Revealed: How fossil fuel reserves match UN climate negotiating positions

[Dead_Parrot]

Want to understand why we're not solving climate change? Then follow the money – which in this case means following the carbon. I've spent much of the past 24 hours crunching data and it turns out there's a very striking – and oddly overlooked – correlation between fossil fuel reserves and national negotiating position on climate change.

First, though, some background. Last year I wrote about the emerging concept of a "carbon bubble" and the risks for investors of putting money into companies that hold fossil fuel reserves. After all, if the world is to meet its stated 2C target for limiting global warming, most of those fuels will need to be left in the ground.

Months later, during the Durban climate talks, I found myself wondering how all that unburnable fuel was distributed globally – and how this might be affecting the negotiations. When I finally got around to looking, I was surprised that there didn't seem to be a good dataset of the potential emissions of each country's fossil fuel reserves. So I decided to make my own. I took the fossil fuel data from most recent BP Statistical Review of World Energy and converted the oil, coal and gas reserves listed for each country into the approximate amount of CO2 that would be released if they were burned.

I should emphasise that the resulting dataset – which I've made available here – is rough and ready. It required a lot of manual data manipulation, so I can't promise that it's error-free. And the underlying BP data is limited in various ways – for example, it just lists "coal" (rather than different types of coal) and the figures for tar sands (which are listed only for Canada) seem oddly low. I hope to work with the Carbon Tracker Initiative to publish a more authoritative dataset in due course, but for now I think this one is sufficient to illustrate the point. Do tweet me on @theduncanclark with any comments or corrections.

More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/feb/16/fossil-fuel-reserves-un-climate-negotiating