Here’s a Way to End Our Fossil Fuel Dependence

The most important challenge facing humanity today is how to stop using the energy source that has given us the levels of wellbeing we enjoy. First coal, the oil and natural gas, improved our living conditions, but at a cost, as we now know, we could not pay: an uninhabitable planet due to carbon emissions.

The Paris Agreement, the biggest attempt so far to try to reach consensus on reducing those emissions and tackle the climate emergency, avoids referring to carbon fuels as the most important cause of that emergency, largely because the governments of the countries that depend on the extraction of those fuels, home to around four hundred million people, would have refused to sign otherwise. In fact, since its approval in 2015 by 196 countries, the fossil fuel industry has continued to expand, exploiting new forms of extraction and opening new wells.

The current estimate, which many clearly consider too conservative and insufficient, is that fossil fuel production should decline annually by 9.5% for coal, 8.5% for oil and 3.5% for natural gas through to 2030. However, reducing fossil fuel production is not a very attractive proposition to countries whose economies depend on coal, oil or gas, even faced with a climate emergency. At the same time, industries around the world, from metallurgy or cement to transport or tourism, do not want to see themselves in a situation that would obviously lead to higher prices for their products.

According to the World Economic Forum and others, a non-proliferation treaty for fossil fuels, similar to the one proposed for another serious danger to humanity, nuclear weapons, is becoming increasingly necessary — urgent, in fact. In both cases we are talking about existential threats to humanity, with the only difference being the speed with which they act. However, such a treaty requires that countries whose economies are highly dependent on the exploitation of these resources be able to make a reasonable transition to the exploitation of sustainable resources.

The only way to make this transition is through international cooperation. But beyond invoking grand agreements, what matters is how to put it into practice and to start designing solutions that will allow these countries to compensate for oil that is not being extracted, so that leaving it in the ground does not mean their ruin. This would require, in the first place, a full audit of the resources currently available, and a valuation of them derived from the amount of carbon dioxide or methane that would be involved in their extraction and use. To implement something like this, in “The Ministry of the Future” science-fiction author Kim Stanley-Robinson (here’s his TED Talk on the topic) proposes a system based on cryptocurrencies, in which the proof of work corresponding to their emission, the “miners”, would be replaced by tons of carbon not emitted, and which would be audited and fixed in the corresponding blockchain by an independent international organization. The cryptocurrency in question could be obtained not only by ceasing to extract fossil fuels, but also through other activities involving the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

This would allow oil, coal and gas producing countries to earn income in a currency that provides a long-term future for humanity. Such a system would not only finance the transition of the economies of the countries involved, but also full traceability of all products manufactured and with a reliable estimate of their carbon footprint, leaving the market the task of decarbonizing as fossil fuels become scarcer and, consequently, more expensive.

Such an idea seems, at the moment, utopian: we are talking about an international currency, which would have a set price, and which countries such as oil-rich Saudi Arabia or coal-rich Australia could capitalize on by simply stopping what they are doing. Difficult, no doubt. But we need solutions, and we need them now, not thirty or forty years from now, when there is nothing left to save. And given the looming threat, such ideas are well worth considering.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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