Latest IPCC Report: Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change Will Require Leaving Most Remaining Fossil Fuels in the Ground

The Suncor refinery in Commerce City near Denver, Colorado. (iPhone photomosaic: © Tom Yulsman) If humanity is to avoid dangerous impacts from climate change, we're going to have to do something that seems almost unthinkable: walk away from the massive riches of fossil fuels still left in the ground. For me, that's the key message of the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released yesterday. The problem, of course, is that right now the world is headed in precisely the opposite direction. While U.S. energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide were about 10 percent lower in 2013 than they were at their peak in 2007, and European nations are struggling to reduce their own emissions, huge growth in the developing world is helping to push anthropogenic emissions of CO2 ever higher. Thanks to all of the carbon that the developing world has pumped into the atmosphere since the ...