Why our continued use of fossil fuels is creating a financial time bomb

But when you compare those numbers with our known fossil fuel reserves, things get jaw-dropping.To reach our climate goals, we'll need to leave a third of the oil, half of the natural gas, and nearly all the coal we're aware of sitting in the ground, unused.Yet we have—and are still building—infrastructure that is predicated on burning far more than that: mines, oil and gas wells, refineries, and the distribution networks that get all those products to market; power plants, cars, trains, boats, and airplanes that use the fuels. We have workers who are trained to use all of the idled hardware, companies that treat the fuel reserves and hardware as an asset on their balance sheets, and various contracts that dictate that the reserves can be exploited.Collectively, you can think of all of these things as assets—assets that, if we were to get serious about climate change, would see their value drop to zero.