Big Oil Thrives – So Does the Planet

There is a possible Climate Change compromise where Big Oil can still do business, and the climate returns to something like normal. I used to think that Big Oil had to be closed down. Science learns from its mistakes. I made a mistake and have learned.

My initial climate model assumed that carbon emissions had to fall to zero in order to stop global overheating and catastrophic climate change. This would mean that fossil fuel companies would be put out of business. No wonder they were fighting back with every dirty trick in the book. But I was wrong. I had overlooked the natural sequestration of carbon on land and more importantly by the oceans.

This was an easy mistake to make, and I’ve seen a number of scientific papers that make the same mistake. This is because carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a persistent gas with no natural processes that act to change it into something else. Other gases like methane react in the atmosphere to turn into other gases and so have a half-life, of about a decade for methane. Carbon dioxide stays there forever- except it doesn’t. That was the mistake.

When plants grow they take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is also absorbed by water. Rain water is actually weak carboxylic acid because the water has absorbed carbon dioxide. This is why it eats caves into limestone. The oceans also absorb carbon dioxide. This is natural carbon sequestration, but how big is the effect?

Two Percent Saves the Day

Historically, before the industrial revolution pumped all this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it is generally accepted that the level of carbon dioxide was about 280 ppm. This was for a normal, stable, balanced carbon cycle. It is now well over 410 ppm. I made a guess that the further out of balance, the further away from normal, the larger the quantity of carbon dioxide and carbon naturally sequestered. When I crunched the numbers this graph seemed to confirm my guess.

Since around 1950 it looks like somewhere between 1.5% and 2% of excess carbon dioxide is naturally sequestered.

The consequences of this are that where our carbon dioxide emissions should be increasing ppm by about 4 every year, the measured amount is only increasing by about 2 ppm.

This why the world can reduce carbon dioxide levels, and global overheating, by reducing carbon emissions to only something like 20% to 25% of current levels and not to zero.

The following graph illustrates this, and forms the core of my plan to reverse global overheating and climate chaos.

So the demand from climate activists needs to be that carbon emissions globally, are reduced to sustainable levels as quickly as possible.

My preferred method to achieve this is with a Global Carbon Extraction Quota, as detailed in my plan.