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Apr 2020) Cars to drive or a planet to live in? A numerical assessment. | Ideas from Brussels and York | Brussels Blog
20th Apr 2020
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee reported:
In the long-term, widespread personal vehicle ownership does not appear to be compatible with significant decarbonisation.
Was the committee correct?
A crude test is to compare personal remaining carbon budgets with the emissions from personal vehicles, aka cars.
1 The fair personal remaining carbon budget
The remaining carbon budget how much CO2 can be released into the atmosphere to limit global warming to a given temperature.
Tim Jackson has estimated the UK’s fair share of the remaining carbon budget. For a 1.5°C rise (with a 66% chance of success) the UK’s share is 2.5 billion tonnes CO2. With a UK population of 66 million, this amounts to a “fair personal remaining carbon budget” of 38 tonnes CO2.
Rogelj et al. have estimated that to keep the Earth’s temperature rise to a maximum of 1.5°C (with a 66% chance of success) the remaining carbon budget is 320 billion tonnes of CO2. With a global population of 7.8 billion, that amounts to just over 40 tonnes CO2 each.
These estimates are for CO2 only: They do not include the effects of other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide.
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