Future CO2 Emissions and Climate Change from Existing Energy Infrastructure

By H. Nakamura, A. Rubio, D. Tománek, D. Merchin, K. Iakoubovskii. Science, 2010

1,310 citations recorded by the source corpus.

What We're In For What would our climate future look like if we stopped building any new infrastructure that used fossil fuels? Davis et al. (p. 1330; see the Perspective by Hoffert) made the assumption that all existing infrastructure will be used until the end of its lifetime, after which it will be replaced by infrastructure that does not produce CO2. They then calculated the amount of additional CO2 that will be added to the atmosphere. The outcome is that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 would remain below 430 parts per million (ppm) (present levels are 390 ppm) and global mean temperatures would increase to 1.3°C above preindustrial values (about 0.5°C above present), well below current targets of 450 ppm and 2°C, respectively. Operation of current energy infrastructure through its projected lifetime would limit carbon dioxide increases to 10 percent. Slowing climate change requires overcoming inertia in political, technological, and geophysical systems. Of these, only geophysical warming commitment has been quantified. We estimated the commitment to future emissions and warming represented by existing carbon dioxide–emitting devices. We calculated cumulative future emissions of 496 (282 to 701 in lower- and upper-bounding scenarios) gigatonnes of CO2 from combustion of fossil fuels by existing infrastructure between 2010 and 2060, forcing mean warming of 1.3°C (1.1° to 1.4°C) above the pre-industrial era and atmospheric concentrations of CO2 less than 430 parts per million. Because these conditions would likely avoid many key impacts of climate change, we conclude that sources of the most threatening emissions have yet to be built. However, CO2-emitting infrastructure will expand unless extraordinary efforts are undertaken to develop alternatives.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db4c6a0618b42ae6cd4dfb0c62788516e2623e3a

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Citations in the corpus

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The decomposition of energy-related carbon emission and its decoupling with economic growth in China (2015, background): “3 1C compared to the level during the pre-industrial revolution period [2].”
Carbon Lock-In: Types, Causes, and Policy Implications (2016, neutral): “D w n l B ou d e r Political scientists, sociologists, and other social scientists have developed theories of institutional lock-in as part of broader theories of institutional stability and change, reﬂecting the view that institutional .”
Carbon Lock-Out: Advancing Renewable Energy Policy in Europe (2012, background): “Sunk investments, or more generally, long-liveability of capital stock create further inertia in the energy system [10,11].”
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