Part Four / What We’ve Done About It

4.2 The New Denialism

All online sources accessed on

  1. under eight years at the current rate of emissions Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. V. Masson-Delmotte et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press), https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/. This figure is based on the carbon budget for a 67 per cent chance of staying below 1.5°C (see Table SPM.2), updated with the latest emissions data for 2020 and 2021. The budget is then divided by current global emissions of CO2 for 2021. This gives under eight years at current emissions levels.

    fewer than 20 years’ worth of current emissions remain Ibid. Calculated using the 83 per cent chance of staying below 2°C (reflecting the language of ‘well below 2°C’) from Table SPM.2.

    by around 2035, we would need to have eliminated the use of all fossil fuels Anderson, K., et al., ‘A factor of two: how the mitigation plans of ‘climate progressive’ nations fall far short of Paris-compliant pathways’, Climate Policy, 20 (10), 2020: 1290–1304, https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2020.1728209. The global carbon budget (for a 67% chance of not exceeding 1.5°C) is taken from the latest IPCC report (Assessment Report 6 – AR6). The IPCC give a global carbon budget of 400 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, but this value is from the start of 2020. Between then and the start of 2022, a further 80 billion tonnes of CO2 has been emitted (globally), dropping the budget to around 320 billion tonnes. With the focus here being on fossil fuels, some of the remaining budget will be required for what are referred to as industrial process emissions (principally from cement production) and for any net land-based CO2 emissions. A very optimistic interpretation of these is around 60 billion tonnes, leaving a fossil fuel carbon budget of around 260 billion tonnes. This approach is detailed in the above ‘Factor of Two’ paper.

  2. the top 1 per cent … give rise to twice the emissions Kartha, S., et al., The Carbon Inequality Era: An Assessment of the Global Distribution of Consumption Emissions among Individuals from 1990 to 2015 and Beyond, Stockholm Environment Institute and Oxfam, 21 September 2020, https://doi.org/10.21201/2020.6492.

    that alone would cut global emissions by around one third Global Carbon Atlas, http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org/en/CO2-emissions; Chancel, L., and Piketty, T., Carbon and Inequality: From Kyoto to Paris. Trends in the Global Inequality of Carbon Emissions (1998–2013) and Prospects for an Equitable Adaptation Fund, Paris School of Economics working paper, 3 November 2015, http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ChancelPiketty2015.pdf. This is a simple calculation based on data from the Global Carbon Atlas and the analysis in Chancel and Piketty’s report.