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After a week of far-reaching climate promises measured over decades, four of the six largest economies in the world have now proposed end dates for their carbon emissions.
President Xi Jinping’s surprise announcement at the United Nations annual climate meeting this week committed China to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. That brings the third-largest economy by nominal GDP to a flexible but vital consensus. importance with the second largest (EU), the fourth largest. (Japan) and the fifth largest (California). The end of emissions has been set even if the target dates continue to vary, and at least one generation in the future.
Each new country that joins this carbon neutral group puts more pressure on the holdouts to align their policies with global goals. Two of the largest economies remain outside the consensus: India, ranked No. 6, and the US national economy, which remains the largest by size and historical contribution to warming.
“Our goal is to peak CO2 emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060,” Xi said by videoconference Tuesday at the UN General Assembly, without providing details on what carbon neutrality will mean. practice. But the mere fact of China’s promise keeps alive the possibility that the world could achieve the most ambitious goal set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement: keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. . The current global average is around 1 ° C warming.
“If China’s emissions didn’t go to zero, 1.5 wouldn’t have been an option,” said Glen Peters, research director at the Center for International Climate Research. The fact is that China, as the world’s largest emitter and consumer of energy today, exerts enormous influence on the prospects of limiting future warming. And not hitting the 1.5 ° C target by just half a degree would cost the world $ 20 trillion by 2100, according to an analysis published in the journal Nature.
For all economies now linked in aspirations to end emissions, reaching net zero will mean critical rewiring that accelerates investments in clean energy and reduces fossil fuels. In the case of China, radical reforms will have to be carried out in dozens of regions led by local governments that may not share the enthusiasm for reaching the 2060 goal. Beijing has long struggled to implement grand plans from the center in one country. the size of a continent of 1.4 billion people. Local officials often have more to gain by appeasing interest groups than by listening to national leaders, especially when those policies could affect local industries like coal mining.
“Announcing a carbon neutrality target is just the first step on a long road,” wrote analysts at BloombergNEF, in a note detailing the “arduous” and “challenging” path ahead. To achieve this goal, China requires new technologies such as carbon-free hydrogen, BNEF concluded, “and it will need to make its economy much more efficient.”
Implementing long-term goals will be a challenge everywhere. California became one of the first major economies to set a carbon neutrality target, resolving two years ago to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. Recent wildfires that have devastated much of the western United States They injected a new level of urgency, and this week California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order prohibiting the sale of new gasoline cars after 2035.
That decision makes California the first US state to join the UK, France, Canada and several other nations in putting an end date on the sale of internal combustion engine cars. It also marks a huge global shift as California consumes about 1% of the world’s oil production, roughly 1 million barrels per day. Yet even after years of incentive policies to encourage the sale of zero-emission vehicles, less than 8% of the state’s registered cars are electric.
Aiming at zero
How California will achieve this 15-year shift away from gasoline cars and what opposition it might face from the federal government is not yet specified, but the state is large enough to set a significant trend for the US as a whole.
There are also questions about how the EU will deliver on its proposal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in March and then set an even more ambitious target earlier this month to cut its emissions by 55% by 2030. That’s it. behind on a previous goal of reducing emissions by 40% compared to 1990 levels by the same end date, so this new benchmark represents a renewed commitment to make profound and drastic changes quickly.
Meanwhile, over the summer, EU heads of state approved the world’s greenest stimulus plan to date, promising to invest more than € 500 billion ($ 580 billion) in measures that will help fight global warming. . The money will go to everything from green hydrogen scaling up to more sustainable agriculture.
The scale of China’s enterprise will be immense, as the nation alone accounted for 28% of the world’s total greenhouse gases in 2019. Simply reduce the share of fossil fuels in its current 85% energy mix to less than 25% it would require $ 180 billion. investment each year through 2050, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Similar investments will be required in everything from electric vehicle production and infrastructure to cleaning up industrial processes such as cement and steel manufacturing, which require massive amounts of energy that can only be reliably supplied by fossil fuels right now.
The impact of China’s decisions will be enormous. Even if the rest of the world’s nations continue with their current climate policies, China will become carbon neutral by 2060 reducing global warming projections by as much as 0.3 ° C. That is the largest individual reduction ever estimated as a result of a change. policy, according to Climate Action Tracker.
The possibility of monumental policy changes looms over the climate debate. While the United States has significantly reduced climate policy under President Donald Trump, cheap natural gas and cheaper renewable energy have largely kept the country’s emissions in check. If the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden defeated Trump in the November elections, the world landscape would change dramatically again.
Yet even without the federal commitment on climate, at the state level, leaders like California’s Newsom have moved in the opposite direction from Trump. In states like Washington and New York there are now net zero targets, and major US-based companies have also pledged to cut emissions to zero. Even America’s utility giants are pledging to go carbon neutral, most recently New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., which did so on Thursday.
“It’s like personal actions but on steroids,” said Noah Kaufman, a researcher at the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “It’s very useful from a directional standpoint, but it will never be enough if you don’t have the policies to support it.”
Biden has promised to restore a national level of political action, proposing a carbon-free power grid by 2035 and net zero emissions by 2050. If Biden rejoins the Paris Agreement, which the United States will leave on November 4, the pressure it will rise on other major issuers – most significantly India, the largest besides the United States without a net zero target set – to make similar commitments.
The UN framework allows developing countries to reduce their emissions much later than developed countries, which are much more to blame for current levels of atmospheric carbon. Although India is not ready to set a net zero emissions target, it has shown its willingness to participate in the global conversation on emissions.
India “sees climate change as an area where, to put it simply, it can score points geopolitically,” said Thomas Spencer of the Institute of Energy and Resources, a think tank in India. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has been setting records for low-cost solar installations and has become a role model in implementing energy efficiency measures, although it does not yet have strong policies to electrify transportation.
The next major UN climate meeting, to be held in Glasgow, has already been postponed until 2021. World leaders have tried to keep up the momentum, with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson calling for a Thursday virtual meeting in December to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement. It would be the next great moment for countries to strengthen their emission reduction commitments.
Also this week, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, called for the creation of a “coalition of great ambition” that would include the EU and China, similar to a group that met in 2015 to help reach an agreement in Paris.
Most of these climate goals are bold and completely voluntary. There is no guarantee that promised reductions will be met. Still, the non-binding resolution created by the Paris climate agreement has fundamentally changed the conversation about climate action.
“That’s the beauty of the Paris Agreement,” Spencer said. “Part of her strength is also her weakness. It appeals to so many different sectors, so many different levers of action, and it just sets the direction. It doesn’t really say you have to. “
Once that direction is established, it often means increasing ambition, not decreasing. The British government is behind on its short-term emissions targets, for example, and is now considering advancing its ban on the sale of gasoline and diesel cars until 2030.
That means those who assume that China’s 2060 target is too late to keep the 1.5 ° C hope alive may be in for a surprise. Peters, from the Center for International Climate Research, suggested it could be just the beginning: “I don’t think this is China’s final offer, and then they go away and not give in for 40 years.”
– With help from Brian Eckhouse, Jess Shankleman, and David R. Baker.
