carbon emissions

In February 2008, airline Virgin Atlantic conducted a test flight using a biofuel made from coconut and babassu oil... During Virgin’s test flight from London to Amsterdam, the Boeing 747 consumed 22 tonnes of fuel, of which only 5 per cent was neat biofuel. Producing even that much required the equivalent of 150,000 coconuts... Had this single flight been run entirely on biofuel, it would have consumed 3 million coconuts

CO2 emissions, 2003 (tonnes per capita):

Luxemborg - 24.3
USA - 20.0
UK - 9.5
Bangladesh - 0.24
Ethiopia - 0.06

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm ... If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.

Two degrees Celsius is guaranteed disaster... It is equivalent to the early Pliocene epoch [between 5.5 and 2.5 million years ago] when the sea level was 25m higher. What we don't know is how long it takes ice sheets to disintegrate, but we know we'd be starting a process which then is going to be out of control. Because the way it works – the planet is out of energy balance, most of the additional energy is going into the ocean, which melts the ice shelves, which then allows the ice sheets to discharge ice more rapidly – if you want to stop that and you've pushed it up to two degrees, then you've got to cool off the ocean. Well that's going to take hundreds of years. So you would have a situation which can't be fixed except with some geo-engineering, which is a pretty awful inheritance to leave for our children....

We've reached a point where it's clear we can't burn all the coal or unconventional fossil fuels [such as oil from tar sands, deepwater drilling and sources revealed by melting ice]. We've got to phase them out. The large pools of oil and gas that are readily available to Russia, Saudi Arabia and the Middle Eastern countries is enough to get us well over 450ppm1.

• 1. In 2008 Hansen published a paper with some ten co-authors, "Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?" which redefined our understanding of what constitutes dangerous climate change. It concluded that we need to reduce the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 390 parts per million (ppm) to below 350

The Ecological Footprint tracks the area of biologically productive land and water required to provide the renewable resources people use, and includes the space needed for infrastructure and vegetation to absorb waste carbon dioxide (CO2). It also shows a consistent trend: one of continuous growth (Figure 2). In 2007, the most recent year for which data is available, the Footprint exceeded the Earth’s biocapacity — the area actually available to produce renewable resources and absorb CO2 — by 50 per cent. Overall, humanity’s Ecological Footprint has doubled since 1966. This growth in ecological overshoot is largely attributable to the carbon footprint, which has increased 11-fold since 1961... However, not everybody has an equal footprint and there are enormous differences between countries, particularly those at different economic levels and levels of development.

• Between 2002 - 2008, the US federal government provided substantially larger subsidies to fossil fuels than to renewables. Subsidies to fossil fuels — a mature, developed industry that has enjoyed government support for many years — totaled approximately $72 billion , representing a direct cost to taxpayers.
• About 98 percent of that went to conventional energy sources, namely coal and oil, leading to more emissions. The rest, $2.3 billion, was pumped into a new technology to trap and store carbon dioxide spewed by coal plants.
• Subsidies for renewable fuels, a relatively young and developing industry, totaled $29 billion over the same period.