14 DAY TRIAL // World leaders are bending over backwards to limit global warming to just 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and almost all talks boil down to the urgent need to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Every once in a while, they mention something called the “carbon budget,” and say that it's very important not to break it.
For those who aren't all that familiar with this concept, here's a 90-second video detailing what the carbon budget is, how it works and what breaking it will lead to.
Kelly Levin, a climate policy expert at the World Resources Institute, says that the carbon budget is basically the amount of emissions that we can be released into out planet's atmosphere before the chances to limit global warming to just 2 degrees Celsius go from slim to none.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has agreed on a carbon budget of 1 trillion metric tons.
The bad news is that the world has already gone through half of it, and, under a business-as-usual scenario, will exhaust the rest in about three more decades.
The good news is that, according to Kelly Levin, there is still hope not to exceed the carbon budget. Thus, catastrophic climate change impacts can still be avoided if 37% of the planet's fossil fuels are left buried and not burnt for energy.