Carbon dioxide emissions from global energy production increased 1.1% last year, to 37.4 billion tonnes, but would have been considerably worse if not for expanded use of solar, wind, and electric vehicles, the International Energy Agency concluded in its annual CO2 emissions inventory published last week.
“A pandemic, an energy crisis, and geopolitical instability all had the potential to derail efforts to build cleaner and more secure energy systems. Instead, we’ve seen the opposite in many economies,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a release. “The clean energy transition is continuing apace and reining in emissions—even with global energy demand growing more strongly in 2023 than in 2022.”
Renewable energy grew twice as fast as fossil fuels between 2019 and 2023, and “deployment of clean energy technologies in the past five years has substantially limited increases in demand for fossil fuels, providing the opportunity to accelerate the transition away from them this decade,” the Paris-based agency reported.
That half-decade saw global emissions rise by 900 million tonnes, but the total would have been three times as high without the deployment of photovoltaic solar, wind, nuclear, heat pumps, and electric cars, the IEA found.
However, the transition has been uneven, with renewable energy deployment concentrated in the rich countries and China. With carbon pollution falling 4.5% in advanced economies but still increasing in the developing world, “we need far greater efforts to enable emerging and developing economies to ramp up clean energy investment.”
World-wide CO2 pollution rose by 410 million tonnes, with more than 40% of the increase brought on by severe drought, generally attributable to climate change, that had several countries pivoting to coal after their hydroelectric output fell short. In India last year, strong economic growth, coupled with a weak monsoon that limited hydropower production, drove up emissions about 190 million tonnes.
“An exceptional shortfall in hydropower due to extreme droughts—in China, the United States, and several other economies—resulted in over 40% of the rise in emissions in 2023 as countries turned largely to fossil fuel alternatives to plug the gap,” the IEA said. If not for that shortfall, “global CO2 emissions from electricity generation would have declined last year, making the overall rise in energy-related emissions significantly smaller.”
Those epic dry conditions and the resulting “historic” drop in hydropower in the first half of the year were a marker for the effects of climate change, the Ember renewable energy think tank reported last fall. The 8.5% drop in hydroelectric output in the first half of the year, the biggest decline in two decades, was a “warning shot that hydro output could negatively affect the speed of the electricity transition,” Ember said at the time.
Even then, Ember said the rise of solar and wind power kept global carbon pollution to just a slight increase for the first half of 2023, even though China’s shift from hydro back to coal raised its CO2 emissions by nearly 8%. The think tank said climate change could be expected to drive down hydropower in China, southern Europe, and the southern U.S., while increasing dams’ output in parts of central Africa, India, central Asia, and northern latitudes, Phys.org reported.
