Below is the transcript for this Fiat Lux Redux episode, which is an edit of a Barbara Weinstock Lecture on the Morals of Trade that happened on October 1, 2024 on the UC Berkeley campus. You can watch the un-edited lecture here.
INTRO: [00:00:00] Welcome to Fiat Lux Redux, a collection of edited lectures and conversations that took place on the campus of UC Berkeley. It’s culled from segments of material available online at UC Berkeley’s many websites, podcast programs and streaming channels. Today’s edition of Fiat Lux Redux starts now.
Lisa Katovich: On today’s episode of Fiat Lux Redux, Bill McKibben, professor and author of over a dozen books on the environment, founder of 350. org and Third Act. Both climate action nonprofits and contributing writer to the New Yorker presents the Barbara Weinstock lecture on the morals of trade, where he examines how the deadly trade in oil and gas has become an enormous threat to the ongoing climate crisis. The lecture took place on October 1st, 2024 in the West Pauley [00:01:00] Ballroom on the UC Berkeley campus.
Bill McKibben: I’ve thought long and hard about this. talk today and taken very seriously the charge to think about the morals of trait and I’m gonna make an argument and it’s a big argument. I think that it’s time for us to end the trade in oil and gas around this world, but particularly and first in this country.
Oil and gas are the largest exports out of this country in dollar value. This is a big case to be making and I will do my best to make it with some precision. I’m going to begin by outlining what strike me as three constraints on our action, followed by one large opportunity. So the first constraint is simply that the climate crisis we now face is exceptionally severe.
It’s the biggest problem that humans have ever faced. I’ve obviously been tracking this for a long time, since I wrote the first book about [00:02:00] what we now call the climate crisis, what we then called the greenhouse effect, back in 1989, when I was in my 20s. The temperature has been rising steadily and dangerously since then, but beginning last year, it took a very sudden and steep spike upwards.
Beginning in about January of 2023, I started getting calls from oceanographer friends around the world. who were encouraging me in the strongest terms to go look at the emerging data sets about what was happening to the temperature of the oceans. It seemed to be going up very dramatically. And by May of 2023, we were recording the hottest ocean temperatures that we’ve ever recorded on this planet.
Buoys off the Florida Keys found sea temperatures day after day after day in excess of 101 degrees Fahrenheit. The scientists told us that these were the hottest temperatures, the hottest days we’d ever recorded on planet Earth. And so they were saying with confidence [00:03:00] that we were seeing the highest temperatures we’ve recorded on this planet in at least 125, 000 years.
And since June of last year, every month has broken the record for the hottest July, August, September, February that there’s been. We set new all time temperature records around the solstice this summer. We’re seeing the rapid melt of the ice caps at both the top and the bottom of the planet. The great glaciers of the Antarctic are being undercut by warm water in the Southern Ocean.
The great ocean currents in the Atlantic, which are beginning to flicker As freshwater pours off a melting Greenland into the North Atlantic, a mega drought in the Amazon is causing fire, not just in the usual places where people are trying to burn down the forest to prospect or raise cattle. But in the pristine interiors of the Amazon, because the rainforest is just literally catching on fire, we seem to be [00:04:00] very near the tipping point that people have long warned about in the Amazon, when that magnificent water transport system that the rainforest represents begins to break down.
There’s only so many really large physical features on planet Earth. Really, every one of them is in now violent and chaotic flux. California is now fire season year round. Last year in Canada, the fires in the northern forest turned that country of 30 million into the fifth biggest carbon emitter on planet Earth, right next to China, India, the U.
S., because so much carbon was pouring out of those conflagrations. Doppler radar indicates that it dropped as much as four feet of rain on top of the mountains on the Blue Ridge just north of Asheville. Places where people had lived for many generations essentially no longer exist. Increasingly it comes down in deluge and flood.
If you think this is bad in this country, and it is, [00:05:00] it is far worse in other parts of the world that lack any of the resilience that money provides to bail them out. At least 148 people are dead in Nepal. Some of the truly remarkable flooding we’ve ever seen. They had the biggest rainstorms they’ve ever recorded in the north of Africa.
