The “End Games” of Climate Catastrophe and Fossil-Fuel Collapse

Last week President Biden announced a halt on permitting new LNG (liquified natural gas) export terminals, pending evaluation of their effect on the climate crisis. He made that decision for strategic reasons having to do with planetary heating, fossil energy as a global resource, short-term geopolitical strategy, the limited supply of fossil fuels, the dangers of stranded assets and pollution, and the likely strategies of competing producers of fossil fuels.

Most of the articles and op-eds that I’ve read on this general subject focus on three issues to the exclusion of all others: (1) the imperative of keeping planetary heating from running away; (2) the short-term pricing of fossil fuels and the profit to be made from them; and (3) the effect of fossil fuels on geopolitical competition, including war. This is like describing an elephant as an animal with a trunk, tusks, and nearly circular feet. In missing so much else that’s important, it falls far short of a useful description of the problems we face—all of us together—as a human species.

In fact, the question of when, how, and how quickly to phase out fossil fuels is one of the most multi-faceted and consequential problems ever to face our species as a whole. Besides nuclear war and pandemic preparedness, it’s the only one that implicates our survival and welfare as a species, including every nation, “race,” bloc, alliance and tiny island on our little blue globe. It exaggerates nothing to say that getting it right will fix the fate of global civilization, both in the long term and quite possibly in the short.

This essay tries to address the problem as a whole, in all its multifarious aspects. It ranks each issue and pitfall in order of its effect on human survival and happiness, beginning with the most drastic effects.

1. Planetary heating is accelerating, NOT moderating. There is no doubt now that planetary heating caused by fossil-fuel-produced greenhouse gases is accelerating. Soon it may reach a “tipping point” beyond which heating becomes self-sustaining, regardless of how quickly humanity phases out fossil fuels.

Half a dozen mechanisms of so-called “positive feedback” increase planetary heating regardless of any increase in our burning of fossil fuels. The most important—and the least-well-quantified—involve the release of methane gas from melting permafrost and deep-sea methane hydrates as the globe and its seas heat up.

Recent events suggest that planetary heating may already have become self-sustaining and may continue to accelerate even if and after we stop burning fossil fuels altogether. There are several such indicators, but I’ll mention only three. First, just ten years ago, climate scientists worried whether and when—how late in our new century—humanity would pass the threshold of 1.5 degree centigrade average heating above pre-industrial levels. We passed that threshold, albeit briefly, for at least three months last year, before the first quarter of our new century has expired. [Search in linked source for “near-term” and see graph below.]

Second, in recent years we’ve seen an explosion of floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildfires. The wildfires in Canada last summer not only brought rare burning-wood-smoke pollution to major cities on our own East Coast. They also burned 5% of Canada’s entire forest area and more than six times it previous burned area for the average summer.

Finally, even cautious scientists are beginning to speculate that their predictions have been low. Routinely brow-beaten by fossil-fuel advocates, scientists have been reluctant to criticize their own quantitative models, which is all that distinguishes them from the “sooth-sayers” of old. But now it’s eminently clear that their computer models don’t (and often can’t) account quantitatively for some of the most powerful forces of positive feedback and so are inadequate to the task of realistic prediction. A few scientists already have started to say so.

The failure of existing quantitative models to account for the acceleration of planetary heating is not just a failure in amount. It’s a failure in kind. If—as recent events suggest—heating has become self-sustaining, then not only won’t decreases in planetary heating “reward” our most strenuous efforts to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. Heating will also continue to boil on, perhaps even increasing without regard to any decrease in our burning of fossil fuels, until global climate reaches a new equilibrium point depending primarily on how much methane there is in global permafrost and deep-sea methane hydrates, i.e., numbers about which today we have no clue.

It’s entirely possible that the next global climate equilibrium, achieved years or decades hence, will be one in which many, if not most, coastal cities have been partially inundated. Most of the tropics will, and even parts of the so-called “temperate zones” of our globe as we know them today may become uninhabitable, at least for much of the year. The implications for global migration are obvious and horrendous.

This outcome is uncertain but, based on our current knowledge, entirely possible. It’s the “wild card” that everyone thinking about planetary heating and fossil fuels should keep in mind, especially as each year’s catalogue of global heating, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and temperature records exceeds the last’s.

2. Fossil fuels are in limited supply and are running out. As Will Rogers once quipped about land, “They ain’t makin’ any more fossil fuels.”

