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28 months and counting
During the filming of Dr Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s satire on nuclear armageddon, Kubrick is supposed to have turned to its star, Peter Sellers, and asked: “Have you ever heard of mutually assured destruction?”
“No,” replied Sellers, “but hum a few bars and I’ll join in.”
Listen carefully to politicians discussing energy policy today and you’ll hear them humming along too. The genius of such military doctrine is to make the absurd and extreme seem reasonable. That’s what attracted Kubrick’s satirical eye.
When the new energy minister, Matthew Hancock, announced the bidding for new oil and gas licences, the first onshore for several years, to make it seem reasonable in the face of hostility to fracking in Conservative heartlands, he hummed a lot about protecting Britain’s most beautiful landscapes, such as national parks and places designated as areas of outstanding natural beauty.
Scratch the surface of the statement, though, and it became clear this was not, in fact, an outright ban on such developments. Scratch a little further and you realise that it would have the politically convenient effect of pushing the development of oil and gas shale reserves more to the north of England, where Conservatives are generally unpopular anyway.
But, promising the protection of national parks while encouraging the further exploration and production of fossil fuels is, regardless, the climate change equivalent of old government advice to “duck and cover” in the event of a nuclear strike at the height of the cold war. It might make it seem safer, and the overall policy more reasonable, but won’t change the catastrophic outcome.
In the Dr Strangelove era it was missiles that could never be used, now if we are to avoid climatic chaos, it is carbon that can never be burned. Why, then, look for more, if we can’t burn what we already know is there? Some argue that fracked gas can form a bridge out of dirtier fossil fuels to a cleaner energy system.
To do that its exploitation would have to be part of a deliberate policy of transition, engineered explicitly to work within scientific emissions limits, and with its own sunset clause to phase the gas out too. That isn’t the case.
Any such strategy would also have to overcome the long historical dynamic that energy use begets more energy use. Substitution generally doesn’t happen. New sources add to, rather than replace, existing ones as economies and demand for energy grow in an expansive dance.
It also overlooks that way that each energy source comes with its own physical, economic and social infrastructure that tends to lock it into place and make any subsequent transition harder. Lobbies and special interest groups form to protect their tax breaks and privileges.
It’s a shame. Recent research suggested that the world needed to spend $1 trillion extra per year on green energy to have a decent chance of not crossing the climate danger line. That sounds like a lot of money until you look at the estimates of current subsidies going to fossil fuels, which range from the International Energy Agency’s $500bn, to the IMF’s figure of $1.9tr.
An energy policy that guarantees we will burn more fossil fuels than it is safe to burn can never be reasonable. Promising to protect national parks in this instance is like saying it is okay to burn a house down with the people inside as long as you promise not to touch the garden.
Often it is history that strips the aura of reasonableness from a patently unreasonable, if not recklessly irresponsible, situation. What nurses a banal acceptance of mutually assured destruction is the air of normality that the fossil fuel sector is able to attach to itself. From arts sponsorship to the irony, for example, of BP sponsoring the Commonwealth Games when given their day job, they should only rightfully be allowed to sponsor a “destruction of the Commonwealth Games”.
The recent demolition of the cooling towers at Didcot power station could have been a powerful symbolic moment. A signal for a bold and liberating new adventure in how to meet our energy needs.
Announcing that same week the new onshore oil and gas licences instead revealed a government clinging to the past.
Often against enormous odds, and in some of the poorest parts of the world, people are finding ways to combat climate change. Giving local communities around the world greater protection and recognition of their rights in forests, for example, proves better for them and better for the climate. Dinosaurs apparently, were simply unlucky, hitting extinction when they experienced an extreme form of climate change that was not of their own making, at an inconvenient evolutionary moment.
Unless we start loudly humming a new tune, like community-controlled renewable energy, you have to wonder what our excuse will be…
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