By the numbers

Sometimes we need to stop and take stock

This newsletter is usually occupied with the action on the important fronts on the climate fight: what activists are doing, and oil companies, and banks, and governments, and so forth. It’s all crucial for one overriding reason: there’s a deadly-earnest race on to see if we can build renewable energy and conserve energy use generally before the ongoing heating overwhelms the physical systems of the planet. On any given day, worrying about exactly where we stand in that race is counterproductive; my job, anyway, is not to assess how hopeful I’m feeling at the moment. It’s to give hell to the bad guys and help to the good ones.

But we do occasionally need to take a step back and see how the fight is going, in part to satisfy our natural curiosity, and in part so we can know where best to press. Maybe it’s like reading polls in election season: helpful every once in a while, debilitating if done constantly. So here’s my best effort at a state-of-the-climate report as of early spring in the northern hemisphere 2024.

At the most fundamental level, new figures last week showed that atmospheric levels of the three main greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—reached new all-time highs last year. Here’s how the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported the figures:

While the rise in the three heat-trapping gases recorded in the air samples collected by NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory (GML) in 2023 was not quite as high as the record jumps observed in recent years, they were in line with the steep increases observed during the past decade. 

The global surface concentration of CO₂, averaged across all 12 months of 2023, was 419.3 parts per million (ppm), an increase of 2.8 ppm during the year. This was the 12th consecutive year CO₂ increased by more than 2 ppm, extending the highest sustained rate of CO₂ increases during the 65-year monitoring record. Three consecutive years of CO₂  growth of 2 ppm or more had not been seen in NOAA’s monitoring records prior to 2014. Atmospheric CO₂ is now more than 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.

Entirely unsurprisingly, the planet’s temperature has also continued to rise. Temperature rise is not as smooth as the growth in greenhouse gas emissions, because other factors—El Niños, volcanoes, and so on—can superimpose themselves on top of the greenhouse gas emissions to push temperatures slightly higher or lower. But at the moment, everything is coming up very very hot. March was the hottest March ever recorded globally, according to European monitors. As the Guardian reported,

This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming phase that has shattered all previous records. Over the past 12 months, average global temperatures have been 1.58C above pre-industrial levels.

This, at least temporarily, exceeds the 1.5C benchmark set as a target in the Paris climate agreement but that landmark deal will not be considered breached unless this trend continues on a decadal scale.

This is a very remarkable run of hot months. Some of it is no doubt due to El Nino, which is now beginning to conclude, but a variety of other factors—including, ironically, the phase-out of highly polluting bunker fuels to power large ships—may be involved as well. But none of these factors, even taken together, fully explain the jump, and so some scientists worry that we may have passed some physical landmark that sets the world’s climate in a new and not-well-understood state. Here’s Gavin Schmidt, who succeeded James Hansen in the critical role at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, writing in Nature:

It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.

Here’s part of the last paragraph of his analysis

In general, the 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system. If the anomaly does not stabilize by August — a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events — then the world will be in uncharted territory. It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.

Meanwhile, his predecessor Hansen has made his call:

Global warming in 2010-2023 is 0.30°C/decade, 67% faster than 0.18°C/decade in 1970-2010 The recent warming is different, peaking at 30-60°N (Fig. 2); for clarity we show the zonal-mean temperature trend both linear in latitude and area-weighted. Such an acceleration of warming does not simply “happen” – it implies an increased climate forcing(imposed change of Earth’s energy balance). Greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing growth has been steady. Solar irradiance has zero trend on decadal time scales. Forcing by volcanic eruptions has been negligible for 30 years, including water vapor from the Honga Tunga eruption. The one potentially significant change of climate forcing is change of human-made aerosols. The large warming over the North Pacific and North Atlantic (Fig. 1) coincides with regions where ship emissions dominate sulfate aerosol production

Warming is accelerating in the past 10-15 years, especially at midlatitudes in the Northern Hemisphere.

Fossil fuel use—the largest source by far of those emissions now heating the earth so rapidly—is still going up. Earlier this week the International Energy Agency slightly raised its estimate of how much oil the planet would burn this year.

The EIA lifted total world-consumption forecasts for 2024 by 0.5% to 102.91 million bpd, and by 0.4% to 104.26 million bpd for 2025. Global oil production, meanwhile, was raised by 0.5% to 102.65 million bpd for 2024, and by 0.4% to 104.61 million bpd for 2025.

The rise is very small—essentially we’ve begun to plateau our fossil fuel use. That’s because large amounts of renewable energy are now coming online. Eighty six percent of new capacity for power generation in 2023 was from renewables, with 473 gigawatts coming on line. That’s better than a gigawatt a day, something like the equivalent of a nuclear power plant.

