Amid a great deal of uncertainty about the world economy, energy, food, and other issues associated with the collateral damage from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there was a closed-door meeting among White House officials and top executives of oil companies and financial institutions Monday. President Joe Biden dropped in briefly, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told him what the United States needs is a “Marshall Plan” to develop more domestic energy.
Dimon’s multinational investment bank is the largest lender to fossil fuel companies in the nation, although in the past few years it has pulled back from lending to coal companies. The original Marshall Plan was a huge government program intended to help Western Europe rebuild after the devastation of World War II. Adjusted to 2022 dollars, that program cost $153 billion.
As first reported by Axios, Dimon laid out four points: increase natural gas production and export it to Europe to replace Russian gas; encourage Europeans to increase their liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities, especially regasification operations; invest more in hydrogen and carbon capture technology; and speed up installations of solar and wind by streamlining permitting.
For readers short on time who want to get to the point, let me just say I’m deeply suspicious of Dimon’s idea, which sounds like a joke version of the Green New Deal.
It might make sense if Dimon focused on very short-term increases of natural gas (and oil) production amid a hugely accelerated effort on energy renewables to get Europe, the U.S., and others past the crunch caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
But Dimon’s proposal isn’t short term. It’s no different than oil and gas company lobbyists agitating for fast-tracking new production and building fossil fuel infrastructure such as pipelines and port facilities with 50-year or longer lifespans. That plus “relaxing” a bunch of those pesky environmental rules the industry has been bellyaching about since forever.
We’re going to be hearing a lot more of these bogus rationalizations because of the war, which is going to cause even more disruption and changes in Ukraine and elsewhere than it already has. But one thing it won’t do is put the climate crisis on hold.
A new paper published by Dan Calverley and Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the United Kingdom makes the urgency clear. As Romain Ioualalen condenses their findings:
At a time when fossil fuel supply is at the top of the global political agenda because of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, this report is also a reminder that building up new fossil fuel infrastructure is not a viable way to cut off Russian oil and gas — not only because cleaner solutions can be scaled up faster, but also because new fossil fuel development is utterly incompatible with limiting warming to 1.5°C.
...
The report highlights the scale of the challenge that the world faces in phasing out fossil fuel production at the pace that carbon budgets dictate: Retaining a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C, which would already lock-in devastating impacts around many parts of the world, means global oil and gas production needs to be phased out by 2050 at the latest. For a 67% chance, oil and gas needs to be phased out by 2042 globally.
...
The report is also clear that immediate action is needed: their production must go down by 74% by 2030.
Right now nations’ pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions come nowhere near what’s needed to keep the planet’s temperature below 2 degrees C of warming, much less the 1.5 degrees C that scientists calculate we really should be shooting for to avoid more severe global impacts. Instead, because most nations aren’t even meeting their inadequate pledges, we’re headed for 2.4 to 2.7 degrees of warming by century’s end. It’s clear we have a climate emergency on our hands. We should call it that officially and we should treat it like we mean it.
Getting Europe over the hump to a nonfossil fuel future with green infrastructure would be a good thing, but prepping for another couple of generations of burning fossil fuel is, as Guterres so rightly says, madness. Although it would take half a year or more to get up to speed, a very short-term increase in natural gas production could be accomplished without new leases on public land and without new pipelines, new refineries, and new port facilities for LNG shipments. Today, just 10% of U.S. natural gas production comes from onshore and offshore public lands, yet the industry sits with 7,700 permits on 13.9 million acres of federally leased but undrilled land. More leases are needed why exactly?
Ever since Richard Nixon was in the White House, the fossil fuel industry and politicians both Republican and Democratic have called for “energy independence,” which has always meant independence from foreign oil. But at the beginning of this month, the 11 Republicans on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources sent a letter to President Biden urging him to take 10 actions to “regain America’s energy dominance.” The fantasy of “independence” just isn’t enough for them.
Ten actions. Not one word about renewable energy. And the only mention of climate is a sneer about an inapt remark by climate envoy John Kerry. In place of those omissions, they put in a good word for coal. Plus more fracking. More leasing. More fossil fuel infrastructure. Fewer regulations. Faster permitting. The senators conclude their letter with: “Mr. President, America is the world’s energy superpower. It is time we started acting like it again.”
It’s as if none of them read a single page of the U.N.’s Sixth Assessment of the Climate.
In 2003, Worldwatch founder Lester Brown called for “climate action on the scope of the WWII mobilization” in his book Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. In their 2008 book, Climate Code Red: The case for emergency action, David Spratt and Philip Sutton used the term “climate emergency.” Others also took up the term. Eight years ago, activists initiated The Climate Mobilization (TCM), which calls for governmental climate action on the scale of the World War II mobilization to cut greenhouse gas emissions. TCM founders Ezra Silk and Margaret Klein Salamon wrote about this in Victory Plan and Leading the Public into Emergency Mode respectively. TCM’s efforts managed to get a climate mobilization resolution included in the Democratic Party’s platform for the 2016 presidential election.
Since then, more than 1,000 municipal governments around the world, including more than 50 in the United States, have adopted “climate emergency” language. In December 2017, Maryland's Montgomery County, a suburb of 1 million people that borders Washington, D.C., became first in the U.S. to make a county-wide declaration. There is, of course, only so much local authorities can achieve. The declaration needs to be nationwide.
This isn’t just symbolism or “virtue signaling,” as so many naysayers would have it. Spratt and Sutton note in their book, we must:
… devote as much of the world’s economic capacity as is necessary, as quickly as possible, to this climate emergency. If we do not do enough, and do not do it fast enough, we are likely to create a world in which far fewer species, and a lot less people, will survive… Declaring a climate and sustainability emergency is not just a formal measure or an empty political gesture, but an unambiguous reflection of a government’s and people’s commitment to intense and large-scale action. It identifies the highest priority to which sufficient resources will be applied in order to succeed.
And that was 14 years ago.
In 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , Rep. Earl Blumenauer, and Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced HR 794, a joint resolution in Congress for climate emergency declaration. It’s been rotting in a subcommittee. Last year, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted that “President Biden should declare a national emergency on the climate crisis.” And last week, the Congressional Progressive Caucus formally called for the same. The president should take them seriously.
The president’s potential powers would be wide-ranging if he declared a national climate emergency. He would not be unchecked: Since 1976, Congress can vote to terminate a presidential emergency with a joint resolution. The president can veto this, which takes a two-thirds vote in Congress to overturn.
It’s infuriating that we have arrived at this moment when a climate emergency needs to be declared and acted upon. If all too many of our leaders—governmental and corporate—hadn’t for decades sandbagged discussion and action on climate with ignorance and lies, a declaration might not now be necessary. But as those 11 Senate Republicans demonstrate in their 10-point letter to Biden, some people still just don’t get it. Or worse, they do get it, but they care more about their political careers and campaign donations than how the future will pan out if their continued love for fossil fuels gets another thumbs-up.