The Earth is warming so fast that overshooting the Paris Agreement’s climate goals will be inevitable without major cuts to fossil fuel use, according to a report released on Sunday at the global climate summit in Dubai.
The Paris Agreement targeted efforts to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celicius. Sunday’s report, by research firms Future Earth, The Earth League, and the World Climate Research Programme, said sticking to that goal “is only possible in the near term with immediate, transformative action that rapidly decarbonises the economy, energy and land-use systems, cutting emissions by 43% by 2030 relative to 2019 levels.”
The report said current emissions levels will exhaust the 1.5 degree goal in six to seven years. It added that current policies, if fully implemented, will raise global temperatures more than 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this decade.
The COP28 climate summit is just getting under way in Dubai, featuring world leaders who are expected to explain how they hope to achieve the goals set out in the 2016 Paris Agreement, plus other climate-focused pledges since then.
While President Joe Biden isn’t attending this year’s summit, as he has for the past two years, the White House has revealed new rules around methane emissions. On Saturday, the White House announced a $3 billion pledge to the Green Climate Fund, and a plan to achieve 50% to 52% emissions reductions in 2030.
The new policies by the Environmental Protection Agency ban flaring of natural gas produced by drilled oil wells, force oil producers to watch for leaks around oil well sites, and use remote detection of large methane releases.
The White House said the rule should prevent the equivalent of 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide—nearly as much as all the carbon dioxide emitted by the power sector in 2021.
The administration also pointed to other methane emissions reduction efforts, including plugging oil and gas wells and leaks, reclaiming abandoned coal mines, reducing agricultural emissions, and new technologies to detect and halt large methane emissions.
At the same time, 50 oil and gas producers, including
Exxon Mobil
and Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, pledged to reach near-zero methane emissions by 2030, including ending routine flaring in drilling operations. They aren’t pledging to cut oil and gas production.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said Sunday that the emissions goals are a step in the right direction but criticized them for leaving out emissions from fossil fuel consumption. “The fossil fuel industry is finally starting to wake up, but the promises made clearly fall short of what is required,” he said, according to a statement on the United Nations’ website.
Global leaders are meeting as the world experiences more frequent and severe weather disasters such as flooding, extreme heat, and drought.
The oil producers making the methane emissions pledge said they have invested $65 billion in low-carbon technologies and have helped companies outside the group also decarbonize. Other participants include
Shell,
Occidental Petroleum,
and Brazil’s state-run producer
Petrobras.
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry also announced joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance to signal momentum in steering away from coal. The seven countries joining the group, including the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Kosovo, and Norway, agreed to not develop new unabated coal power plants and phase out existing ones.
There was no timeline given, but the administration has set a goal of no coal by 2035.
“We will be working to accelerate unabated coal phase-out across the world, building stronger economies and more resilient communities,” Kerry said. “The first step is to stop making the problem worse: stop building new unabated coal power plants.”
Write to Liz Moyer at [email protected]
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