World’s green recovery stalls
LONDON: Carbon dioxide emissions from the global electric power sector rebounded in the first half of 2021 to above pre-pandemic levels, according to an analysis, signalling that the world has failed to engineer a “green recovery” and shift decisively away from fossil fuels.
As electricity demand jumped from last year’s lows, the London-based think tank Ember found, it outpaced the growth of renewable energy. That pushed global electricity-related emissions 5% above where they stood before the coronavirus outbreak.
The new findings have major implications for the upcoming UN climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, where negotiators hope to forge a pact to cut greenhouse gas emissions and keep the planet from warming more than 1.5°C compared with pre-industrial levels. They also suggest that a surge in electric vehicles, which US President Joe Biden and many other world leaders support, will tax the electricity grid as developers work to add wind and solar.
The report showed that places such as the US and Europe cut emissions slightly this year. However, even there, the pace of lowering greenhouse gas emissions was far too slow to keep the world on a path limiting warming to 1.5°C. And rising energy use increased planet-warming pollution for the power sector in China, Bangladesh, India, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Pakistan and Vietnam, Ember lead analyst Dave Jones said.
“Catapulting emissions in 2021 should send alarm bells across the world. We are not building back better, we are building back badly,” Jones said.
Jones said that the US experienced a 16% drop in carbon emissions from electricity in the first half of last year compared to the first half of 2019.
However, the US electricity sector’s emissions during the first half of this year were only 4% below those of 2019.
The wind and solar sectors rose sharply, but natural gas was flat and coal use amounted to 7% less than 2019 levels.
Pandemic-related shutdowns curtailed transportation and energy demand more broadly in countries across the globe, helping spur a drop in greenhouse gas emissions. The Global Carbon Project estimated that daily global carbon emissions dropped by 17% in April last year compared with the average rate the year before.
But even those changes did nothing to prevent atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide from reaching a record high this May, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, at nearly 419 parts per million. Several energy experts said the new statistics underscored that the temporary economic downturn did not represent a fundamental change in the way in which businesses produce power across the globe.
“The only thing surprising about a rebound in emissions as economies recover from pandemic lockdowns is that anyone is surprised by it,” said Jason Bordoff, a dean of Columbia University’s climate school and founding director of its global energy centre. “Emissions are the result of a complex, massive and capital-intensive energy system, and the underlying infrastructure for how we make electricity, steel and much more did not change in the last 12 months. So it is not surprising that emissions rebounded as economies opened back up and that energy infrastructure ramped back up.”
The figures were part of a midyear update to Ember’s Global Electricity Review of 63 countries, which represent 87% of electricity demand.
There were some bright spots. For the first time, wind and solar generated more than a 10th of global electricity and overtook nuclear generation. In addition, wind and solar power met more than half the additional electricity demand worldwide. But coal accounted for another 43%, while natural gas consumption remained almost unchanged.
“The goal of a ‘green recovery’ was never realistically to transform the world’s energy infrastructure overnight, but to make large government investments in economic recovery that will begin to transform the world’s energy system,” Bordoff said.