Not that long ago I wrote here about Daniel Yergin’s latest book, the long-awaited follow up to his authoritative history of human use of oil. I concluded by noting:

[How] difficult [it would be for] Dr. Yergin to fully confront the dilemma implicit in his work – that the presence of affordable hydrocarbons (oil and/or natural gas) for indefinite future will create a strong pull constantly moving us away from making the reductions in our greenhouse gas emissions that science tells us we need to make in order to save ourselves.

Sadly, this is not a challenge that Dr. Yergin has taken up. The New York published an essay by Dr. Yergin in its widely-read Sunday Opinion section about the changing face of petroleum supply as the United States has dramatically increased its oil and gas production.  As influential commentator Joe Romm notes in a blog post this new Yergin piece completely ignores the issue of climate. Romm argues that, “While Yergin is happy to detail America’s new orgy of fossil production, he is has nothing to say about how we could do this in an environmentally sound way, in part, I suspect, because he knows that we can’t.”

But this head-on collision of climate and increased gas and oil production is not unique to Daniel Yergin.  Over at Foreign Policy, Steve LeVine provocatively asks “Can we survive the new golden age of oil?“  He surveys the opinions of various experts about how oil and gas production around the world will continue to expand in all kinds of places including in North America and in the Eastern Mediterranean noting that:

What these experts have not said, however, is that while this new golden age may indeed shake up the currently rich and powerful and create new regional forces, it could also accelerate the swamping of the planet in melted Arctic ice. So much new oil may flood the market that crude and gasoline prices might moderate and lessen consumer incentives to economize. “In the absence of U.S. leadership, I tend to agree with NASA’s James Hansen that it is ‘game over for the planet,’” Peter Rutland, a professor at Wesleyan University, told me in an email exchange.

These thoughts, and related exploration of the same theme by Michael Levi, should provide us all with a real jolt. It is simply not true that declining supplies and rising prices of oil and gas will bring about the fundamental changes that will be needed to avert climate disaster. And if you think the U.S. Federal government or a global agreement will save the day – you just haven’t been paying attention.

Dr. Yergin and others who describe a world with continued high availability (and low prices) of petroleum are presenting us with a gordian knot – and among the only folks holding a sword are the local, state and regional leaders from both government and business who are working to build a new economy around clean, zero emissions technology and practices.

Update – The debate about this phenomena continues.  See compilation of further ruminations about continued available petroleum and climate from a variety of powerful voices in another post from June 11, 2012.  And some of the same ideas are chewed on in an interesting op-ed by Reuters editor Chrystia Freeland in the August 9, 2012 New York Times.

In 1991 Daniel Yergin published his massive history of the petroleum industry, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. Regardless of what you think about Yergin’s perspective on the topic, it is hard to dispute the complete and authoritative nature of that book. It provided a guided tour through the life of one of the defining industries of the 20th century and remains a powerful and surprisingly readable look at this essential subject.

In the years that followed there was strong interest in an update to The Prize that brought the story up towards the present and grappled with challenges to the ascendancy of petroleum in our economy and society – like the realization that global warming caused by burning fossil fuels is causing deep and systemic damage to the planet.

In 2011 Doctor Yergin did produce that much awaited sequel, The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World. That book contains six full chapters detailing the evolution of modern climate science and leaves no doubt about the fundamental validity of the observation that the phenomena of global warming from the burning of petroleum and other fossil fuels is indeed, very real.

However, that point must play out against the backdrop of Dr. Yergin’s deep and abiding belief that the there is no such thing as “peak oil” – that global oil production may plateau and stop rising but that improvements in technology mean that we will never see a steep decline in exploitable oil reserves. Indeed, he is even more firm in his belief that if you look at the broader array of fossil hydrocarbons, including natural gas, that the progression of technologies like hydraulic fracturing and its deployment across the world will lead to continued availability of such fuels at fairly low prices for the long term – really, he argues, indefinitely. This is a hard perspective for a climate advocate to ponder – he is in effect arguing that continued availability of hydrocarbons is an “inconvenient truth” that those addressing the challenge of global warming must face, that the argument that “we are running out of the stuff anyway” is simply not part of the debate about continued use of fossil fuels.

