{"id":3936,"date":"2015-12-19T09:43:35","date_gmt":"2015-12-19T14:43:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/climatechange\/?p=3936"},"modified":"2015-12-21T10:41:38","modified_gmt":"2015-12-21T15:41:38","slug":"legal-implications-of-the-paris-agreement-for-fossil-fuels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/climatechange\/2015\/12\/19\/legal-implications-of-the-paris-agreement-for-fossil-fuels\/","title":{"rendered":"Legal Implications of the Paris Agreement for Fossil Fuels"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"smokestack\"<\/a>By Michael B. Gerrard, Director<\/em><\/p>\n

The Paris Agreement on climate change reached on December 12, 2015 has a heavily negotiated sentence that, when closely read, seems to call for the virtual end of fossil fuel use in this century unless there are major advances in carbon sequestration or air capture technology. That, in turn, has important legal implications.<\/p>\n

Article 4 Par. 1 says, \u201cIn order to achieve the long-term temperature goal \u2026 Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible \u2026 and to achieve rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, what goes up should be taken back down: for every ton of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted from a smokestack, tailpipe or chopped tree, a ton should be removed.<\/p>\n

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The Numbers<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change\u2019s Fifth Assessment Report<\/a> (2014), fossil fuel use emits about 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year. Other sources, such as methane leakage, cement manufacture, and other industrial processes add another 5-7 gigatons carbon dioxide equivalent. Deforestation and agriculture, forestry and other land use changes (but subtracting emissions sequestered by forest growth) add yet another 10-12 gigatons a year.\u00a0 This all adds up to about 49 gigatons. However, global carbon sinks remove only about 18 gigatons per year (8.8 to the oceans, 9.2 to land, not including land use changes).<\/p>\n

Thus the sinks take up about the equivalent of the non-fossil sources. In order to achieve a \u201cbalance\u201d between emissions and sinks, we need to just about end the release of GHGs from fossil fuels, though a radical increase in sinks or reduction of non-fossil fuel emissions would provide some slack.<\/p>\n

Assuming that some kind of balance between emissions and sinks can be achieved, would we actually have until 2099 to decarbonize the economy, as these numbers imply is needed?\u00a0 Not really. Kelly Levin, Jennifer Morgan and Jiawei Song at the World Resources Institute provide here<\/a> \u00a0an illuminating overview of what is required to achieve the long-term temperature goal in Article 2 of the Paris Agreement (\u201cholding the increase in global average temperature to well below 2\u00b0 C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit temperature increase to 1.5\u00b0 C\u201d). As the WRI post notes, a recent paper<\/a> in Nature Climate Change<\/em> suggests that carbon dioxide from electricity would have to be brought close to zero by 2050, and by then around 25 per cent of energy required for transportation would also need to come from electricity (up from less than one per cent now).<\/p>\n

There seem to be only three ways to continue to use fossil fuels for electricity in the second half of the century (and for transport by the end of the century) and still meet the temperature goal:<\/p>\n