This story includes details on the impacts of climate change that may be difficult for some readers. If you are feeling overwhelmed by this crisis situation here is a list of resources on how to cope with fears and feelings about the scope and pace of the climate crisis.
With at least 2,456 fossil lobbyists attending the COP28 climate summit and negotiations bogging down on a key part of the Paris Agreement process, a flurry of reports today showed climate pollution still rising, industry pitching “carbon bomb” solutions that could trigger another 86 billion tonnes of emissions, and five alarming climate tipping points within reach.
The lobbyist count was released at the conference site in Dubai by the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition, with Joseph Sikulu, managing director of 350.org, declaring that “their increasing presence at COP undermines the integrity of the process as a whole,” CBC reports. A news report last week had several fossil industry representatives tagging along to the COP as members of the Canadian delegation, though subsequent analysis had most of them invited by provincial governments.
But while concern mounted about the progress of the Global Stocktake, a critically important process meant to hold countries accountable for reducing their emissions and addressing climate impacts, the latest round of research shows key indicators of climate progress going in the wrong direction.
On Monday and Tuesday:
• The Global Carbon Project projected that fossil fuel emissions—including oil, gas, coal, and cement—will rise again this year, by 1.1%, to a record 36.8 billion tonnes, accounting for 90% of carbon pollution from human activities. After factoring in changes in land use, the total for the year will hit an estimated 40.9 gigatonnes, effectively tying the all-time record set in 2019. While vegetation and the oceans still take up about half of that total, “the rest builds up in the atmosphere and is causing increasing warming of the planet,” a group of nine study team authors write for The Conversation.
“At current emission levels, the remaining carbon budget for a one-in-two chance to limit warming to 1.5°C will likely be exceeded in seven years, and in 15 years for 1.7°C,” they warn. “The need to cut emissions has never been so urgent.”
“Just supporting renewables alone is not going to solve the climate problem,” study co-author Glen Peters, a senior researcher at Oslos’s CICERO Center for International Climate Research, told the New York Times. “You have to have policies that are ensuring that fossil fuels actually go down. We can’t just cross our fingers and hope.”
The study did point to signs of progress. Emissions in China rose 4% this year, most of all from oil consumption driven partly by post-COVID recovery in the country’s transportation sector. That finding set the stage for last month’s bombshell analysis showing how China’s emissions could start to decline in 2024.
Emissions in 2023 were set to grow 8.2% in India but fall 7% in the European Union and 3% in the United States, with more than two dozen countries showing emission reductions over the last decade while their economies grew.
Carbon Brief has a deep dive into the analysis.
• The latest Climate Action Tracker report, issued Tuesday by the Climate Analytics think tank, concluded that governments’ “weak existing targets” for 2030 emission reductions will bring average global warming to 2.5°C by century’s end. In an optimistic scenario where the world’s 40 biggest carbon-polluting countries follow through on all their announced climate actions, not just the legally binding ones, average warming still lands at 1.8°C—well above the 1.5°C threshold in the Paris Agreement. But without “significant improvements in governments’ existing long-term targets,” the analysts write, “we are unlikely to see any movement in this pathway.”
The landing page for the more detailed report shows China, the European Union, India, Saudi Arabia, and the United States moving in the wrong direction on growing demands to phase down and phase out fossil fuels, while Canada, China, Norway, the United States, and COP28 host the United Arab Emirates are far too keen on favouring “abated” fossil fuel operations, a reference to still-embryonic carbon capture and storage technologies that the industry itself admits won’t even be ready to scale in 2035, and certainly not in time for the 2030 deadline to reduce global climate pollution by 43 to 45%.
• A second report released by Climate Analytics warned that the fossil industry’s relentless, global push for carbon capture and storage “could release an extra 86 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere between 2020 and 2050” by giving political cover to continuing fossil extraction.
“The report calculates the additional emissions that could result from continued fossil fuel use excused by reliance on CCS,” the authors explain. “It highlights the level of risk should the technology continue to underperform, consistent with the industry’s record.”
While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has set the expectation for CCS to capture about 95% of the CO2 an installation emits, real-life capture rates have been far lower. In future, “if carbon capture rates only reach 50% rather than 95%, and upstream methane emissions are not reduced to low levels, this would pump 86 billion tonnes of GHG into the atmosphere—equivalent to more than double the global CO2 emissions in 2023,” Climate Analytics warns.
“The term ‘abated’ is being used as a trojan horse to allow fossil fuels with dismal capture rates to count as climate action,” warned report author Claire Fyson. “‘Abated’ may sound like harmless jargon, but it’s actually language deliberately engineered and heavily promoted by the oil and gas industry to create the illusion we can keep expanding fossil fuels.”
• And finally, a report released this week shows the world’s natural systems close to tipping five “disastrous” tipping points as the world races toward exceeding a 1.5°C limit on average global warming. “The speed of fossil fuel phaseout and growth of zero-carbon solutions will now determine the future of billions of people,” write the 200 researchers who helped author the Global Tipping Points Report, as “positive” tipping points race to keep up with the negative ones.
Our writer Christopher Bonasia has that story here.
