A grim report on climate change
Report warns that emissions must drop or disasters will rise
WASHINGTON — World leaders’ efforts to shift away from fossil fuels and slow climate change are not going quickly enough to avoid environmental catastrophe, the United Nations said in a report Monday.
Considering current emissions and the existing pledges by individual countries, the Earth’s temperature would rise by almost six degrees Fahrenheit, far beyond the 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit goal set at the Paris meeting on climate change in 2015. To avoid that scenario — which scientists predict will lead to deadly heat waves and flooding, among other effects — nations will need to increase their pledged carbon reductions five fold between 2020 and 2030, read the UN’s annual Emissions Gap Report.
"For 10 years, the Emissions Gap Report has been sounding the alarm – and for 10 years, the world has only increased its emissions,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement. “There has never been a more important time to listen to the science. Failure to heed these warnings and take drastic action to reverse emissions means we will continue to witness deadly and catastrophic heatwaves, storms and pollution.”
Despite significant shifts away from coal in recent years, global emissions continue to rise, with the world’s 20 richest nations responsible for about three-fourths of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that contributing to global temperatures.
Last year energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in the United States rose by 3 percent to more than 5.2 billion metric tons, driven by increased natural gas demand during an unusually hot summer and cold winter, along with rising gasoline demand due to the strong economy, the Department of Energy said Monday.
Likewise, in China, now the world’s largest emitter of green
house gases, emissions are estimated to have increased 2.3 percent last year. Now the U.N. is saying the world needs to begin reducing emissions starting next year, at a rate of almost three percent per year for the next decade.
“U.S. emissions are down 13 percent since 2005, which is about 1 percent a year, and frankly that’s without trying very hard,” said Elliot Diringer, executive vice president at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a think tank focused on climate change. “With stronger policy we can rapidly accelerate the reduction.”
To date much of the emissions reductions in the United States and Europe has come from shifting from coal-fired electricity to wind and solar energy, along with natural gas. The oil and gas sector has increasingly pledged to cut emissions from its operations by reducing amount of methane burned off, or flared, during oil and gas drilling and developing more efficient fuels.
“We’re committed to being a part of the global solution, playing a vital role in developing technology aimed at reducing emissions while alleviating poverty and meeting growing energy needs around the world,” said Bethany Aronhalt, spokeswoman at the American Petroleum Institute.
But such efforts will likely only take the world so far. And reducing emissions to the degree prescribed by the UN would almost certainly mean reducing reliance on petroleum-based fuels, at a time demand for automobiles in developing nations is expected to rise.
So far, there is little indication governments are willing to shift away from gasoline and diesel at a time electric vehicles have yet to prove themselves on a large scale.
President Donald Trump has pulled the United States from the Paris agreement, and China’s climate pledge allows emissions there to continue rising through 2030. Only five countries in the G20 have pledged to get to zero emissions, according to the U.N., despite scientists warnings the world has three decades to do so to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
That reality has helped drive climate protests around the globe in recent months, ahead of the next climate summit in Madrid next month.
“To world leaders we say: it is time to stop the expansion of the fossil fuel industry immediately,” May Boeve, chief executive of the activist group 350.org said in a statement Monday. “Not a single new mine can be dug, not another pipeline built, not one more well dropped into the ocean.”