Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who spoke at the Oxford forum this week, put the value of unburnable fossil fuels at $22 trillion.
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These firms do not even sense the long-term risk of sitting on vast volumes of unburnable carbon reserves, which is a carbon bubble.
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In fact, recent findings recommend that 88 percent of the world's coal reserves, 35 percent of known oil, and 52 percent of natural gas reserves are "unburnable".
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Not only are most of the known fossil fuel reserves unburnable if we want to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius, but so are any newly discovered fossil fuels.
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In the future, should they carry on as before, splurging on expensive vanity projects in hard-to-reach places, at the risk of having "unburnable" reserves as environmental concerns mount?
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If the world doesn't take ambitious steps to phase out fossil fuels, and if technological competitors to fossil fuels don't develop faster than expected, then no, unburnable carbon poses no financial risk.
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Any oil extracted from off the East Coast would be effectively "unburnable" if the world is to limit climate change to the international goal of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times, he said.
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Laurence Tubiana Chief executive, European Climate Foundation, chairwoman of the Board of Governors at the French Development Agency According to an analysis by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, from 60 to 80 percent of coal, oil and gas reserves of publicly listed companies could be classified unburnable in a 2-degree world.
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The Paris agreement commits the signatories to holding the rise in average global temperatures "well below 2 degrees C" and "pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C". But the problem with the concept of "unburnable carbon" is that it confuses what campaigners would like to happen in an ideal world with what is actually likely to happen in the real one.
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Unburnable was named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by Black Issues Book Review.
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The novel has received favourable book reviews in the United States and the Caribbean. Essence Magazine's book editor, Patrick Bass, selected Unburnable as one of three "Patrick's Pick's", commenting that "Unburnable marks the arrival of a major new voice in fiction." In Black Issues Book Review, Denise M. Doig called the novel's author "superb". Dalia King of The Trinidad Guardian in her review of the novel commented, "John weaves the weighty issues of race, sex and politics into the fabric of a historical Dominica without allowing the essential story of 'Unburnable' — that of a woman searching for her past so that she may find herself — to get lost in the novel’s own self- importance".
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The term "carbon bubble" arose in the early 21st century from the increasing awareness of the impact of fossil fuel combustion on global temperatures. The term was coined by the Carbon Tracker Initiative which published key reports in July 2011 and April 2013.Unburnable Carbon – Are the world's financial markets carrying a carbon bubble? Unburnable carbon 2013: Wasted capital and stranded assets and it was further popularised in the New Scientist magazine in October 2011.
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Unburnable is a 2006 novel written by Antiguan author Marie-Elena John and published by HarperCollins/Amistad. It is John's debut novel. Part historical fiction, murder mystery, and neo-slave narrative, Unburnable is a multi- generational saga that follows the African Diaspora in the United States and the Caribbean, offering a reinterpretation of black history. John was an Africa Development specialist in New York City and Washington, D.C. prior to turning to writing.
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Set in both contemporary Washington, D.C. and Dominica, and switching back and forth between contemporary and historical stories, Unburnable weaves together the black experience with Caribbean culture and history. Among the themes in the novel are the Caribs (the Kalinago), the Maroons, the history of Carnival and masquerade, the practice of Obeah, the fusion of African religions and Catholicism, resistance to slavery and post-colonial issues.
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Walker, T.R. (2005) Comparison of anthropogenic metal deposition rates with excess soil loading from coal, oil and gas industries in the Usa Basin, NW Russia. Polish Polar Research. 26(4): 299–314. Approximately 10% of the mass of coals burned in the United States consists of unburnable mineral material that becomes ash, so the concentration of most trace elements in coal ash is approximately 10 times the concentration in the original coal.
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Two stroke engines rely on effective scavenging in order to operate correctly. This clears out the combustion exhaust gases from the previous cycle and allows refilling with a clean mix of air and fuel. If scavenging falters, the mixture of unburnable exhaust gas with the new mixture may produce an overall charge that fails to ignite correctly. Only when this charge is enriched by a second volume of clean mixture does it become flammable again.
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Chemex coffeemaker, designed 1941. Brooklyn Museum. The Chemex coffeemaker was a consequence of intersection of Schlumbohm's scientific and marketing interests. Between his first American trip in 1931 and the filing of the U.S. patent for Chemex, Schlumbohm applied for dozens of patents, focused on his core specialty of refrigeration but also wildly diverse. Patents included applications for a ‘method of illuminating rooms’, ‘unburnable gasoline’, a ‘writing utensil’, and a ‘show window’ among many others, most of which are assumed to have been produced for sale. The final event of the process which culminated in the marketing of the Chemex was Schlumbohm's final attempt to market the ‘open system’ transitory refrigeration cycle device which he had been perfecting for some years.
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Carbon Tracker was founded by UK fund manager Mark Campanale, with Jeremy Leggett serving as chairman. The organisation's first two reportsUnburnable Carbon (2011) and Unburnable Carbon (2013)argued that up to two-thirds of the world's known reserves and resources of oil, coal and gas could not be burned while avoiding dangerous levels of climate change. As summarized by Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf: "The conclusion is quite simple: burning known reserves of fossil fuels is incompatible with meeting the climate targets governments have set themselves." The Paris Agreement, adopted internationally in December 2015, aims to keep the global average temperature rise below 2 °C of warming, to avoid and reduce some of the most severe risks and impacts of climate change. But this requires carbon dioxide levels emitted in the atmosphere by 2050 to not exceed a "carbon budget" of up to 900 gigatonnes.Malte Meinshausen, Nicolai Meinshausen, William Hare, Sarah Raper, Katja Frieler, Reto Knutti, David Frame and Myles Allen, "Greenhouse- gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2°C", Nature, volume 458, pages 1158–1163, 2009.
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The following year, Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, in his lecture to Lloyd's of London, warned that limiting global warming to 2 °C appears to require that the "vast majority" of fossil fuel reserves be "stranded assets", or "literally unburnable without expensive carbon-capture technology", resulting in "potentially huge" exposure to investors in that sector. He concluded that "the window of opportunity is finite and shrinking" for responding to the threat that climate change poses to financial resilience and longer-term prosperity, which he called the "tragedy of the horizon". That same month, the Prudential Regulation Authority of the Bank of England issued a report discussing the risks and opportunities that climate change presents to the insurance industry. In his speech announcing his denial of the proposal to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline, United States President Barack Obama gave as one reason for the decision "... ultimately, if we're going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we're going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground...".
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Drawing on research from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Carbon Tracker's reports showed that the world's reserves and resources of coal, oil and gas, if burned, would emit more than three times this amount: approximately 2800 gigatonnes. This raises the possibility that, by financing the development and production of fossil fuels that might never be consumed, investors are exposed to the risk of "stranded assets", rendered unprofitable by climate regulations and technological alternatives such as renewable energy.At about that time, the carbon budget idea was plucked from academia by Carbon Tracker, a small London think-tank founded by Mark Campanale, one of the city’s first sustainable investment analysts. Applying the research to the world’s coal mines, oil wells and gasfields, the think-tank said that to have even a small chance of meeting the 2C target, only 565 gigatonnes of CO2 could be emitted up to 2050. But the known fossil fuel reserves of energy and mining companies were equal to 2,795 gigatonnes of CO2. So if the world ever took serious action to meet the 2C goal, most of those reserves would become “unburnable” stranded assets.
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