00:00In just 10 years, world may hit 2 degrees of warming, according to Cornell scientists, by Sharon Kelly from Desmog.
00:08Back in 2011, a Cornell University research team first made the groundbreaking discovery that leaking methane from the shale gas
00:17fracking boom could make burning fracked gas worse for the climate than coal.
00:39On average, 4% of the gas that was extracted from the ground ended up in the atmosphere instead of
00:45in the pipeline.
00:46You're showing a leak rate that's four times as high as what the industry says to us.
00:51That's right.
00:52In the late 1990s and early 2000s, U.S. natural gas production was flat or falling.
00:58Today, instead, the shale gas rush, propelled by hydraulic fracturing, fracking, sweeps across the U.S., with drillers snapping up
01:08land to drill for previously inaccessible fossil fuels locked in geologic formations of shale rock from coast to coast.
01:15While the shale gas industry promised benefits like jobs and American energy security, Ingrafea notes those benefits would have been
01:24almost exclusively aimed at just 5% of the world's population, North Americans.
01:29But the harms will affect the remaining 95% of the world as well.
01:34Dr. Anthony Ingrafea, professor of engineering emeritus at Cornell University, outlines more precisely the role U.S. fracking is playing
01:44in changing the world's climate.
01:46Dr. Anthony Ingrafea, professor of engineering emeritus at Cornell University, and a senior fellow at Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for
01:59Healthy Energy.
02:00The title of my lecture is Shale Gas, the technological gamble that should not have been taken.
02:09From the time that we are young, we begin to hear from our parents this very simple precept.
02:16Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should.
02:21As we grow older, we realize through experience and gathered wisdom that we should weigh any risk that we take
02:29by doing something we've never done before.
02:31However, to broader consequences and unintended consequences, we learn to be wise.
02:41This precept also applies to science and technology.
02:48For example, our noted futurist Arthur Clarke wrote back in the 1950s basically the same thing.
02:57But they knew in their hearts that once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its
03:05eventual realization.
03:07What does this precept have to do with human rights and climate change today?
03:13Well, let's fast forward to a few years ago when my philosopher friend Adam Briggle wrote,
03:21Fracking exemplifies the technological wager, by which I mean a gamble, or even a faith, that we can transform the
03:30world in pursuit of narrowly defined goals
03:34and successfully manage the broader unintended consequences that result.
03:41He was referring directly to the gamble that was taken early this century.
03:45The oil and gas industry then discovered that they could do something they had never been able to do before.
03:52Extract prodigious amounts of gas and oil from shale formations.
03:58They knew it was a gamble.
04:00They saw then only the narrow intended goals.
04:06They didn't then, nor do they now, acknowledge the broader unintended consequences.
04:12Let's look at both, the narrowly defined goals.
04:19Shale gas development might create jobs.
04:22Shale gas development might encourage economic growth.
04:26Shale gas development might provide energy security.
04:29It could lower prices for energy.
04:32And it could displace dirty coal.
04:36Well, in and of themselves, those are wonderful, if true, immediate consequences.
04:44But they were the goals that would only affect about 5% of the world's population, that of North America.
04:51That's pretty narrow.
04:54Let's now look at the broader unintended consequences that we see all around us every day.
05:00The first of those is the elongation of the fossil fuel era.
05:07Next is the depression of renewable energy supply.
05:11And finally, the exacerbation of climate change.
05:16The most recent climate data suggests that the world is on track to cross the 2 degrees of warming threshold
05:22set in the Paris Accord in just 10 to 15 years, according to Ingrafea.
05:27That's if American energy policy follows the track predicted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration,
05:35which expects 1 million natural gas wells will be producing gas in the U.S. in 2050, up from roughly
05:42100,000 today.
05:44The history of the production of natural gas in the United States.
05:49The vertical axis is the amount produced.
05:52The horizontal axis is year.
05:55You'll note that first we saw a drastic increase in production of natural gas that was coming from onshore wells.
06:04That began to decline.
06:07We were running out of onshore gas.
06:10And just in the nick of time, we began to produce prodigious amounts of natural gas from offshore wells in
06:16the Gulf of Mexico.
06:19That rose, but eventually also began to decline.
06:23And note that it began to decline in this period of 2006, 2007, 2008.
06:30Just about that time, shale gas kicked in.
06:33The technological wager was taken.
06:35And since then, we have seen enormous increases in shale gas production in the U.S.
06:41We should have stayed on this path and allowed renewable energy to take the place of natural gas.
06:49I'm going to show two versions of the same graph.
06:53The first version is taken directly from a paper that was published six years ago.
06:59It shows the history of global warming, starting with the beginning of the 20th century.
07:07The squiggly black line is raw data, actual data taken of global climate change, temperature increase, global warming.
