‘A critical moment’: UN warns world will miss climate targets unless fossil fuels phased out
‘A critical moment’: UN warns world will miss climate targets unless fossil fuels phased out
Governments failing to cut emissions fast enough to meet Paris agreement goals and avoid disaster, major report says
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weve tried nothing and were all out of ideas
We're doing a lot more than nothing, but renewables aren't yet growing fast enough to cause fossil fuel use to decline globally.
Every time we had a new energy source, we just added it to the mix. We always had to activly cut the usage of the old one to cause a decline. So renewables just can not grown fast enough to cause a decline in fossil fuels. They however can replace them, if we cut them in a smart way.
That's not really true at all. Significant parts of the world have managed substitutions in recent decades, in particular the decline of coal use in the US and EU looks like replacement, rather than "adding to the mix" on a regional level, and neither part of the world is exporting coal to the places that are burning it.
What we do is a choice, not some inevitability of adding new energy sources to the mix.
The US is a net exporter of coal and since 2007, when gas really started to grow, coal imports have fallen and exports have somewhat increased. The good part is mining it in the US is just too expensive, so mines do close down, but it is not a clear win. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/imports-and-exports.php https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?country=~USA
As for the EU, there is a working emissions trading system, which limits emissions, so there is active cutting of fossil fuels and coal is the easiest to replace.
Overall US coal extraction has dropped sharply in recent years
The EU did better, with an earlier peak.
this seems incredible to me. especially given the co2 emission-equivalency with the deforestation of the amazon. i haven't clicked the link, but do you know whether that calculation takes deforestation into account?
Yeah, deforestation is a much smaller impact thing at this point than fossil fuels. Big enough to matter, but only a bit of the overall problem.
Based on multiple lines of evidence using interhemispheric gradients of CO2 concentrations, isotopes, and inventory data, it is unequivocal that the growth in CO2 in the atmosphere since 1750 (see Section TS.2.2) is due to the direct emissions from human activities. The combustion of fossil fuels and land-use change for the period 1750–2019 resulted in the release of 700 ± 75 PgC (likely range, 1 PgC = 1015 g of carbon) to the atmosphere, of which about 41% ± 11% remains in the atmosphere today (high confidence). Of the total anthropogenic CO2 emissions, the combustion of fossil fuels was responsible for about 64% ± 15%, growing to an 86% ± 14% contribution over the past 10 years. The remainder resulted from land-use change.
And CO2 is big enough that this means that fossil fuels are the biggest piece of the problem:
