The three options in the article are accurate (tax, compete, or capture). I work in solar, and the consensus in the industry is that #2 is happening first (solar and wind are currently replacing coal). #1 will start to happen over the next few decades as the effects of climate change have more of an impact on society (e.g. the California drought). #3 won't likely happen since #1 will probably be cheaper.<p>Anyway, I'm a chemical engineer from UT-Austin, so most of my graduating class went into oil. I have a standing $100 bet with two of them that they will not retire in the oil industry.<p>Finally, I don't understand why more entrepreneurs don't do startups in energy. 87% of the world energy sources will have to change in the next 35 years. To most, that sounds scary. However, to an entrepreneur like me, that sounds like a huge ceiling.
The cheap and easy energy of fossil fuels made the leap to modern civilization possible. Beyond the environmental and social impacts of continuing to use fossil fuels when alternatives exist, would (hypothetically) post-apocalyptic humanity be able to reboot civilization if all the easy fossil fuels have been mined?
"An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye." [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem</a>
> protecting the world from climate change requires the even more difficult task of disrupting today’s energy markets.<p>Let's not mince words, the plan is and has been to manipulate the energy market through coercive authority. Calling this "disrupting" is the most cringe-worthy instance of that term I've ever seen in print (and there is a lot of competition).
The calculation seems a bit dubious. They apparently assume a linear relationship between carbon emitted and temperature change. "Following the National Academy of Sciences (2011), we take 1.75°C per 1,000 GtC emitted as the central best estimate."<p>However doubling CO2 does not double the amount of radiation it absorbs. CO2 absorbs at certain particular wavelengths and even if you make the atmosphere 100% CO2 it can only absorb all the light at those wavelengths and remain clear at others. In fact replacing everything in the atmosphere, including water vapour with CO2 would probably make the Earth cooler as the biggest green house effect is from water vapour.<p>There's some discussion here, admittedly from a skeptical source without full citations suggesting far lower warming from increases in CO2.<p><a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-effectiveness-of-co2-as-a-greenhouse-gas-becomes-ever-more-marginal-with-greater-concentration/" rel="nofollow">http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-effectiveness-of-c...</a>
The title says "All Our Fossil Fuels" but they really mean something like "all the fossil fuels we are likely to dig up given reasonable economic assumptions." If they really meant "all" the fossil fuel, the results would be worse than they suggest.<p>If you consider this:<p>"The climate of the Cretaceous is less certain and more widely disputed. Average temperatures were higher than today by about 18 degrees F (10 degrees C)."<p><a href="http://what-when-how.com/global-warming/mesozoic-era-global-warming/" rel="nofollow">http://what-when-how.com/global-warming/mesozoic-era-global-...</a><p>Then this seems a bit odd:<p>"an astonishing 16.2 degrees"<p>That sounds accurate if they mean Celsius but this is the New York Times, which I believe uses Fahrenheit as a matter of style, and they write: "Scientists predict global disaster at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over pre-industrial temperatures; there is enough fossil fuel extracted and within reach to raise temperatures 16.2 degrees" which confirms the use of Fahrenheit.<p>It's frightening to consider the impact it would have if we really did dig up all the fossil fuel, including the stuff that we probably won't be able to reach. It's worth thinking about, since technological breakthroughs now allow us to reach a great deal of fossil fuel that was considered uneconomic 30 years ago and, likewise, 30 years from now we might be able to reach fossil fuel that we now consider unreachable.<p>Assuming large concentrations of life, allowing the formation of fossil fuels, starts with the Cambrian, or a bit after, we can say that "all our fossil fuels" refers to the deposits that built up over the course of 500 million years. If we dug all of that up and burned all of it, then we should arrive at a temperature that is a bit hotter than anything that ever occurred before. If the Mesozoic saw average temperatures that were 10 degrees Celsius higher than today, then something like 16 degrees Celsius would be a reasonable guess. Or higher.
I'm not sure this kind of headline is helpful. We should try to stop burning fossil fuels but that will mean that we can use them to produce petrochemicals for longer, the known reserves still have value.
We are going to have waste heat gather in our atmosphere, from whatever energy sources we attempt to capture, and use and store. This move toward renewables, doesn't solve the problem. We need a lever to offload waste heat and we aren't even looking at it in the proper perspective. Eventually, it looks like we'll be living underground, no matter what solutions we devise in this next 1000 year interim.