Don't Even Think About It (27 page)

Although many campaigners would regard such inconsistency as evidence of the hidden influence of oil corporations, policies to deal with other global problems—even those with powerful vested interests—never ignore production in this way. Fisheries are managed through fishing rights and production quotas. Illegal logging is prevented through permits and forest management. And to take a notoriously wicked problem, it would be unthinkable for drug policy to ignore production, which is why the U.S. government spends nearly two billion dollars per year on international control measures. If, as George W. Bush said, we are addicted to oil, then a policy on climate change that ignores production of fossil fuels is like a policy on drugs that ignores the poppy fields, cocaine labs, smuggling networks, and dealers and focuses exclusively on the addicts.

In fact, when compared with these other examples, it makes even
more
sense for climate change policies to include production. Two-thirds of the world’s oil production is produced by just ten oil companies or, to look at it another way, by just ten countries. Representatives from every one of them could comfortably sit around a single conference table. There would be enough space left over for a couple of extra delegates from China and the United States, which between them account for two-thirds of the world’s coal production. This was self-evident to the economist Thomas Schelling, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on negotiation theory. Schelling regards climate change policy to be an “awfully complicated hodgepodge.” To him, the answer seems very straightforward: “The way to simplify this is to put the cap on the fossil fuels, not on different industries—a cap on oil and gas at the wellhead, a cap on coal at the minehead,” he says. When I asked him why he thought that no one has ever proposed doing this, he said, “I don’t have any good theory except to say that hardly any leading politician in the U.S. manages to speak truthfully and candidly about the subject of climate change.”

Robert N. Stavins, a professor of business and government at Harvard University, agrees. He supports the model of emissions trading but argues that the precedent should have been the trading model applied during the 1980s to phase out leaded gasoline, which focused on the lead content in gasoline (the fuel input) not the exhaust (the tailpipe output). According to Stavins, the cheapest and most enforceable system is to tax the carbon content of the fuels.

So, I wondered, when had the governments and experts working on the international process weighed up the various options for policy interventions and decided that the best basis for national and international policy was to regulate and trade gases and ignore the fossil fuels that produce them?

The answer is that this discussion has never taken place.

The science of climate change has only ever been concerned with greenhouse gases and their potential impacts. In 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produced the first tables of national greenhouse gas emissions, which then became the basis of the international negotiations. However the IPCC had no remit to produce tables of national fossil fuel production. Sir John Houghton, the founding chair of the IPCC, sees no difference between the fossil fuels that are produced and the greenhouse gases they later become. “Of course,” he says, “they are all part of the same thing.” The problem, he told me, is that “talking about the source of fossil fuels would have moved us from the science arena into the policy arena. Because of the pressure we were under, we needed to be squeaky-clean, maybe too clean, but we needed it to be that way.”

In his fourteen years chairing the IPCC Science Committee, Sir John could not recall a single proposal or debate about controlling production at the wellhead. “It’s a pity that it never has been addressed, but it is not a science question. It is a policy question.”

Except that it was never discussed in policy circles either. Jeremy Leggett, a former oil industry geologist who later became the senior climate campaigner for Greenpeace International, has attended the international climate negotiations since 1990 and sat in on every major policy discussion. Yet he could not recall a single instance when anyone formally proposed a policy that would constrain the exploration and development of new sources of oil, gas, and coal. “Looking back,” he says, “I think it was a missed opportunity that we did not make this argument earlier.”

“Nor,” he adds, “was there any point at which the oil companies or producers actively generated this approach. It just happened to be the zeitgeist that this was how the problem was approached and this just happened to be in the interest of the oil companies.”

Leggett’s observation is important. Of course, there were very powerful national and commercial interests protecting fossil fuel production. Attempts to limit wellhead production would have been bitterly resisted. But there were no fights, no struggles, no backroom deals. There did not need to be because it was never discussed.

Jennifer Morgan has dedicated most of her working life to following the climate negotiations. She headed the delegation for the World Wildlife Fund throughout the Kyoto negotiations and has led campaign teams in every negotiation since 1994. Like Leggett, she could not identify any point at which a decision was made to focus on tailpipe emissions. She tells me that “it has just been assumed for a very long time.” Morgan and Leggett agree that campaigners and negotiators alike were trying to get the best deal they could on the terms that were available to them—and these were only concerned with the tailpipe.

And so everyone fought bitterly over the mechanisms for sharing, controlling, and trading tailpipe emissions. The science was only concerned with
gases
. The international process had taken all of its precedents from previous policies to control and trade
gases
. From the very outset fossil fuel production lay outside the frame of the discussions and, as with other forms of socially constructed silence, the social norms among the negotiators and policy specialists kept it that way.

Consequently, the narratives surrounding the environmental impacts of fossil fuels became divorced and disconnected. Narratives around the impacts of oil, gas, and coal production become concerned with health, safety, and compensation for localized environmental damage. Narratives around climate change become concerned with emissions, energy demand, efficiency, consumer lifestyles, and global climate impacts.