All the stuff we burn is the result of millions of years of geological forces compressing and fossilizing of long-dead vegetation. By the time similar geophysical forces will have produced significantly more of these fuels, we’ll either have a galactic civilization or be as extinct as the dinosaurs.

But fossil fuels are running out at an infinitely faster rate than that. In 2014, I estimated the then remaining lifetime of global oil supplies and US-controlled supplies of natural gas. The calculations were relatively simple, based on then-prevailing estimates of supply and then-prevailing consumption rates, including an estimated 1% annual increase in consumption.

Under what seem now to have been the most likely assumptions regarding reserves and consumption rates, the results, reduced for the nine years that already have passed, are as follows:

Remaining life of global oil reserves: 28 years
Remaining life of US-controlled natural gas: 30 years

(Estimates of oil reserves in Canada’s tar sands, now roughly 166 billion barrels, were omitted from these calculations. If considered, they would have extended the former figure by 11%, or 3 years. But tar sands have special problems in practical use, including the price of, and massive pollution in, refining them.)

Of course these numbers are moving targets, as much of the developed world goes into overdrive trying to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, thereby presumably lowering demand, and as the fossil-fuel industries search frantically for yet more reserves, thereby hoping to increase supply. But what these possibly malleable numbers say is that, if we continued at 2012 consumption rates, we would exhaust then-known reserves of global oil and US-gas in about one or one-and-a-half generations from now. Do we really want to bet our species’ long-term future on such short-term needs?

The gas figures in particular shed light on President Biden’s order to reconsider new LNG export terminals. If we export a significant fraction of our own natural gas, our own reserve-lifetime number drops proportionately. It would be easy for massive exports to lower it to a single generation. And there are now good practical reasons, including the war in Ukraine, to export gas massively to Europe. So it looks as if we are likely coming to the end of our national natural-gas reserves in something like a single generation.

So we are not analyzing the distant future here. We’re discussing the time frames in which a baby born this year would reach college age and then height of his or her career.

The lifetime of global coal reserves is much longer. But burning coal produces nearly twice the amount of carbon dioxide per unit of energy as burning oil or gas, and vastly more harmful air pollution, including sulfur dioxide (which causes “acid rain”) and various disease-causing particulates and organic pollutants. London’s Great Coal Smog of 1952, for example, produced a plague of disease and death. It also motivated the Clean Air Act of 1956, which limited coal burning in urban areas and authorized local councils to set up smoke-free zones.

So almost everyone, except perhaps the Chinese and Russians, agrees that conversion to coal use would not only vastly accelerate planetary heating, but would remake most of the civilized world in the image of Hell, perpetually polluted like Beijing on a hot summer day. Therefore, this essay focuses on the “cleaner” and “better” fossil fuels, namely, oil and gas.

3. The unpredictable and erratic market effects of phasing out fossil fuels will intensify the pain of planetary heating, especially for nations and regions that continue to produce and/or consume them to the end. Sitting here in 2024, it’s absolutely impossible to predict with any realism, let alone any semblance of accuracy, how and when oil and gas prices will fluctuate as (1) our cooler climate collapses into one in which parts of the globe are uninhabitable and (2) fossil fuel reserves begin to run out. It’s even impossible to predict whether humanity as a whole will “do the right thing” and leave most remaining reserves in the ground.

But certain long-range predictions are possible because the end game will be much the same whether fossil-fuels are phased out through agreements with petrostates, through political pressure (or even wars!) to idle fossil-fuel infrastructure and save our planet from further runaway heating, or through simple exhaustion. In the end, fossil-fuel production will subside and eventually halt, one way or the other.

What will happen to petrostates like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela and their diehard customers for fossil fuels as the endgame approaches? Several general conclusions are possible.

First, market prices for fossil fuels will become more and more unstable and erratic. Cartels like OPEC will break down as individual producers “cheat” on their agreed production allotments to maximize their individual profit and advantage from a dying industry.

Low-cost producers with big near-surface underground pools of oil and gas—including Saudi Arabia and Venezuela—will set a floor on prices. Producers like the US, with sophisticated but expensive extraction technologies such as “fracking,” will set a ceiling. But prices will likely fluctuate wildly, between the floor and the ceiling, as various producers decide to maximize income from their “last chance,” exit the market, or wisely save their reserves of oil and gas for use in producing plastics, paints, medicines, and other organic chemicals.

Global supplies may dwindle as producers are priced out of the market by low-cost cartel “cheaters,” decide (far too late) to do their part to arrest the accelerating climate catastrophe, or decide to exit the market for burning and hold their reserves of fossil fuels for chemical, medical and other uses. At some point, these collective impacts on global supply may produce a steady decrease in supply and therefore steadily increasing prices.

