“GAME OVER” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 90

Still, these i gures can yield some useful insight about how the costs
of rising U.S. oil production might compare with the benei ts. h ink
about what happens when U.S. oil production increases by one bar-
rel. Remember that some OPEC members, in an at empt to stabilize
prices, are likely to cut their own output by nearly as much as the
United States boosts its own; imagine, for simplicity, that every barrel
the United States adds to the market is of set by four-i t hs of a barrel
others remove from it, for a net increase of only one-i t h of a barrel.
h en the net climate damage from every barrel of added U.S. oil pro-
duction works out to about two dollars. Even if the U.S. government
analysts are way of , and the social cost of carbon is a hundred dollars a
ton, the net climate damage from every extra barrel of U.S. oil is likely
less than ten dollars. Unless oil production depends on subsidies that
are much larger than the ones currently in place, the economic benei t
gained from a barrel of U.S. oil production will almost always exceed
these costs by more than that. 19
h ere is, however, a fundamental problem with focusing too much
on the climate cost of each individual barrel of oil or ton of carbon diox-
ide: it only works well for small shit s in emissions. Many of the biggest
climate risks, though, show up only when you look at big changes. Small
increments in emissions may each have small consequences, but when
added together they might prove catastrophic.
h is is why it's ot en best to measure big fossil-fuel developments
against big concrete goals. In recent years many governments have i x-
ated on a goal of preventing global temperatures from rising by more
than two degrees Celsius. h is sounds sharp and scientii c until you
notice that it's also 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which sounds pret y arbi-
trary. But so is any other goal. h e bigger problem with the two-degree
target is that, because we don't really know how sensitive the climate
is to greenhouse gas emissions, it's only tenuously connected to con-
crete changes that might happen to the energy system. h e world could
slash emissions and end up with temperatures rising far more than two
degrees. It could also do a lot less and still get lucky.
It ot en makes more sense to talk instead about concentrations of
greenhouse gases, particularly of carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere.
h is is basically tantamount to thinking about how high the water in