9 Danielle Kurtzeblen, “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Releases Green New Deal Outline,” NPR, February 7, 2019.
10 For example, see Editorial Board, “Want a Green New Deal? Here’s a Better One,” Washington Post, February 4, 2019.
11 “Pelosi calls the Green New Deal ‘the green dream or whatever,’” The Week, February 7, 2019.
12 60 Minutes, CBS News, June 23, 2019.
13 Johan Rockström et al., “A Roadmap for Rapid Decarbonization,” Science, vol. 355, no. 6331, March 24, 2017.
14 Bill McKibben, “A World at War,” New Republic, August 15, 2016. Also see Mark R. Wilson, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016).
15 Oxfam International, “Extreme Carbon Inequality,” December 2, 2015, oxfam.org.
16 Kevin Ummel, “Who Pollutes? A Household-Level Database of America’s Greenhouse Gas Footprint,” Center for Global Development, Working Paper 381, October 10, 2014, cgdev.org.
17 Kevin Anderson, “Response to the IPCC 1.5°C Special Report,” Manchester Policy Blogs, October 8, 2018, blog.policy.manchester.ac.uk.
Aluminum has a melting point of 1,220° Fahrenheit. If you aren’t a welder or a chemist, there’s no practical reason to know this. From beer kegs to the foil we wrap our leftovers in, aluminum is ubiquitous. But it’s one of the less charismatic elements on the periodic table, not a show-off like neon or cobalt or a celebrity like carbon.
More carbon in the atmosphere has helped make ten of the last fifteen years the hottest on record. Fourteen of the largest twenty wildfires in California history have occurred over the same period: less rain and higher temperatures create petri dishes for wildfires to spark. Climate change increases the variability in rain and temperature, and a wet winter one year can sprout vegetation that becomes kindling during a dry season the next. The Camp Fire, which leveled the town of Paradise, killed eighty-six people after sparks from a poorly maintained transmission line owned by mammoth California power provider PG&E met the surrounding brush.
Those trying to escape flames were surprised as their cars’ aluminum rims turned molten, splaying out onto the overheated pavement. Drivers who managed to flee on foot found that their shoes melted to the road as they ran. Rubber melts at 356° Fahrenheit. Many didn’t make it out. Flames burned so hot, one local official in Alameda County told the New York Times, that there was no DNA left on human remains; emergency response officials and cadaver dogs sorting through the ruins often found only unidentifiable bone fragments. “People have been cremated, for lack of a better term,” he said.1
Breaking the Chain
It’s rare to be able to name who caused climate impacts with confidence. We can’t blame any given weather event on a coal or oil company any more than we can pin a particular lung cancer death on a particular cigarette company, however often the deceased lit up Marlboro Reds. Yet just ninety greenhouse-gas-producing companies—almost all privately held or state-owned fossil fuel producers—have been responsible for two-thirds of planet-warming emissions since the dawn of the industrial age; half of those were released in the last thirty years.2 As state investigators in California found, a private utility squeezing out extra profits by neglecting maintenance of its power lines is responsible for the sparks igniting them. From extraction to delivery to lobbying, the fossil fuel industry and private utilities work hand-in-hand as the masters of an energy system dominated by shareholders and driven by all the wrong priorities.
To keep warming below 2° Celsius, about four-fifths of known fossil fuel reserves must not be dug up and burned. And yet companies’ valuation is premised on the expectation that everything they own will be sold and combusted. The fossil fuel industry’s business model, and hence their executives’ prerogative, is to grow their reserves and burn every last drop. The industry’s ongoing existence is thus incompatible with the future of anything we might recognize as human civilization. The Green New Deal should dismantle our profit-driven energy system just as aggressively as it constructs a clean energy alternative. It’s the only way to stop the carbon pollution that’s driving the climate emergency and to crush the companies erecting the greatest political obstacles to decarbonizing.
It’s easy to forget how simple this problem is when we navigate our own little energy landscapes. We can flick a switch without much thought for the long-dead creatures compacted into coal, oil, and gas, their unrecognizable carcasses exhumed by fossil fuel companies and shipped around the world to be incinerated, unleashing heat-trapping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and threatening millions now living. Left unchecked, the death toll of climate change could easily creep up into the hundreds of millions—or billions in the worst case scenarios—unleashing chaos and suffering on an unprecedented scale, all to pad a few corporate bottom lines.3
Yet for as long as it’s been in the public consciousness, climate change has masqueraded, like other environmental problems, as a fight without enemies—as the old Pogo cartoon mourns, with the titular character staring out at a field of litter, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Demand shapes supply, so we’re all a tiny bit complicit in fossil fuels’ toxic excavation. These companies and their products are ubiquitous. That we all use them has been a powerful defense for the companies profiting from them: energy executives spare no expense painting shareholder and public interest as one in the same. “Very few aspects of modern life aren’t touched in some way by natural gas and oil,” a shiny ad campaign from the American Petroleum Institute argues. “Thousands of products made from natural gas and oil make life healthier, safer, more comfortable and more enjoyable … They support creativity, help us manage our environment and think beyond ourselves.”4
The strategy has worked, shifting focus away from the obvious: the first step to preventing catastrophic climate breakdown is to keep the fossil fuels that cause it in the ground, as Indigenous-led fights against projects like the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines have argued.
Potentially trillions of dollars’ worth of fossil fuel profits—stranded coal, oil, and gas assets—will have to go unrealized. The industry’s legendary profitability is far more fragile than it looks. The moment world powers make credible commitments to slash carbon emissions, the stock value of oil will crash, likely precipitating a global economic crisis if we don’t plan for it. We have met the enemy and he is a few hundred fabulously wealthy executives.
The inflated value of these companies is premised on a promise to kill. Prioritizing the lives of billions means seizing public