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Originally posted by Geezer:

Good stuff to know as we explore CO2 emissions.

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by Geezer:

Good stuff to know as we explore CO2 emissions.

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All the fossil fuels now buried in the ground are potentially worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. The slower the fossil fuel is burned, the slower the flow of money. Fuel that is not burnt will not earn money. (Some fossil fuel does become plastic, not CO2, but not much.) So the owners of the fuel are highly motivated by that potential pile of money to burn all the fuel to CO2 as fast as there is money to be made. www.statista.com/topics/1046/us-fossil-fuel-consumption/

The fossil fuel owners do have a technical problem they need to solve before they can collect the last few tens of trillions of dollars. It is not the problem of where to store all their money, because there are banks for that, but where to store all their CO2. The atmosphere is that place for now. There needs to be a better place for storage. Maybe convert CO2 into fuel, then bury the fuel in the ground? Then the fuel is back where it began and the cycle continues unstoppably.

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The calculation is straightforward. There is a proposed maximum CO2 load we can emit into the atmosphere before we have a 50% chance of driving global warming beyond 2C. I simply calculated how much CO2 headroom we had left since the paper was published, took the current population and multiplied it by 10 tons/ year; and found that at that rate and population we had about 20 years of CO2 emissions left.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
But using that carbon load as a basis - Cuba's per capita emissions are approximately 1/5 of Germany's. If everyone were to either drop down to that level (or build up to it) we could stretch out our "do or die" timeline to 100 years.

What would that mean? Cuba has worked pretty hard to improve their living standard on a meager energy diet. During their energy crisis, they moved farms into the cities, cities into the farms, decentralized education, and (in general) attempted to reduce their transportation costs, which represented their largest energy usage. As a result, the average diet improved, but living in high-rise apartments became a misery. They probably represent the best that can be achieved (small nation, low transport costs, temperate climate, but also poor access to energy from non-fossil fuels). For many people in the USA and the EU, it would mean a reduced living standard (altho a step up for the United States' poorest of the poor, if we followed Cuba's healthcare example). For many people around the world, it would be a step up.

It would be a challenge to our ingenuity to get the most possible out of those CO2 emission limits. For one thing, we would no longer be able to afford those fuel-guzzling jet fighters and ships. Unlike Cuba, we have the manufacturing capacity to shift from fossil fuels to other sources, should we choose.

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