Related: A new study urges leaving fossil fuels in the ground.
Economists generally agree that the key to addressing climate change is to raise the cost of burning fossil fuels, either directly, through a carbon tax, or indirectly, through a cap-and-trade program.
Far more fossil fuels – about 2650GT – are held by state-owned companies, meaning that in total there are four to five times more fossil fuels in existing reserves than can be safely burned.
It seems a good bet that if you want to help the world's poor you should get them on more power now and to a very large extent that's going to be fossil fuels.
"We've now got tangible figures of the quantities and locations of fossil fuels that should remain unused in trying to keep within the 2C temperature limit," said Christophe McGlade, at University College London (UCL), and who led the new research published in the journal Nature.
Some countries, such as South Korea, have recently announced carbon taxes as a way of making the use of fossil fuels more expensive.
"It is a difficult issue for us because we want to see people using less polluting fuels, but if we facilitate this we will see more and more money going into roads with more cars on them," the Greens leader, Christine Milne, has said.
It seems that Abbott is intent on turning Australia into a charco-state — a nation that pursues economic riches from coal, gas and other fossil fuels no matter the social or environmental cost.
The main reason to divest from the fossil fuels is – it's simply the right thing to do.
But governments must also start to implement policies that properly price in the hidden costs of fossil fuels.
Related: Fossil fuels subsidised by $10m a minute, says IMF The latest evidence about how expensive fossil fuels really are has been provided this week by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an organisation that monitors the progress of the world's economy.
