Fossil fuels driving planet to disaster

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/03/2022 (1471 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Most people know that dinosaurs were extinguished about 66 million years ago by an asteroid impact that caused a global ecological catastrophe. But that mass extinction was just one of five (six, if you count today) over the last half-billion years, and not the biggest — not even close.

The mother of all mass extinctions — the planet-killer — occurred a quarter of a billion years ago at the end of the Permian geologic period. Massive volcanic activity in present-day Siberia spewed enormous quantities of carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide and methane into the atmosphere, and may have even set alight vast coal beds, raising carbon dioxide levels further.

Greenhouse warming raised global temperatures at least 10 degrees Celsius. Carbonic and sulfuric acid rained into the ocean, turning it into a vast, largely oxygen-free, hot-and-sour soup.

The result? Nine of every 10 species on planet Earth went extinct.

The oceans were especially hard hit and nearly emptied of life. The landscape was seared, the interiors of continents transformed into desert. Life clung on near the poles, where temperatures were slightly less sweltering. Cockroaches survived. Not much else did.

In recent years, geologists have reconstructed the events that lead to the “Great Dying” and have reached a chilling conclusion: we may, in the next few centuries, replicate the end-Permian events. The cause of the Permian extinction was greenhouse warming. It appears that extinction was lightning-quick by the standards of geological time, occurring in just 60,000 to 70,000 years. We may get there in one-hundredth of that.

Current estimates by researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington indicate that if we continue our use of fossil fuels under a business-as-usual policy, we will be 20 per cent of the way to a Permian-level extinction by 2200; 35 to 50 per cent of the way there by 2300.

The burning question is how do we prevent another Permian-level event? The answer is to stop burning fossil fuels. No more coal, oil and gas. To anyone paying attention, it is clear that fossil-fuel extraction is a sunset industry. Building more pipelines, and mining more heavy oil (and burning natural gas to do so), makes no sense in 2022.

Pretending the problem doesn’t exist — the standard policy position of Canadian Conservatives and American Republicans, particularly the virulent Trump-supportive strain — needs to stop. Instead, we need sensible policies that plan for the rapid transition to carbon-free renewables, not more T-shirts saying “I love oil and gas.”

Biologists have had a front-row seat to rapid effects of climate change. We can easily measure the changing distribution of tree species moving toward the poles; birds migrating earlier in spring and later in fall. Pacific salmon are disappearing in the south, where streams are now too hot to live, and showing up in the Arctic Ocean, chased by Pacific salmon sharks, where they are in the wrong ocean.

In Manitoba, we could manage the transition to renewables more easily than almost any place on Earth. Our current government has had six years to do something. Other than oppose the federal carbon tax, it has done nothing of significance. At least it didn’t introduce a tax on electric vehicles like Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe did.

Our current federal government has performed better, albeit unevenly. Introducing the rebated carbon tax is a good policy move along with other measures, such as incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles, to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. But buying and building a pipeline is not.

At least that is better than what the federal Conservatives have on offer. The party’s leadership front-runner, Pierre Poilievre, promises to cancel the carbon tax and all other anti-energy laws, to build more pipelines and to expand oil and gas production.

That basket of policies can be summarized simply: the objective, it seems, is to extinguish life as we know it on this planet as quickly as possible. It’s quite a campaign slogan: Back to the Permian with Poilievre.

Such a policy stance is clearly immoral, and should disqualify one from elected office.

Canada could choose to become a renewable-energy superpower, harnessing wind, tides, solar, hydro and hydrogen power. But too many of our current provincial and federal politicians are blinded by short-term thinking and afraid to “look up” to see what is coming.

And by look up, I mean check the science. Instead, they proudly wear their “I love oil and gas” T-shirts. Like cigarette packages, those shirts should come with a warning label — one that states: “I hate my planet.”

Unfortunately, that sentiment might be a badge of honour for Conservatives. They would probably sell a boatload those T-shirts at a Poilievre or Trump rally.

Scott Forbes is an ecologist at the University of Winnipeg who teaches on the ecology of sustainability.