In spring 2010 there was a perfect opportunity to bring these two drifting stories back together again. Senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer were holding intensive negotiations to redesign a climate bill for a vote in the U.S. Senate. To maintain the political momentum, mainstream environment organizations were running the largest and most expensive public outreach campaign ever held on climate change. And then, on April 20, BP’s
Deepwater Horizon
oil rig exploded and spilled four million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The result should have been a godsend for climate advocates: a media-driven outrage about dirty fossil fuels at exactly the time that legislators were considering an even greater crisis caused by the pollution of those same fuels. This perfect storm of synchronicity happens only once in a campaigner’s lifetime.

Only there was no room for making these connections because the U.S. climate bill, following the lead of the international negotiations and the acid rain emissions trading, was entirely concerned with tailpipe emissions. In return for their involvement and support, oil, gas, and coal companies had been offered generous emissions allowances and increased exploration rights. Three weeks before the explosion, as part of a grand bargain to get a climate bill through the Senate, President Obama had announced plans to open up 167 million acres of the Atlantic coast for oil drilling.

So there was no means to connect the narratives—although grassroots groups like the Sierra Club tried valiantly to do so.
Deepwater Horizon
became all about local impacts and corporate health and safety—with a compelling enemy narrative centering on the slippery and evasive performance of BP CEO Tony Hayward.

The more radical environmentalists have always tried to make the connection between wellhead and tailpipe. Patrick Reinsborough of the Oakland-based Center for Story-based Strategy sees this as part of a wider vision of an inclusive movement for social justice. “There is now a new political space opening up,” he told me, “in which we see that the problems are fossil fuels, and people who have been on the front lines of fighting fossil fuels are the obvious people who should be on the front line fighting for solutions.”

The battle over the Keystone XL pipeline and the movement mobilized to demand divestment from fossil fuel companies are also determined attempts to reframe the issue of climate change in terms of wellhead. A pipeline not only has the proximity of a visible struggle but it also gives tangible form to the transmission of carbon from stored reserves to emissions.

But the problem remains—as with the language and images of climate change as a whole—that for as long as radical activists are the only ones making these connections, their arguments may be marginalized and disregarded.

So, I suggest, the separation of wellhead and tailpipe was not primarily the product of corporate lobbying or global power politics—although these have played a role. It can also be understood as an extreme error of judgment resulting from cognitive error and flawed categorization. Scientists categorized climate change as a tailpipe issue because production was considered a political issue that was outside of their domain. Policy makers then categorized climate change as a tailpipe problem because they drew on recent available experience that suggested viable solutions for tailpipe problems. Confirmation bias and a socially constructed norm of disattention finished off the job.

Because climate change is multivalent and wicked, it can have multiple interpretations but exists only in the form that people choose it to have. This means in turn that it does not exist in the form that they choose to ignore. Production controls are not debated, because they simply don’t exist within the debate.

After twenty years of negotiating around emissions, we are now in a bizarre situation. Most Western governments have established programs to subsidize the increasing production of renewable energy, biofuels, and—with less success—nuclear power. And they do so while encouraging, and usually subsidizing, ever-larger investments into exploring and developing new fossil fuels.

In 2012, the global investment in renewable energy was an impressive $244 billion. In 2012, for the first time, the oil and gas sector investment into exploration and development of new reserves broke the $1 trillion barrier. While the renewable sector tries to reduce emissions at the end of the pipe, the oil and gas industries seek to pump ever more fossil fuels into the front of the pipe.

But the procession must go on and the lords of the bedchamber are taking greater pains than ever to appear to be holding up the emperor’s train, although, in reality, there is no train to hold.

33

The Black Gooey Stuff

Why Oil Companies Await Our Permission to Go Out of Business

Shell Oil is very concerned
about my safety. On a large video screen by reception in its South Bank headquarters in London, the office manager tells visitors, “Your safety is very important to us. We have a policy of Goal Zero:
All
accidents
can
be avoided. Comply with all safety notices. Do not run in the corridors. Report any unsafe behavior by your host. We hope you have a very happy, positive, and
safe
visit.”

As I am watching this, the woman at reception is trying to get my attention.

“Your shoe,” she says.

“Sorry?”

“Your shoe. Your shoelace.
Shoelace
.” By now, everyone in reception is joining in and pointing. “Your shoelace,
sir
. It’s loose. You could trip up and have an
accident
.” “Oh well,” I say, “I like to live dangerously.”

Following the circular staircase that spirals up to the meeting rooms are cardholders, like the kind they have in fancy cake shops, with smiling faces of the Shell family. It’s very exciting—say the people on the cards. Never a dull moment. Vibrant. Exciting. We have a shared vision. We know what we want to be. The head of communications says, “One big challenge is to help Shell show people in the UK that it’s really serious about climate change.” A big challenge indeed—but then Shell likes challenges.

As I make my way up, reading the cards as I go, the receptionists are concerned again. Now they are sounding more anxious and obviously have me pegged as a dangerous risk taker and threat to Goal Zero.

“Sir.
Sir!
Can you
please
hold the handrail on the stair.”

“The what?”

“The handrail—you might trip and have an
accident
.”

It is then that I notice an array of signs all along the staircase warning me of slippery steps and directing me to walk carefully and use the handrail. When I finally sit down with David Horne, Shell’s climate change supremo, a look of concern crosses his face.