Tons of Emissions from Power Plants Are Already Locked In, Study Says
Current methods for calculating global emissions fail to take current facilities into account.
The world's existing power plants are on track to pour more than 300 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and current monitoring standards often fail to take these long-term emissions into account, according to new research from scientists at UC Irvine and Princeton University.
The paper, published Tuesday in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, is the first to estimate the lifetime carbon emissions of power plants globally over multiple years.
The drive to meet the world's ever-growing energy demand means that global power sector commitments—the projected lifetime carbon emissions of currently working power plants—have not declined in a single year since 1950. These so-called committed emissions are growing at about 4 percent a year, according to the study,
