wild places | wild happenings | wild news
make a difference for our wild places

home | links | search the site
  all articles latest | past | articles by topics | search wildnews
wild news on wildsingapore
  Business Times 25 Aug 07
Global warning, ExxonMobil style
Group's stance now is not to assume the worst will necessarily happen
By Matthews Phan

(SINGAPORE) Public debate on climate change has focused on extreme scenarios as if they were certain, but there is actually a 'tremendous range of possibilities' for global warming outcomes, a senior ExxonMobil executive said at a seminar last week.

'To accomplish his goal of motivating change, (former US president) Al Gore looks at the six-degree outcome. When he talks about alarming scenarios, he doesn't mention that it's a probability, and that there are probabilities attached to less extreme scenarios as well,' Sherri Stuewer, the group's vice-president of Safety, Health and Environment, also said at a separate lunch with the media on Aug 17.

Given ExxonMobil's reputation as climate change sceptic, this position is unsurprising.

Yet the group has conceded ground to environmentalists and acknowledged that global warming is occurring (though as some cuttingly point out, even the Bush administration now admits this).

Its present stance, according to Ms Stuewer, a 30-year ExxonMobil veteran who holds engineering degrees from Cornell University and was previously the group's strategic planning manager, is not to assume the worst will necessarily happen, and to warn that mitigation could cost far more than anticipated.

As she pointed out, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2007 summary of the physical science behind global warming reports that the earth is likely to warm between 1.1° and 6.4° Celsius by year 2100, across six scenarios with different assumptions about the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Yes, six degrees is very serious, but 'I wouldn't mortgage my children's economic future to prevent a one-degree change', she told a seminar on Addressing the Risk of Climate Change held at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

Ms Stuewer said that ExxonMobil previously 'let our position on this issue be defined by what others say about us', but about a year ago decided to take a more active role and share its understanding of energy markets with policy-makers.

Over lunch, she'd described a few of the group's clean energy initiatives, such as to drill deep into the earth's crust to tap geothermal energy, or to design modular plants to convert fuel to hydrogen on board vehicles.

ExxonMobil's approach is to first ask what levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide would yield acceptable ranges of probable global warming scenarios. It then estimates how much it would cost the world to stabilise greenhouse gases at those levels by reducing emissions.

According to Ms Stuewer, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study estimates that to stabilise the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere at 550 parts per million (ppm), it would cost the world about 50 US cents per gallon (about 3.8 litres) of gasoline.

To set this level in context, the pre-industrial revolution concentration was 250-280 ppm, and the current concentration stands at around 400-430 ppm. At a stable 550 ppm, there is a more than 50 per cent chance that global temperature change by 2100 would be less than 1.5° Celsius, compared to less than 20 per cent if no action is taken, says one of Ms Stuewer's slides.

And, at 550 ppm, the most extreme change expected is over 3° Celsius, versus over 5° Celsius if no action is taken.

But another of her slides is more conservative. It shows three studies, one by MIT and two others by research lab Batelle and the non-profit Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

Each of the studies tries to answer the same question - how much would it cost to stabilise carbon dioxide concentration at various levels?

MIT has the highest estimates, or about US$75 per tonne of carbon by the year 2020 to stabilise levels at 550 ppm, while EPRI has the lowest, or US$8 per tonne. By 2100, MIT's cost estimates escalate to over US$1,700 per tonne of carbon, with EPRI's at US$330 per tonne. (Every US$100 per tonne of cost works out to about an extra US$60 per barrel of crude oil.)

'The different models of the costs varied by a factor of 10,' says Ms Stuewer. 'What this shows is we don't know what it's going to cost'.

For policy-makers, it means it is important to build in 'safety valves' to make sure costs don't skyrocket, she said.

Meanwhile, politicians must 'make sure there are transparent cost signals so that voters know they are paying extra at the fuel pump or in electricity bills to reduce carbon emissions'.

As one might paraphrase, make sure people know that trying to save the planet won't come free.

Participant Matthias Roth, a meteorologist at the National University of Singapore's department of geography, told BT it was clear that Ms Stuewer 'gave a range to distract from the actual science, which is surprisingly precise'.

In a comment during the public Q&A, Prof Roth said the IPCC report used projections from over 100 models and the range is thanks to a few models that project at the upper and lower bounds.

'The majority of the models congregate around a mean value of three degrees,' he said. But he conceded the presentation was 'more honest than before' and vastly different from what ExxonMobil would have said barely two years ago.

Moderator Ann Florini, a director at the LKY school's centre on Asia and Globalisation, noted that even with a less than 1° Celsius change in global temperatures, the world is already seeing major changes, like the disruption of vast ecological systems.

'The two-degree threshold we are talking about was not chosen because we know the climate can sustainably bear a change in a short period of time of two degrees but because everybody looked at it and said we don't know how to do it any better than that, so we better hope that two degrees will not be catastrophic. But it may be.'
links
Related articles on Climate change
about the site | email ria
  News articles are reproduced for non-profit educational purposes.
 

website©ria tan 2003 www.wildsingapore.com