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Australian researchers say they’ve built the world’s first public tool for calculating how fossil-fuel developments will affect the climate, and they’re using a Canadian offshore oil project as a test subject.
Researchers say the new Carbon Impacts Tracer can estimate how proposed mines, offshore oil platforms or other energy projects will contribute to global warming, glacier melt and even human deaths.
“We can now link the emissions associated with individual fossil-fuel projects to the amount of warming that they contribute to the planet, and then a direct line to specific impacts from that warming,” Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate science professor at the Australian National University, said Monday during a virtual news conference.
The online tool uses a project’s expected carbon dioxide emission data, often from the proponents’ own environmental assessment submissions, to compute its impact on global temperature rise.
It then uses peer-reviewed literature to calculate the real-world impact of that increase, such as coral reef loss, drops in food production and job losses.
The site launched Monday with case studies on five Australian projects, one in the U.K., and another on the proposed Bay du Nord offshore oil project, which if built would be Canada’s first deepwater oil project, about 500 kilometres east of St. John’s.
The project, led by Norwegian energy giant Equinor, is expected to draw from more than 430 million barrels of oil reserves. The tool says CO2 emissions from Bay du Nord could amount to 188 megatonnes over 20 years, which it says would add 0.00008 C to global temperatures.
As well, the tool says that amount of CO2 would expose more than 111,000 more people to unprecedented heat and lead to 25 more heat-related deaths in Europe alone.
The tracer claims Bay du Nord could cause 4.6-square-kilometres of glacier loss, raising sea levels by 0.025 millimetres. It also says about 2,100 jobs would be lost due to the project’s pollution, with about 9,800 people forced into extreme poverty.
Equinor did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
Joel Finnis, a climatologist with Newfoundland and Labrador’s Memorial University, wasn’t involved in the tracer project, but is part of a local team trying to measure the impact of the province’s oil and gas sector. He said the tracer brings together the findings of many different studies and puts them in one place so the average person can understand.
“It really undercuts the arguments that we keep hearing to push forward with new oil production, new oil expansion,” he said in an interview. “And [it] serves as a stark reminder that even what is often considered a small project is going to cost a lot of people their lives. It’s going to cost us a lot of money. It is going to create a lot of environmental damage.”
Maria Nawaz, head of the climate change accountability project at the University of New South Wales’ Australian Human Rights Institute, told reporters that it’s historically been hard to link a fossil fuel project to its real-world impacts. Most proponents argue their individual projects are just a “drop in the ocean” when it comes to emissions.
She said she hopes the tracer will be used by governments, regulators and members of the public as new projects are pitched in their communities. She expects it to strengthen climate litigation, which seeks to hold governments and corporations to account for their emissions.
“Individual fossil fuel projects can now be directly tied to additional warming and consequential, measurable human and ecological harms… This means that the `drop-in-the-ocean’ defence that depends on the harm being impossible or too small to measure can no longer stand up.”
Nawaz said she can see insurers using it to gauge a project’s risk, while economists could use it to project economic impacts.
The site only calculates the impacts of proposed projects, not existing oil wells or mines, and researchers say they intend to add more proposed developments as data becomes available.
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