UN: Planned fossil fuel output shatters 1.5°C climate target
PRODUCTION OF COAL, OIL AND GAS NEEDS TO BE CUT NEARLY 50% BY 2030
The world’s nations are currently planning to produce more than double the amount of coal, oil and gas consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°Celsius, the United Nations said yesterday.
Ten days before a climate summit that is being billed as key to the viability of the Paris Agreement temperature goals, the UN’s Environment Programme said that government fossil fuel production plans this decade were “dangerously out of sync” with the emissions cuts needed.
The UN says emissions must go down nearly 50 per cent by 2030 and to net-zero by mid century to limit warming to 1.5° C above preindustrial levels.
But its Production Gap report found that total fossil fuel production would likely increase until at least 2040. Development plans would produce 110 per cent more fossil fuels this decade than consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C, and 45 per cent more than for a world where temperatures increase 2°C.
‘Major mismatch’
“The research is clear: global coal, oil and gas production must start declining immediately and steeply to be consistent with limiting long-term warming to 1.5C,” said Ploy Achakulwisut, a lead report author from the Stockholm Environment Institute. “However, governments continue to plan for and support levels of fossil fuel production that are vastly in excess of what we can safely burn.”
Michael Lazarus, a co-author of yesterday’s report, said the difference between countries’ NDCs and production plans was “the major mismatch” in climate diplomacy right now.
Last week the International Energy Agency (IEA) said that the use of coal — the most polluting fossil fuel — had in fact increased since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. In May it said that no new oil and gas production was compatible with 1.5°C.