FRENCH president François Hollande did not turn up as scheduled to deliver the opening address at a major climate science conference in Paris last week. No doubt the Grexit crisis demanded his attention.
Instead, while scientists from around the world flew in and out to discuss the future under various climate change scenarios, it emerged during the week that Hollande’s government plans to quietly renege on a climate promise France made last year. It will now continue to subsidise the building of coal-fired power stations in other countries, to save jobs at the French companies that construct them.
Coal is the key to all our futures. Rich countries have made some progress in cutting carbon dioxide emissions, largely by shifting away from coal to less-polluting fuels. But the result has been a glut of cheap coal, leading to a coal renaissance that could consign us to a world more than 4°C [7°F] warmer.
And the nation hosting the December 2015 UN summit on climate change, also in Paris, is helping fund this renaissance. It’s hardly surprising then that no one at last week’s conference thought the summit would deliver a deal to stop global temperatures rising more than 2 °C – generally considered to be the threshold above which catastrophic consequences are inevitable.
Instead, some called for Plan B: a global pricing system for carbon that is high enough to kill coal once and for all.
“Without carbon pricing, I have serious doubts that we can deal with the renaissance of coal,” economist Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany told the conference.
Given all the talk of the death of coal lately, the idea that coal use is rising may sound surprising. But poor, fast-growing economies in Asia and Africa have been investing heavily in coal power as prices fall.
The result is that global CO2 emissions are rising faster than ever >(see graph). And they are likely to continue to grow, warns Edenhofer. “Emissions are rising and rising,” he said. “Instead of decarbonising, we are carbonising our economy.”
Click on the following image to get the whole thing. Blogger bug.
Some have claimed the opposite recently, heralding a report by the International Energy Agency finding that global energy-related emissions had not risen for the first time in 2014, even as the economy grew.
But Edenhofer thinks the 2014 figures could well be revised upwards. And even if they’re right, it was probably a blip rather than a turning point, he told New Scientist: “One year is not a good indicator.”
To have any hope of preventing catastrophic climate change, global emissions must start falling soon. This is what the December meeting is supposed to ensure.
But it is already clear that any cuts the major polluters are prepared to make fall woefully short of what’s required. “It’s not enough,” was the phrase echoed by many conference speakers.
Several went further, arguing that the UN’s entire approach is flawed. Trying to get an effective global agreement on cutting emissions is not possible, they say. “Game theory tells you this will fail,” Gjalt Huppes of Leiden University in the Netherlands told New Scientist.
Instead, every country should put a price on carbon that is high enough to kill first coal, then oil and gas. “Most economists agree a carbon price is the best way to curb carbon emissions,” said Joseph Stiglitz, the World Bank’s former chief economist, now at Columbia University. Each country could implement its own pricing system, by taxes or carbon markets, he said. What matters is that the price starts high and rises steadily, to give businesses confidence to invest in alternatives.
Poor nations are unlikely to be keen on the idea, fearing it will harm their development. But the thing about a global carbon pricing scheme is that a relatively small “coalition of the willing” could force it on the world. Just two or three of the US, the European Union, China and Japan could do it, Huppes argues. It needn’t even be the whole US, he says – California would be enough.
[We would need to give some kind of help to poor countries to prevent hardship.]
But even if carbon prices were introduced tomorrow, it is unlikely to be enough. Some politicians are still talking about limiting warming to 1.5 °C, but scientists now regard this as fantasy. “I’m struggling for words to characterise the 1.5-degree target,” said Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern, Switzerland. Even the 2 °C target has become “extremely ambitious”, he says.
Just about every scenario leading to 2 °C either assumes global emissions peaked around 2010 – they didn’t – or requires “negative emissions” (see “The dirty secret of 2 °C scenarios“). So achieving it requires either time travel or geoengineering, Kevin Anderson of the University of Manchester told the conference.
It will take decades to transform our energy supply to a zero-carbon one, Anderson argues – decades that we don’t have. So our only hope of sticking to 2 °C is to slash energy use instead – such as by cutting down on air travel. Climate scientists should start by setting an example themselves, said Anderson, who never flies anywhere himself.
“We need radical reductions in energy demand from now until 2030,” Anderson said. “And a Marshall plan to build a zero-carbon energy supply.”
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