Gun, Check. Point at Head, Check. Squeeze the Trigger?

Think we're on the cusp of a "clean energy revolution" that will sweep the world and rescue our grandkids from environmental catastrophe?  Think again.

A report from the Our World 2.0 project of the United Nations University warns that coal, that accounts for almost half of energy-sector greenhouse gas emissions and was thought to be on the way out, is actually staging a comeback and faces a bright future.

the world is using coal for energy generation like never before, and projections are for consumption to grow by at least a third by 2040, possibly by a half if the worst case scenarios are fulfilled.

The US Federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) has just released its comprehensive International Energy Outlook 2013.
The EIA says world energy consumption is likely to grow by more than 50 percent over the period 2010 to 2040, with fossil fuels supplying 80 percent of the total, despite a growth in renewables and nuclear power.

It sees coal as remaining dominant in the electricity generation sector: global consumption will rise by 1.3 percent a year  — from 147 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) of energy in 2010 to 180 quadrillion Btu in 2020 to 220 quadrillion Btu in 2040.

While much of that growth will come from the rapidly growing economies of China and India, coal consumption is at present rising rapidly in other parts of the world.

The shale gas boom in the US means record amounts of relatively cheap US coal are now available for export. The EIA says US coal exports were more than 115 million tons in 2012, more than double the 2009 figure.

It all makes grim reading for those hoping to limit CO2 emissions and prevent runaway global warming. Even in the US — where much has been made of the switch away from coal to less carbon-intensive gas — coal is making a comeback.

With coal prices falling and natural gas prices rising, the EIA says coal’s share of US power generation in the first four months of 2013 averaged 39.5 percent, compared with 35.4 percent in the same period last year.

US greenhouse gas emissions have been falling over the past four years: watch out for a rise this year.

Over at TomDispatch, meanwhile, Michael Klare describes how we're giving renewable energy a pass and embarking on the Third Carbon Era, the era of unconventional fossil fuels. 

The energy industry is not investing in any significant way in renewables.  Instead, it is pouring its historic profits into new fossil-fuel projects, mainly involving the exploitation of what are called “unconventional” oil and gas reserves.

The result is indisputable: humanity is not entering a period that will be dominated by renewables.  Instead, it is pioneering the third great carbon era, the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas.

That we are embarking on a new carbon era is increasingly evident and should unnerve us all. Hydro-fracking -- the use of high-pressure water columns to shatter underground shale formations and liberate the oil and natural gas supplies trapped within them -- is being undertaken in ever more regions of the United States and in a growing number of foreign countries.  In the meantime, the exploitation of carbon-dirty heavy oil and tar sands formations is accelerating in Canada, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

It’s true that ever more wind farms and solar arrays are being built, but here’s the kicker: investment in unconventional fossil-fuel extraction and distribution is now expected to outpace spending on renewables by a ratio of at least three-to-one in the decades ahead.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an inter-governmental research organization based in Paris, cumulative worldwide investment in new fossil-fuel extraction and processing will total an estimated $22.87 trillion between 2012 and 2035, while investment in renewables, hydropower, and nuclear energy will amount to only $7.32 trillion. In these years, investment in oil alone, at an estimated $10.32 trillion, is expected to exceed spending on wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, hydro, nuclear, and every other form of renewable energy combined.

As we continue the transition from conventional to unconventional fossil fuels, a few more home truths that we've been ignoring will become inescapable.

In certain ways, unconventional hydrocarbons are akin to conventional fuels.  Both are largely composed of hydrogen and carbon, and can be burned to produce heat and energy.  But in time the differences between them will make an ever-greater difference to us. Unconventional fuels -- especially heavy oils and tar sands -- tend to possess a higher proportion of carbon to hydrogen than conventional oil, and so release more carbon dioxide when burned.  Arctic and deep-offshore oil require more energy to extract, and so produce higher carbon emissions in their very production.

“Many new breeds of petroleum fuels are nothing like conventional oil,” Deborah Gordon, a specialist on the topic at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in 2012.  

“Unconventional oils tend to be heavy, complex, carbon laden, and locked up deep in the earth, tightly trapped between or bound to sand, tar, and rock.”

By far the most worrisome consequence of the distinctive nature of unconventional fuels is their extreme impact on the environment.  Because they are often characterized by higher ratios of carbon to hydrogen, and generally require more energy to extract and be converted into usable materials, they produce more carbon dioxide emissions per unit of energy released.  In addition, the process that produces shale gas, hailed as a “clean” fossil fuel, is believed by many scientists to cause widespread releases of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.

All of this means that, as the consumption of fossil fuels grows, increasing, not decreasing, amounts of CO2 and methane will be released into the atmosphere and, instead of slowing, global warming will speed up.

And here’s another problem associated with the third carbon age: the production of unconventional oil and gas turns out to require vast amounts of water -- for fracking operations, to extract tar sands and extra-heavy oil, and to facilitate the transport and refining of such fuels.  This is producing a growing threat of water contamination, especially in areas of intense fracking and tar sands production, along with competition over access to water supplies among drillers, farmers, municipal water authorities, and others.  As climate change intensifies, drought will become the norm in many areas and so this competition will only grow fiercer.

So, as always, money talks and in the case of high-carbon fossil fuels it's talking loud and clear to anyone who will listen.  It's a message of warning as much as anything if only we will heed it.    Left to their own devices, the energy industry and major markets will drag us through the comeback of coal and full scale exploitation of  unconventional oil and gas

Stopping this in time will be a challenge in a "top down" world in which political and economic power is becoming increasingly concentrated and fused, manifested in (among other things) the steadily widening gap between rich and poor.   In a top down world the welfare of those most vulnerable to the impacts that our Third Carbon Era will wreak is greatly discounted by the dominant class.

To many of us, Stephen Harper's obsession with maximizing production and export of Athabasca bitumen can seem like madness.  That's only because you're not seeing it from Steve's, top down perspective.  Steve is merely following his corporatist instincts which are, of necessity, narrow and short-term.  When you begin with a business outlook, maximum exploitation of the Tar Sands is nothing but rational.

It seems that the real battle we're facing isn't so much a war with the fossil fuel industry but a struggle to rehabilitate democracy, to restore a healthy and effective degree of progressivism - the very thing that's been steadily laundered out of our politics. 

Progressivism is the counterfoil to corporatism.  It is the key to restoring democracy as a bottom-up process that promotes the public interest instead of a top-down process that leads to the capture of political power and its merger with economic power, that is to say corporatism, the forerunner of fascism.

So far we haven't had a political leader prepared to promise to break the yoke of corporatism on Canada's politics.  Trudeau, Mulcair, makes no difference.  Neither of them has the courage to speak out against what ails our democracy and to speak for what we need to heal it - progressivism.  If you need proof of how far to the corporate right both of those characters really are, you need to recalibrate your political compass and the quickest way to do that is to read Theodore Roosevelt's "Square Deal" speech from 1910.