The rain in Libya was enough to wash out two dams and then that river tore into a coastal city where it swept 10, 000 people out to sea where they drowned in an hour. It’s a good place to just remind ourselves of the ethical implications here. The entire continent of Africa has put just 3 percent of all the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Essentially, it’s a rounding error in the calculations. The 3 percent of human beings, who call themselves Americans, have put 25 percent of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. No one, not China, will ever catch us in the historical record. And it’s all still up there in the atmosphere, trapping heat.
Everything that I’ve described so far has [00:06:00] happened with a little bit less than 1. 5 degrees Celsius of extra heat trapped near the planet. But we’re on a path to raise that temperature about three degrees Celsius unless we dramatically get off this path and very soon. The level of chaos that it produces, let’s lay aside for the minute basic questions like agriculture and water supply.
Just concentrate on one thing, the UN estimates that that would be enough to produce between one and three billion climate refugees. Something like one person in four on this planet having to get up and leave their home. Try to imagine what kind of world we live on then. So, that is the first constraint under which we labor.
The second constraint is that we have very little time in which to solve it. We are used to thinking of political problems as lasting forever. That we just argue them over and over again and make incremental progress back and forth and that’s just how it works. Climate change [00:07:00] isn’t like that. Past certain tipping points, there is no going back.
Nobody has a scheme for how you freeze the Arctic back up again once you’ve melted it. So that constraint of time, that limit, makes this Very different from other issues that we’re used to dealing with the best estimate that we have of this time frame comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s climate scientists who, in a 2021 paper, published Evaluating the Paris Climate Accords concluded that if we had any hope of staying on that pathway that we set in Paris just eight years ago, that we would need to reduce emissions in half on this planet by 2030.
2030 by my watch is five years and four months away. That’s the constraint of time that we face. And the third constraint is that we understand very clearly. the overwhelmingly dominant [00:08:00] cause of the crisis that we face. And that cause is the combustion of coal and gas and oil. It accounts for well more than 80 percent of the emissions that we find in the atmosphere.
A deeply ingrained habit in our economy. Our habit of burning things stretches back at least 700, 000 years. That’s how long ago the archaeologists find the earliest campfire rings that they can carbon date. And really that’s how they tell there were humans around. Burning stuff has been a useful thing.
for our species. We learned to cook food that gave us the big brain. We were able to move north and south from the equator. The anthropologists even believe that many of the social bonds that mark our species probably come from those millennia of standing around the campfire at night. And when we learn to control the combustion of coal and gas and oil in what we call the Industrial Revolution, that produced modernity.
It produced [00:09:00] everything that we know around us. So combustion has been An absolute hallmark, maybe the absolute hallmark of our species. But combustion is now causing us way more trouble than we could ever have imagined. Not just the destruction of the planet’s climate system, and with it all the other physical systems on the surface of this planet, but even as that happens, Nine million people a year die on this planet.
That’s about one death in five from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. If you’ve been to Delhi or Shanghai in recent years, this won’t surprise you, but it happens here too. There are hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood asthma and many deaths in America every year due to breathing those particulates that happen inevitably as you burn fossil fuel.
And we know who gets to live next to the refinery and next to the highway. It’s the people. It’s the other reason that this is the [00:10:00] paramount justice issue of our time. So far, the attempts to do carbon capture at fossil fuel plants have been ludicrously expensive and completely ineffective. They do not represent a serious attempt to do anything other than separate the taxpayer from their money in an effort to allow the oil industry and the gas and coal industry to pretend that they are doing something.
about the climate crisis. So those are three constraints. So those constraints are crucial, but without the opportunity that I’m going to describe, they probably wouldn’t be enough to get us to take action because fossil fuel has been absolutely essential to the conduct of the world as we know it. And it seems to me highly unlikely.
That in the next five years, human beings en masse will decide to change their lifestyles in ways that dramatically shift the amount of energy that we [00:11:00] use. But the opportunity, and the very good news is, that there is another possible exit from this dilemma. And it’s been provided to us over the last few years by the hard work of engineers around this world, many of them here in the Golden State.
