The Carbon Ask: effects of climate policy on the value of fossil fuel resources and the implications for technological innovation

Strong policies to address climate change will almost certainly require that large quantities of oil, natural gas, and coal remain underground. Because these resources have economic value, action to reduce carbon emissions means that fossil fuel owners and producers, and other entities in the fossil fuel supply chain, will experience a reduction in wealth. They will be on the receiving end of what we call the “Carbon Ask.” We compile disparate data sources, make some simplifying assumptions, and approximate the value of the Carbon Ask for the world as a whole. We find that the value of the world’s fossil fuel enterprise in a business-as-usual case, unconstrained by climate policy, is about $295 trillion. In a world with a strong climate policy, the value of these resources drops to about $110 trillion, a decrease of $185 trillion, or 63 %. The Carbon Ask is equivalent to 2.4 years of global GDP. After reviewing the literature on resistance to technological innovation during the past two centuries and examining legal challenges to recent US greenhouse gas regulations, we find it unsurprising that the Carbon Ask creates powerful incentives for many stakeholders—who may be firms, workers, consumers, and governments—to resist policies to speed the development and diffusion of new, more environmentally benign technologies. We also find few precedents for policy-driven, rather than market-driven, technological transformations with a scale and scope similar to decarbonization of the global economy.