Almost 60 percent of global crude oil and fossil methane gas reserves, plus 90 percent of coal reserves, should be kept in the ground if the world has a chance to meet the target to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050, a new peer-reviewed study showed . Researchers led by environmental and energy economist Dan Welsby at University College London have estimated that oil and gas production must decline globally by 3 percent each year until 2050 if the target is to be achieved. “This implies that most regions must reach peak production now or during the next decade, rendering many operational and planned fossil fuel projects unviable,” the researchers wrote in their paper ‘Unextractable fossil fuels in a 1.5 °C world’ published in the journal Nature this week. The “bleak picture” of the scenarios in the study are probably underestimating the changes in fossil fuel […]