(UPDATED*) Rolling Stone: How Obama trade policy sabotages climate goals

Rolling Stone – illus Victor Juhasz

  If you look at the website of Rolling Stone Magazine it looks almost as though it is about nothing but brash movies and music. But as regular readers know its political coverage is serious. Politics controls energy policy. Energy use effects climate. And every once in a while the magazine slaps one awake with a big, disturbing story on climate change. A year and a half ago, for example, Bill McKibben's story "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math" shook up a lot of people, including me for sure. Not that it was entirely new. But its emphatic use of numbers to dramatize the power of the fossil fuel industry was depressingly effective at saying we're screwed.

   Now we have another in the same dark genre, another example how near term economics and overwhelming industrial-political muscle can blind or cow even smart and sensible people in responsible positions.

• Tim Dickinson: How the U.S. Exports Global Warming / While Obama talks of putting America on the path to a clean, green future, we're flooding world markets with cheap, high carbon fuels.

  Staff writer Dickinson's voluminous previous work indicates little, previous reporting on environmental matters. But his portfolio is loaded with accounts of complex policy issues including pot legalization, gun control, voting reform, and US race relations. In keeping with that, this is not a story about global climate change itself – nothing for instance on how CO2 alters the fate of solar energy as it enters the atmosphere. Rather it takes as a given that burning colossal quantities of  fossil fuel is a bad idea. It then demolishes any smug feeling that the US has polished its green credentials simply because its carbon emissions are dramatically down thanks in large part to cheap natural gas and to regulations that demand more efficiency from automobiles.

    Turns out that tremendous forces are at work to drastically increase overseas sale of US coal, which the headline rightly equates with exporting global warming. And not just coal, but oil as well. Furthermore, not just coal and oil, but something I'd not heard of: petroleum coke or petcoke. This is a carbon rich, dusty crud left over in vast amounts by the processing of heavy crude oil – such as Canada's tar sand gunk – into refined petroleum products. A leftover of making one sort of fuel, petcoke itself also can be burned for energy – energy even dirtier than that from coal. As it happens, we read here, the biggest American dealer in petcoke – much will be going to China – is one of those conveniently homophonically named siblings, the Koch brothers. It says here that 'the third brother' Billy run something called Koch Carbon, making him petcoke king. Don't put that in your pipe and smoke it.

   One would think that reporter Dickinson would have – I kept expecting it to come up – mentioned that the US has been exporting its carbon footprint for some time and mainly in recent decades to Asia. As first Japan, then Korea and now overwhelmingly China became the suppliers of more and more manufactured goods at the expense of US factories, America in effect has been jobbing its industrial pollution overseas. As Dickinson writes we now, increasingly, are not only sending our dollars abroad to buy stuff from other nations' factories we are sending them much of the (dirty) fuel to run them, too.  Sort of doubling down. One thinks the story would have more expanse by recognizing that this new phase in US fuel trade builds on a long history of complicity in other nations doing our dirty work.

   Dickinson even puts a specific name on the agent for this effort to expand export of carbon-rich fuels: Ambassador and chief trade representative Michael Froman.

   The story is full of detail and insight. It includes emphatic recognition that vast expansion of US carbon exports is not inevitable, that a backlash is underway that might reverse the current trends.

     I'll stop trying to summarize the whole thing. I'll close by applauding one very powerful quote from a climate activist  regarding chances that the US may soon list regulatory restriction on oil exports. "Lifting the oil-export ban is simply climate denial in a new, and very dangerous, form."

*UPDATE:

• NYTimes/DotEarth Blog – Andrew C. Revkin: U.S. Push to Export Dirty Fossil Fuels parallels Past Action on Tobacco ; An exquisitely apt historical parallel on winners and losers, at least in the medium to short term, when doing what's right and consistent collides with the essential interests of large, entrenched industries with big roles in a nation's economy and employment rate.