If we want to have a 66 per cent chance of keeping below 1.5°C, we can pump no more than another 205 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere between 2015 and the end of the century.55 This is known as the ‘carbon budget’. At our current rate of emissions, we are pumping 40 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, which means the 1.5°C budget will be blown by 2020.56 To limit ourselves to 205 gigatons of CO2 will take a monumental effort, given that the world’s fossil fuel reserves currently contain more than 2,600 gigatons’ worth of CO2. These are reserves that are known
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