Governments Have Already Announced Plans For Oil, Coal, Gas At 120% Of Maximum Paris Targets
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Second number: 120 percent, as in the plans by the world’s governments to produce 120 percent more coal and gas and oil by 2030 than the planet can burn and have even half a hope of meeting the Paris climate targets. The new report, which emerged last week from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), is one of the most important pieces of research in years. What it means is, the world is producing endlessly more coal and oil and gas than safety allows.
Scientists have a fairly exact idea of how much carbon dioxide we can still emit and stay south of the red lines we’ve drawn (red lines, it should be pointed out, that we haven’t crossed yet even though we’ve already lost most of the sea ice in the Arctic, intensified the world’s patterns of drought and flood and fire, and turned the ocean 30 percent more acidic. We’re already in great trouble). That estimate of how much we can still sort of afford to burn represents our “carbon budget,” and it’s not very large (it’s not very large because when scientists issued their first dire warnings 30 years ago we paid no attention). Meeting that budget would require — well, it would require budgeting. That’s kind of what the world’s nations did in Paris, when they set out targets and made pledges. Sadly, the pledges didn’t meet the targets: no nation committed to cutting the use of fossil fuels fast enough to dramatically slow down the warming. If you want to use a dieting metaphor, we were unwilling to rein in our appetites in any significant way.
But of course there’s another way at this problem. Along with reducing demand, you could also work to reduce supply. If we didn’t have more coal and oil and gas than we could burn, we would, ipso facto, be more likely to stay on our diet. Sadly, the world’s governments have never made any serious attempt to restrict the production of coal and oil and gas — instead, they’ve offered endless subsidies to spur the endless overproduction of fossil fuels.
America has done this more effectively than anyone else — for the last few presidential administrations we’ve offered the industry pretty much carte blanche for drilling and fracking and mining. That’s why, during the Obama years, the United States surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s greatest supplier of hydrocarbons. And if you think Obama might be embarrassed about that, you’d be wrong. As the former president told a cheering Texas audience last year, “You wouldn’t always know it ,but it [oil and gas production] went up every year I was president,” he said. “That whole, ‘suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas,’ that was me, people.” Precisely the same scenario is playing out in the other big fossil fuel nations. In Australia last month, for instance, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that his government was planning to outlaw protests that seek to persuade banks to stop financing new coal mines. (He did this as one of the worst waves of bush fires in the nation’s history turned the Sydney skies gray — humans returning to the blackened forests reported being traumatized by the agonized howls of burned animals).
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https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-new-climate-math-the-numbers-keep-getting-more-frightening
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