To avoid warming beyond 1.5 C, we need to reduce emissions by 7.6% each year from 2019 to 2030. 

Every year we don’t act, the difficulty and cost of reducing emissions goes up. Within another 3 years the required emissions reduction will jump to a near impossibility of 15.5% each year. 

 

For an 83% chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 C the world can only emit another 300 Gt CO2 (Gigatons, i.e. billion tons). In 2021 alone the world emitted over 36 billion tons of CO2. 40.8 billion tons of CO2 equivalent was emitted when other greenhouse gases are also taken into account. 

 

Too many countries are banking on carbon capture to reach net zero. 

 

Targets to achieve net zero in China by 2060 and India by 2070 are not acceptable. The 2050 deadline is nearly 30 years away and is plenty of time to make the necessary changes.

 

The IPCC estimates that there’s only about 500 million hectares of land left that can be dedicated to new forests for carbon capture. Some of the roadmaps assume amounts of negative emissions that vastly exceed the best estimates of what is economically feasible. 

 

Renewable power installations are set for a record year – but lag even existing uninspiring net-zero goals. 

 

The concept of ‘net zero’ is a dangerous trap, which is essentially burn now pay later. Retrofitting carbon scrubbers on existing power stations and building the infrastructure to pipe captured CO2 and developing suitable geological storage sites requires huge sums of money. 

 

“Net zero” has become a rallying cry for action on climate change. To achieve the Paris goal, at a minimum the entire world has to become net zero perpetually after 2050 and most likely carbon negative afterwards. Pledges to reach net zero at present cover almost 80% of the global economy but not all targets are created equal. Companies have more freedom to transition to a zero-carbon business model than countries. 

 

As the Washington Post recently reported many countries under report their greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations, by 8.5 to 13.3 billion tons per year. This is particularly worrying given that global carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) projects are on track to pull only about 550 million tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year by 2030. 

References

 

[1] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/countries-must-act-on-climate-or-risk-up-to-792-trillion-in-economic-damage#:~:text=The%20global%20economy%20could%20lose,in%20the%20journal%20Nature%20Communications.

[2] https://www.unep.org/explore-topics/climate-action/facts-about-climate-emergency

[3] https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-2/

[4] https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/too-many-companies-are-banking-on-carbon-capture-to-reach-net-zero-121011500980_1.html

[5] https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/climate-scientists-concept-of-net-zero-is-a-dangerous-trap/