“Leave It in the Ground”—The Worst Idea of Climate Activism

You can hear the rallying cry at climate protest events everywhere: “Leave it in the ground!” exasperated protesters exclaim. They are talking, of course, about oil and other fossil fuels. Years ago I joined those protests and uttered those words. Oil left in the ground can’t be burned. It doesn’t emit carbon. The idea is that we can live without oil.

I recent years, however, I have become skeptical of that idea. We can’t just leave the oil in the ground, my assessment said, because like it or not, people need oil and natural gas. Heating our homes, growing and transporting food, bottling water, getting to work, and even turning on the lights require them. All the systems that support modern life require oil and gas as a core piece of the overall system. As I have argued, we can’t just do without it if we don’t have a replacement. Food, water, work, and heat are not optional. Humans need them all. We need to meet those needs in some way. Yet we seem to be careening toward a situation in which we will not have a way to meet those needs. I’ll explain in a minute, but first, let’s look at what happens when the fuel runs out.

Yesterday, Reuters reported (AppleNews Link) that Cuba ran out of fuel—diesel and fuel oil.

“Cuba’s energy and mines minister earlier in the day said the nation had completely run out of diesel and fuel oil, and that its power grid had entered a “critical” state.

“”We have absolutely no fuel (oil), and absolutely no diesel,” Energy Minister Vicente de la O said on state-run media. “We have no reserves.””

There is no fuel because of Trump’s blockade of the country. As a result, Cuba’s ten million residents have no power 22 hours a day. Weather is Caribbean humid, hot, and stuffy. They can’t cool themselves without power. They can’t keep food. They can’t work. Protests are breaking out across the country. The situation will quickly morph into a humanitarian disaster.

Aside from the utter immorality of Trump’s blockade and attack on a civilian population, Cuba shows what happens when fuel runs out—enormous suffering and sociopolitical unrest. It’s going to get worse. Cuba, like humanity, has no viable alternative to fuel at this time. If all oil is left in the ground, this is the outcome we can expect. It is also the outcome we can expect if we have oil but fuel becomes too scarce to meet our needs anyway. That situation may be much closer than we think.

It is hard to say exactly what will happen, but virtually everyone from Goldman Sachs to Bloomberg, the IEA, and the UN FAO are waving the flag of impending disaster. What unfolds ahead may be an unmitigated catastrophe, or it might just be a very difficult time economically as governments find some way to move through it. But the problems and challenges are very real, even if the answers are elusive.

The problem is that the 20% decline in global oil supply is changing the availability of fuels like diesel in exponentially bigger ways. “Tank bottoms” is a term used to describe when storage tanks get to the bottom and are, for all intents and purposes, empty. When this happens, the system loses pressure. It’s not just that the tank is empty, but that without pressure, the pumps don’t work, the pipelines can’t fill, and refined products like diesel can’t flow. In other words, the fuel infrastructure stops working. Multiple estimates are saying that Europe will hit tank bottoms this month and that the US will hit them in July. At that point, fuels stop flowing. No diesel. No fuel oil. No gasoline. It’s as if the economy goes from leaving 20% in the ground to 100% in the ground. No one can get oil or fuel at any price. Just like in Cuba.

Tank bottoms hit Europe this month and the US in July… these are the likely scenarios under current conditions. No doubt, governments will move to stave off these outcomes because of their dire consequences. In fact, they already are. Countries in Asia, who are hardest hit by the shortages so far, are shortening work weeks, telling people to work from home, rationing fuel. The US has plenty of oil and refineries are running at full tilt, but diesel exports are way up to try to meet worldwide demand—far more than production—and therefore reserves are dropping in the US. Inevitably, government intervention will only go so far and when we are depleted to tank bottom status, there is effectively no diesel available any more.

This situation goes well beyond an inconvenient rise in the cost of fuel. If we get to tank bottoms, we are looking at extreme shortages. Diesel will be the first oil distillate to disappear. Think that’s not a big deal? Diesel fuel operates nearly everything we need in modern agriculture. It runs nearly all farm equipment—tractors, combines, threshing machines, and so on. It fuels the trucks or trains to move produce and farm commodities to the processing facilities. It is an input to many of those facilities’ machinery. Diesel fuels the truck that picks up the product and delivers it to market. Can you imagine what the US looks like without diesel fuel? Without, that is, the ability to fill our grocery store shelves so that we may buy food for our families? This is how it goes from big picture to very personal.

The problem goes beyond agriculture. Those same trucks and trains that run on diesel also deliver virtually all products everywhere—clothing, computers, books, pencils, coffee makers… everything people need to live their lives. That is, diesel enables the essence of commerce. Without fuel, commerce stops, and without commerce, we have no economy and the tax base disappears just when the country needs it most. Our debt situation is already out of control, and with a collapsing economy, borrowing to save the economy may become impossible. We get very quickly to economic meltdown.

Government might be able to take proper action to limit damage. It certainly did with the last big shock during COVID. Maybe it will do so again. At the same time, government doesn’t seem very focused on this problem, and it is likely to be constrained in what it can do anyway. Likely, there would have to be a new legal structure to control and limit exports of oil and gas, but if America does that, it would be catastrophic to much of the rest of the world. It would be like our own embargo against everyone else, thereby pushing the world into partnership with China and Russia, even though the real problem would be here at home.

Some people think it will all resolve once Trump’s Iran War is over, but there are many reasons why that won’t solve it. First, refining capacity cannot re-open when the Strait of Hormuz opens because the facilities have been physically damaged and must be rebuilt. Second, even refining capacity could start up immediately, it takes months for ships to get there, load, and set sail to deliver their cargo, and then more time to distribute throughout the nations affected, including the US. This is why analysts keep saying that there is no quick return to normal coming.

At one level, climate activists may still say this is all a good thing. After all, 20% less oil is 20% less carbon. And we should be happy that the real cost of things is finally reflected in what we pay to live, eat, move, heat and cool buildings, etc. Maybe this is true. But economic meltdown isn’t just a problem for business, the stock market, global debt, or people trying to eat. It is also a catastrophe for the environment. Recovery programs lose funding. The clean energy transition comes to a screeching halt along with all other construction. Desperate people begin to do desperate things, often resulting in even more deforestation, poorer conservation efforts, and other abuse of the land and waters in order to eek out whatever is needed to survive. People, government, industry, business. The scary part is that today we can be collectively desperate at immense scale.

This is the catastrophic scenario if we were to successfully “leave it in the ground.” I have tried to articulate in climate discussions. Without a replacement for oil and gas, human suffering will be enormous. Hunger, thirst, exposure to increasingly dangerous elements, and profound social and political breakdown will result. The death, destruction, and suffering would be enormous. I don’t see this as an acceptable trade-off. Trump’s War in Iran and blockade of Cuba is showing us what it would look like if our calls to leave it in the ground were to succeed. We can do better as climate activists in changing what needs to happen.

Anthony Signorelli