Change the report
Ah yes, if the science says fossil fuels are cooking the planet the thing to do is…lobby to change what the science says.
A huge leak of documents seen by BBC News shows how countries are trying to change a crucial scientific report on how to tackle climate change.
The leak reveals [that] Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia are among countries asking the UN to play down the need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels.
Similarly, if your house is on fire, the thing to do is take the phone away from the damn fool who is calling the fire department and call for pizza instead.
The leaked documents consist of more than 32,000 submissions made by governments, companies and other interested parties to the team of scientists compiling a UN report designed to bring together the best scientific evidence on how to tackle climate change.
“Dear Science Talkers, please say coal and oil are good for us, thank you very much, The Coal and Oil Interests.”
The leak shows a number of countries and organisations arguing that the world does not need to reduce the use of fossil fuels as quickly as the current draft of the report recommends.
An adviser to the Saudi oil ministry demands “phrases like ‘the need for urgent and accelerated mitigation actions at all scales…’ should be eliminated from the report”.
One senior Australian government official rejects the conclusion that closing coal-fired power plants is necessary, even though ending the use of coal is one of the stated objectives the COP26 conference.
Saudi Arabia is the one of the largest oil producers in the world and Australia is a major coal exporter.
It’s like driving at top speed toward a cliff saying “We’re fine!”
Australia asks IPCC scientists to delete a reference to analysis of the role played by fossil fuel lobbyists in watering down action on climate in Australia and the US.
“Hello, we’re here to lobby you to remove insulting references to lobbying.”
It’s like putting together a group of traffickers, dealers, and addicts to discuss how to deal with meth. “What we need is more of it. Clean meth is the answer!”
Faster, actually, like, 1980s. But since that can’t happen, we need to take as fast of action as possible.
Funny you said that…I was talking about ‘clean coal’ just yesterday in my environmental science class. Hey, I’ve got an idea. Instead of erasing the word “woman”, can we erase “clean coal” from the conversation? Cleaner? Yeah. Some. Not clean.
And then there’s “clean natural gas”. Yes, it burns cleaner than coal or petroleum, but it still produces CO2, not to mention all the damage that happens in extracting and transporting it.
The first rule of Lobby Club…
Residential homes powered by natural gas need to be watchful not only for explosions, but also for CO leaks. While I was househunting, I searched for houses that had electrical heat and ranges, but they were not available in the price range/neighborhoods I had as options. So, I have gas. But, I have eyes on converting.
Not only does fracking pump chemicals into the ground to force rocks apart, the process requires fracking sand and the mining and extraction of the sand is highly polluting and can cause silicosis as the particles float through the air. While Minnesota doesn’t have any natural gas, we do have the silica sand used for fracking. Greg Graffin of Bad Religion owned a farm near Ithaca and his pondwater was poisoned by fracking chemicals that had seeped up.
The energy required to extract all these carbon-based fuels create their own demand for energy that does not need to be replaced by renewables, so the figures given for how much wind and solar (and yeah, maybe nuclear) should be adjusted not to reflect total energy used currently, but to show the needs based on reduced energy due to a reduction in carbon fuels.
And lots of water.
As an aside, when I first learned about fracking what really resonated was “Marcellus Shale”, because it was named after the village in upstate New York where my mother grew up.