Lorenzo Pellegrini (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

To reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change a large share of existing fossil fuels reserves has to be kept underground. This basic fact can be challenged only by climate skeptics and technological optimists. The former are in denial of climate change and/or of its anthropogenic root, the latter believe in the massive development of (yet non-existent) capture and storage technologies within the next few decades.

Notwithstanding the relatively uncontroversial nature of the fact that a large share of fossil fuel reserves are ‘unburnable’, little progress has been made to identify the specific reserves that should be left untapped and the way the costs of the policy should be met. This presentation is going to explore the methods to develop spatially-explicit and just proposals for specifying the reserves that need to be labelled unburnable and the way these proposals intersect and can contribute to global environmental justice.

The presenter is Dr. Lorenzo Pellegrini, Associate Professor in Development Economics at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Event Date: 17 January 2018

Released by: SOAS Economics Podcast