And that is the very, very rapid decline in the price of renewable energy. Price of energy from the sun and from the wind and the batteries to store that energy have all fallen on the order of 90 percent over the last decade. Cheaper than coal and gas and oil to produce energy. We now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.
That is a truly important moment in human history. The second cheapest is to take advantage of the fact that the sun differentially heats the earth, producing the winds that turn those turbines both onshore and off. There [00:12:00] is no technical or financial obstacle to very quickly weaning ourselves off of fossil fuel.
For the last hundred days, almost every day, California has produced more than 100 percent of the electricity it produces for long stretches of the day from renewable energy. At night, the biggest source of supply to the grid is often now batteries. Batteries that did not exist on that grid three years ago.
California this year has used 29 percent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did last year. That’s the most impressive thing. number like that we’ve had around the world to date. This, after all, is the fifth largest economy in the world, and arguably the most modern, and it’s using a third less fossil fuel to produce electricity this year than last.
That is a big enough number to [00:13:00] To start taking a bite out of that three degrees Celsius. If we were able to quickly apply it elsewhere, the country of Pakistan has suffered more climate damage than any country on earth. The two most epic floods since Noah in the last decade, Pakistan earlier this year, people began to note.
That demand on the national electric grid was down about 10%, which does not happen in this world. Demand for electricity goes up, not down, unless there’s a very steep recession or something like COVID. And Pakistan was not in a recession, and so people couldn’t figure out what was going on. With the help of Google Earth, over the last few months, people have figured it out.
Because if you go look at the images from Lahore or Karachi or Islamabad, you see a dramatic increase in the number of solar panels on roofs. Chinese solar panels are now so cheap that people were just buying them and putting them on the top of their store, [00:14:00] their mall, their phone. factory their home, the equivalent in the last six months of 30 percent of their national electric grid in solar panels.
That’s an extraordinary feat, and it’s apparently being echoed across large parts of Africa. Understanding that opportunity is important. We still refer to sun and wind as alternative energy. It is the Costco of energy. All right. It is the cheap stuff available in bulk, ready to go. 80 percent of human beings live in countries.
that are net importers of fossil fuel. That import of fossil fuel is by far the biggest obstacle to a favorable balance of trade. Often a crisis as they struggle to continue to keep their countries operating. It would be a gift of historic proportion to remove that burden from those places. It [00:15:00] requires coming up with lots of capital in order to build those panels and wind turbines.
But, the advantage is enormous. The rapid conversion to renewable energy would save the earth tens of trillions of dollars over the next few decades, not taking into account, in any way, The slowdown in the highly expensive destruction of the planet that we currently enjoy counting only the sheer cost of having to pay for fossil fuel.
You have to, among other things, mine some stuff in order to make it happen. And we need to do that mining of lithium and cobalt and everything else as responsibly and humanely as we can. And we should be capable of doing that. The total mining materials cost for batteries between now and 2050 would be less than the amount of coal we mined last year.
If you mine some lithium, you put it in a battery, and there it [00:16:00] happily sits for the next 25 years doing its job. And if you need to, you then send it off to the new plant on the California Nevada border. and recover 98 percent of the lithium and the cobalt and the copper and whatever else. This should be fairly quickly a kind of steady state circular economy if we could get it going.
I’ve outlined for you the most devilish problem that we’ve ever faced, and I’ve outlined a plausible solution to it that we can begin to see taking shape. But that again has to take shape with incredible speed to have any chance of doing the thing we needed to do. The question that naturally arises then is why are we not making this transition as fast as possible?
And the answer, of course, is that there are some people who want us not to make this transition. And those are the people who own the reserves of coal and gas and oil that would become essentially valueless in [00:17:00] that scheme. Just in this country, there are several tens of trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuel reserves.
That’s several tens of trillions of reasons for a very small number of people to fight to keep us from making this change. The fossil fuel industry has been a bad actor and a intellectually dishonest one from the beginning. We now know from whistleblowers and archives that the fossil fuel industry was studying climate change at least as diligently as I was.
Exxon was the biggest company in the world. They had a huge staff of scientists. Their product was carbon. Of course they were going to understand it. And they did. And we found the documents that the scientists gave their executives that predicted with stunning accuracy, what the temperature would be in 2020.
