‘Sobering’: Carbon emissions from oil, gas and coal continue to rise

Climate-harming emissions from oil, gas and coal rose globally again last year as countries failed to honour commitments to reduce their use. The annual Emissions Gap Report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) shows while emissions growth has slowed, a turnaround has yet to begin. In an assessment it calls “sobering”, the report says the only way the world can now minimise the damage is by dramatically scaling up climate action and deploying technologies to remove huge amounts of emissions from the atmosphere – technologies that do not yet exist. Otherwise, countries must prepare for a global temperature rise of at least 2.1 degrees and more likely 2.6-2.8 degrees within this century. This is far above the global pledge to keep temperature rise from exceeding 1.5 degrees. READ MOREThe chance to avoid that overshoot is now “lost”, the report says. Even before it officially happens, the extra warming is already causing climate chaos with deadly and destructive extreme weather in all continents. “Overshoot is not surrender,” UN secretary general António Guterres says in a message in the report. “We can still keep it as small and as short as possible and bring temperatures back below 1.5 degrees by the end of the century.” However, the report shows that would entail unprecedented effort. If all countries honoured their individual pledges, or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), global emissions would fall by 5 to 8 per cent by 2030 and 11 to 15 per cent by 2035. To have a hope of minimising the 1.5 degree overshoot, emissions need to fall around three times faster – by 18 per cent by 2030 and 45 per cent by 2035. In addition, 320 gigatonnes of carbon emissions would have to be removed from the atmosphere and permanently stored. That equates to eight years of global carbon emissions. Carbon capture and storage technologies are in their infancy and their potential to work at the scale needed is unproven. The report admits “socioeconomic and technological challenges make the chances of achieving this uncertain”. The challenge is made greater by the behaviour of big emitters such as the US, which had the largest emissions increase last year, largely because of a return to burning coal. Turkey, which hosts the UN climate summit Cop31 next month, had the second highest emissions increase. The outlook in this year’s report is “worse than last year’s projections”, the report says. “New NDCs submitted since last year’s report have made a negligible difference for these projections.” The authors insist that there are still grounds for hope, highlighting progress made since the 1.5 degree pledge was made in the 2015 Paris Agreement. In the decade since, global renewable electricity capacity has grown three times faster than anticipated, with solar PV buildout increasing seven times faster. “Growth in fossil fuels has been slower than predictions made ten years ago, and there is evidence that climate policies have real effects on reducing emissions,” they say. They also warn, however, that emissions of carbon and the second most common greenhouse gas, methane, “are heading in the wrong direction”. “While current policy scenarios project that some of these emissions will stabilise by 2030, none show declines occurring at the pace and scale needed to minimise the magnitude and duration of the overshoot of 1.5 degrees.” UNEP executive director Inger Andersen urged countries to “pull out all the stops” to make “fast, deep and sustained emissions reductions”. “Every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of warming above 1.5 degree increases climate impacts and risks, such as the deadly floods, heatwaves and wildfires that have plagued many nations this year,” she said.