Our present government has shown considerable enthusiasm for finding and exploiting possible undersea oil, gas and mineral reserves. We are told this could bring significant economic benefit, but there are good reasons to hesitate before going down this road.
One is highlighted by a paper titled Unburnable Carbon 2013: Wasted Capital and Stranded Assets by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change (part of the London School of Economics) and a non-profit research group called Carbon Tracker. This report concludes that in order to have a 50 per cent chance of limiting global warming to two degrees, we can emit about 1000 gigatons of CO2 between now and 2050. This is identified as our "carbon budget". It represents about a third of the Earth's estimated oil, gas and coal reserves, which means that two-thirds of those reserves will have to stay underground. The International Energy Agency agrees.
By now, most of the world's thinkers and planners understand that we need to stop emitting CO2. Even the smarter oil industry figures concede that oil is a transitional fuel.
Unfortunately, it seems that very few governments, with the notable exception of the Scandinavian countries and Germany, are willing to get serious about driving the transition. Clean energy technologies to pull this off are up and running, but fossil fuels are still heavily subsidised, both directly, and through not being required to pay for the downstream damage caused by their use.
Meanwhile, oil companies continue to look for oil in increasingly expensive and dangerous places. Extraction industry companies' share values are closely linked to their reserves. So, with governments dragging their heels on instigating carbon taxes, they are being encouraged to keep trying to fatten these reserves.
