Plenty of Oil Fueling the Race to Climate Disaster

In a bizarre confluence of events last week, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that there is probably at least twice as much oil and natural gas trapped under parts of the western United States as previously estimated. Some estimates suggest that could be just the tip of iceberg.

If so, the iceberg is melting. Even as the USGS was releasing its report, on a mountaintop in Hawaii, sophisticated sensors were recording the highest levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide in recordable history. For the first time since the Pliocene epoch, when mastodons and saber-toothed tigers roamed North America, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere soon will hit 400 parts per million.

What does that mean? Before the industrial revolution, CO2 levels had averaged about 283 parts per million for 800,000 years. That's about the time that many scientists believe ancient man was migrating out of Africa.

But in the last 150 years or so, as man started burning fossil fuels in earnest, atmospheric CO2 has risen by a third. If it hits 450 parts per million, the earth's mean average temperature could rise by 2 degrees Celsius. At that point, climate catastrophe will be well under way. The polar ice caps will be all but gone, so will many coastal areas. Deserts will spread.

"I wish it weren't true, but it looks like the world is going to blow through the 400-ppm level without losing a beat," geochemist Ralph Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography said in a statement Monday. "At this pace we'll hit 450-ppm within a few decades."

Keeling is continuing the work begun by his father, Charles David Keeling, who began measuring atmospheric CO2 at Hawaii's Mauna Loa observatory in 1958.

The so-called "Keeling Curve" is the graph that plots the atmosphere's fluctuating but ever-increasing CO2 levels, which roughly track fossil fuel consumption levels. The Keeling Curve is the baseline measurement that underlies concern over global warming; much of the non-scientific world was first exposed to the Keeling Curve in the 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

In apocalyptic, but not unreasonable, scenarios painted by climate scientists Eelco Rohling and James Hansen, if the nations of the world continue emitting CO2 at current levels, a level of 560 parts per million will be reached by the end of the century.

At that point huge parts of many of the world's largest cities will be under water.

"The 400-ppm threshold is a sobering milestone, and should serve as a wake-up call for all of us to support clean energy technology and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, before it's too late for our children and grandchildren," said Tim Lueker, an oceanographer and Scripps CO2 reseacher.

Those who like a daily dose of something to worry about can follow the numbers on Twitter at @Keeling_Curve.

The news from Scripps threw a wet blanket over the new USGS oil survey, something that in past years would have been cause for a national celebration, albeit a shortsighted celebration.

Under parts of Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota are rock formations, the Bakken and the Three Forks, that together hold an estimated 7.4 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil, the USGS study said. "Technically recoverable" doesn't mean economically recoverable; it means you can get it out using today's technology and practices, although at today's prices, it might not be worth it.

In fact, some experts said the estimates are too conservative. "The prospects of finding additional sweet spots in an area this size is relatively high," Don Van Nieuwenhuise, director of petroleum geosciences progams at the University of Houston, told the Reuters news service. "I'm pretty sure every drop they say you're going to find, you'll find."

If past is prologue, every drop that's found will be burned. The American Enterprise Institute has gone so far as to suggest there could be 100 years' worth of oil trapped in the American West. It's shale oil, meaning it uses tremendous amounts of increasingly scarce water to recover, costs more to transport and refine, and has a far greater carbon cost than sweet crude.

At the very least, this is a mixed blessing. Cheap oil is good for the economy. It's good for national security. But it depresses incentives for cleaner energy sources and postpones the day when America, and the world at large, will be willing to confront the reality of climate change. That China, even less sensitive to climate change than the United States, is now exploring fracking technology for its own vast shale oil reserves only makes things worse.

America is not good at sacrificing for the future. The country may indeed have a 100-year supply of oil, but absent technological miracles, in 2113 that may be very small comfort.

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