Peak fossil fuel doesn’t mean climate change is solved

It’s certainly sounding that way. Emissions from fossil fuels — the key driver of global warming since the dawn of the industrial era — are set to peak within two years, according to Rystad Energy, an oil and gas consultancy. Carbon pollution from electricity, the sector with the biggest footprint, will never again hit the levels it reached last year, the International Energy Agency said February 8.

That’s a remarkable and somewhat unexpected achievement. Predictions of large-scale decarbonization are “the academic equivalent of science fiction,” Vaclav Smil, Bill Gates’s favorite energy thinker, argued last year. Exxon Mobil Corporation still expects petroleum demand to be growing in 2050. One of the main models used until recently to map out the future of results entirely from the remaining third, 14 billion tons a year or so, that goes into the atmosphere.

Should the land and ocean carbon sinks reach saturation and stop sucking carbon out of the skies — something that may occur on land in a matter of decades — then even a reduction of our emissions may be insufficient to stop the atmosphere’s carbon concentration from going up and cooking the planet.


Changing the natural environment was the first way human technology started to bend this world to suit our needs, dating back to the dawn of fire agriculture 80,000 years or so ago. In comparison to two centuries or so of industrialization, that ancient practice may be far harder to reverse.