Markets are gambling trillions that governments will never seriously curb emissions
Humankind cannot bear very much reality but climate change will not go away: 400 parts-per-million, Prince Charles on the warpath, and here is the most succinct exposition of the great dilemma for some time. Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark are honest about our reluctance to face up to the challenge: "If you wanted to invent a problem to induce confusion, disbelief and the turning of blind eyes, it would be hard to come up with something better than climate change."
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Beyond its raw facts about emissions, this book's great contribution to the debate is to point out that the markets are gambling trillions of dollars on a bet that governments will never seriously curb carbon emissions. How do they know this? Because to address climate change would mean leaving most of the remaining fossil carbon in the earth. But that would entail the future value of the fossil-fuel energy companies falling to a fraction of their present valuation: current share prices declare that no climate mitigation will happen. However, sudden action may be forced on governments by a period of catastrophic climate damage and food shortages. This would cause a global collapse of the energy industry greater than the crash of 2007-08. Something will have to give. If the markets are playing their usual game – we know a bubble will burst but that's OK because we'll get out in time – they are gambling with the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and the livelihoods of billions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/31/burning-question-berners-lee-review
Interesting read...
= new reply since forum marked as read
> To come within the agreed 2C rise we can add around 565 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide
> by 2050. But using established reserves of fossil fuels would add 2,795 gigatonnes
> and the City is betting on all of that being burned. At the present rate we'll hit 565 gigatonnes
> in a mere 16 years.
> Meanwhile, we have the fossil-fuel lobby: a modern version of the Catholic church refusing
> to admit the evidence of Galileo's telescope. The church apologised 367 years later.
> The lobbyists for the dirty black stuff are just as wrong and will be proved to be so.
> But any (at present, most unlikely) apology from them is going to be too late for us all.
