emissions

Climate scientists hail 2023 as ‘beginning of the end’ for fossil fuel era

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/30/climate-scientists-hail-2023-as-beginning-of-the-end-for-fossil-fuel-era

Cautious optimism among experts that emissions from energy use may have peaked as net zero mission intensifies

Image of gas flaring. CC.
Fossil fuel emissions from gas, oil and coal plants will have peaked by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. Image of gas flaring. CC.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/30/climate-scientists-hail-2023-as-beginning-of-the-end-for-fossil-fuel-era

Global efforts to slow a runaway climate catastrophe may have reached a critical milestone in the last year with the peak of global carbon emissions from energy use, according to experts.

A growing number of climate analysts believe that 2023 may be recorded as the year in which annual emissions reached a pinnacle before the global fossil fuel economy begins a terminal decline.

The milestone is considered a crucial tipping point in the race to drive emissions to net zero. But for many climate experts it’s an inflexion point that was due years ago and which, although encouraging, falls far short of the rapid reduction the world needs.

The world’s leading climate scientists have consistently warned that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere means it is critical to drive down emissions before 2030 if leaders hope to keep global heating to a maximum of 1.5C above pre-industrialised levels. The rate at which emissions would need to be reduced will require, most experts agree, global transformation on a scale not yet in the pipeline.

“We can take a small pause to celebrate this tipping point,” said Dave Jones, a director at the climate thinktank Ember. “But in a way it’s worrying that we are still talking about when emissions might peak. The reality of the situation is that we need deep and fast reductions in emissions if we hope to stay within the vanishingly small budget for carbon which remains.”

The International Energy Agency (IEA) raised hopes earlier this year of an end to the fossil fuel era when it predicted for the first time that the consumption of oil, gas and coal would peak before 2030 and begin to fall as climate policies took effect.

“It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s just a matter of ‘how soon’ – and the sooner the better for all of us,” said Fatih Birol, the head of the IEA.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/30/climate-scientists-hail-2023-as-beginning-of-the-end-for-fossil-fuel-era

Scientists protest at UK Parliament 5 September 2023.
Scientists protest at UK Parliament 5 September 2023.

dizzy: I’m expecting huge disinvestment and consequent disempowerment of the fossil fuel sector. The longer investors stay in fossil fuels, the larger their lossses will be. later elaboration: Plutocrats are losing control of the narrative, activists are aware of and highlighting huge fossil fuel subsidies and fossil fuel lies like CCS, renewables becoming much cheaper, court cases, greater acceptance and recognition of role of fossil fuels in destroying the planet, green parties achieving much higher vote share, it’ll hit the fan. later still elaboration: All the increasingly extreme and more often weather events that we’re experiencing attributed to fossil fuels caused climate crisis.

Continue ReadingClimate scientists hail 2023 as ‘beginning of the end’ for fossil fuel era

Study Finds Carbon Offset Schemes ‘Significantly Overestimating’ Deforestation Claims

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

“These carbon credits are essentially predicting whether someone will chop down a tree, and selling that prediction,” said one study author. “If you exaggerate or get it wrong, intentionally or not, you are selling hot air.”

Most carbon offset schemes significantly overestimate their impact on reducing deforestation, with many of the carbon credits purchased by polluting corporations amounting to little more than “hot air,” according to a researcher behind a study released Thursday that could portend billions of dollars in losses for speculators.

“Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) projects are intended to decrease carbon emissions from forests to offset other carbon emissions and are often claimed as credits to be used in calculating carbon emission budgets,” explains the study, which was published in the journal Science.

However, according to the study:

We examined the effects of 26 such project sites in six countries on three continents using synthetic control methods for causal inference. We found that most projects have not significantly reduced deforestation. For projects that did, reductions were substantially lower than claimed…

Methodologies used to construct deforestation baselines for carbon offset interventions need urgent revisions to correctly attribute reduced deforestation to the projects, thus maintaining both incentives for forest conservation and the integrity of global carbon accounting.

“Carbon credits provide major polluters with some semblance of climate credentials. Yet we can see that claims of saving vast swathes of forest from the chainsaw to balance emissions are overblown,” study co-author Andreas Kontoleon, from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Land Economy, said in a statement.

“These carbon credits are essentially predicting whether someone will chop down a tree, and selling that prediction,” he added. “If you exaggerate or get it wrong, intentionally or not, you are selling hot air.”

Kontoleon added that overestimations of forest preservation have driven an increase in the number of carbon credits on the market, resulting in artificial price suppression.

“Potential buyers benefit from consistently low prices created by the flood of credits,” he said. “It means that companies can tick their net-zero box at the lowest possible cost.”

This could mean that carbon speculators stand to lose billions of dollars in the future as offsets become stranded assets.

“It’s currently a buyer’s market and buyers are, rightly, prioritizing quality. There are over a billion tons of issued but not retired credits in the market—this suggests lots of credits can be written off, and there will remain a large supply for buyers to tap into,” Anton Root, head of research at AlliedOffsets, toldThe Guardian Thursday.

