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The Fossil Fuel Industry and the Case for Divestment
By staff - Toronto350, April 10, 2015
The governments of the world — including the governments of Canada, the United States (U.S.), the United Kingdom (U.K.), China, Brazil, and the 27 European Union (EU) members — have agreed we should avoid raising global temperatures to more than 2 ̊C above pre-industrial levels.1 This is the threshold at which the major governments of the world have agreed that climate change becomes “dangerous”. In 2009, an article in Nature warned that failing to constrain warming to below 2 ̊C “would threaten the ecological life- support systems that have developed in the late Quaternary environment, and would severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies”. In the Summary for Policymakers from their Fifth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) explains:
Without additional mitigation eforts beyond those in place today, and even with adapta- tion, warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally.
Based on hundreds of thousands of years of evidence on how the climate responds to greenhouse gases (GHGs), we can calculate the total quantity of all fossil fuels we can burn, adding the carbon they contain to the atmosphere, while still giving ourselves a good chance of avoiding a 2 ̊C increase.7 To do so we must keep future GHG pollution to no more than 565 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of carbon dioxide (CO2).8 At the same time, we know that burning the world’s proven reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas would produce 2,795 gigatonnes of CO2 — nearly ive times as much as it would be safe to burn.91011 The University of Toronto (U of T) can play a role in helping humanity stay within these planetary limits by choosing to sell its investments in fossil fuel companies.
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