More about carbon dioxide emissions per head
I attended a fascinating lunchtime talk by Dr Michael Molitor from Price Waterhouse Coopers on Thursday 22nd May. His figures were of CO2e or including the other gases such as methane, nitrous oxides and others with CO2 as a “carbon dioxide equivalent”.
When we look at CO2e the figures are very interesting. Globally the average per person is 8 tons of CO2e. The Average Australian emits 28 tons CO2e per person and Queenslanders emit 41 tons CO2e per person (the extra is coal related).
The average person in China emits 4 tons CO2e. Because so much of our total emission is coal related we do have opportunities to reduce this. One major issue is that China is replicating our entire power grid every 8 months with coal fired power stations. I have just returned from Newcastle with is a major coal exporting port and the amount of coal being exported is mind blowing. That wonderful “fount of all wisdom and information” the taxi driver, was saying that at times the queue of waiting coal carrying ships is as many as 60, hanging outside the port. The scale of the export that I saw was HUGE.
Globally we need to stabilise at 1ton of CO2e per person. The current best guess at the average cost of reducing 1 ton CO2e is US$50 so to remove the 750 billion tons of CO2e that we need is around UD$37.50-$40 trillion. At the same time we need to keep growing the global economy so that all humans can lead sustainable and healthy lives. There are some interesting balancing acts here.
Some interesting facts Michael told us were that if we were to replace all cars with hybrid vehicles like the Prius, the net effect would be negative because the CO2e used in replacing the other vehicles would well and truly outweigh the improvements in reduction due to the hybrid engine. It is a similar story apparently with Qantas’s move to 22% more efficiency in the new airbus engines they have ordered. This is because of the increase in air traffic.
There is a flow on effect now into global financial markets and the carbon disclosures required for stock market reporting. Carbon is impacting on share price. Look at the Carbon Disclosure Project at www.cdproject.net.
The coal value chain is under pressure. 69 of 84 new US coal fired power plants have been stopped. Canada has a 2012 ban on coal fired power plants (sorry I was unclear whether this was existing or new and I would welcome feedback from you)
The good news in Australia is that it is possible to reduce our emission to 30% at NO net cost as we have a very large pool of low cost abatements.
Technorati Tags: carbon dioxide emissions, carbon dioxide, emissions, CO2, Dr Michael Molitor from Price Waterhouse Coopers, CO2e, global warming