The global effort to reduce carbon emissions doesn't appear to be working. This year CO2 emissions are set to hit a record high despite the global climate change agreement, new analysis has found.
Cutting carbon emissions through political regulation is not that easy. The current state of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris says it all.
The French government’s latest plan to increase taxation on fuel and diesel may have been motivated by the need to shift towards cleaner energy – but it was met, quite literally, with a nation's fire and fury. Predictably, US President Donald Trump poured more fuel on the flames when he tweeted that his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron should have dropped out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change just like he did.
But the dependency on fossil fuels, even in a developed country, is simply too high. At the UN Climate Change Conference (COP24) currently underway in Katowice, Poland, a research team from the University of East Anglia has found that global carbon emissions are set to hit an all-time high this year, with a projected rise of more than two per cent. This follows a rise of 1.6 per cent that occurred in 2017.
It is a significant setback, given that global emissions had remained relatively flat with little to no growth between 2014 and 2016. It seems, therefore, that we can start shifting away from the hope that CO2 emissions had peaked before 2014. This year marks a second year-on-year growth; the rise, which could be seen as a one-off in 2017, is now set to become a trend. At least if countries around the world don’t act more firmly to stick to the 1.5℃ commitment they made in the Paris climate deal in 2015.
With CO2 concentration in the atmosphere projected to reach 407 parts per million (ppm) this year, there is a long way to go before the Paris targets are met. In comparison, global CO2 concentration stagnated at about 280 ppm in 1750, before the Industrial Revolution – that’s a 45 per cent increase, and the main cause of global warming. Fossil fuels, industry and land-use change are the main human activities to blame for this increase. Together, they are expected to account for 41.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide globally released in the atmosphere in 2018 alone.
Glen Peters, a research director on global carbon cycles at the Center for International Climate Research, says the 2018 rise is dominated by China, India and developing countries, but that the US also saw an unexpected rise in emissions.
“Basically all countries are dragging their feet on climate,” says Peters, who took part in the new study. “The big developing countries are not slowing down emissions growth, and the developed countries are not reducing emissions fast enough.”
In other words, for all the commitments that were made in Paris three years ago, not nearly enough is being done to support the policies that could limit the amount of CO2 released in the atmosphere. Industries such as transportation and construction, which are power-intensive, are still demanding energy based on coal, oil or natural gas – and the urge to switch to renewables is not yet sufficient to stop the growth in fossil fuel consumption.
In China, for example, predictions for 2018 estimate the country’s use of coal increasing by 4.5 per cent; the number goes up to more than seven per cent in India. “Current energy and climate policies are not strong enough to overcome growth in economic activity and energy use,” Peters says.
Read more: What is climate change? The definition, causes and effects
Greg Keoleian, a professor of sustainable systems at the University of Michigan, works on reducing the carbon footprint of products: much of his work has focused on encouraging the electrification of vehicles. He explains that with overall transportation – both personal and industrial – in the US accounting for 28 per cent of the country’s emissions, electrification needs to happen urgently.
“Since 2016, there has been an increase again in the demand for light duty trucks, which combined with lower oil prices created more supply in the SUV market,” he says. “We need to do much more to electrify those vehicles if we are to meet targets.”
Technical solutions to reduce carbon emissions exist though. In fact, electricity generation based on renewable energy grew 15 per cent year on year in the world in the last decade. And those technologies don’t necessarily stop growth: in 19 countries which reduced their emissions until 2017, including the UK, the economy grew in parallel.
The price of renewable energy technology is also going down – costs have dropped by 80 per cent in the last decade, according to Christiana Figueres, the leader of the Mission 2020 climate action campaign. So why are global carbon emissions on the rise again?
Hal Harvey, the CEO of Energy Innovation, an energy and environmental policy firm based in San Francisco, says that this is because policies around the world lack the necessary speed and scale. Take China, for example: the country is leading clean-energy development, with investments in projects totalling $44 billion (£34.5bn) in 2017. But coal is still its main source of energy.
“One must marvel at the rate of solar, wind and EV adoption in China,” says Harvey, “but to meet 6.5 per cent economic growth solely with green power – that would be heroic compared to today’s efforts.” According to him, what we need is both specific policies for different sectors, such as building codes for infrastructure, and an economic signal such as a tax on carbon. “Ever-tighter standards, ever-stronger price signals,” he says.
But policy can only go that far – the real change at stake is also a social one. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in France, where the fuel tax rises envisaged by policymakers have been suspended for six months as a result of social unrest, raising the question of whether society is ready to cut production and consumption at source. Behavioural shifts, in that respect, are much harder to achieve than political ones.
“As we work our way into the future, the high demand for energy will not only be linked to population growth, but to the increased standard of living of those populations as well,” says James Anderson, professor of atmospheric chemistry at the Harvard University Center for the Environment.
With global carbon emissions on the rise again in 2018, those standards of living need urgent rethinking. Anderson explains that we are effectively approaching 500 ppm; a point at which none of the ice systems in the northern hemisphere can be stable. What we need, according to him, is not only to aim for zero emissions, but also to extract CO2 from the atmosphere to get back to a stable level of 300 ppm.
“We are creating an irreversible situation,” he says, “as the ice protecting Greenland is disintegrating. If nothing is done in the future, that will be something of profound concern.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK