Keep it in the ground?
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Integrated assessment modelling
11 min read
The article extensively discusses IAM scenarios and their 1.5C warming projections. Understanding how these complex models work, what they can and cannot predict, and their role in climate policy would provide crucial context for evaluating the article's claims about overshoot scenarios.
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Representative Concentration Pathway
10 min read
The article references RCP2.6 as the pre-Paris ambitious scenario. Understanding what RCPs are, how they differ from each other, and why they were developed would help readers grasp the evolution of climate target-setting and why 1.5C was such a dramatic shift.
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Carbon budget
10 min read
The article mentions 'vanishingly small carbon budget' and the relationship between cumulative emissions and warming (220 gigatons CO2 = 0.1C). Understanding how carbon budgets are calculated, their uncertainties, and why they constrain policy options is fundamental to the supply vs. demand debate.
Recently there has been quite a debate online about the extent to which opposing near-term oil and gas infrastructure – pipelines, refineries, new production – is both necessary and politically effective as a strategy to reduce US emissions. These conversations have occurred in the context of a broader pivot toward affordability as a rallying cry of the left in the US, driven by concerns around the rapidly rising cost of housing, energy, and other goods.
Matt Yglesias had a provocative piece in the NYT arguing that liberals should be less opposed to oil and gas, arguing that it might help make energy more affordable and win more conservative states and labor (without which there would be no climate policy at all). He also noted that US oil and gas is generally lower carbon than foreign alternatives in a world that is still using vast amounts of the stuff. Policies, in his view, should focus on making production cleaner by more strictly regulating methane emissions, in-sector electrification, and other best practices rather than restricting supply. Other mitigation advocates like Jesse Jenkins and Ramez Naam chimed in to support the broad thrust of his argument.
This is, it is worth pointing out, not too far from the policies pursued by both the Obama and Biden1 administrations, where both clean energy and domestic oil and gas production boomed (while the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal, saw a dramatic decline).
Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) posted a long rebuttal on BlueSky arguing that we’ve already overshot our climate goals, and the only way to turn things around is to keep fossil fuels in the ground. He noted that what is politically popular is not always what is right, and that sometimes politicians need to do what is necessary to meet the moment. He also notes that leakage from US gas “makes natural gas worse than coal from a global warming perspective.”
These responses broadly reflect two different schools of thought on how to best practically (and politically) achieve decarbonization goals: by reducing fossil fuel supplies, or by reducing fossil fuel demands.
The physical science is absolutely clear that to stop the world from warming we need to get global emissions of CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases to (net) zero. Every 220 gigatons (billion tons) of CO2 we emit warms the surface by around 0.1C, and the world is already at 1.4C above preindustrial levels today. ...
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