With leaders of civil society, governments, and business interests in Lima, Peru this week discussing what an international agreement to address climate change will ultimately entail, a growing focus has turned to how much longer the fossil fuel industry can avoid what scientists and financial experts say is now a fundamental truth: if the planet is to be saved from cataclysmic global warming, an enormous proportion of untapped coal, oil, and gas reserves will need to remain in the ground.

Speaking from the Conference of the Parties (COP20) summit on Tuesday, Christiana Figueres, who heads the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said evidence is clearly mounting “that investment in fossil fuel is actually a high risk” and “getting more and more risky” with each passing day.

As the business pages of Bloomberg reflected on Tuesday, “With representatives from more than 190 countries gathered to discuss climate rules in Lima, the argument that burning all the world’s known oil, gas and coal reserves would overwhelm the atmosphere is moving beyond the realm of environmental activists.” According to Bloomberg the idea is increasingly hitting the mainstream, with large international investor groups and top banks studying the issue seriously:

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To explore the idea of leaving those reserves in the ground—which economists call “stranded assets”—Bloomberg spoke with several experts on the subject, including former president Al Gore, who compared the global economy’s reliance on fossil fuel extraction as “absurd” a financial situation as the one preceding the 2008 collapse of the U.S. housing market which unleashed a global domino effect of economic misery.

“Investors who haven’t yet come to grips with the stranding problem are like the classic scene in the Road Runner cartoons where the coyote runs off the edge of the cliff, and his legs keep moving for quite a long time before gravity takes hold,” Gore said. “There are investors out there whose legs are moving in mid-air.”

Though advocates of climate justice, progressive-minded (as well as clear-eyed) economists, and other experts have long concluded that the combined math and science of climate change compels humanity to end its century-long addiction to fossil fuels, the elite investor class and world leaders have been much slower to admit the Earth has limits to the amount of carbon and other greenhouse gases it can absorb.