Warm ing threat from cars ac cel er at ing, UN warns
BERLIN — The greatest emerging threat to the global climate may rest in the side pocket of your trousers — or wherever you keep the car keys.
Emissions from transportation may rise at the fastest rate of all major sources through 2050, the United Nations will say in a report due Sun day.
Heat- trapping gases from vehicles may surge 71 percent from 2010 levels, mainly from emerging economies, according to a leaked draft, obtained by Bloom berg, of the most comprehensive UN study to date on the causes of climate change.
Rising in comes in nations like China, India and Brazil have produced explosive demand for cars and for consumer goods that must be delivered by highway, rail, ship or air. The new pollution, measured in millions of tonnes of green house gases, may exceed all of the savings achieved through initiatives like subsidies for public transport and fuel efficiency.
Cutting back on transportation gases “will be challenging, since the continuing growth in passenger and freight activity could out weigh all mitigation measures un less transport emissions can be strongly decoupled from GDP growth,” the report’s authors wrote.
In China, gross domestic product will jump to $ 10,661 US per capita this year from $ 3,614 US a decade earlier, according to estimates by the International Monetary Fund. That vault edit to rank 92 world wide by that measure, from 114 in 2004. Jumping ahead even further by ranking were Timor- Leste — up 43 lev els — Azerbaijan, Belarus and Turkmenistan.
The warning in the 2,061page report forms the third part of the UN’s study of global warming. Hundreds of scientists and government officials are meeting until at least Friday in Berlin to finalize the wording of a smaller document summarizing their findings. It will guide UN envoys as they try to devise a plan to fight climate change and stop temperatures from rising to dangerous levels.
While transportation accounted for only about 27 percent of total “enduse” energy in 2010, according to the report, emissions from vehicles have more than doubled since 1970. They expanded at a faster rate than any other energy end- use sector, to reach seven gigatons of CO2 in 2010.
Road vehicles made up about 80 percent of the in crease.
The report examines four end- use sectors: transport, industry, building, and agriculture and forestry.
Not all polluting groups burn fossil fuels as end- users. The power generation industry, for example, uses coal, natural gas and the like to make electricity, and it is a bigger emitter than transportation.
While there will be efforts to mitigate increases in developing nations, “there will still be a lot of transportation growth in places such as Thailand, Indonesia and India,” Dave Hurst, a transportation analyst at Navigant Research, said by phone from Troy, Mich.
The study from the UN- sponsored Inter governmental Panel on Climate Change is designed to influence governments around the world.
It will be used to guide discussions next year as envoys from 194 nations in tend to adopt an agreement on fight ing climate change.
Glob al emissions need to fall about 12 percent in 2020 from 2012 levels to prevent temperatures rising two degrees Celsius from pre- industrial times, according to the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.
It estimates carbon output won’t fall under existing climate commitments.