07:19At the time this paper was published in 2012, the data went up to about 2009.
07:26At that point, the authors of this paper made speculative simulations.
07:32Each of these solid curves is the result of one scenario where they imagined what might happen in the future
07:39should mankind decide to do certain things with regards to fossil fuels.
07:46So these were predictions.
07:48And as such, they were subject to error.
07:52But note that every one of the predictions predicted that we would be in the 1.5 degree centigrade temperature
07:59rise,
07:59that which the Paris Climate Agreement says we should attempt to avoid.
08:05And each one takes us into the 2 degree temperature rise still in this century.
08:11I've added here a series of red dots.
08:14Each of those red dots corresponds to a global temperature rise as recorded by NASA.
08:21You'll note a couple of things from this chart.
08:23First, all the simulations done back in 2010, 2011, 2012 were wrong, regardless of the scenario.
08:33Worse, they were wrong in the worst possible way.
08:38Every one of these scenarios under-predicted actual global warming.
08:45Whereas the worst-case scenario brought us to 1.5 degrees centigrade in 2040, we're almost there today.
08:55We will certainly be there in the next two or three years.
08:59If you extrapolate from these red dots, meaning that we don't do anything significant about fossil fuels, and especially shale
09:07gas,
09:08we will be in 2 degrees centigrade territory within the next 10 to 15 years.
09:13An average global temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, will bring catastrophic changes.
09:23Even compared against a change of 1.5 degrees Celsius, 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, heat waves would last around a
09:31third longer.
09:32Rainstorms would be about a third more intense.
09:34The increase in sea level would be higher, and the percentage of tropical coral reefs at risk of severe degradation
09:41would be much greater.
09:43With just that half-degree difference, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained in a 2016 post about climate change,
09:51that increase in temperature makes things much more dire.
09:56At 1.5 degrees Celsius, tropical coral reefs, the rainforests of the seas,
10:02stand a chance of adapting and reversing a portion of their die-off in the last half of the century.
10:08But at 2 degrees Celsius, the chance of recovery vanishes.
10:13Tropical corals are virtually wiped out by the year 2100.
10:17On a global scale, production of wheat and soy is forecast to increase with a 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature
10:24rise,
10:25partly because warming is favorable for farming in higher latitudes,
10:29and partly because the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,
10:33which is largely responsible for the temperature increase,
10:36is thought to have a fertilization effect.
10:39However, at 2 degrees Celsius, that advantage plummets by 700% for soy and disappears entirely for wheat.
10:47So what happened to the technological gamble?
10:51Did the people who made it, the oil and gas industry, our regulators, our legislators, our governors, our president,
10:58take into account that these broader unintended consequences weren't worth the risk?
11:06I'll go to my last graph.
11:08This one shows the history and the prognosis for shale gas development in North America.
11:15You will note in purple the history of shale gas production, how much has been produced,
11:20and the number of wells it took to produce it.
11:23The oil and gas industry and the U.S. Department of Energy predict what's shown in the orange,
11:30a tenfold increase in shale gas production, and a million additional wells to do it by 2050.
11:38More shale gas, more wells.
11:41If we do that, there will be dire consequences to every human being on Earth.
11:47I want to end my presentation with questions for you.
11:51So you've noticed I've concentrated almost exclusively on shale gas.
11:56So a question is, do you think that the impact of shale oil is similar on all three of those
12:04unintended consequences?
12:06I want you to think about that and discuss it among yourselves.
12:10I also want you to think about whether shale gas and oil, currently produced almost exclusively in North America,
12:18will soon be produced in other places.
12:22And what will be the consequences of an even more drastic increase in the development of shale gas and oil
12:28around the world?
12:31The second series of questions has to do with you.
12:34What will you do in the face of this evidence?
12:39What will you do to decrease your use and demand for fossil fuels?
12:44What will you do to increase your use and demand of renewable energy in all aspects of your energy lives?
12:51A draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, was leaked in January,
12:58concludes that it's extremely unlikely that the world will keep to a 1.5-degree change,
13:04estimating that the world will cross that threshold in roughly 20 years,
13:09somewhat slower than Ingrafea's conclusion.
13:11The climate is changing faster and more dramatically than it might have otherwise.
13:17And, far from serving as a bridge fuel,
13:20fracking huge amounts of natural gas has already played a significant role
13:25in pushing the world toward a vastly more difficult future.
13:28Of developing shale gas early in the century was one that should never have been taken
13:33and has very grave consequences for every person on Earth.
13:38So, thank you very much for listening to this video.
13:41I hope you do take into account the questions I asked and answer them for yourselves.
13:47Goodbye.
14:07Goodbye.
14:10Goodbye.
14:12Goodbye.
14:13Goodbye.
14:16Goodbye.
14:18Goodbye.
14:18Goodbye.
