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123 comments on The post-oil energy economies of the future - by Gordon Brown
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123 comments on The post-oil energy economies of the future - by Gordon Brown
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There's not THAT much carbon left in the second half of the oil. Most of the carbon has been from coal and most of the potential carbon to come is from coal. We can burn all the conventional oil and gas and keep CO2 concentrations well below 450ppm. Coal is where we should focus.
Yeah, when you think about it the global volume of oil is actually not that big after all. If we assume 2,000 billion Bbls as the absolut global reserve and imagine it is equally spread on the serface of the Earth, then it will only be a 0.6 mm thick layer, just like a very thin layer of paint.
I'm not so persuaded of this notion that people will still go on burning/using coal. You can't just dig it up with a spade in your garden. You have to (1) go to the remote location, (2) use some heavy machine to break it up and get it out (or seriously heavy manual labour); you then have to haul it back to its place of use. All this requires time, energy, steel etc. We might not have these available in sufficient quantity and cheapness to be able to do that coal-digging. I'm more fearful of all the trees getting burned to extinction by people trying to keep warm and well-fed.
Was that 450 figure picked out of the atmosphere by a politician? Is it any less arbitrary than the 350 picked by Jim Hansen?
http://www.350.org/
James Hansen (NASA) has incorporated "oil peaking" into his policy analysis. From his recent Congressional testimony:
"Requirements to halt carbon dioxide growth follow from the size of fossil carbon reservoirs.
Coal towers over oil and gas. Phase out of coal use except where the carbon is captured and
stored below ground is the primary requirement for solving global warming.
Oil is used in vehicles where it is impractical to capture the carbon. But oil is running
out. To preserve our planet we must also ensure that the next mobile energy source is not
obtained by squeezing oil from coal, tar shale or other fossil fuels."
http://columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TwentyYearsLater_20080623.pdf
Anybody who is freezing cold will pay no attention whatsoever to Jim Hansen.