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(even on those rare days when the Major Oil and Gas Companies’ 5
temperature still dropped below Expenditure on Climate Lobbying
zero) into comfortable indoor air.
Gas burners gave way to induction Bill McKibben
BP 53
cooktops. The last incandescent
bulbs were in museums, and even
Shell 49
most of the compact fluorescents
had been long since replaced
by LEDs. Electricity demand ExxonMobil 41
was up — but when people
plugged in their electric vehicles Chevron 29
at night, the ever growing fleet
increasingly acted like a vast 0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Percentage
battery, smoothing out the curves
as the wind dropped or the sun $ (in millions)
clouded. Some people stopped This graph shows the amount of money that oil firms have spent on
eating meat, and lots and lots of climate lobbying, defined by Forbes as “spending to delay, control
people ate less of it — a cultural or block policies to tackle climate change.” These five oil companies
transformation made easier by spent over $200 million on climate lobbying.
the fact that Impossible Burgers Why would such companies want to spend so much money
turned out to be at least as juicy as on climate lobbying? What does this graph suggest about
McKibben’s claim about “low-hanging fruit” in paragraph 12?
the pucks that fast-food chains had
been slinging for years. The number of cows on
the world’s farms started to drop, and with them we would have to pay the price of delaying
the source of perhaps a fifth of emissions. More action for decades.
crucially, new diets reduced the pressure to cut For one thing, the cuts in emissions that
down the remaining tropical rain forests to make scientists prescribed were almost impossibly
way for grazing land. deep. “If you’d started in 1990 when we first
In other words, the low-hanging fruit was warned you, the job was manageable: you
quickly plucked, and the pluckers were well could have cut carbon a percent or two a year,”
paid. Perhaps the fastest-growing business one eminent physicist explained. “But waiting
on the planet involved third-party firms that 30 years turned a bunny slope into a black
would retrofit a factory or an office with energy- diamond.” As usual, the easy “solutions” turned
efficient technology and simply take a cut of out to be no help at all: fracked natural-gas wells
the savings on the monthly electric bill. Small were leaking vast quantities of methane into the
businesses, and rural communities, began to atmosphere, and “biomass burning” — cutting
notice the economic advantages of keeping the down forests to burn them for electricity — was
money paid for power relatively close to home putting a pulse of carbon into the air at precisely
instead of shipping it off to Houston or Riyadh. the wrong moment. (As it happened, the math
The world had wasted so much energy that showed letting trees stand was crucial for pulling
much of the early work was easy, like losing carbon from the atmosphere — when secondary
weight by getting your hair cut. forests were allowed to grow, they sucked up
But the early euphoria came to an end pretty a third or more of the excess carbon humanity
quickly. By the end of the 2020s, it became clear was producing.) Environmentalists learned they
65
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