A globalist, climate-alarmist group from the United Kingdom is telling the United States and certain other wealthy nations that they must get completely out of the fossil-fuel production business by 2034 for the world to have the best chance of keeping global temperature increase below the 1.5° Celsius benchmark called for by the United Nations. The Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research argues that this will give nations more dependent on the sale of oil and other fossil fuels more time to divest from fossil fuels.
“Countries such as South Sudan, the Republic of Congo and Gabon have little economic revenue apart from oil and gas production. By contrast, wealthy nations that are major producers would remain rich even if fossil fuel income were removed,” the report states.
The report, titled Phaseout Pathways for Fossil Fuel Production, argues that in order to have a 50/50 chance of meeting or exceeding the 1.5° C limit for halting global temperature rise. In order to have those less-than-stellar odds, wealthier nations such as the United States must essentially donate their own production abilities to poorer nations that rely heavily on fossil fuels as a large portion of their economy.
“Wealthy nations that are major producers, typically remain wealthy even once the oil and gas revenue is removed,” the report claims. For instance, oil and natural gas revenue in the United States contributes approximately eight percent to the U.S. GDP. But if you remove that oil and natural gas revenue from the U.S. economy, the report claims that GDP per person would still be approximately $60,0000 in the United States.
The report calls for the United States, the U.K., Norway, Canada, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates to get completely out of the fossil-fuel business by 2034. Currently this group of nations is responsible for 35 percent of global oil and gas. The report calls for a 74-percent production reduction by these nations by 2030, phasing down to zero production by 2034.
Fourteen other high-capacity countries, including Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, and Kuwait, will have to decrease production by 43 percent by 2030 and cease production entirely by 2039. The next 11 countries, described as medium-capacity countries, include China, Mexico, and Brazil, and would need to cut production 28 percent by 2030 with complete production phase out by 2043.
The report calls for poor nations such as Iraq, Libya, and Angola to continue producing fossil-fuel energy until 2050. What happens then? Is there a new power source set to meet all of our energy needs ready to take over at that point? Can those poorer nations even meet the global need for those energy resources?
The report uses the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that remains once energy production is taken away as the sole indicator of what nations it schedules to cease production of fossil fuels and when.
The study’s lead author, Kevin Anderson, a climate-change researcher at the University of Manchester, explains, “We use the GDP per capita that remains once we’ve removed the revenue from oil and gas as an indicator of capacity,” Anderson explained.
“We calculated emissions phase-out dates for all of them consistent with the Paris Agreement temperature goals,” Anderson said. “We found that wealthy countries need to be at zero oil and gas production by 2034.”
Those calculations are all well and good but, at some point, the climate-alarmist community needs to join the real world. In the United States alone, PriceWaterhouseCoopers estimates that the oil and natural gas industry supports nearly 10 million employees, some 5.6 percent of total U.S. employment.
What are those employees supposed to do when their jobs are axed for the sake of climate fanaticism? Learn to code?
In the end, this report is yet another example of people with little understanding of the real world, where people must go to work and earn money for their families, setting arbitrary deadlines on when nations must act to prevent another arbitrary measure — the 1.5-2.0° Celsius limit on global warming — from possibly (not surely) being breached.
