The late David Koch, one of the multibillionaire Koch brothers, was a major philanthropist supporting such cultural institutions as New York City Ballet and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But he will likely be remembered for a different kind of activities. He and his brother spent millions promulgating a notion that man-made climate change is a hoax. Having been born super-rich thanks to an energy company founded by their father, they promoted global warming skepticism in a single-minded pursuit of even more wealth.
Largely thanks to the Kochs—and the greed of American politicians—the United States, alone among nations, blithely shrugs off warnings that the human race is headed for a major climate-engendered calamity. After Donald Trump took it out of the Paris Accord, America also stands alone in its determination to do nothing about it.
It’s rather symbolic that David Koch departed this world amidst rising alarm about massive man-made fires in the Amazon and on the eve of the catastrophic destruction wreaked in the Bahamas by yet another category 5 hurricane. To be fair, even the Kochs has begun to realize what monster they had created. They toyed with the idea of supporting some Democrats in the 2020 election.
It is probably too late. The Trump Administration, besides junking the Paris Accord, has reversed decades of environmental protection legislation and rulings, set back conservation, dealt a blow to the clean environment and in other ways promoting pollution and carbon dioxide emissions in the world’s largest economy. It deliberately hampered the development of renewable energy, rolled back car mileage requirements, propitiated increase use of coal and opened up forests and waterways to drilling and national parks to logging.
As if to mark David Koch’s passing, Trump last week cancelled previously agreed-upon rules on energy-saving light bulbs and his Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation of four carmakers who wanted to adopt California’s more stringent car mileage requirements.
It will now take years after Trump is gone just to get back to the status quo ante.
But it may be too late in a broader sense. Human population will reach 10 billion by the second half of this century. That will increase the headcount by 25%, adding 2 million souls—or the sum total of the entire world population 100 years ago.
Under any scenario–even with an extremely rapid adoption of clean renewable energy technologies–we will go on burning more and more fossil fuels. Technology, moreover, is allowing oil companies reach previously inaccessible deep-water and shale oil and gas, very likely depleting most of Earth’s fossil fuel deposits by the end of the century.
Burning fossil fuels has been what our civilization has been truly efficient at. Since the advent of the industrial revolution ca. 1800, we have dug out of the ground and burned up a large portion of carbon that dying plant and animal life had been burying underground for the past two billion years. For several million years the concentration of CO2 in the air fluctuated in the 180-280 parts per million range; in about one hundred years we have managed to double it, to over 400 parts per million.
This represents trillions of tons of fossil fuels that have been burned, and billions of tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere. If human civilization were to disappear, any trace of it would be erased in a mere flash of geological time, say another two hundred thousand years. Except for one lasting legacy: the release of some two billion years worth of accumulated carbon.
The old tale has the scorpion asking the frog to take him across the river. “I’m not going to sting you of course,” he tells the frog. But in the middle of the river the frog suddenly feels the pain of a deadly sting. “Why did you do that? Now we’re both going to die.” “What could I do,” replies the scorpion. “It’s my nature.”
We think that we’re different from other living beings. We are rational and are endowed with free will. Animals are driven by instinct while we believe that we choose our actions on our own. However, we are part of the natural world and it is our nature, not ourselves, that determines what we are and what we do. We keep mining hydrocarbons even though as rational beings we understand that it is likely to be our demise.
The biosphere makes life on the planet possible by maintaining a remarkably stable atmosphere and limiting the extremes of temperature. However, it relies on all living organisms—microbes, plants and animals—to ensure a stable environment. Without human intervention carbon, the chemical element on which all life on Earth is based, would have continued to accumulate underground. As a result, the chemical composition of the biosphere, which is vital for its survival, could have become dangerously unbalanced.
From the point of view of biology, we are the same species that first appeared two hundred thousand years ago. However, modern humans are clearly different from those who lived in caves ten thousand years ago. We are different in appearance and in character. It can be said that society has domesticated its members the way humans changed wolves into dogs.
Possibly in an atmosphere that became too rich in oxygen—an element, incidentally, which produces fire—a species of animals developed an ability to build an advanced civilization. Civilization started when Homo sapiens learned to control fire. In fact, this hairless species needed fire to survive almost from the moment it evolved.
In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. The ability to control, and then make fire, was the foundation of human civilization. It created both warmth and light, enabled metalworking and agriculture and was key to the development of hunting. The skill of handling fire was most likely the first knowledge our ancestors passed from one generation to the other, and accumulation of knowledge is what civilization is all about.
This suggests that we did evolve for the purpose of releasing carbon into the air. Consequently, our attempts to stop burning fossil fuels will continue to be useless. A constantly heating planet will alter life on Earth—to the detriment of existing species, including humans, that have evolved to live in a more temperate environment. Their place will be taken by other species, who are adapted to what we think of as more extreme conditions. There may be overkill—temperatures may get too high for a while, killing off most of the currently existing flora and fauna, once again including humans. But the biosphere will eventually right itself by stimulating the growth of plants which will use up excess CO2, produce more oxygen and cool off the planet. That may take thousands of years, long after our fossil fuel-burning civilization will cease to exist.
