THE CLIMATE CRISIS
is many things: a test of whether we can overcome the vast gulfs between the Global North and the Global South, a challenge to a political system geared toward short-term thinking, a lens that magnifies past injustice and future deprivation. But it’s also, at heart, a math problem.
And not even a very hard one, at least conceptually. The atmosphere can only hold so much carbon before it overheats the Earth. Think of it as a one-gallon bucket: If you put more than a gallon of water in it, it will overflow. So that would be dumb.
About a decade ago, I wrote an essay for this magazine that went quite viral, simply because it laid out the math of climate change as we understood it at the time. Scientists calculated that in order to have any real chance of meeting the climate goals the world had agreed on, our atmospheric bucket had space for about 585 gigatons more carbon dioxide. And new data showed that the fossil-fuel industry had in its reserves — the stuff it had told shareholders and banks it would dig up and burn — about 2,795 gigatons worth of CO2. Which is to say: five times too much.
From that math, you could derive a powerful result: The fossil-fuel industry was a rogue enterprise. If the various companies (and countries that operated like companies — think Saudi Arabia) carried out their stated business plan, there was no drama about the outcome: Earth as we had known it would no longer exist, and in its place would be something much hotter and more dangerous.
That remains true — truer, even. Mark Campanale, whose London-based NGO Carbon Tracker provided those numbers a decade ago, has kept an ongoing count, and here’s where we stand. The fossil-fuel industry has continued to explore and prospect, and now controls reserves of coal, gas, and oil that, if burned, would produce 3,700 gigatons of carbon dioxide. That’s 10 times the amount that scientists say would take us past the temperature targets set in the Paris Climate Agreement.
Another way of saying this: If we are to meet the climate targets set by scientists, we have to leave 90 percent of the fossil fuels we have discovered underground. And at current prices that means stranding about $100 trillion worth of assets in the soil. If you want to understand why the battle over climate progress is so fierce — why the fossil-fuel industry fights so hard, with all the political influence it can buy — remember that $100 trillion. That’s a lot of incentive.
On the face of it, then, we’re still losing this fight. But there are a few new numbers — wild cards, really — that could yet rewrite the end of this story. They cut both ways: Some of this math deepens our predicament, and some of it points toward a way out. They’re the new numbers of this past decade, and they’re big enough to stop and take notice.