Corinne Le Quéré, one of the authors of the study and a professor of climate change science at the University of East Anglia, said the big, pandemic-induced drop in emissions in April was short-lived.
Once lockdowns started to lift, emissions bounced back strongly.
“Because nothing has changed around us,” she said. “The confinement measures are a forced behavior change, they are not lasting.”
And while the world’s battle with Covid-19 is far from over, emissions have already recovered.
Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said the rebound in carbon emissions was “a stark warning that not enough is being done to accelerate clean energy transitions worldwide.”
“If governments don’t move quickly with the right energy policies, this could put at risk the world’s historic opportunity to make 2019 the definitive peak in global emissions,” he said in a statement.
The burning of fossil fuels in cars, planes and power plants — as well as through other human activities — releases CO2 into the atmosphere, where it accumulates like a blanket and traps in radiation that would otherwise escape into space. This causes temperatures on Earth to rise, which is linked to more extreme weather, ice melt and a rise in sea levels. And the more carbon emitted into the atmosphere, the more the planet will warm.
Those drops are similar in size to the one seen last year: Le Quéré and her co-authors estimate global emissions fell by 2.6 gigatons in 2020 to 34 gigatons — but this drop was temporary and came at a huge cost to the economy.
They key going forward is to figure out how to achieve such significant drops without hurting the economy. To do that, the authors say investment in renewable energy and a green recovery is vital.
She added that while many countries have adopted ambitious goals of cutting emissions to net zero by 2050 or 2060, what’s lacking are many details on how they plan to get there.
Despite the pledges, there’s growing evidence that the world’s governments are not taking sufficient action.
The group found that of the total stimulus of $14.9 trillion injected so far, only $1.8 trillion has gone into green projects, while $4.6 trillion has gone directly into sectors that have “a large and lasting impact on carbon emissions and nature.”
The new IEA data also backs up the idea that much of the recovery is being fueled by polluting sectors and that, in some cases, the emissions reductions seen in the first half of 2020 were more than made up for by dramatic increases later on.
China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, saw a 12% drop in emissions in February 2020, compared with the same month in 2019, according to the IEA.
But emissions bounced back quickly after the country’s economy returned to growth in April 2020, and for the rest of the year, monthly emissions were on average 5% higher compared with 2019 levels. This rebound meant that despite the big drop in February, emissions in China actually rose by 0.8% for the whole of 2020.
“China is so big, well over a quarter of global emissions, so whatever happens in China leaves a big fingerprint on the global total,” said Glen Peters, research director at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research.
China isn’t the only trouble spot. Emissions in India were back above 2019 levels from September 2020 onward. In Brazil, they surpassed the 2019 levels throughout the final quarter, the IEA data shows.
Source : Nbcnewyork