“A correction like that could help to orient the market toward fundamental supply-demand dynamics, which we don’t currently tend to see, and drive up the price for credits that are deemed to be above the quality threshold,” he added.

The new research follows other scientific research and journalistic investigations, including a January study by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial that concluded that over 90% of the rainforest carbon offsets sold by Verra, the nonprofit organization that sets the world’s leading sustainability standard, “are largely worthless and could make global heating worse.”

While some scientists argue that CO2 extraction, either via natural or technological means, is needed in order to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, opponents call the technology a “false climate solution.”

Green groups including Extinction Rebellion and Food & Water Watch have for years warned against carbon capture and storage, which critics call a “scam” and “greenwashing.”

“Carbon offset markets are widely discredited,” Food & Water Watch policy director Jim Walsh said earlier this year. “Their only benefit lies in enriching the middlemen charged with selling the lie.”

Despite this, the Biden administration is pushing ahead with a plan to invest $2.5 billion in a pair of major carbon capture and storage projects, which it claims will “significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation and hard-to-abate industrial operations” as part of the “effort critical to addressing the climate crisis and meeting the president’s goal of a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.”

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingStudy Finds Carbon Offset Schemes ‘Significantly Overestimating’ Deforestation Claims

‘They Will Never Change on Their Own’: Top Oil Giants Have No Serious Plans to Curb Emissions

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Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Canadian wildfire 2023
Canadian wildfire 2023

“Instead of providing desperately needed clean energy, they feed us greenwashing garbage.”

A new analysis of the activities of twelve major fossil fuel giants shows that the companies are misleading the public about their emission-reduction commitments while raking in record profits from fossil fuels, which are driving catastrophic extreme weather events across the globe.

In a report published Wednesday, Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe examines the decarbonization pledges, investments, and profits of six global fossil fuel giants—including Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies—and six European oil companies.

The results indicate that, in 2022, close to 93% of the oil giants’ investments on average went to keeping the companies on the “fossil oil and gas path” while just 7.3% were aimed at promoting “low-carbon solutions” and sustainable production.

“Although most of the sample companies are committed to ‘net zero’ by 2050, a closer look shows that none of them has developed a coherent strategy to achieve this,” the report notes, adding that the examined companies are in fact “scaling back their ambitions” even as their polluting activities wreak havoc worldwide. Shell and BP recently announced they are ditching previous plans to curb oil production and emissions.

The report shows that BP, Equinor, Wintershall and TotalEnergies cut their investments in renewable products last year—a fact that, according to Greenpeace, bolsters the case for “compulsory investment in genuinely green infrastructure” and other government regulations.

Kuba Gogolewski, a finance campaigner at Greenpeace CEE, said Wednesday that “as the world endures unprecedented heat waves, deadly floods, and escalating storms, Big Oil clings to its destructive business model and continues to fuel the climate crisis.”

“Instead of providing desperately needed clean energy, they feed us greenwashing garbage,” Gogolewski added. “Big Oil’s unwillingness to implement real change is a crime against the climate and future generations. Governments need to stop enabling fossil fuel companies, heavily regulate them, and plan our fossil fuel phase-out now. They will never change on their own.”

“Fossil fuel companies like Shell, TotalEnergies, BP Equinor, and ENI have shown the public they are incapable of self-regulation.”

The new report offers several examples of companies offering misleading data in an apparent attempt to convince investors and the public of their commitment to the renewable energy transition.

“Shell reports a ‘renewable capacity’ of 6.4 gigawatts for the 2022 financial year,” the analysis observes. “Only in the footnote… does one learn that this figure also includes plants that are still under construction or committed for sale. The actual capacity at the end of 2022 was only 2.2 gigawatts, as the group admits in another place in its reporting.”

In the case of BP’s 2022 financial disclosures, the report notes, “there is no number that would show the amount of wind and solar power” the company generated last year.

“This lapse is only an indication that no major oil company can show a comprehensible plan for a ‘net zero’ in 2050,” the report states.

“Fossil fuel companies like Shell, TotalEnergies, BP Equinor, and ENI have shown the public they are incapable of self-regulation after scaling back their climate ambitions, despite being heavily responsible for the climate crisis,” said Gogolewski. “That’s why Greenpeace is calling for European governments to strictly regulate the industry and begin its rapid economic and political downsizing.”

The new analysis comes in the wake of devastating fires in Maui, Hawaii that were fueled by climate change, which contributed to the severely dry conditions that allowed the fires to spread rapidly.

Maui County is currently suing Shell, BP, and other fossil fuel giants, accusing them of engaging in a “coordinated, multi-front effort to conceal and deny their own knowledge” about the climate threat and profiting “from a massive increase in the extraction and consumption of oil, coal, and natural gas, which has in turn caused an enormous, foreseeable, and avoidable increase in global greenhouse gas pollution and a concordant increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases.”

