A few years ago Bill McKibben wrote in Rolling Stone, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math. It makes the point that to avoid climate change catastrophe we can only release 565 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere but energy companies have 2795 gigatons in proven reserves. So the climate movement must convince energy companies to not use 80% of their assets.
Information Is Beautiful has a graphic on this based around the year 2000. How Many Gigatons of CO2?.
A couple of week ago Chris Hayes wrote in The Nation, The New Abolitionism. While all this is difficult to estimate, he placed the value of that 80% at $20 trillion and to be conservative cuts that in half. Then he tries to find an analogy. "The last time in American history that some powerful set of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth was in 1865—and then only after four years and more than 600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we’ve ever fought." What follows is a history of the economics leading to the civil war and a description of our current state of fossil fuel extraction boom.
Matt Karp has a nice followup in Jacobin, A Second Civil War saying the analogy works even better than Hayes thinks. "The issue, in other words, is not the $10 trillion in potential fossil fuel wealth that must be forfeited, but the principle at stake in its forfeit. Without some larger challenge to the current configuration of power and ideas, we are just asking our masters, politely, if they will agree to commit suicide. We shouldn’t be surprised when they decline the offer."
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