But the crucial thing, of course, is not the total amount of renewables. It’s whether this is fast enough to meet the pace that scientists have told us is necessary to stop slowing down that heating—to cause the plateau in fossil fuel use to turn into a steep dive. And there we’re not going fast enough. The most important statistic in this newsletter—because it’s comparative—may come from a Paris-based think tank. The new report from Ren21 takes that 473 gigawatt figure and puts it up against what science requires. Here’s the bottom line, as reuters reported it:

But it fell far short of the 1,000 GW per year required to meet the world's climate commitments

In other words, we’re going at less than half the pace we need to be going. And the growth in renewables is not evenly spread—outside of China, the developing world is getting a far-too-small share of this growth, lacking the investment necessary to drive rapid change.

The list of political players blocking change is relatively small. A new report this week found

Over 70% of global CO2 emissions historically can be attributed to just 78 corporate and state producing entities.

But though small in number they are large in power.

My reading of all these numbers is that the story remains largely the same, just more desperate.

We have one force large enough to present any challenge to the rising temperature of the planet, and that is the rise of cheap renewable energy. But it’s not happening fast enough, and to speed it up requires political mobilization to break the power of the fossil fuel industry.

That’s why we do what do here at the Crucial Years, and why I spend my time volunteering at Third Act and elsewhere to make change. Thank you for being a part of that. Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed with either optimism or pessimism. Keep fighting.

In other energy and climate news:

+EarthJustice has a great interview with environmental hero John Beard of Port Arthur, Texas:

I’m a second-generation petrochemical worker. My dad worked in one of the major companies, the former Gulf Oil Company that is now Valero. Back then, it allowed him to buy a house and a car, send me to college, and allowed my family to take vacations and live a good life that was not easy to come by in some other places, including Port Arthur.

People saw those jobs as a means of changing your life and making good money. But that began to change in the 1970s with large layoffs and fewer Port Arthur residents being hired by these companies. Instead, those companies were hiring people who largely did not live in Port Arthur.

But throughout this time there was always the pollution, the stench, the odor, and the releases from these facilities. At the time, people didn't know or understand what was really happening.

+Bill Kitchen reminds us that we are putting pipelines in the ground with bad pipe that is likely to corrode and leak—pipe that probably violates federal rules.

That rule says that pipelines MUST be protected from external corrosion by having a protective coating which, among other things, is “sufficiently ductile to resist cracking.”

The rule exists because long sections of pipe flex a great deal between the time they are manufactured and coated at the plant and when they finally come to rest in a ditch. If the corrosion-proof coating on the pipe is not “sufficiently ductile” (flexible) to also flex when the pipe does, then it will crack. Once a crack in the coating opens up, it creates a pathway for moisture to come in contact with the steel and begin corroding the pipe. Corrosion is a leading cause of pipeline explosions. Controlling corrosion is of particular concern regarding MVP because of its huge size (42-inch diameter) and the extremely high pressure (1,480 pounds per square inch, or psi,) it will be operating under.

+The idea of charging oil companies with homicide continues to gain traction, or at least notice. Here’s Newsweek

As a growing number of legal experts, scientists, and former prosecutors have recently begun positing, the fossil fuel industry's knowing generation and coverup of the climate crisis may constitute a range of criminal offenses. Indeed, the facts described in these civil suits could support charges including criminal fraud, conspiracy and racketeering, reckless endangerment, criminal damage, causing or risking catastrophe, and criminally anticompetitive practices. They could even support charges of homicide.

This, the most serious of crimes, is committed when a person or corporation contributes to or accelerates any death with a culpable mental state. Given the escalating body count from climate-driven heat waves, wildfires, storms, and other extreme weather events, and the mounting evidence that fossil fuel companies acted with clear knowledge of the dangerousness of their conduct, it may already be possible to show that Big Oil's actions satisfy both requirements.

So, it's no wonder that Big Oil executives like Darren Woods want to obscure this history. Like many unreformed criminals, fossil fuel companies want to pin the blame for their lethal conduct on anyone—everyone—but themselves.

+And since you’ve had to live with all this reality, a reward of sorts. In the New Yorker, humorist Megan Amram gave us the most accurate take yet on how oil companies actually think about the future

It’s National Environmental Awareness Month, and all of us at SaaxoAmco Petroleum Corp. are dedicated to using our powerful access and responsibility to insure that the Earth is a healthier and cleaner place for future generations. To demonstrate our dedication, we would like to announce a new array of environmental-progress investment areas.

Carbon offset: For every pipeline that we build, we will plant one tree in a local park. We will then cut down the tree to make paper to send a memo to that town’s mayor to announce that we have planted the tree so that the public knows to come and look at the tree. Just in case the public doesn’t know exactly where the tree is, we will make hundreds of thousands of paper maps available to show the location of the tree before we cut it down, so that visitors won’t need to use their phones (whose batteries are the world’s leading cause of pollution, as per a bunch of studies). This will mean that it will soon take only four thousand trees to see a tree that used to be there! And get this. The mayor we told you about? She’s a woman!