What the world is doing to cut global emissions
The nations of the world will assemble for the COP26 Glasgow climate conference on November 1 with inadequate plans for slashing greenhouse gases, and the largest emitter planning a massive expansion of fossil fuel projects.
While most major emitters have vowed to slash emissions to net zero by 2050 or 2060, a September report card on the Paris Agreement climate targets found global emissions are still rising, and they’re likely to be nearly 60 per cent above 1990 levels in 2030.
This is despite several countries announcing bold new emissions targets earlier this year.
President Joe Biden committed the US to 50-52 per cent cuts by 2030; Canadian Prime
Minister Justin
Trudeau opted for 40-45 per cent; and
British Prime
Minister Boris
Johnson went all out with a promise to reduce greenhouse gases by
76 per cent by 2035.
The UN Framework
Convention on Climate
Change report card found there is now an “urgent need” for countries to increase their targets, smash their existing targets, or do both, in order to keep global warming below 2C.
Australia is facing increasing pressure to commit to net-zero emissions by 2050, and to do better than its Paris Agreement pledge to lower greenhouse gases by 26-28 per cent by 2030.
Latest figures show Australia has trimmed its emissions by just under 21 per cent from 2005 levels already.
The European Union has reduced its emissions much more substantially, by about 24 per cent on
1990 levels, while the US has gone slightly backwards, with its emissions increasing by about 2 per cent over the same period.
But the big concern is with China, the world’s largest emitter, which is adding coal-fired power stations to its energy network at a staggering rate.
In 2020 alone, Beijing added more than 38 gigawatts of new coal-fired energy capacity to the national grid. For comparison, that’s about one-and-a-half times the total output from all of
Australia’s coal-fired power stations.
And according to economics professor Warwick Mckibbin from the Crawford
School of
Public
MANY NATIONS ARE MAKING BIG CLIMATE CHANGE PROMISES, BUT EXPERTS SAY WE NEED A LOT MORE THAN PROMISES TO AVERT A WORLDWIDE CATASTROPHE
Policy at the
Australian National University, there’s a lot more to come.
“They’ve got something like 250 gigawatts of coal capacity in the pipeline to be built,” Prof Mckibbon said. “You’ve got to swing a lot from where we are today to a (promised) 2060 net zero. It’s a big job.”
China became the world’s largest emitter of CO2 in 2007, and it now accounts for 28 per cent of all emissions. Australia produces about 1.4 per cent of global emissions.
But looking at action on reducing greenhouse gases can be cut and diced in many ways.
Want to talk about emissions trading schemes? China has one; Australia does not.
Compare tonnes of carbon emitted per head of population, and Australia’s tally (17.10) is more than double China’s (7.38). Look at which country is using the most energy from renewable sources, and China is way ahead of every other country.
Look at who’s pumped more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution, and Europe leads the pack, followed by the US, and then China, with Australia just a bit player.
Consider the structure of different economies, and yet another set of considerations arise.
“The amount that (a country is) cutting is not really a good representation of effort,” Prof Mckibbin said.
“For example, in the UK (in the 1980s), Margaret Thatcher closed down the coal industry and they can now easily hit decarbonisation targets for almost no cost, whereas Australia has an enormous endowment of fossil fuels and an economy (connected) to that.”
The complexity of global climate politics has not been helped by countries cherrypicking baseline years for their targets to maximise their successes, and a lack of transparency around data.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison picked up on this point when releasing the latest national emissions figures in August, saying Australia was the only country to offer full transparency across “every
sector, sector every gas, gas every quarter”.
“No other country does that,” Mr Morrison said.
Prof Mckibbin said the Kyoto Protocol-era of global climate politics (1997) was about targets and timetables for participating countries, and the Paris Agreement-era (2015) was about nationally determined contributions, but Glasgow will be focused squarely on net zero.
“The whole game has shifted,” he said. “Now everyone is talking about everyone going to zero, but that’s a different world than ‘Let’s reduce as much as we can, wherever it’s low cost’. It’s now basically everyone should be eliminating CO2 from their economies. That is a world where you’re going to have to co-operate across countries because that’s going to require massive transformation of economies.”
“What’s also changed since Paris has been the increased climate events, which has shown that we’re well and truly on the road towards some serious problems,” Prof Mckibbin said.
Those environmental catastrophes, like the floods that inundated central and western Europe in July, have an obvious economic cost, but Prof Mckibbin said there’s another cost of climate change which is emerging.
“When people say Australia is about 1 per cent of global emissions, that’s factually correct. But a lot of our income comes from what other countries are using our exports for, so if we don’t do anything, if we just stand back with our head in the sand, we’re going to get hit with a massive economic shock coming from other people’s policies.”
And it’s a problem that simply has to be solved, Professor Will Steffen from the Climate Council said.
“With increasing fires, floods and extreme heat, the climate system is on the verge of getting out of control, and that’s going to be a future that’s not going to be compatible with well functioning societies,” he said.
“The thing that people tend to forget is that the risk of not getting on top of this is enormous. It’s almost existential.”