"A new study finds we’ve already installed enough fossil fuel infrastructure to commit to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of planetary warming, even without new planned installations."
"The world’s existing power plants, industrial plants, buildings and cars are already numerous enough — and young enough — to commit the Earth to an unacceptable level of warming, according to new research published Monday.
This fossil fuel infrastructure merely needs to continue operating over the course of its expected lifetime, and the world will emit over 650 billion tons of carbon dioxide, more than enough to dash chances of limiting the Earth’s warming to a rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s a level of warming that has become increasingly accepted as a scientific line-in-the-sand.
And it gets worse: Proposals and plans are currently afoot for additional coal plants and other infrastructure that would add another nearly 200 billion tons of emissions to that total. Some of these are now actually under construction. In other words, human societies would need not only to cancel all such pending projects but also timeout existing projects early, in order to bring emissions down adequately."
