“GAME OVER” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 94

oil is in the ground; it is how much will be burned in the coming
years. It would take three thousand years to extract all the fuel from the
Canadian oil sands at the current pace, and it would take even longer
to tap out Colorado oil shale if it were developed at the same rate. h e
future course of climate change will be determined long before that.
h is means the sheer volumes of each resource mat er far less than how
much of them is promptly developed.
We can put some numbers on this. As of 2011, the United States
produced 5.7 million barrels of oil a day. 23 Imagine, in a massive leap,
that this was doubled. What would the extra emissions contribution
be? Burning a barrel of oil generates about four hundred kilograms of
carbon dioxide emissions; adding in the emissions required to get the
oil out of the ground and turn it into fuel at a rei nery brings that up
to about half a ton. 24 An added 5.7 million barrels of oil every day
thus translates into about a billion tons of carbon dioxide annually.
h is compares to about six billion tons a year of total U.S. emissions
and nearly forty billion tons a year of global emissions (and the i gure
is rising). It's a decent slice, particularly of the U.S. contribution, but
measured against the global benchmark it's still relatively small. Figured
another way, a billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions adds about 0.07
ppm to the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations; sustained over
sixty years, the added burden would be about four parts per million.
Again, this is far from trivial, but in a world that's on course to see car-
bon dioxide concentrations rise by many hundreds of parts per million,
it's not earth-changing either.
Such arguments, though, can be dangerously slippery. No single
action alone, even a big one, will make the dif erence one way or
the other when it comes to dangerous climate change. h is means
you can't dismiss any particular step as inconsequential unless you
look at it in the broader context. Here's the real question we should
ask: How might adding this much new oil production in the United
States (and perhaps in Canada) af ect what others around the world
do with their own oil and emissions? And what are the consequences
for climate change? It turns out that once you factor in how others
are likely to respond, the net impact is bet er for climate change,
not worse.