Most major nations falling behind on climate change goals
For most of the major carbonpolluting nations, promising to fight climate change is a lot easier than actually doing it.
Among the 10 biggest carbon emitters, only the European Union has enacted polices close to or consistent with international goals of limiting warming to just a few more tenths of a degrees, according to scientists and experts who track climate action in countries.
But Europe, which is broiling through a record-smashing heat wave and hosting climate talks this week, also faces a short-term winter energy crunch, which could cause the continent to backtrack a tad and push other nations into longer, dirtier energy deals, experts said.
“Even if Europe meets all of its climate goals and the rest of us don’t, we all lose,” said Kate Larsen, head of international energy and climate for the research firm Rhodium Group. Emissions of heat-trapping gases don’t stop at national borders, nor does the extreme weather that’s being felt throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
“It’s a grim outlook. There’s no getting away from it, I’m afraid,” said climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics. His group joined with the New Climate Institute to create the Climate Action Tracker, which analyses nations’ climate targets and policies compared to the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
The tracker describes as “insufficient” the policies and actions of the world’s top two carbon polluters, China and the US, as well as Japan, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. It calls Russia and South Korea’s polices “highly insufficient”, and Iran comes in as “critically insufficient”. Hare says number three emitter India “remains an enigma”.
“We are losing ground against ambitious goals” such as keeping global warming to less than 2C or 1.5C since pre-industrial times, said international climate negotiator Nigel Purvis of Climate Advisers. The world has already warmed 1.1C since preindustrial times.
The Russian energy crisis has definitely been a major setback, Hare said. While there is a risk Europe might add infrastructure for natural gas that will be hard to abandon, it looks like the Russian invasion of Ukraine strengthened Europe’s resolve to reduce Russia’s energy influence and get off fossil fuels, Purvis said.
There are other places where weaning the world off carbon looks more possible.
A new report from the International Renewable Energy Agency found the cost of electricity last year from onshore wind fell by 15 per cent, offshore wind by 13 per cent and solar panels by 13 per cent compared to 2020. —AP