic representation of why nothing but systemic collapse can save humans from themselves, take a look at this graph posted by Joseph Romm at Climate Progress:

While people have been flapping their lips, talking about doing something to avert climate catastrophe, their actions speak the truth: left to our own devices, we will commit planetary suicide. We are committing planetary suicide.

Update: as if increasing coal consumption isn’t bad enough, there’s this:

In a bid to shore up its precarious energy security Japan is to start commercial test drilling for controversial frozen methane gas along its coast next year.

The gas is methane hydrate, a sherbet-like substance consisting of methane trapped in water ice – sometimes called “fire ice” or MH – that is locked deep underwater or under permafrost by the cold and under pressure 23 times that of normal atmosphere. . .

Concerns had been raised that digging for frozen methane would destabilise the methane beds, which contain enough gas worldwide to snuff out most complex life on earth. Methane itself is a greenhouse gas which is 21 times as damaging as carbon dioxide and any leakage from wells could be an environmental problem. . .

Environmentalists, however, are concerned about the burning of more earth-locked hydrocarbons. Methane may be a cleaner-burning fossil fuel than coal or oil but will still release many tons of CO2.

Pray for collapse. Plan for collapse. Work for collapse. Collapse is humanity’s only hope.