Japan's 'frozen gas' is worthless if we take climate change seriously

[wtmusic]

"There's only one way of knowing whether or not governments are serious about climate change: have they decided to leave most of their fossil fuel reserves in the ground? We have already discovered far more carbon than we can afford to burn, if we are not to commit the world to very dangerous levels of heating. Only if most of it – four-fifths according to a detailed estimate – is left where it sits is there a good chance of preventing more than2C of global warming.

Forgive me if you've heard me say this many times before. But it is the only point that is really worth making. It doesn't matter how many wind turbines you build, or energy-saving lightbulbs you install, or more economical cars you manufacture: unless most of our fossil fuel reserves are declared off-limits they will, sooner or later, be extracted and burned. The question of whether it is sooner or whether it is later makes little difference: we have already identified more underground carbon than we can afford to burn between now and the year 3000.

Far from agreeing to leave existing fossil fuel reserves in the ground, governments and corporations are spending hundreds of billions prospecting for new reserves, and finding ways to extract ever more exotic forms of buried carbon. Every time they succeed, press reports gush like a Texan oil well in the 1920s."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2013/mar/14/japan-gas-climate-change

[GliderGuider]

1. Abso-fucking-lutely!

We humans apparently can't leave the fossil fuel in the ground. We progressive humans seem to have decided that the inability to leave fossil fuels in the ground comes from greed. Have any progressive humans wondered where the greed comes from? Wondered in a way that doesn't point back to the concept of a genetic, moral or narrative failure on the part of the species (i.e. that we're broken)?

It is not sensible that any creature could live as far out of balance as we seem to have gone, for so long (some say for the last 10,000 years). It makes more sense to me that we are in fact living in accordance with our own nature, but that we simply don't understand one or more of its underpinnings. Otherwise, I come back to the only other possible explanation: that we are, in some manner, broken. As a human being I’d rather be ignorant than broken. I have to say that the “broken species” postulate doesn't align with my understanding of how species develop in conjunction with their environments.

So where does the greed come from?