Washington Post
- Brady Dennis | Chris Mooney | Sarah Kaplan
Despite sharp drop in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic, the
world remains on pace for catastrophic warming in coming decades
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Students gather at John Marshall Park in Washington to protest
climate change during a climate strike on Sept. 20, 2019.
(Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)
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The world’s wealthy will need to reduce their carbon footprints by a factor of
30 to help put the planet on a path to curb the ever-worsening impacts of
climate change, according to new findings published Wednesday by the United
Nations Environment Program.
Currently, the emissions attributable to the richest 1 percent of the global
population account for more than double those of the poorest 50 percent.
Shifting that balance, researchers found, will require swift and substantial
lifestyle changes, including decreases in air travel, a rapid embrace of
renewable energy and electric vehicles, and better public planning to encourage
walking, bicycle riding and public transit.
But individual choices are hardly the only key to mitigating the intensifying
consequences of climate change.
Wednesday’s annual “emissions gap” report, which assesses the difference between
the world’s current path and measures needed to manage climate change, details
how the world remains woefully off target in its quest to slow the Earth’s
warming. The drop in greenhouse gas emissions during this year’s pandemic, while
notable, will have almost no impact on slowing the warming that lies ahead
unless humankind drastically alters its policies and behavior, the report finds.
Instead, nations would need to “roughly triple” their current emissions-cutting
pledges to limit the Earth’s warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6
degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial average — a central aim of the Paris
climate agreement. To reach the loftier goal of holding warming to 1.5 degrees
Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the report found, countries would need to
increase their targets at least fivefold. That goal in particular would require
rapid and profound changes in how societies travel, produce electricity and eat.
“We’d better make these shifts, because while covid has been bad, there is hope
at the end of the tunnel with a vaccine,” Inger Andersen, executive director of
the U.N. Environment Program, said in an interview. “But there is no vaccine for
the planet.”
Global carbon dioxide emissions are likely to fall by about 7 percent during
2020 — a significant change driven by the spread of the
coronavirus
and the shutdowns that accompanied it, which had a particularly strong impact on
travel. But that temporary dip probably will have only a “negligible long-term
impact” on climate change in the years ahead, the U.N. report found.
If the drop in emissions caused by the pandemic proves an isolated event rather
than the beginning of a major trend, the episode will prevent only .01 degree
Celsius (.018 degree Fahrenheit) of warming by the year 2050, the report found.
Last year’s “emissions gap” report
found that
humans would need to collectively cut emissions by close to pandemic amounts
(7.6 percent) every year to begin to meet the Paris agreement’s most ambitious
climate goals. That is nowhere near to becoming a reality.
“Are we on track to bridging the gap? Absolutely not,” the new report bluntly
states.
Global greenhouse gas emissions have risen about 1.4 percent annually on average
over the past decade. Last year saw the highest global emissions ever recorded,
at 59 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, a category that
includes not only the principal greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, but also methane
and other climate-warming agents.
Based on countries’ current promises, U.N. researchers found, the world remains
on a trajectory to experience a temperature rise this century of about 3 degrees
Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) — an amount that many experts say would have
catastrophic effects on much of the planet.
Bending that disturbing curve in a more sustainable direction will require
fundamental, unprecedented changes on the part of leaders around the globe. But
as Wednesday’s report makes clear, individual behavior also has a role to play.
And the wealthy — whom the report defines as those with the highest 1 percent of
incomes globally, or more than $109,000 per year — bear the greatest
responsibility for helping fuel such a shift. (The “1 percent” in the United
States, a wealthy country, are considerably richer than average, with annual
household incomes
above $500,000.)
Wealthy people are more likely to travel frequently by car and plane and to own
large, energy-intensive homes. They tend to have meat-rich diets that require
large amounts of greenhouse gases to produce. They buy the bulk of carbon-costly
appliances, clothing, furniture and other luxury items.
Residents of the United States — the world’s largest historical source of
planet-warming emissions — have some of the most carbon-intensive lifestyles.
The carbon footprint of the average American is about 17.6 tons of carbon
dioxide equivalents a year, about twice the footprint of a person living in the
European Union or the United Kingdom, and almost 10 times that of the average
Indian citizen’s 1.7 tons annually.
If the world is to achieve the kind of sweeping societal transformation needed,
limiting consumption “will be really important,” said Surabi Menon, vice
president of global intelligence at the ClimateWorks foundation and a member of
the report’s steering committee.