The Maui lawsuit states that “wildfires are becoming more frequent, intense, and destructive in the county” as the planet warms due to ever-rising carbon emissions.

Last month was the hottest on record.

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue Reading‘They Will Never Change on Their Own’: Top Oil Giants Have No Serious Plans to Curb Emissions

Net Zero is not enough

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t.A.T.u. All The Things She Said

‘A Burning World Shows Net Zero is Not Enough’

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[T}he very concept of net zero is deeply flawed. It is based on the idea that all we need to do to prevent dangerous levels of warming is eliminate carbon pollution to the point where our remaining emissions are matched by the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by plants, soils and other natural carbon sinks, as well as – should they ever exist – novel carbon removal technologies. But this focus on emissions is misguided, because it is not how much we emit every year that ultimately counts.

What matters is the concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and these, as the planetary catastrophe unfolding around us testifies, are already far too high. 

Atmospheric concentrations of the most significant greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, are now around 420 parts per million, up from 280 ppm in the 18th Century and 336 ppm when I was born in 1979.

The safe level is generally considered to be no more than 350 ppm, yet net zero aims to stabilise concentrations at whatever level they reach when we finally reach carbon neutrality – and that may be as high as 470 ppm even if we meet our commitments globally. Given what we’re already experiencing at 420 ppm, stabilising the climate at such levels should be unthinkable – and that means we need to rethink net zero. 

Rather than slowly applying the brakes with the aim of stopping by 2050, we should be slamming on the brakes immediately and then shifting into reverse. Simply reducing emissions to net zero is not enough, we should be aiming for net negative so that we can start reducing atmospheric concentrations back down to safe levels.

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‘A Burning World Shows Net Zero is Not Enough’

Continue ReadingNet Zero is not enough

Wealthiest 10% of US Households Responsible for 40% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Study

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Image reads "The rich and powerful piss on us and the media tells us it's raining"

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams.

“Without policies such as regulations or taxes on very polluting investments, it’s unlikely that wealthy individuals making a lot of money from fossil fuel investments will stop investing in them,” says one economist.

The richest tenth of U.S. households are responsible for 40% of all the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, a study published Thursday revealed, underscoring what progressives say is the need for regulations and taxes on carbon-intensive investments.

Published in PLOS Climate, the study—which was led by University of Massachusetts, Amherst sustainability scientist Jared Starr—analyzed 30 years of U.S. household income data and the greenhouse gas emissions generated in creating that income.

“We find significant and growing emissions inequality that cuts across economic and racial lines,” the paper notes. “In 2019, fully 40% of total U.S. emissions were associated with income flows to the highest earning 10% of households.”

“Among the highest-earning 1% of households (whose income is linked to 15-17% of national emissions), investment holdings account for 38-43% of their emissions,” the publication continues. “Even when allowing for a considerable range of investment strategies, passive income accruing to this group is a major factor shaping the U.S. emissions distribution.”

“It just seems morally and politically problematic to have one group of people reaping so much benefit from emissions while the poorer groups in society are asked to disproportionately deal with the harms of those emissions.”

The study’s findings are consistent with research published in 2021 by the Institute for European Environmental Policy and the Stockholm Environment Institute that estimated the wealthiest 1% of humanity was on track to produce 16% of all global CO2 emissions by 2030. Additionally, a 2022 Oxfam report found that a single billionaire produces a million times more carbon emissions than the average person.

Starr toldThe Washington Post that “as you move up the income ladder, an increasing share of emissions is associated with investments.”

According to the Post:

Then there were “super-emitters” with extremely high overall greenhouse gas emissions, corresponding to about the top 0.1% of households. About 15 days of emissions from a super-emitter was equal to a lifetime of emissions for someone in the poorest 10% in America.

The team found that the highest emissions linked to income came from white, non-Hispanic homes, and the lowest came from Black households. Emissions peaked until age 45 to 54, and then declined.

“It just seems morally and politically problematic to have one group of people reaping so much benefit from emissions while the poorer groups in society are asked to disproportionately deal with the harms of those emissions,” said Starr.

The study asserts that “results suggest an alternative income or shareholder-based carbon tax, focused on investments, may have equity advantages over traditional consumer-facing cap-and-trade or carbon tax options and be a useful policy tool to encourage decarbonization while raising revenue for climate finance.”

Lucas Chancel, a French economist who was not part of the study, told the Post that “all Americans contribute to climate change, but clearly not in the same way.”

“Without policies such as regulations or taxes on very polluting investments,” he stressed, “it’s unlikely that wealthy individuals making a lot of money from fossil fuel investments will stop investing in them.”

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams.

This article is about the rich having high climate impacting investments in addition to high climate impacting lifestyles.

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Continue ReadingWealthiest 10% of US Households Responsible for 40% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Study