Posted May 22, 2022
Research
just published in the journal Energy
Policy and “revealed” by The
Guardian make it clear that despite government’s pledges to take action to
preserve a livable world, the oil and gas companies are proceeding with
business as usual. Unless governments (including ours, because the US is the
worst culprit) take quick action to defuse these bombs, all hope (for keeping
global temperature from exceeding 1.5OC above preindustrial levels)
will be lost.
Some of the
gory details:
· The fossil fuel industry’s short-term
expansion plans involve the start of oil and gas projects that will produce
greenhouse gases equivalent to a decade of CO2 emissions from
China, the world’s biggest polluter.
· These plans include 195 carbon bombs, gigantic
oil and gas projects that would each result in at least a billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over their
lifetimes, in total equivalent to about 18 years of current global CO2 emissions.
About 60% of these have already started pumping.
· The dozen biggest oil companies are on track
to spend $103m a day for the rest of the decade exploiting new fields of oil
and gas that cannot be burned if global heating is to be limited to well under
2C.
· The Middle East and Russia often attract
the most attention in relation to future oil and gas production but the US,
Canada and Australia are among the countries with the biggest
expansion plans and the highest number of carbon bombs. The US, Canada and
Australia also give some of the world’s biggest subsidies for fossil fuels per
capita. The US is the leading source of potential emissions. Its 22
carbon bombs include conventional drilling and fracking and span the deep
waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the foothills of the Front Range in Colorado to
the Permian basin. Together they have the potential to emit 140bn tonnes of CO2, almost four times more than the
entire world emits each year.
Defusing carbon bombs must
become an important dimension of climate change mitigation policy. The world is
in a race against time,” said UN Secretary-General Guterres. “It is time to end
fossil fuel subsidies and stop the expansion of oil and gas exploration.”
Reflecting on the war in Ukraine, he said: “Countries could become so
consumed by the immediate fossil fuel supply gap that they neglect or knee-cap
policies to cut fossil fuel use. This is madness. Addiction to fossil fuels is
mutually assured destruction.”
We must avoid the activation of new carbon bombs and put
existing ones into the “harvest mode” at any cost.
References:
Carrington, Damian and Matthew Taylor. 2022. Revealed: the ‘carbon
bombs’ set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown. The Guardian. May 11. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2022/may/11/fossil-fuel-carbon-bombs-climate-breakdown-oil-gas
Kühne, Kjell et al, 2022 “Carbon Bombs” – Mapping key fossil fuel
projects. Energy Policy May 12. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421522001756?via%3Dihub#!