And yet, although it is hard to argue with the numbers overall on the emissions
consequences of more affluent lifestyles, this approach to rapidly changing
people’s ways would likely prove contentious.
“Shaming people and nations and demanding they change never has or will work,”
said Frank Maisano, a senior principal at Bracewell LLP, a law firm that works
with a variety of energy companies in multiple sectors. “What is necessary is
creating modestly increasing political, technology and cultural successes that
build upon each other to create meaningful overall change.”
Still, this year’s pandemic might offer clues about how humans could achieve
those cuts, Menon added. People are flying less, teleworking more and making
fewer luxury purchases. “The question is, how do you keep these new behaviors we
learned this year, but in a more sustainable way?” she said.
The latest sobering snapshot of the world’s uphill battle to halt warming comes
amid constant reminders of the urgency of the problem, as well as ongoing
uncertainty about whether world leaders can summon the political will to take
the actions scientists say are necessary.
Already, 2020 is on pace to be one of the warmest years on record, marked not
only by a crippling pandemic but also devastating wildfires, scorching droughts
and a startling number of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin. A
separate report Tuesday, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that the
Arctic as a whole is warming at nearly three times the rate of the rest of the
world.
“To put it simply, the state of the planet is broken,” U.N. Secretary General
António Guterres said in an address last week at Columbia University, in which
he pleaded that world leaders act with more urgency. He pointed to the collapse
of biodiversity, the bleaching of coral reefs, and “apocalyptic” fires and
floods. He noted that global emissions are 62 percent higher now than when
international climate negotiations began three decades ago.
“Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal,” Guterres warned. “Nature
always strikes back, and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.”
Wednesday’s report does not paint an entirely bleak view of the future.
Governments around the world have spent $12 trillion boosting their economies in
the wake of the pandemic — an unprecedented injection of public funds. The
authors found that if leaders around the world seize the opportunity to invest
heavily in renewable energy and other green infrastructure as part of a
post-coronavirus stimulus, the world could trim as much as 25 percent from its
predicted 2030 emissions.
“We are in the middle of the pandemic, and recovery packages can still be shaped
to solve the economic and the climate crises at the same time,” Niklas Höhne, a
German climatologist and founding partner of NewClimate Institute, and a
contributing author to Wednesday’s report, said in an email. “This is the one
chance we have. Governments will not spend this much money again in 10 years.”
Still, the report found little evidence that most countries, at least so far,
have prioritized climate-friendly stimulus; instead, they have mainly funded
existing industries, many of them carbon-intensive. “Large shares of resources
still support fossil fuels with waivers of environmental regulations and
bailouts of fossil fuel ... companies without environmental conditions,” Höhne
said.
A growing number of countries have committed to eliminate their net emissions
entirely by mid-century. The report notes that at least 126 nations,
representing 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, have either
announced or are considering such a goal. That number is likely to grow in the
coming months, with a similar pledge widely expected from the United States
under the incoming Biden-Harris administration.
Although such promises offer hope of a dramatic shift in the next decades, most
nations have yet to back them up with concrete action.
“What’s very exciting is that countries have now come out with these
declarations on net zero,” said Andersen, the UNEP chief. “Now, they need to sit
down and do the hard work of telling us how they are going to get there.”
In his speech last week, Guterres pleaded for a more equitable, thoughtful world
to emerge from the pandemic. “We cannot go back to the old normal of inequality,
injustice and heedless dominion over the Earth,” he said.
And yet, studies have shown that the economic impacts of the coronavirus have
most battered developing countries, the working poor, women and racial
minorities. In the United States, billionaires have seen their wealth grow this
year while millions of Americans head into the holidays unemployed, behind on
rent and dependent on food banks for their next meal.
Research
suggests
that greater inequality within countries makes them less able to tackle climate
change. The more wealth is concentrated at the top, the more powerful people
tend to insulate themselves from the effects of warming and resist meaningful
climate action. To make the extraordinary changes necessary in the years to
come, the United States and other nations will need to overcome the habits of
the past.
“We worry about the recovery being K-shaped: The rich get richer and the poor
get poorer, and inequality keeps widening,” Menon said. “I’m very mindful that
those kinds of inequalities can really hamper any kind of climate progress that
is made.”
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