Global Warming: It's About Energy

By Michael T. Klare, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted February 17, 2007.

Finally, after years of effort by dedicated scientists and activists like Al Gore, the issue of global warming has begun to receive the international attention it desperately needs. The publication on February 2 of the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), providing the most persuasive evidence to date of human responsibility for rising world temperatures, generated banner headlines around the world. But while there is a growing consensus on humanity's responsibility for global warming, policymakers have yet to come to terms with its principal cause: our unrelenting consumption of fossil fuels (primarily coal, fuel oil and natural gas).

When talk of global warming is introduced into the public discourse, as in Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," it is generally characterized as an environmental problem, akin to water pollution, air pollution, pesticide abuse, and so on. This implies that it can be addressed -- like those other problems -- through a concerted effort to "clean up" our resource-utilization behavior, by substituting "green" products for ordinary ones, by restricting the release of toxic substances, and so on.

But global warming is not an "environmental" problem in the same sense as these others -- it is an energy problem, first and foremost. Almost 90 percent of the world's energy is supplied through the combustion of fossil fuels, and every time we burn these fuels to make energy we release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; carbon dioxide, in turn, is the principal component of the "greenhouse gases" (GHGs) that are responsible for warming the planet. Energy use and climate change are two sides of the same coin.

Fossil Fuel Dependency

Consider the situation in the United States. According to the Department of Energy (DoE), carbon dioxide emissions constitute 84 percent of this nation's greenhouse gas emissions. Of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, most -- 98 percent -- are emitted as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels, which currently provide approximately 86 percent of America's total energy supply. This means that energy use and carbon dioxide emissions are highly correlated: the more energy we consume, the more CO2 we release into the atmosphere, and the more we contribute to the buildup of GHGs.

Because Americans show no inclination to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels -- but rather are using more and more of them all the time -- one can foresee no future reduction in U.S. emissions of GHGs. According to the DoE, the United States is projected to consume 35 percent more oil, coal, and gas combined in 2030 than in 2004; not surprisingly, the nation's emissions of carbon dioxide are expected to rise by approximately the same percentage over this period. If these projections prove accurate, total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2030 will reach a staggering 8.1 billion metric tons, of which 42 percent will be generated through the consumption of oil (most of it in automobiles, vans, trucks, and buses), 40 percent by the burning of coal (principally to produce electricity), and the remainder by the combustion of natural gas (mainly for home heating and electricity generation). No other activity in the United States will come even close in terms of generating GHG emissions.

What is true of the United States is also true of other industrialized and industrializing nations, including China and India. Although a few may rely on nuclear power or energy renewables to a greater extent than the United States, all continue to consume fossil fuels and to emit large quantities of carbon dioxide, and so all are contributing to the acceleration of global climate change. According to the DoE, global emissions of carbon dioxide are projected to increase by a frightening 75 percent between 2003 and 2030, from 25.0 to 43.7 billion metric tons. People may talk about slowing the rate of climate change, but if these figures prove accurate, the climate will be much hotter in coming decades and this will produce the most damaging effects predicted by the IPCC.

What this tells us is that the global warming problem cannot be separated from the energy problem. If the human community continues to consume more fossil fuels to generate more energy, it inevitably will increase the emission of carbon dioxide and so hasten the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, thus causing irreversible climate change. Whatever we do on the margins to ameliorate this process -- such as planting trees to absorb some of the carbon emissions or slowing the rate of deforestation -- will have only negligible effect so long as the central problem of fossil-fuel consumption is left unchecked.

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Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency.

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