Oil Industry Blows Past Climate Limits; New Supplies 'Lock In Disaster'

[wtmusic]

"What if you knew that smoking that one last packet of cigarettes was going to give you cancer? Imagine if our understanding of cancer was so precise as to allow doctors to predict with virtual certainty that smoking that particular pack, which you just picked up at the corner store, would definitely be the last straw and cause you to contract life-threatening cancer? Obviously, you would not smoke that pack.

In the world today, global warming is our collective cancer, and despite dire and clear warnings, the oil industry is still smoking away. The best climate science in the world tells us that in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we need to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius. But the amount of new oil production the industry is bringing online over the next eight years is exponentially more than we can afford to burn and stay under two degrees. We simply cannot afford to burn all the oil that the industry is capable of producing over the next few years, and in the long term.

It is worth noting that this is a new equation that reaches essentially the same conclusion as the Carbon Tracker / Bill McKibben Math, but by using the actual plans of the industry itself rather than estimates of fuels in the ground. Carbon Tracker measured the total amount of carbon in fossil fuels in existing reserves (2,795 gigatons) and found them to be five times more than can be safely burned (565 gigatons). That is terrifying, although this does not tell us along what timeline those reserves will be pulled out of the ground."

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/26/1092241/one-chart-says-it-all-why-oils-new-supply-boom-is-a-bust-for-the-climate/

[GliderGuider]

1. Any rationalizations are OK so long as we keep the party going.

How do we know +2C is “safe”? There is a body of sober scientific opinion that maintains we are now – at 0.8C – seeing the chaos we expected at 2 degrees.

Based on the historical record it takes natural processes about 1,000 years to remove 1 ppmv of CO2 from the air. If we stopped emitting CO2 entirely today, it would take over 100,000 years for CO2 levels to return to the only known safe level of 280 ppm. Arguing over whether this amount of FF development or that is “safe” from a climatological perspective amounts to willful blindness, and is in my opinion dangerously misguided.

[pscot]

2. Hey! Just wait 'til we get those West Coast coal ports up

and running 24/7. Coal for the generators of China. Low grade, high sulpher Wyoming coal. I read there's 160 billion tons of it. There's money to be made. And think of the jobs. We're gonna make Bladerunner look like a utopian fantasy before we're through.