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The transition from fossil fuels must be carefully managed to avoid an economically disastrous bursting of the "carbon bubble," the World Bank's top climate official said on Saturday.
Decades of reliance on oil, gas and coal have made them central to the global economy, and polluting industries risk a potentially catastrophic crash as the world shifts to alternative energies, said Rachel Kyte, the Bank's special envoy for climate change.
"If we accept that we need to have less carbon in our growth, then we might have a financial risk associated with the prominence in our economy of companies who are heavily invested in carbon. That's the whole question of the carbon bubble," Kyte told AFP on the sidelines of the World Bank's annual meeting in Lima, Peru.
"financial risk associated with the prominence in our economy of companies who are heavily invested in carbon." Break out the tissues, everyone.
(Score: 1) by tekk on Tuesday October 13 2015, @09:20PM
Actually that's a pretty interesting misconception. We won't be turning into oil, and neither will anything else. I don't have a citation as usual, but I recall that all the oil was only created because it was from plant matter before bacteria had evolved to break it down, and so it never decomposed properly and left us with oil, coal, all those nice things.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday October 14 2015, @01:38PM
Thomas Gold [wikipedia.org] had a theory, and significant evidence, that a large majority of "fossil fuels" was in fact primordial. That is, it was simply incorporated into the planet as it accreted and slowly made its way to the surface because it was less dense than rock.
There is significant biological contamination (he also wrote a book about that - "The Deep Hot Biosphere"), but he claimed actual source of hydrocarbons was not biological.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.