Chapter 1. CO2 Emissions. Where We’re At and Where We’re Headed

Why is climate change such a hard problem to solve?

First, civilization has shown itself to not work so well when it comes to solving global problems. There have been successes, such as ozone depletion and the Montreal Protocol, but the list of problems that haven’t been solved is large, and this includes climate change.

Second, and more importantly, we’re telling the fossil fuel industry, the most profitable industry in human history, that they’ll have to find something else to do. This is a major turning point in the development of civilization and they are not going quietly into the night. We have petrostates, Saudi Arabia and Russia being the biggest and one of them has nuclear weapons. There are major global corporations such as ExxonMobile. Some of these are so big they’re named after countries, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell. As a group they move 100 million barrels of oil around the world every day. At today’s price of $103 dollars per barrel that’s over 10 billion dollars of product a day and that doesn’t include coal and natural gas. And yet, they have to stop.

We can expect them to fight for every last petro dollar. And they are.

In the U.S. the fight is being led by the biggest oil companies who have adopted the tobacco industry playbook. Fossil fuels has an advantage over tobacco because they’re fighting this out in the social media era. They’ve successfully combined misdirection, misinformation and propaganda with the capture of the Republican party to keep those sweet, sweet, petro dollars rolling in.

I’m sure they fear ending up like the tobacco industry but their coalition and their lawyers have run the table to this point. But all things must end and climate change will force society to address the issue, the only question is when.

As I heard Greta say, you can’t compromise with physics. Or maybe that was Yogi Berra, but probably not.

There’s another side to the story. Modern civilization was built on fossil fuels. Hundreds of millions were being brought out of extreme poverty because of fossil fuels. Then someone pointed out that a few hundred additional parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere was going to totally screw up our ecosystem.

Parts per million? That can’t be right.

But the big eye don’t lie. Basic physics will win the day. And now the age of fossil fuels has to end. What a mess.

Let the Charts Begin

Here’s a chart showing the results of computer models based on five different future scenarios defined by the IPCC, which is the United Nations’s International Panel on Climate Change. The two dashed lines are old news from the IPCC Fifth Assessment. The solid lines are updated scenarios that will be used in the Sixth Assessment Report that has been partially released with the rest coming out this year.

The scenarios describe different fossil fuel use patterns. The best case scenario, the blue line, requires that we reduce fossil fuels starting now. The worst case scenario, the red line, is OMG that’s really bad. It’s called the business as usual case, but it was always meant to represent an unlikely future. That scenario looks really, really bad, but we don’t have access to enough fossil fuels to make this happen.

The Best Case

The blue lines. That doesn’t look too bad. The temperature (graph d) and CO2 concentration (graph b) level out near or below today’s values. We might make it after all.

Figure 5 from B. C. O’Neill et al.: The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP) for CMIP6

Except we’ve already blown past it. This case requires that we start lowering emissions by now and that’s not happening.

The Worst Case

The red lines. Those are scary. The temperature rise is 8 degrees C (14.4 F) and the CO2 concentration goes to 2,000 (it’s 421 today). This would be catastrophic. But it’s also implausible because the amount of fossil fuels needed to do this greatly exceeds what’s available. The IPCC agreed with this, recently stating, “the likelihood of high emission scenarios such as RCP8.5 or SSP5–8.5 is considered low in light of recent developments in the energy sector” (p. 1–110).

Let’s take a look at the red line. This graph shows a gray shaded area that’s a part of the red line scenario. The gray area is 220 years long and 10 units high. The units are in Gigatons of Carbon (GtC). Ten GtC is about the amount of fossil fuels we are currently emitting each year. So, even if we stayed at today’s output the gray area alone would require 220 years of fossil fuel reserves.

But there are only 50 years of recoverable oil and natural gas reserves available right now. Coal has 133 years of recoverable reserves but we haven’t included the rest of the fossil fuels needed in the red line scenario.

The purple shaded area also has to be counted. This brings the total amount of fossil fuel reserves needed for this scenario to 500 years worth of today’s yearly emissions. We are a clever species, but that exceeds our capabilities. This scenario was developed when it was thought that coal could become the dominant fossil fuel, but now solar and wind are much cheaper than coal and the red line scenario just isn’t realistic.

The Middle Way

The green line. That seems to be where we’re headed.

Even in this case we will have consumed today’s reserves of oil and gas by 2060.

This case requires massive amounts of CO2 capture and storage. That’s why the green line dips to below zero GtC around 2070. The CO2 capture starts around 2050 and continues through most of the 22nd century. This will be a daunting task but many of the pieces are being put in place and it’s what brought me to this work.

In this scenario, fossil fuel reduction doesn’t start until 2040. The red line peaks at, let’s call it 17 GtC. That peak level looks too high for two reasons. First, emissions have flattened out since 2013 (IEA). Second, that would require a 70% increase in emissions from today’s level. 45% of that increase would need to be oil. Increasing oil output from today’s 100 million barrels per day to 131 million by 2040 would seem to be impossible without another technology miracle comparable to the changes brought by fracking.

A more realistic version of the green line scenario would be where the red line flattens out and fossil fuel reduction begins by 2040, though hopefully, and quite conceivably, by 2030. The sooner reductions begin the lower the green line peaks in atmospheric CO2 and temperature gain will be.