On the 13th March, the Biden administration has given final approval to an Alaska oil project: ConocoPhillips' $8 billion Willow project can now proceed to drilling over the objections of environmentalists and many Democrats who wanted the project scuttled. On the contrary, the Alaska delegation praised the White House’s decision, since it will contribute to create thousands of good union jobs and to generate billions of dollars in new revenues, providing benefits to Alaska native communities and improving the quality of life on the North Slope and all over the State. Many local indigenous groups have backed the project, which is expected to produce about 180,000 barrels of oil a day – the 40% of Alaska’s current crude production.
A moral dilemma
On the campaign trail, Biden had promised "no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period." Nevertheless, for all the talk about the renewables boom and the green transition, and all the money pouring into them as well, there has been little concerted effort, in the United States at least, to really draw down the profligate use of fossil fuels.
The approval process obviously presented a dilemma for President Joe Biden, who vowed on the campaign trail to crack down on new drilling by the oil industry but has since implored producers to pump more oil after petrol prices rose in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The expansion reflects indeed surging global demand for US gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent energy war on Europe.
Environmentalists denounced the approval, as it contradicted Mr. Biden’s vow to fight climate change and it would cause harm to Alaskans, leaving them contending with the effects of drilling operations. A TikTok campaign against the project drew support among younger activists, with the hashtag #willowproject attracting more than 94mn views over the past month.
Opposition to the project resulted in years of litigation and thousands of pages dealing with environmental analysis by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, which estimated that oil and gas extracted would generate more than 270 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over the project’s lifetime.
In fact, the project was initially approved by the Trump administration, but was halted in 2021 after a federal judge deemed the initial environmental review flawed. The Biden administration has defended the project in court.
Therefore, being the decision widely expected, the administration on Sunday took steps to quell criticism and demonstrate its environmental commitment: a plan to block further oil and gas leasing in the Artic Ocean’s federal waters was announced, which should limit future development of the 23mn area known as the National Petroleum Reserve. Moreover, the interior department, which controls the federal land where the Willow project would be developed, on Monday said it was "substantially reducing" the size of the project, cutting it to three drilling sites from the five initially proposed.
It is true that American emissions have been decreasing progressively since 2005, mainly because of natural gas replacing coal for electricity generation. However, the decline has been relatively slow and pockmarked by concessions to the fossil fuel industry and climate hypocrisy. Last year, the United States approved more oil and gas expansion than any other nation in the world, according to Oil Change International. This year, it will also become the world's biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas.
In this regard, Willow was not the only US energy project to make progress on Monday: in Louisiana, the liquefied natural gas developer Venture Global committed to a big expansion to an export plant it is constructing.
Besides, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that oil and gas will remain the country's biggest sources of energy at midcentury, when the country has formally pledged to be net zero, with oil production continuing to grow over that time.
How big of a carbon bomb is Willow in reality?
Nonzero but not catastrophically large, on its own: it is expected to generate 9.2 million additional metric tons of CO2 each year - about the equivalent of two new coal plants added to our fleet or two million gasoline cars added to the road. And yet, nine million metric tons is only about two-tenths of 1% of current American emissions.
Still, the same reasoning could be used to validate any particular fossil fuel project. This is the nature of a problem that pervades almost every trait of industrial and postindustrial progress: the scale of the challenge seems concurrently to argue for urgency and to counsel a kind of unconcern.
This is no excuse for inaction, given that those countries whose "negligible emissions" each amount to less than 2 percent of the problem altogether account for more than a third of it. You have to draw the line somewhere, and the Biden administration keeps doing so only to cross it.
At a global level, there are some more encouraging signs: according to a recent analysis of an International Energy Agency report by Carbon Brief, renewables will become the world's top source of electricity within three years. By 2025, the I.E.A. suggests, global emissions should reach a peak - and then either plateau or decline. However, its attainment only implies that perhaps next year we will manage to do only as much damage to the future of the planet's climate as we had the previous, record year, which is to say, more damage than we managed in every previous year in human history. In a report last year, the Tyndall Center in Britain found that to reach ambitious climate goals equitably, fossil fuel production in the world's rich countries had to be phased out entirely by 2034. The Willow project is expected to produce oil for decades thereafter.
The Green New Deal appeared as a solution, since it helped shepherd forward an almost painless-seeming new green industrial policy (the I.R.A.) built simply around incentives and recompenses. This soft-touch approach is politically appealing, but the risk is that left to its own devices, the market won't actually retire fossil fuels - at least not fast enough, because, unfortunately, fossil fuels remain something of a bonanza business.
It goes without saying that the recent American pattern of forward progress mixed with backsliding seems like an addiction, with the admonition that implies: a drink isn't a bender, but, if you're hoping to put alcoholism behind you, you must actually stop drinking at some point.
Carlotta Caromani
Opmerkingen