Ray Wheeler on the energy list asked: > could you briefly explain ... why it is that you think we have only > five years to achieve--what, comprehensive carbon neutrality?
It is based on the carbon budget (google it). Global warming does not depend on annual emissions (a flow quantity) but of the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. CO2 is so long-lived, that the stock of CO2 is basically the cumulative emissions since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Here is a quote from journalist David Roberts http://grist.org/climate-change/2011-12-05-the-brutal-logic-of-climate-change/ summarizing a paper by climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows: > If we delay the global emissions peak until 2025, we pretty much have > to drop off a cliff afterwards to avoid 2 degrees C. Short of a meteor > strike that shuts down industrial civilization, that’s unlikely. > How about 2020? Of the available scenarios for peaking in 2020, says > Anderson, 13 of 18 show hitting 2 degrees C to be technically > impossible. (D’oh!) The others involve on the order of 10 percent > reductions a year after 2020, leading to total decarbonization by > 2035-45. Therefore we have five years to turn the world economy around in such a fundamental way that carbon emissions decline 10 percent every single year after this for the next 20 years or so. In other words, I did not mean to say that we need carbon neutrality in 5 years, but the world economy has five years to turn around and aim full speed towards comprehensive decarbonization, at a speed which may be technically feasible but is not profitable for the owners of the means of production. The president of the US does not have the constitutional authority to "interfere" in the economy to such a degree even if he wanted to, and the population is kept in the dark that this is what is required. Hans G Ehrbar _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
