The world can only consume a fraction of the known deposits of fossil fuels if it’s to avoid the most dangerous impacts from climate change, according to the biggest ever assessment of the issue.
Burning the existing reserves of oil, natural gas and coal that have already been identified by national governments and commodity companies would cause widespread droughts, more violent storms and melting of polar ice caps, a long-awaited report by a panel of climate scientists gathered by the United Nations said.
The finding, encapsulated in a so-called carbon budget for the world, is crucial because it tells governments how much room they have to maneuver in balancing measures to reduce emissions that may be costly to companies and the economy against the predicted consequences of doing nothing.
“At the current rates, the carbon budget will be depleted within just a few decades,” Alden Meyer, director of policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in an interview. “We cannot afford to dig up and burn all the fossil fuels that companies have on the books now, much less explore for new ones in places like the Arctic or the tar sands.”
The carbon budget was given a prominence in the report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ensuring that the concept will seep deeper into the vocabulary of government officials. The report, released yesterday in Copenhagen, is the work of some 2,000 scientists and is the fullest investigation to date into the science of global warming and sets out ways to make changes.
It’s meant to guide ministers from more than 190 nations working toward signing a deal in Paris at the end of 2015. The pact is aimed at restraining emissions in all nations, building on the limits set out in the Kyoto Protocol that lapse in 2020.
“We must act quickly and decisively if we want to avoid increasingly disruptive outcomes,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters in Copenhagen on Sunday when the report was released. “If we continue business-as-usual, our opportunity to keep temperature rises below” the internationally agreed target of 2 degrees Celsius “will slip away within the next decades.”
Oil companies including Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) and Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) have said they don’t see a danger of their reserves becoming devalued as emissions limits take hold. About 85 percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels, and they are predicted to remain the dominant for decades to come.
Oil View
“Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technologies have allowed us to not only lead the world in cutting CO2, but also have generated billions in revenue to the federal government, created millions of jobs,” said Eric Wohlschlegel, a spokesman at the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the big oil companies. The oil industry, he said, is “one of the few bright spots in our economy.”
The IPCC report gives a budget for carbon dioxide emissions compatible with the goal of keeping global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since the industrial revolution. That level that still puts the world on track for the fastest shift in temperatures since the last ice age ended around 10,000 years ago.
Its figures suggests that if the world spews another 1.1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide or less into the atmosphere, there’s a better-than-even chance temperatures won’t push past the 2-degree threshold. That theoretical budget may be used up by 2033, assuming the rate of pollution remains constant. About 49 billion tons were emitted in 2010.
Senator’s Response
“We must act now to reduce dangerous carbon pollution or it will it lead to irreversible impacts for human health, food and water supplies, and vital infrastructure,” Barbara Boxer, a Democrat who leads the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement.
The IPCC estimated 3.7 trillion tons to 7.1 trillion tons of fossil fuel emissions remain trapped underground in the form of reserves of oil, coal and gas, which are recoverable given current economic conditions.
The UN Environment Program said last year that yearly output of CO2 will rise to 59 billion tons by 2020, and that current emissions pledges are insufficient to meet the 2-degree goal. To stand a two-in-three chance of meeting two degrees, there’s even less remaining budget to use — about 1 trillion tons, according to the panel. That’s 20 years of emissions at current levels.
Phase Out
“This report convinces me that we need to phase out fossil fuels sooner than we thought,” Danish Minister of Climate Energy and Buildings Rasmus Helveg Petersen said in a statement. “The bigger the problem gets, the more expensive and more difficult it will be for us and for our children to solve it.”
Factories, power plants and auto tailpipes have already pumped out 1.9 trillion tons of the 3 trillions tons of CO2 available under the budget if the planet.
The report also said humans risk causing “irreversible” damage to the planet through widespread impacts including floods, droughts, species extinctions and ocean acidification.
“The report puts the writing on the wall: we’re going to face a very grave future in terms of food shortages, extinction of species and also increasing natural disasters,” Harjeet Singh, a climate campaigner at the non-profit Actionaid, told reporters. “These impacts are going to hit us harder and much faster than we previously anticipated.”
Temperature Target
UN envoys taking part in the climate negotiations have endorsed the 2-degree ceiling on temperatures, while investigating whether it’s possible to tighten it to 1.5 degrees — a goal sought by low-lying island nations concerned that rising seas will swamp them, leaving them nowhere to go.
“A carbon budget could be an important indicator for tracking our progress toward limiting warming, but we cannot let the topic obscure the need for us to take action immediately,” Marlene Moses, chairwoman of the 44-member Alliance of Small Island States, said in an e-mailed reply to questions. “What we do today will determine whether or not we are on track to stay within a 1.5- or 2-degree budget a decade from now.”
The IPCC report released in Copenhagen is called the Synthesis report, and it draws together findings from three earlier reports produced by the panel. Those dealt with the observed physical impacts of climate change, the resulting impacts, and the tools governments have at their disposal to curtail emissions. A smaller so-called Summary-for-Policymakers condenses the findings further to 40 pages.
Policy Shift
Large-scale changes in the energy system are needed to keep a 2-degree scenario likely, according to the panel. Many emissions scenarios that keep temperatures under the 2-degree lid involve zero or negative emissions by the end of the century, according to graphics in the report.
That means policies may be needed that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, including planting forests where there are none, as well as deploying so-called bioenergy with carbon dioxide capture and storage, or BECCS. That’s a combination of burning plant material in power stations, capturing the resulting gases, and storing them underground, while replenishing felled vegetation by planting more trees.
The study is the culmination of five years of unpaid work by thousands of scientists to sift through research into all areas of global warming and condense them to a document that summarizes the most policy-relevant findings. The Nobel prize-winning UN panel last carried out the exercise in 2007.
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