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Paris (AFP)
The global effort to prevent Earth from becoming an uninhabitable greenhouse is in the grip of the “net zero” fever.
More than 110 countries have pledged to become carbon neutral by mid-century, including major greenhouse gas emitters like Britain, Japan and South Korea, according to the United Nations.
The European Union has cast the vote, as has the incoming President of the United States, Joe Biden.
China, which generates a quarter of all carbon pollution, set 2060 as the year in which any remaining emissions from energy, agriculture or industry must be offset by tree farms or experimental technologies that absorb CO2 from the air. .
More than 65 percent of global CO2 emissions are now under such commitments, according to a UN estimate.
The London-based Climate and Energy Intelligence Unit estimates the aggregate GDP of nations, cities and states with zero net targets by 2050 to be $ 46 trillion, more than half of global GDP.
“I strongly believe that 2021 can be a new kind of leap year, the year of a quantum leap towards carbon neutrality,” UN chief Antonio Guterres said last week in New York.
“All countries, cities, financial institutions and companies must adopt plans to make the transition to net zero emissions by 2050.”
– ‘Devil in the details’ –
But what is promised?
And will it meet the Paris Agreement targets of limiting global warming to “well below” two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels or, better yet, below the 1.5 ° C limit that the treaty aspires to? ?
“In many cases, the net zero promises are an improvement, but in others the ‘net’ arrangement is a black box that can hide all sorts of problems,” Duncan McLaren, a professor at the Center for the Environment at the University, told AFP Lancaster University.
The Earth’s surface has already warmed 1.2 ° C on average, making extreme weather more deadly, and new research shows that a return to 2019 carbon pollution levels would likely push the world further. past the 1.5 ° C milestone around 2030.
“The devil is in the details,” said Kelly Levin, a senior associate in the global climate program at the World Resources Institute (WRI).
There are several keys to assessing the value of carbon-neutral promises, Levin and other experts said.
The first is whether they apply to all greenhouse gases or just carbon dioxide.
CO2 is responsible for more than three quarters of global warming. But methane concentrations, mainly from natural gas leaks and animal husbandry, are rising and could overturn the goals of the Paris treaty if left unchecked.
New Zealand, for example, consolidated its net zero votes for 2050 into law in November 2019, but with a vague caveat: it only applies to CO2. One third of the country’s total emissions come from the burping of cattle and especially sheep.
– Kick the can? –
A second red flag is the lack of intermediate hard targets before 2050, said Teresa Anderson, climate policy coordinator at ActionAid International.
“A smoker who promises to quit while still on a pack a day for the next 30 years will still do a lot of harm.”
Scientists are adamant about the need for deep, short-term reductions in carbon pollution.
The UN’s climate science advisory panel, the IPCC, has said that human-made emissions must fall 45 percent by 2030, and then 100 percent by 2050, to have any hope of staying on this side of the world. the 1.5 ° C barrier.
Last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave a boost to the UN-led climate process by announcing a 68 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, compared to 1990 levels.
Johnson, who will host a virtual climate summit on December 12 and the most important UN climate conference from Paris next year in Glasgow, encouraged other leaders to follow suit.
The European Union could increase its commitment for 2030 by the end of this week to 55 percent, but so far few other nations have done so.
China, the world’s top coal consumer, has hinted that it could commit to peak emissions in 2025, five years before its long-standing commitment.
But despite the pandemic, its 2020 emissions will exceed those of 2019, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
– One billion trees –
A third crucial measure is how much of a net zero commitment will be met with short-term emissions cuts, and how much will come from so-called “negative emissions technologies.”
“You can’t get to net zero without removing some carbon dioxide,” said Oliver Geden, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and lead author for the IPCC.
And yet all the options on the table to remove excess carbon from the air remain deeply flawed, experts say.
To scale, it would take an area more than twice the size of India for tree farms in the second half of the century, studies have shown.
Last year, a plan put forward by Swiss scientists to solve the climate crisis by planting a trillion trees, quickly adopted by fossil fuel companies and even by US President Donald Trump, was scrapped by experts. based on faulty calculations and requiring unrealistic amounts of land.
Another approach, in which the CO2 emitted from burning biofuels is buried underground, faces a similar problem.
Meanwhile, technology that extracts CO2 directly from the air, to sequester it or turn it into fuel pellets, is still in its infancy.
“There is a great deal of uncertainty about the scale and availability of future carbon removals from both terrestrial carbon sinks (trees) and emerging carbon removal technologies,” said WRI’s Levin.
The handful of fossil fuel companies that claim their futures are consistent with the Paris Agreement targets, such as Shell and BP, rely heavily on both to justify short-term plans to increase oil and gas exploration and production.
A UN report last week showed that global fossil fuel production must, in fact, decline by about 6 percent annually over the next decade to maintain the 1.5 ° C target.
– ‘Legal loopholes’ –
Finally, one should read the fine print of the zero net promises to see exactly what is or is not included.
“There is no agreed set of principles and guidelines for these plans, so they are riddled with loopholes,” said Jesse Bragg, media director for the corporate responsibility watchdog NGO.
Many national schemes leave out the aviation and shipping sectors that, if they were nations, would rank among the top ten global emitters.
“Most, if not all, of the aviation and oil sector plans are seriously flawed, with a heavy reliance on biological sinks (trees) to offset ongoing fossil fuel emissions,” McLaren said, adding that some steel and cement companies had taken bold steps.
“Good plans are the ones that maximize reduction at source and redesign their technologies accordingly.”
Experts say that net zero plans should clearly separate goals to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from future carbon removal plans.
“If you have explicit goals on both sides, it becomes more difficult, both politically and reputationally, to manipulate one against the other and hide unreliable options,” McLaren said.
But even if all the promises about carbon neutrality are kept, he added, that only stabilizes greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
“That means the impacts of climate change will remain as bad or worse than they are now, unless we subsequently increase withdrawals to reduce concentrations,” he said.
© 2020 AFP
