{"id":977,"date":"2009-11-20T12:51:56","date_gmt":"2009-11-20T16:51:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=977"},"modified":"2009-11-20T19:09:19","modified_gmt":"2009-11-20T23:09:19","slug":"will-peak-oil-save-us-from-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/2009\/11\/will-peak-oil-save-us-from-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Peak Oil Save us from Climate Change?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I posted that the total budget of fossil fuel emissions we can ever emit is 1 trillion tonnes of Carbon<\/a>. And that we’ve burnt through about half of that since the dawn of industrialization. Today, I read in the Guardian that existing oil reserves may have been deliberately overestimated<\/a> by the International Energy Agency. George Monbiot explains how frightening<\/a> this could be, given the likely impact of lower oil supplies on food production. Madeleine Bunting equates the reluctance to discuss this<\/a> with the head-in-the-sand attitude that preceded last year’s financial crisis. Looks like the more pessimistic of the\u00a0peak oil<\/a> folks may have had it right all along.<\/p>\n

None of these articles however makes the link to climate change (Monbiot only mentions it in passing<\/span> in response to comments). So, which problem is bigger, peak oil or climate change? Does one cancel out the other? Should I stop worrying about the trillionth tonne<\/a>, if the oil simply doesn’t exist to get there?<\/p>\n

A back of the envelope calculation tells me that more than half of the world’s estimated remaining reserves of fossil fuels have to stay buried in the ground if we are to stay within a trillion tonnes. Here’s the numbers:<\/p>\n