I'm interested in promoting the idea of a carbon budget - a limited
amount of carbon that can be added to the atmosphere as CO2 - but
I'd qualify it by taking into account the greenhouse forcing of
other greenhouse gases, especially methane, so there'd be an even
tighter budget. The original carbon budget idea comes from the
Potsdam Institute. The tar sands article refers to the carbon
budget idea thus:
[quote]
Over 1 billion tons of equivalent CO2 emissions is a substantial
chunk of emissions. We recently discussed The Critical Decade
report produced by the Climate Commission established by the
Australian government. Their
report concluded that humanity can emit not more than 1
trillion tonnes of CO2 between 2000 and 2050 to have a probability
of about 75% of limiting temperature rise to 2°C or less. According
to the latest data, between 2000 and 2010 we emitted
approximately 300 billion tons of CO2, so after 20% of the allotted
timeframe, we're already over 30% of the way through the allotted
emissions.
[end quote]
The implications are enormous, if you are an investor in fossil
fuels - or your pension provider is - because only about 20% of the
reserves are usable! Read about it here:
