“If your bathtub was overflowing, you wouldn’t immediately reach for a mop — you’d first turn off the tap. That’s what we need to do with single-use plastics,” wrote Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA and Martin Bourque, executive director of the Ecology Center, Berkeley in a recent LA Times op-ed.
Last month, more than 600 organizations submitted a letter to House members that laid out a vision of what a true Green New Deal should include. “Halt all fossil fuel leasing, phase out all fossil fuel extraction, and end fossil fuel and other dirty energy subsidies” topped the list. In other words, the metaphorical tub of fossil fuels is overflowing. Turn off the tap.
The version of the Green New Deal introduced today in a joint resolution by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (D-NY), and Sen. Ed Markey, (D-MA) makes no mention of a phasing out of fossil fuels. For all of the good things GND does, going after the problem at its source is not one of them. The Green New Deal is just the latest policy proposal to put all of the emphasis on demand rather than supply, or on consumption rather than production.
Recent analysis by a team of British researchers demonstrated that we can limit the global temperature increase to 1.5˚C, but only if we act now. They found that every year of procrastination reduces by two years the amount of time we have left for the phase out. Sound climate policy must address production.
But there’s another reason why attention must be given to production and it brings us back to the single-use plastics Leonard and Bourque are fighting to stop. The main ingredient in single-use plastics is ethylene extracted from ethane molecules that are cracked open in processing facilities called cracker plants. Ethane is a gas that exacerbates climate change in three ways: 1) it is a greenhouse gas, 2) it contributes to the formation of smog, a major player in global warming, and 3) it deprives the very powerful greenhouse gas methane of the hydroxides it needs to convert to carbon dioxide, thereby extending its life in its most climate-killing form.
Ethane is at the heart of a second-generation fracking boom, a petrochemical boom that has nothing to do with energy production. Ethane is a greenhouse gas, but not a fossil fuel. Fracking for it creates all of the same problems fracking for methane has caused for well over a decade. Ethane crackers pollute the air with Volatile Organic Compounds. The cracker Royal Dutch Shell has proposed for Beaver County, Pennsylvania would be the single biggest source of VOC pollution in the western part of the state. Just like methane production, ethane production means more pipelines, more processing facilities, and more export facilities which bring about more pollution, more risk of explosions and fires, and more health impacts. And just as it is with the natural gas industry, the investment into the expansion of all of the infrastructure to support the petrochemical industry means we will be locked in to production of a greenhouse gas far longer than we can afford to be.
Organizations like Leonard’s Greenpeace and the organization she founded, The Story of Stuff, are among those in the single-use plastics fight that have made the link to ethane’s role in climate change, but there’s no mention of it in GND, nor in the letter sent by the environmental community to House members.
Procrastination from widening our focus to include the supply side of the climate issue not only reduces the time we have for a phase out, it prevents us from understanding and preparing for what it is we need to phase out. It’s time to stop limiting the conversation to fossil fuel production and start calling for the phase out we really need – a phase out of greenhouse gas production. And do it quickly — the tub is overflowing.