But Dr. Yergin has his own dilemma to confront: he does not address the fundamental collision between his observations about the validity of climate science and his belief that we are not in danger of running out of affordable hydrocarbons. This is an especially difficult circle for him to square as he is fundamentally an optimist – believing that society has always found technological solutions to the problems we have encountered and created for ourselves in the past and we will do so again. To Dr. Yergin’s credit he does engage renewable energy and energy efficiency, the  key tools for decarbonizing our economy, at  length in The Quest but never quite gets to the point of describing a path to a future where we are no longer burning fossil fuels and putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

It would be very difficult for Dr. Yergin to fully confront the dilemma implicit in his work – that the presence of affordable hydrocarbons (oil and/or natural gas) for indefinite future will create a strong pull constantly moving us away from making the reductions in our greenhouse gas emissions that science tells us we need to make in order to save ourselves.

Bill McKibben has noted on many occasions, getting off fossil fuels will be the hardest thing that humanity has ever done and the only thing that would be harder would be living in the world where we don’t. And Dr. Yergin is telling us that his expert analysis is that it will be even harder than many believe to make that transition because new technologies and techniques will continue to increase the pool of available fossil fuels – but he has looked at the climate science and he does not deny that we must make the transition.

I often say that there are two phrases that a professional climate advocate, whether they like or not, ends up repeating.

The first one, which is not the subject of this post, is “The scary part is . . . “  As in “The scary part is that Daniel Yergin might be right when, in his new book, he suggests that climate science is right and fossil fuels are a systemic problem AND that peak oil/gas theory is wrong and we are not running out of fossil fuels.”  But that is the subject of another and different blog post to be written and just one of millions of examples of sentences beginning “The scary part is . . .” that you can write or utter about global warming.

The second one is “We have to do that too . . . ” As in, “Yes, we need to conserve more and be more efficient but we need to build wind farms, like the one proposed off of Cape Cod, too.”   As so many folks, including the folks at Princeton who are more famous for wedges than dairy farmers in Wisconsin, will tell you big systemic problem like global warming requires a huge range of solutions.  As some like to say, there is no silver bullet, perhaps multiple rounds of silver buckshot.

This last point causes me to do something I am reluctant to do – disagree with a very smart guy who has a record of knowing how to get things built.  In an opinion piece, Jiggar Shah, the founder of the solar development company Sun Edison and CEO of the very laudable Carbon War Room disagrees with the wisdom of the “jumbo” solar projects being undertaken by large energy companies like NRG Energy that are chronicled in a recent New York Times article.

My suggestion is simple: We need to do both.  We need the vast network of distributed solar on millions of rooftops that Mr. Shah envisions.  We need to do smart development of large solar as well.  We also need to be far more efficient in how we light and heat all our buildings and how we use energy to travel.

The array of technologies we will need to address global warming range from new smart heating devices for our homes, sidewalks to allow safe travel on foot in all our communities, shareable bicycles like the one I took to work this morning, electric cars powered by clean renewable energy, trains that connect cities and neighborhoods, and intelligently sited wind farms and solar installations on land and in the water.

We need to be relentless in our search for new solutions, recognizing dead-ends like the old nuclear power plants that have proved to be an expensive dead-end while aggressively evaluating new answers.

The good news about solar electric generation, as a source of new answers, is that the price of this technology continues to descend at a very steep rate.

While this is very bad news for folks trying to build a business that depends on making a profit by selling these modules, it creates many new opportunities to deploy solar electric generation as part of a large scale clean energy solution; and to do so in the form of a whole lot of Small on many rooftops, a fair amount of Medium on large roofs and appropriate locations on the ground, some Large and, where appropriate, even some Extra Large.