They were spot on. Executives at places like Exxon began building their drilling rigs higher in the 1980s in order to compensate for the rise in sea level that they knew was in [00:18:00] the offing. They started mapping out precisely which portions of the Arctic they wanted to lease once they’d melted it. They didn’t tell the rest of us, though.
They kept us locked for 30 years in a completely sterile debate about whether or not global warming was real or not. And it became the most consequential lie in human history because it cost us the thing we needed most dearly, which was time. That’s why we have five years and four months to solve this, not 35 years to solve this, and why we may not be able to solve it.
This brings us back to this question of trade. Since that’s what this Weinstock lecture is about. And to my argument, that one component of phasing out the use of these commodities, coal, gas, and oil, is to end their export to the rest of the world immediately. Which sounds like a very, very extreme position to take, but in fact has plenty of precedent in American history.
The oil crisis of the [00:19:00] 1970s, the problem was, and it was a real problem that we had to wait in long lines to get gasoline for our cars. That emergency was enough to persuade our Congress and our administration to ban the export of oil abroad beginning in 1973. And that ban lasted until 2015, when in one of the great ironies of American history, the fossil fuel industry used the moment when all the world’s environmentalists were gathered in Paris for the final negotiations of the Paris Climate Treaty to quickly pass through Congress and end to that oil and gas export ban.
Almost no one paid attention to it because as I say, every environmentalist was busy in Paris trying to wrap up that deal. So we resumed export of these commodities only in 2016, but in the time that passed, we have turned this into an [00:20:00] enormous, enormous industry. America is now the leading exporter of natural gas on the entire planet.
More than Qatar, more than the Saudis, more than Iran, more than anybody. In the last ten years, that trade has exploded, and that has been very bad news. First, for local communities on the ground, almost all of them communities of color and poor communities, who have the misfortune to live next to these truly enormous and truly disgusting facilities that have been built.
One of the most famous CP1 in the Louisiana parishes has been an almost constant violation about things like flaring and emitting for the last months. It’s literally hellish to live next to these places. That export of LNG is a real problem also for Americans who remain connected to the gas grid and who can’t afford to pay the elevated prices [00:21:00] that come when you’re exporting this commodity abroad, which is one of the reasons why there’s been substantial opposition to that export from those parts of the country, particularly the northeast that are still heavily dependent.
On natural gas, but most of all, of course, the problem that this LNG export presents is to the global environment, to the climate crisis. And this takes a little bit of explaining here, a little bit of physics. For a long time, people assumed that the export of gas was actually an environmental good. All things considered.
And the reason was that we hoped and thought that it might be substituting for coal in other places, as indeed it has to some extent in this country. And that that was better. And the reason we thought it was better was because when you burn gas in a power plant, you produce about half as much carbon dioxide per BTU as you do when you burn coal.
So it felt like that was a good [00:22:00] thing. About 15 years ago. A small group of scientists began to suspect that there was a real problem here. And the real problem is called methane, though natural gas, which is mostly methane is cleaner when you burn it. If it is released. Unburnt to the atmosphere, it’s much, much more effective at trapping heat than CO2.
Something like 80 times more effective at trapping heat. Which means, all of you who can do the math, that as little as 2 percent or so leak rate is enough to make this worse than coal. Now, the fossil fuel industry did not like this research as it began to emerge. I started writing about it, some of the first articles about it in the New York Review books, almost 15 years ago.
And the most important player was a methane scientist at Cornell University named Robert Howarth. And they ridiculed him in ways that I’ve rarely seen any scientist attacked. [00:23:00] Many of whom liked natural gas and the export of it because they saw it as a strategic advantage in many ways to the U. S. A way to gain balance of payments money and strategic power in the rest of the world.
But study after study, now hundreds of them over the intervening decade, has found, unfortunately, that Howarth was right and that huge amounts of methane were leaking in every part of this process. When we flew satellite drones over fracking fields, we were finding leak rates of seven or eight percent, that there were There were enormous leakages at every step of the operation, particularly when we took this stuff, super chilled it, compressed it, put it on boats, sailed it across the ocean to Asia and took it back out again and pumped it through pipelines.
