The scientific community and UN have come up with a recommendation of no new Carbon emissions added beyond year 2050. How much can we emit until that time? What is our budget? Well, that depends on how much warming we allow. For example, if we want to limit the warming to 1.5 C with a probability of 50% to 66%, then Carbon dioxide emission budget is in the range of 580 Gigatons to 420 Gigatons. Can we meet this target? What steps do we need to take?
It is in this context that Prof Steven J Davis and his team at UC Irvine in collaboration with Qiang Zhang’s team at Tsinghua University and Ken Calderia’s team at Carnegie Institute of Science asked an important and timely question. What happens to Carbon Dioxide emissions if we stopped adding new fossil fuel consuming plants? How much will be the carbon dioxide emissions from the plants that are running based on their expected lifetime and from the plants that are proposed? Which sectors contribute the most? Which geographical regions contribute the most? This is a very pertinent study to help guide our collective actions to curtail global warming.
Their study indicates an expected carbon dioxide emissions of 658 Gigatons, with a range (attributed to sensitivity around the life time) of 226 Gigatons to 1,479 Gigatons from the plants that are running and with an additional 188 Gigatons from proposed plants, with a range of 37 Gigatons to 427 Gigatons. About 50% of emissions is from electricity sector and about 41% is from China, 9% from USA and 7% from 28 member countries.
As we see, the total of 846 Gigatons is well over the budget of about 580 Gigatons and this with no new plans to commission fossil fuel consuming plants.
So where do we go from here. Here are couple of options. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
- Decommission existing plants if non emitting alternatives are available and affordable.
- Work like crazy to make non emitting alternatives affordable.
- Develop technologies to convert existing emitting plants to negative emission plants.
Steven J Davis and team has kindly shared the article published in Nature via open access to through Sharedit. Learn more details here: Nature Articles