A Hard Deadline: We Must Stop Building New Carbon Infrastructure by 2018

In only three years there will be enough fossil fuel-burning stuff—cars, homes, factories, power plants, etc.—built to blow through our carbon budget for a 2 degrees Celsius temperature rise.  Never mind staying below a safer, saner 1.5°C of global warming.  The relentless laws of physics have given us a hard, non-negotiable deadline, making G7 statements about a fossil fuel-phase out by 2100 or a weak deal at the UN climate talks in Paris irrelevant.

By 2018, no new cars, homes, schools, factories, or electrical power plants should be built anywhere in the world, ever again unless they’re either replacements for old ones or are carbon neutral?
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Steve Davis of the University of California and co-author Robert Socolow of Princeton University published a groundbreaking paper in Environmental Research Letters last August, entitled Commitment accounting of CO2 emissions.  A new coal plant will emit CO2 throughout its 40- to 60- year lifespan.  That’s called a carbon commitment.  A new truck or car will mean at least 10 years of CO2 emissions.  Davis and Socolow’s study estimated how much CO2 will be emitted by most things that burn oil, gas, or coal, and it is the first to actually total up all of these carbon commitments.

Based on their work, I estimated that if we continue to build new fossil fuel burning stuff at the average rate of the last five years, we’ll make enough new carbon commitments to blow through our 2°C carbon budget sometime in 2018.
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There is a slow shift underway to replace fossil fuels, but it’s not happening nearly fast enough considering the massive carbon commitments in the stuff we already have built—and continue to build.  Politicians, business leaders, investors, planners, bureaucrats don’t seem to understand this.  They don’t seem to truly grasp that decisions made today commit us and every generation that follows to greater levels of CO2.  At some point those decisions will be undone.  What was built will be abandoned at enormous cost.  We should not forget who deserves the blame and the bill.

This is what the upcoming Paris climate talks are actually about

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