“Carbon Bombs” - Mapping Key Fossil Fuel Projects

Fossil fuel companies are planning nearly 195 projects capable of producing at least a billion tons of CO2 pollution.

• The document identifies the 425 biggest fossil fuel extraction projects globally (defined as >1 gigaton potential CO2 emissions). We list these “carbon bombs” by name, show in which countries they are located and calculate their potential emissions which combined exceed the global 1.5 °C carbon budget by a factor of two.

• Climate change mitigation efforts cannot ignore carbon bombs. Defusing them could become an important dimension of climate change mitigation policy and activism towards meeting the Paris targets. So far, few actors, mainly from civil society, are working on defusing carbon bombs, but they are focussing on a very limited number of them. We outline a priority agenda where the key strategies are avoiding the activation of new carbon bombs and putting existing ones into “harvest mode”.

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421522001756?via%3Dihub