Reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, I got curious about Chapter 8’s numbers, which essentially break down some of the main driving forces of the climate crisis better than most other things I’ve come across.
KSR describes how much fossil carbon we’re consuming, how much is left, how much should not be extracted if we want to stay below 2C, who owns what’s left, and what problems that suggests.
But I decided to do that myself from what I can Google.
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This link provides a conversion formula from barrels of oil to metric tons of CO2 — it’s 0.43 metric tons of CO2 / barrel.
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Here’s quick stats about reserves and consumption of oil, coal, and natural gas. Total reserves: 6,807 billion barrels of oil equivalent, or 2,927 gigatons of fossil carbon.
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Consumption currently is around 42 gigatons of fossil carbon per year, near KSR’s quote of 40.
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This link provides some numbers in ppm of CO2 that must not be exceeded so that we stay under 2C of average warming. “Based on the TCR estimated from observational constraints in IPCC AR5, this paper estimates median CO2 concentrations at 1.5 and 2 °C of 507 ppm and 618 ppm, respectively”. I also found historical data from another source.
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Let’s pick this 618ppm number as the one to stay under 2C of average warming, for our estimation.
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Some basic conversion from ppm to gigatons of carbon: “1 ppm by volume of atmosphere CO2 = 2.13 Gt C”
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618ppm (2C of warming) minus today’s ~418ppm => 200ppm remaining, which is 426 gigatons of fossil carbon remaining in the “budget”.
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But, there’s 2,927 gigatons of fossil carbon in the ground, proven reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas.
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So, ~2,500 gigatons of fossil carbon in the ground should be left there to keep below 2C.
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If simply pricing at $100 a barrel (regardless of type of fuel, but also discounting future price swings — need more precision here but good enough to guesstimate at least), then the possible value of this fossil carbon we should not extract is on the order of $680 Trillion ($680,782,719,400,000).
Only about a quarter of oil reserves are owned privately, the rest are considered national assets by various governments. Harder to find for coal and natural gas, but let’s assume a similar story.
The numbers generally agree w/ Chapter 8 of Ministry for the Future, and doing this back of the envelope calculation didn’t take much.
How would these private and public actors, who own this fossil carbon worth potentially hundreds of trillions, act based on this knowledge?
These are considered national assets, and are already incorporated into the economy — loans/financing granted based on that wealth, expectation of future value from extraction efforts, and so on.
Maybe a portion of these stored reserved of fossil carbon become stranded assets. But in what long term, under what conditions, and what of the short and medium term? Is keeping warming at 2C achievable, considering this?
As KSR mentions, “in the meantime, some people will be trying to sell and burn the portion of it they own or control, while they still can. Just enough to make a trillion or two, they’ll be saying to themselves — not the crucial portion, not the burn that pushes us over the edge, just one last little taking. People need it.”
originally published in Medium