Just as the oil companies told us that deep-water drilling was
safe, they tell us that it’s perfectly all right to dump 90 million
tons of CO2 into the air of the world every 24 hours. Even as the
oil spill continues to grow-even as BP warns that the flow could
increase multi-fold, to 60,000 barrels per day, and that it may
continue for months-the head of the American Petroleum Institute,
Jack Gerard, says, “Nothing has changed. When we get back to the
politics of energy, oil and natural gas are essential to the
economy and our way of life.” His reaction reminds me of the day
Elvis Presley died. Upon hearing the tragic news, Presley’s
manager, Colonel Tom Parker, said, “This changes nothing.”
“This is a consciousness-shifting event. It is
one of those clarifying moments that brings a rare opportunity to
take the longer view. Unless we change our present course soon, the
future of human civilization will be in dire jeopardy. Al
Gore
However, both the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the CO2
spill into the global atmosphere are causing profound and harmful
changes-directly and indirectly. The oil is having a direct impact
on fish, shellfish, turtles, seabirds, coral reefs, marshes,
and the entire web of life in the Gulf Coast. The indirect effects
include the loss of jobs in the fishing and tourism industries; the
destruction of the health, vitality, and rich culture of
communities in the region; imminent bankruptcies; vast
environmental damage expected to persist for decades; and the
disruption of seafood markets nationwide.
And, of course, the consequences of our ravenous consumption of
oil are even larger. Starting 40 years ago, when America’s domestic
oil production peaked, our dependence on foreign oil has steadily
grown. We are now draining our economy of several hundred billion
dollars a year in order to purchase foreign oil in a global market
dominated by the huge reserves owned by sovereign states in the
Persian Gulf. This enormous and increasing transfer of wealth
contributes heavily to our trade and current-account deficits, and
enriches regimes in the most unstable region of the world, helping
to finance both terrorism and Iran’s relentless effort to build a
nuclear arsenal.
The profound risk to our national and economic security posed by
the prospect of the world’s sudden loss of access to Persian Gulf
oil contributed greatly to the strategic miscalculations and public
deceptions that led to our costly invasion of Iraq, including the
reckless diversion of military and intelligence assets from
Afghanistan before our mission there was accomplished.
I am far from the only one who believes that it is not too much
of a stretch to link the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
northwestern Pakistan-and even last week’s attempted bombing in
Times Square-to a long chain of events triggered in part by our
decision to allow ourselves to become so dependent on foreign
oil.
One important difference between the oil
spill and the CO2 spill is that petroleum is visible on the surface
of the sea and carries a distinctive odor now filling the nostrils
of people on shore. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is
invisible, odorless, tasteless, and has no price tag. It is all too
easily put “out of sight and out of mind.”
Here at home, the illusion that we can meaningfully reduce our
dependence on foreign oil by taking extraordinary risks to develop
deep reserves in the Outer Continental Shelf is illuminated by the
illustration below. The addition to oil company profits may be
significant, but the benefits to our national security are trivial.
Meanwhile, our increasing appetite for coal is also creating
environmental and human catastrophes. The obscene practice known as
“mountaintop mining,” for instance, is not only defacing the
landscape of Appalachia but also destroying streams throughout the
region and poisoning the drinking water of many communities.
The direct consequences of burning these vast and
ever-growing amounts of oil and coal are a buildup of heat in the
atmosphere worldwide and the increased acidity of the oceans.
(Although the world has yet to focus on ocean acidification, the
problem is terrifying. Thirty million of the 90 million tons of CO2
being spilled each day end up in the oceans as carbonic acid,
changing the pH level by more than at any time in the last many
millions of years, thus inflicting every form of life in the ocean
that makes a shell or a reef with a kind of
osteoporosis-interfering with their ability to transform calcium
carbonate into the hard structures upon which their life
depends-that threatens the survival of many species of zooplankton
at the base of the ocean food chain.)
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Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, is
chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection.
Nobel-Prize-winning