Even this possible endgame is uncertain. Why? It depends on the demand-side decisions of multiple consuming nations—whether to wean themselves from fossil fuels and avoid the worst of these wild endgame energy-price fluctuations and possibly steadily increasing prices, or whether to take their economic chances on the theory that each is a small part of the problem and therefore their decisions will have a small effect on the outcome.

This dilemma will be the fate of virtually all of the “less-developed” world. Each smaller nation, island or region will have a complex decision to make. The decision will involve assessment of its own (and its geopolitical friends’) fossil-fuel reserves, its resources of sun, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and other forms of renewable energy, and its own (and its geopolitical friends’) financial and technological resources to exploit them.

Those with wise leaders, good local resources, and strong and wise friends may survive the transition well. Those with deficiencies in any of these categories will come out poorly. Some may go extinct, whether from economic catastrophe, climate catastrophe, or (in the case of inundated islands) total out-migration. Out-migration from the slower, weaker or less capable states will likely become a torrent to make the so-called “invasion” of our Southern Border look like a walk in the park.

4. Phasing out fossil fuels will leave mankind, and especially the petrostates, with an enormous array of largely useless “stranded assets”. Whether through exhaustion of reserves or through their deliberate, strategic nonuse, our species eventually will stop extracting and refining oil and gas in order to burn them for energy. That endgame is certain to occur in this twenty-first century.

When the last barrel of oil and cubic meter of gas has been extracted for fuel, what will remain is an enormous and hideously expensive array of so-called “stranded assets.” They will include: drilling rigs, derricks, drills, bits and the factories to produce them, “fracking” equipment (including that used to inject fracking fluids into the ground), tanks, tank cars, other storage devices, oil refineries, and oil and gas distribution pipelines and meters, including both long-distance oil and gas transportation pipelines and in-city lines for the distribution of natural gas to homes and businesses throughout the US and the developed world. The stranded assets will also include all the internal combustion engines that burn fossil fuels in cars, trucks, railroads, aircraft, industrial equipment, construction equipment and fossil-fuel burning power tools. (Some of these engines might be converted to burn “clean,” mostly electrolized, hydrogen.)

When oil and gas run out or stop being burned for energy, all or most of these expensive and heavy assets will become useless. Some may be capable of being repurposed to use other sources of energy, principally electricity and “green” hydrogen. Some may be useful for scrap and melted down and recycled as such.

But many—such as the derricks on the huge oils fields of South Texas and the massive refineries there and in South Louisiana will remain, perhaps for millennia, as ugly monuments to our species’ era of profligate and thoughtless burning of carbon-bearing things for energy. It goes without saying that those nations and regions that first stop investing in and building these to-be-stranded assets, and that devote their corresponding resources to more enduring assets, including those for producing and using renewable energy, will have an economic advantage over others.

* * *

In every prediction regarding climate change and fossil-fuel use, the level of uncertainty is and will remain high. The rate of heating of our pre-industrial climate depends on so many variables. Some of them—including the rate of positive feedback—are at present literally impossible to predict, for lack of solid data. Others involve the responses of human beings, both individually and collectively, and so depend on all the vagaries of humanity, including including brute selfishness, disinformation, denial, politics and demagoguery.

But one thing is fairly certain. Land masses on or near the Equator are highly likely to become uninhabitable before humanity’s energy transition is complete. There is little seasonal variation in climate there, so the only possibility for long-term human survival there will be building cities underground. (The likelihood of maintaining surface agriculture in a much hotter, drier surface climate, with occasional devastating floods, seems low.) Possibly these regions could be used to produce cheap solar and wind energy, and transport it, in the form of electrolyzed (“green”) hydgogen gas, to the rest of the globe.

How far from the Equator the zone of uninhabitability will range is, as of now, completely uncertain. The only certainties are that its extent will depend on: (1) the amount of methane released from melting permafrost, dissociating deep-sea methane hydrates, and last-ditch attempts to exploit natural gas as an energy source; and (2) how quickly our species begins to understand and accommodate to the facts of life. Those facts include: (1) that planetary heating is accelerating; (2) that positive-feedback mechanisms may become (or may even now be) the dominant causes of the acceleration; and (3) that a species-wide concerted effort to address the problem is the best, if not the only, way to avert a global climate catastrophe, or at least to keep the one that now appears to be unfolding from getting much, much worse.


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