Category: Mitigation

Feasibility and affordability of reducing greenhouse gas emissions

By Ajay Gambhir, Research fellow on mitigation policy at the Grantham Institute

The United Nations Climate Summit 2014, to be held in New York on 23rd September, comes at an important point in the calendar for discussions on how to address climate change. Next year will see nations submit pledges on their future greenhouse gas emissions levels, as part of the United Nations process culminating in the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP) in Paris at the end of 2015, the ambition of which is to secure a global agreement to tackle climate change.

There is now a rich body of evidence on the implications of mitigation at the global, regional and national levels.

Stranding our fossil assets or stranding the planet

By Helena Wright, Research Postgraduate, Centre for Environmental Policy

Earlier this month Carbon Tracker came to Imperial College London to discuss their report on ‘Unburnable Carbon’.  The report outlines research which shows between 60-80% of coal, oil and gas reserves of publicly listed companies are ‘unburnable’ if the world is to have a chance of keeping global warming below the globally-agreed limit of 2°C.  The event was followed by a lively debate.

The research, led by the Grantham Research Institute at LSE and the Carbon Tracker Initiative, outlines the thesis that a ‘carbon bubble’ exists in the stock market, as companies with largely ‘unburnable’ fossil fuel reserves are being overvalued.

2014 – A pivotal year for CCS?

By Dr Niall Mac Dowell, Centre for Environmental Policy

For centuries, all of the world’s economies have been underpinned by fossil fuels.  Historically, this has primarily been oil and coal, but since the mid-1980s natural gas has become increasingly important. Over the course of the last decades, there has been an increasing focus on electricity generation from renewable sources, and since about 1990 carbon capture and storage (CCS) has become an important part of the conversation around the mitigation of our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The role of CCS in addressing our GHG mitigation targets is clear and unambiguous – see for example the IEA CCS technology roadmaps which show that by 2050, almost 8 GtCO2/yr needs to be sequestered via CCS; a cumulative of 120 GtCO2 in the period from 2015 to 2050.