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The environmental movement in the US has been fairly successful in preventing the construction of many coal-fired power plants and perhaps also the Keystone Pipeline. The argument which carried the day was not global climate catastrophe but the pollution caused by coal and the tar sands operations. Energy matters also put the ruling class under pressure because of a prolonged recession: whenever business picks up, oil prices shoot up and suffocate demand. Obama's support of fracking announced in his State of the Union address is a cunning response to this predicament. Obama is promoting fracking not only in the US but everywhere in the world (Poland). The idea is to loosen the world wide dependence on oil from the Middle East or Venezuela and the dirty oil from Canadian tar sands, taking full advantage of the large supplies of cheap and plentiful Natural Gas which have become available due to the fracking technology. US electricity will come from clean natural gas instead of dirty coal, silencing the environmentalists, and many US trucks will run on natural gas. The US will become a net exporter of coal and natural gas and will have to import less oil, which helps the dollar and undermines the power of countries like Russia, Iran, Venezuela. I am indebted for this outlook to Richard J Pierce's presentation at a conference called "Electric Power in a Carbon-Constrained World" at the University of Utah Law School last Thursday, Feb 9. Pierce is on the faculty of the law school of the George Washington University in Washington DC. Pierce estimates that gas from fracking will last 100 years, and then gas from methane hydrates will take over which last another 300 years. With so much energy available, Pierce thinks adaptation to climate change is possible, and he thinks that carbon capture and sequestration is easier for natural gas than for coal. Pierce is clearly wrong about adaptation. I am not sure whether Pierce has read up on tipping points, or whether he is aware that the greenhouse effect is not the only aspect where modern industrial production bumps against the limits of planetary resources. But in the time frame of the next 5-10 years, the only possible hole I see in Obama's strategy is the question whether the extraction of natural gas can be sustained or whether the yield of the shale gas fields suddenly collapses. Other than this, such a strategy will get Obama re-elected, and the inexorable descent into climate catastrophe will be even more difficult to stop because now it is not based on oil from our enemies or extremely dirty oil from our friends in Canada or Utah, but on clean domestic natural gas and a booming economy in the US. Our response to Obama's strategy must be to oppose fossil fuels not based on the Clean Air Act or too high costs but based on the world wide need to leave all fossil fuels in the ground. The conference was misnamed; our problem is not too little carbon but too much of it. In view of this abundance, market forces cannot steer us away from fossil fuels. Therefore we must be much more vocal about it that a response to the climate crisis is not possible within the capitalist system. Hans ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
