Motivation For Reading
In my work in climate organizing, I spent a lot of time thinking about the strategy behind how we stop climate change. If you are thinking strategically, you inevitably run into the fossil fuel industry as one of the key players and villains who is in the way of climate action.
I wanted to learn a little bit more about fossil fuels, about the story behind net zero, the barriers in the way to ending fossil fuels, and come away reading the book with a clearer pathway towards decarbonization… and doing away with the fossil fuel industry.
So here is a short overview & summary of key things I learned while reading Ending Fossil Fuels.
Half Baked Reviews:
Key Thesis: Net zero is a sham and distraction; we should be talking about the phaseout of fossil fuels entirely. While there are some roadblocks in the way (e.g., technical difficulty around decarbonizing parts of agriculture, transportation, electricity, industry), we must push for a planned transition away from fossil fuels, in a way that does not screw over developing countries and does not leave massive parts of world without reliable energy or spark financial crises. To do that, a few area must be shifted or thought about:
Shift culture: Build new practices, values, beliefs, rituals around our relationship to fossil fuels.
Infrastructure: Because urban areas lack space for massive renewable energy development, we must work with communities who do, say rural communities, (to place expansion and build out of renewables)
Geopolitics: Ground in geopolitics of fossil fuel wind down by asking, “Who is reliant on oil? Who has the ability to switch to another source of energy? Who has the ability to change their economy to another basis?”
Code: Leverage the power of Big Tech, both for its ability to track much of information needed to do good planning and assess whether we’re on the right path towards ending fossil fuel. This includes using machine learning to enable smart grids, power climate analytics for smart investments, forecast supply and demand to help determine where variable power plants should be build, etc. But also, because Big Oil relies heavily on Big Tech for things like using the cloud to store data on fossil fuel extraction and production. Big Tech could use its power to refuse service to Big Oil, and send it’s production to a grinding halt.
Political Power: Develop the political power to make phaseout of fossil fuels possible.
Key Themes
Net zero: balancing some amount of positive greenhouse gas emissions with negative emissions of removals
Phase out: a planned transition over time, away from fossil fuels (growing the new and starving the old)
Phaseout toolbox
Moratoria, Bans, and Refusal to Finance
Banning Exploration and Export
Banning Fossil Fuel End-User Technologies
Global Coordination
Dealing with Transnational Companies
Ending Subsidies
Permission to Extract
Nationalize Fossil Fuel for Exit
Reverse Engineer
Key Quotes
“To limit warming to 1.5 degree C, countries would need to decrease fossil fuel production by 6 percent a year over this decade. But they are planning to increase production 2 percent a year.”
“Fossil fuel companies have list the credibility to set the terms of their own phaseout.”
“Much as slavery went from universal institution to universal abomination and as tobacco went from medicinal and cool to lethal and disgusting, the delegitimization of fossil fuels will flap the valence of these otherwise wondrous, free-for-taking hydrocarbons".” - Ending the Fossil Fuel Era
“The biggest barrier to energy change is not technical but cultural and political structures of feeling that have been produced through regimes of energy consumption.”
“For those capacities to grow, they need to become part of our culture. How does that happen? Through education, media, art, making planning into a cool career, mainstreaming it into childhood…”
“We have to build institutions of democratic planning so that everyone can participate in it — or so that we can delegate making the plan to people we choose, not McKinsey consultants and black-box platforms.”
“Both of these transitions feature an entire group put out of work by technological changes; scores of jobs lost along the way. The number of journalisms in the United States has gone from half a million at its peak to 174,000. Compare that to the mourning of coal jobs: one gets a lot of requiems and is a social problem to communally solve; the other is not. One gets a lot of technological determinism — a narrative of historical inevitability… The other does not: the rules of creative disruption don’t apparently apply to fossil fuel companies: we’re supposed to empathize with them, help them continue in the face of technological disruption.” One of my favorite quotes from the book.
“If we gain the capacity to direct the tech industry, we may in parallel gain the political power to direct fossil fuels, too.”
“The political power needed to phase out the fossil fuel industry needs to include coalitions of people in rural areas…”
“There are various types of bans and moratoria: bans on exploration, bans on extraction, bans on export, and bans on technologies that use fossil fuels.”
“What we need is more domestic policy in the world’s most important large emitters to drive the transition, because we don’t need all 256 countries around the world to do this at the same time.”
Overall, in the spirit of Goodreads ratings, I’ll give this book a 7.5/10.
I got a little lost and confused at times in parts, but I learned so much, and there were some incredible quotes that are really useful in my organizing.