Fossil fuel reserves contain 3.5tn tons of greenhouse gas emissions

Fossil fuel reserves contain 3.5tn tons of greenhouse gas emissions

PARIS: Burning the world’s remaining fossil fuel reserves would unleash 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions-seven times the remaining carbon budget to cap global heating at 1.5C-according to the first public inventory of hydrocarbons released Monday.

Human activity since the Industrial Revolution, largely powered by coal, oil and gas, has led to just under 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming and brought with it ever fiercer droughts, floods and storms supercharged by rising seas. The United Nations estimates that Earth’s remaining carbon budget-how much more pollution we can add to the atmosphere before the 1.5C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement is missed-to be around 360 billion tons of CO2 equivalent, or nine years at current emission levels.

The UN’s annual Production Gap assessment last year found that governments plan to burn more than twice the fossil fuels by 2030 that would be consistent with a 1.5C world. But until now there has been no comprehensive global inventory of countries’ remaining reserves. The Global Registry of Fossil Fuels seeks to provide greater clarity on oil, gas and coal reserves to fill knowledge gaps about global supply and to help policymakers better manage their phaseouts.

Containing more than 50,000 fields across 89 countries, it found