Kathleen Dean Moore is an emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University. Her recent work focusses on the moral issues of climate change.
She recently wrote a brilliant article in Salon under the headline “How Big Oil is manipulating the way you think about climate change”.
Moore’s article highlights the best way to address the climate crisis. Moore writes that,
The best way to reduce carbon dioxide is to stop burning fossil fuels — not to spend billions of dollars developing an entire new industry devoted to sequestering carbon in all kinds of complicated ways.
Moore’s article unfortunately does not mention carbon offsets, which are one of the major distractions that Big Polluters use to get away with continued pollution. Had she mentioned offsets, it would have given her the opportunity to use a really bad pun: “REDD herrings”. (It turns out it’s not even original.)
However, Moore’s focus on carbon sequestration is timely and extremely relevant.
As climate scientist David Ho pointed out in a recent article in Nature we must “Drastically reduce emissions first, or carbon dioxide removal will be next to useless”.
Red herrings
Moore’s article starts with an explanation of the term “red herrings”:
In medieval times, gamekeepers trained dogs to the hunt by setting them on the trail of a dead rabbit they had dragged through the forest. Once the dogs were baying along the rabbit’s scent, the gamekeeper ran across the trail ahead of them, dragging a gunny sack of red herrings. Red herrings are smoked fish that have been aged to a ruddy, stinking ripeness. If any dog veered off to follow the stench of the red herrings, the gamekeeper beat him with a stick. Thus did dogs learn not to be lured into barking up the wrong tree.
The red herring fallacy is one of the best-known types of logical fallacies. Moore explains the fallacy to her students as a “fallacious and dishonorable” strategy used to divert attention from the real issue by raising something that is only tangentially related to the argument in question.
“This fallacy seems to be working spectacularly well for the fossil-fuel industry, the petrochemical industry, and a bunch of other bad actors who would like to throw us off the trail that would lead us fully to grasp their transgressions,” Moore writes. “We shouldn’t keep falling for it.”
Moore gives a series of examples which I’ll summarise briefly here.
East Palestine, Ohio
When a train carrying vinyl chloride derailed and caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio, politicians, commentators, and citizens asked how will we punish the railways and how can we make the railways safer?
“These are the wrong questions,” Moore writes. Vinyl chloride is a flammable petroleum product. It’s a potent carcinogen. When it burns it releases dioxin, another carcinogen.
Instead, Moore asks why the US petrochemical industry is allowed to produce 7.2 million metric tons every year “of a poison the causes liver, lung, and brain cancer, and to polyvinyl chloride in water pipes, gutters, rubber duckies, and My Little Pony dolls?”
Eugene, Oregon
The city of Eugene recently banned natural gas in new houses. The question often asked in response was along the lines of “How can anyone ask us to sacrifice our gas stoves, just to cut carbon emissions?”
Moore points out that we should be asking what sacrifices we are already making to support the fossil fuel industry? She reminds us that in 2022, the industry made profits of US$4 trillion globally.
The real question, Moore writes, is, “How can we free ourselves from the fossil-fuel industry’s iron grip, even in our homes?”
Carbon sequestration
The false solution of carbon sequestration comes from asking this question: “How can we capture the carbon dioxide that is spewing into the atmosphere?” The answers tend to be something like embed it in concrete blocks, pipe it thousands of kilometres to store it underground, store it in algal blooms, or marshes, or timber-frame skyscrapers.
At this point I would have added rainforests. I might be biased, of course, having spent the last 14 years writing about the harebrained scheme called REDD, but along with Natural Climate Solutions, it seems to me to be one of the biggest distractions from leaving fossil fuels in the ground.
“Obviously,” Moore writes, “we need to remove excess carbon dioxide from the air if we want Earth to remain habitable.” But the best way of reducing the amount of CO₂ going into the atmosphere is to stop burning fossil fuels.
Close down the coal plants. Phase out oil and gas drilling. Get those brilliant engineers back on track, addressing the real question of how we are going to stop oil and gas drilling, and soon.
Carbon footprints
Moore writes about climate footprint “calculators” that allow people to put a figure to how responsible they are personally for the climate crisis. She notes that the idea of carbon footprints came from the oil giant British Petroleum (BP).
BP hired Ogilvy & Mather, a public relations company, to push the idea that the climate crisis is the result of individual actions rather than the fault of the fossil fuel industry. BP launched its carbon footprint calculator in 2004.
Moore points out that asking how individuals can reduce their carbon footprint is the wrong question. “I want to know what Big Oil is going to do,” she writes, “to phase out the 73 percent of greenhouse gas emissions that they empower — which was 37,190,000,000 metric tons of CO₂ in 2021.”
United Arab Emirates: COP28
Moore’s last example is COP28, the UN climate meeting that this year will take place in the petrostate of the United Arab Emirates. We can expect endless debates about loss and damage, adaptation, finance, business action, carbon trading, nature, agriculture, seawater inundation of cropland, climate refugees, and so on.
All of which is important. But it’s important because we’ve spent decades allowing ourselves to be distracted from what Moore calls “the one bloody big question”:
How quickly and completely can the world transition from the burn-it-all-down fossil-fuel economy and replace it with an economy of restraint and renewal?
The best defence against a red herring fallacy, Moore writes, is to call it out and to restate the central question:
Let us focus full attention on the real issue here, which is, how can we stop the fossil-fuel industry from destroying the life-sustaining systems of the planet in their seemingly endless, and certainly shameless, quest for profit?
“REDD herring”, very clever! But let’s not overlook the herrings hiding in the Professor’s comments.
The use of the energy slaves found (for free) in fossil fuels fueled the entirety of civilization and its expansion to massive numbers unsustainable under natural survival conditions. It powers industrial agriculture needed to feed this massive population, it powers the industrial chemical industry which makes your synthetic fabrics to clothe this massive population (we can’t raise that many sheep for wool or pick that much cotton), it powers all the travel (mostly needless) which this capitalist society seems to require and many other aspects of this culture which has used every possible tool for warding off the usual existential threats to their City-based existence.
You can NOT blame it all on the fossil-fuel industry - it is YOUR hand on the pump, not theirs. Professor Moore mentions an economy of “restraint and renewal.” Yes, we need to “live quietly” as per James Rebanks’ book _The Shepherd’s Life_, in other words, use MUCH LESS energy and get back to use of renewable (solar) energy. But that isn’t what you presently know as an “economy”: the economy is a measure of everyone’s activity and obviously we need MUCH LESS of such activity to reach “restraint.” All of society has lived beyond their means, as per the fuel consumption, the energy use, the environmental impact, as well as financial debt, always kicking the can down the road, putting the pain on to future generations.
As for the South Africa power outages, I would imagine they have plenty of power for an appropriate population level which is at least attempting to live in harmony with this planet. Could you tell me how city traffic is what this planet looks like? A key to living in harmony with this planet is finally beginning to set Limits to Progress.
https://kathleenmccroskey.substack.com/p/limits-to-progress
South Africa right now is experiencing 8 hours to 12 hours of power outages every day partially due to the demand for them to decommission their coal power stations as they can't get the financing anymore for the maintenance. Last year the country had more than 200 days of power cuts. I wonder if Kathleen Dean Moore would like to live without electricity for 12 hours a day?