And that's not to mention any disruptive carbon capture technologies that might come along to help us burn more of the fuel without cooking the climate.
For now, we are cooking our climate future project by project, and Keystone XL is the biggest project in the queue.
In its "Cooking the Climate" report, Greenpeace calculated that the burning of South-east Asia's peat forests – largely for palm-oil plantations – spewed 1.8bn tonnes of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere: 4 per cent of global climate-change emissions from 0.1 per cent of Earth's land.
It has drawn up a shortlist of options, including a carbon tax or cap-and-trade scheme that would apply to all airlines.China's rulers should meanwhile note that, besides cooking the climate, aviation also causes local pollution, which poor countries suffer more grievously than rich ones.
The industrial pollution that is cooking the climate could also cause another problem: carbon dioxide, absorbed by the sea from the atmosphere, turns to carbonic acid, which is a threat to coral, mussels, oysters and any creature with a shell of calcium carbonate.The enormity of the sea's troubles, and their implications for mankind, are mind-boggling.
Lifting the oil exports ban is something Oil Change International called tantamount to cooking the climate, an analysis also shared by the Center for Biological Diversity and others.
An innovative angle put forward by Yamamoto et al. (29) is to view policies for reducing biomass-burning for cooking as climate policies, which have huge health co-benefits.
For many chefs in the current economic climate, cooking no longer seems enough.
Dinosaurs cavorting with humans, climate scientists cooking up the global warming "hoax," the health establishment using vaccines to bring about socialism – it's hard to imagine mainstream leaders in other advanced economies not laughing at such claims.