The leakage rates made it clear in Howard’s writing and now many others that the export of natural gas was producing more greenhouse gas emissions than the export of [00:24:00] coal was. That in essence, America had over a decade built up a huge coal like export fleet. And the numbers are astonishing because of the scale of this.
If the industry built out all the LNG export terminals that they have applied to build out, then within a very few years. American LNG exports would be producing more greenhouse gases than everything that happens in the European Union. Every car and home and factory from Athens to Helsinki would be doing less climate damage than LNG exports from the Gulf of Mexico in the U.
- That’s why, last year, a bunch of us, local environmental justice groups, and Third Act, kind of in the lead, led this campaign to get the Department of Energy to put a pause on the permitting of new LNG export facilities. Not to stop the [00:25:00] export, merely to pause the granting of permits for new terminals.
We were already, remember, the largest exporter in the world. That became a very difficult fight. In and of itself, but we were able to win it in January of this year when the department of energy announced that they would be doing an extensive review to take this newest science and the newest economics about the cost to Americans into account, that was a huge victory.
They did not react well. Many of you may recall that story in the Washington Post a few months ago when Donald Trump was meeting with oil Executives and telling them that if they could cough up a billion dollars for his campaign, he would do anything they wanted Well, it was clear from the notes of that meeting that the thing they wanted by far above all was an end to this ban on New approvals for LNG export terminals.
It’s going to be a very hard fight to keep this from resuming. The industry used the invasion of Ukraine to [00:26:00] justify this big increase in exports. But in fact, if it was ever valid, it is certainly valid no longer. Europe is awash in natural gas, and every single analyst says that demand In Europe is now shrinking dramatically because like California for its own reasons, Europe used the invasion of Ukraine to go on the renewable energy course in a serious way.
This is gas destined for Asia and it’s very much equivalent to to what the tobacco industry did after America got serious about trying to prevent the sale of cigarettes here. What they did was go try to sell cigarettes to people in China. And that’s exactly what’s happening here. A last ditch effort to lock in Asian economies, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, to using American natural gas, if they can get them to build the power plants and the import terminals and things, then they’ve got them hooked for another 30 or 40 [00:27:00] years.
And of course, that’s a problem for those places, but it’s a problem for everyone. The secondhand smoke that comes from burning natural gas mixes into the global atmosphere. in a matter of four or five days and raises the temperature everywhere around the planet. One of the things you should be concluding here is that natural gas is a dangerous thing.
Both the moral, since that’s the title of this lecture, and the practical seem to me to point us in the same direction, towards the obvious conclusion that it would be a highly sensible policy. To, as soon as possible, in the course of the next few years, cease the exportation of gas and oil around the world, and to leave that gas and oil in the ground, where it safely can be stored away without doing damage.
To replace it with the energy that comes to us from the sun. If we [00:28:00] did that, it would obviously have enormous impact on trade. We’ve always assumed that more trade is good, but I think that that’s at this point in human history, not clear at all. And I want to leave you with one vision in your head related to trade.
Currently, about 40 percent of all the ship traffic on planet Earth is just carrying coal and oil and gas back and forth across the oceans to be burnt. That is not necessary. The sun rises in the east every morning and sets in the west every evening, having taken a transit across the planet, delivering energy gracefully and benignly.
We do not need that great fleet of ships sailing and to dock them would be a hardship in certain ways to a small number of people, but an extraordinary gift to the planet at large and especially to its future. So there I end, thank you very much.[00:29:00]
Lisa Katovich: You’ve been listening to professor and author Bill McKibben and the Weinstock Lecture on the Deadly Trade in Oil and Gas. This lecture was sponsored by the UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Group and Environmental Sciences Policy and Management, and co sponsored by Bay Area Environmental Groups, 350. org, and Third Act. You can listen to the entire lecture and discussion on YouTube. This program was edited by Lisa Katovich.
OUTRO: You’ve been listening to Fiat Lux Redux, a public affairs show at KALX that features edited lectures and conversations that took place on the campus of UC Berkeley. The source material is culled from things available online at UC Berkeley’s many websites, podcast programs, and streaming channels, often in a longer form.
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