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https://www.sciencealert.com/this-is-how-much-fossil-fuel-the-world-is-sitting-on-and-its-a-time-bomb>
"Burning the world's remaining fossil fuel reserves would unleash 3.5 trillion
tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – 7 times the remaining carbon budget to cap
global heating at 1.5 degrees Celsius – according to the first public inventory
of hydrocarbons released Monday.
Human activity since the Industrial Revolution, largely powered by coal, oil,
and gas, has led to just under 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming and brought with
it ever fiercer droughts, floods, and storms supercharged by rising seas.
The United Nations (UN) estimates that Earth's remaining carbon budget – how
much more pollution we can add to the atmosphere before the 1.5 degrees Celsius
temperature goal of the Paris Agreement is missed – to be around 360 billion
tonnes of CO2 equivalent, or 9 years at current emission levels.
The UN's annual Production Gap assessment last year found that governments
plan to burn more than twice the fossil fuels by 2030 that would be consistent
with a 1.5-degree Celsius world.
But until now there has been no comprehensive global inventory of countries'
remaining reserves.
The Global Registry of Fossil Fuels seeks to provide greater clarity on oil,
gas, and coal reserves to fill knowledge gaps about global supply and to help
policymakers better manage their phaseouts.
Containing more than 50,000 fields across 89 countries, it found that some
countries on their own held reserves containing enough carbon to blow through
the entire world's carbon budget.
For example, US coal reserves embed 520 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
China, Russia and Australia all hold enough reserves to miss 1.5 degrees
Celsius, it found.
All told, the remaining fossil fuel reserves contain seven times the emissions
of the carbon budget for 1.5 degrees Celsius.
"We have very little time to address the remaining carbon budget," said
Rebecca Byrnes, deputy Director of Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, who
helped compile the registry.
"As long as we're not measuring what is being produced, it's incredibly hard
to measure or regulate that production," she told AFP."
Via Rixty Dixet.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
