The third report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment performs a valuable service. It establishes boundaries for compromise and thereby appeals for reasonable discussion about an important issue.
The report from Working Group 3 on mitigation postulates action necessary to keep mean global temperature from rising more than 2° C. above preindustrial levels. Given the complexity of relationships among temperature, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and other influences, any such target and strategy for meeting it are theoretical. To meet this one, according to scientists in the working group, people must cut total GHG emissions 40-70% by midcentury and to nearly zero by 2100.
Won't happen
This will not happen. Lowering GHG emissions by even the midcentury goal would require massive displacement of hydrocarbon fuels by energy forms many times more expensive. The economic burden would be politically intolerable. People would reject the effort long before the promised benefits of avoided warming came clearly into view. In many countries in Europe, with first-step energy-substitution efforts elevating electricity bills painfully, citizens now demand relief. Governments would be foolish to impose further hardship in pursuit of IPCC numbers uncertain to deliver on the promise.
Still, moderation of GHG emissions remains a prudent goal of policy, even if associated changes in measured temperature can't be known in advance. The effort just needs to acknowledge that people won't make large, immediate sacrifices of well-being and comfort in service to indistinct benefits in the far-distant future.
This dilemma radiates the need for compromise, which requires reasoned discussion of alternative approaches. So far, reasoned discussion has been absent from the political sphere, which treats views on climate change more as matters of faith and belief than of science and economics. Politics thus quashes any approach not grounded in economic hopelessness. That must change.
If reasoned discussion did somehow erupt around this issue, what might constructive compromise look like? And what role should the oil and gas industry play in it?
At the outset, constructive compromise would acknowledge physical realities of energy. One such reality is that energy never has been created as an act of political will and never will be. With energy, people must make the best use of what nature gives them. The meaning of "best" under a new approach would incorporate cost and scale as well as environmental performance.
Constructive compromise also would accept that mandates to use expensive instead of affordable energy doom themselves. Policy would be most effective if it instead fostered the discovery of ways to make physical laws work for rather than against the further decarbonization of energy and management of emissions. Policy therefore should refocus on research and retreat from the futile reengineering of markets.
Efforts can proceed on other fronts while scientific exploration progresses. People can cut their energy use. Conservation works. But it works better when encouraged by education and judicious tax incentives than when it's imposed. Performance standards for energy-consuming goods work, too, when standard-setters don't get carried away. By a very important metric—energy use per increment of economic growth—prosperity enhances conservation meaningfully. Policies that sacrifice economic health to rote consumption targets defeat themselves—if they don't provoke riots first.
Companies' role
Oil and gas companies can complement governmental efforts by lowering emissions from their own work and by promoting conservation through education and support for policies geared to energy-use efficiency. They can conduct and fund research. They can encourage economic growth and support tax policies that encourage economically sensible conservation. In return, companies should expect relaxation of the obstructionist bias now turning energy policy against any project that would boost supply or consumption of coal, oil, or gas.
A compromise approach would keep emission reductions below 40%. But that still would represent progress—almost certainly more than unsustainable energy substitution can achieve. Who knows? Globally averaged temperature might stabilize within the 2° window, anyway. In nature, stranger things have happened.
