Ten years ago, on this day, February 15, 2013, a journo for the Melbourne Age writes a piece about the then-all-the-rage topic of “unburnable carbon”
Energy analysts and activists warn that most of the world’s fossil fuels must remain in the ground, and that it can’t be business as usual for the industry.
Green, M. 2013. Bursting the carbon bubble. The Age,15 February, p.16.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 397ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
This “unburnable carbon”/”carbon bubble rhetoric was all the rage 10 years ago. It looked like the UNFCCC process was going to be a slow route back to feeling that the system could deliver. Copenhagen had been a failure, Paris was two and a half years off and it was still not clear that it would provide anything. So all those people who need to believe that there are levers and buttons in the policy sphere that we can push turn their attention to the idea that investors rather than statesmen could solve the problems; they just needed to be given stark advice that investing in stranded assets was a bad idea.
How do you strand an asset? Well, ultimately, you need to have markets and regulations that make some investments,a bad idea and other investments a better one. How would you do that on carbon? Well, you would need a strong legally binding international agreement (which you can’t get), and therefore, we’re all toast.
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What I think we can learn from this
Using one “part” of the financial system – whether it is the re-insurers, the insurers, the institutional investors as the leverage point, the secret push-this-button-to-change-the-system is a long-standing and soothing idea for a certain kind of climate-motivated person. Some of them are super-smart. This does not mean they are right.
Unburnable carbon as a meme allowed people to hold conferences, put out press releases, videos, get interviewed on Newsnight and podcasts and generally feel that things were still salvageable. Am I too cynical? My therapist says so.(1)
What happened next
You hear less about unburnable carbon these days, now that Paris and Net Zero are flooding the zone.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
- As someone who read this before publication said – “I understand the dynamics of hoping there is a secret lever to pull, but in dismissing that at the same time as providing a psychological sort of explanation for why people keep coming back to this, you might be throwing the baby out with the bath water. There may not be a simple lever we can pull, but even if a mass movement formed which highly organized, highly effective and coordinated, competent, resourceful and dedicated, in the way you would like to see, it would still end up having to deal with the power of capital and would be highly involved in trying to pull these various “levers”
References and See Also
IPIECA on the concepts…
July 2022 “Unburnable Carbon Ten Years On.”