US President Joe Biden's approval of ConocoPhillips' $8 billion plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from federal lands in Alaska "came with a thud of betrayal and an air of inevitability," says David Wallace-Wells. Wallace-Wells writes in her New York Times newsletter: "On the campaign trail, Biden promised 'no more drilling on federal lands, period.' Dot, dot, dot\u201d. But for all the talk of the renewable energy boom and the green transition and all the money pouring into it, there has been little concerted effort, at least in the US, to actually reduce our wasteful use of what is actually poisoning the climate: fossil fuels.\u201d He asks \u201chow big a carbon bomb\u201d is the Willow project, noting: \u201cThe honest answer is that it's not zero, but it's not catastrophically big in itself. If the project goes ahead and produces oil as predicted, it is expected to produce an extra 9.2 million metric tonnes of CO2 each year \u2013 roughly the equivalent of two new coal-fired power plants added to our fleet or 2 million petrol cars added to the road . That's bad\u2014any amount of additional carbon promises to push the world even further outside the temperature envelope that has so far bounded and helped cultivate the entire history of human civilization... And yet 9 million metric tons represents only about two-tenths of 1 % of current US emissions.\u201d But , he continues, "the same logic could be used to justify any particular fossil fuel project." Such is "the nature of the problem, which permeates almost every aspect of industrial and post-industrial civilization: The scale of the challenge seems to both urge urgency and recommend a kind of indifference." He concludes: "A line has to be drawn somewhere, and the Biden administration keeps crossing it."<\/p>\n
David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times, Carbon Brief<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" U.S. President Joe Biden\u2019s approval of ConocoPhillips\u201e $8 billion plan to drill 600 million barrels of oil on federal lands in Alaska \u201ccame with a simultaneous rumble of betrayal and an air of inevitability,\u201e says David Wallace-Wells. Wallace-Wells writes in his New York Times column: \u201aOn the campaign trail, Biden promised \u2018no more drilling on federal lands, [\u2026]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-klimaticka-zmena","category-uhlikova-stopa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1377\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}