Caught in the carbon pincers

Martin Hanson

Opinion

In psychology, cognitive dissonance is a state of psychological stress experienced by an individual as a result of holding two or more contradictory ideas, beliefs or values.

It seems that most of us suffer from cognitive dissonance; we want to do something about global warming, but at the same time think we can continue our energy-guzzling lives.

For example, in June 2018 the UK Parliament voted by 415 votes to 119 to go ahead with a third runway at Heathrow airport, oblivious of the fact that any solution to global warming must involve severe reductions in air travel. Yet on May 2 this year, the British Government, presumably with straight faces, declared a “climate emergency”.

And in New Zealand, newspapers carry articles about the threat to our climate and adverts for 4x4s, jet skis and other gas guzzlers. Nowhere, it seems, are there any hints that we need to change our ways, drastically and soon.

Perhaps craziest of all, even if we prove incapable of leaving fossil fuels voluntarily, fossil fuels are inevitably going to leave us, for the simple reason that they are finite.

This doesn’t mean that at some time in the future the last drop of oil will be extracted, as some might think; it’s a little more complicated than that, as I’ll explain.

Oil companies first go for the “low-hanging fruit”, the land-based, easy-to-extract reserves. Last century, in the United States and Middle East over a hundred barrels of crude oil could be extracted by “spending” the energy of one barrel of oil. This is expressed as Energy Return over Energy Invested, or EROEI. As terrestrial oil reserves have been depleted, oil companies have turned to the harder stuff — offshore, deep sea, bitumen sands, and most recently, fracking, yielding lower and lower EROEIs. At the moment the world average EROEI is about 15, but the Canadian bitumen sands yield about five. Once the world average gets below five, so much energy has to be spent finding and extracting more that there isn’t enough left over for things we consider essential, such as health, education, scientific research, etc.

And what should be concentrating our minds with even greater urgency is the fact that fracked wells deplete extremely rapidly, so more and more have to be drilled just to maintain extraction, like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice through the looking glass”. With most of the best areas exploited, the fracking boom is coming to an end sooner rather than later. And then we shall have a very forceful reminder of what is meant by “sustainability”.

Humanity is caught between the pincers of declining availability of fossil fuels and the climatic devastation resulting from their combustion. So one is bound to ask, how is it possible for humanity to saw off the branch on which we sit?

The answer lies in two kinds of addiction. On the one hand, the vast majority of us are so dependent on our 21st century lifestyle that we cannot even conceive of reducing our energy expenditure to that of our grandparents. To many people, jetting to far-away places, rally-driving, jet skiing and so on are considered to be non-negotiable parts of modern life.

On the other hand, the “one percent” have become addicted to the wealth and power that fossil fuels have made possible. It is these über-rich corporate CEOs and politicians who are most resistant to taking action. Not only do they not care about the rest of humanity; they evidently don’t even care about their children and grandchildren. Now there’s something for the psychiatrists.