Renewable energy is booming. So why are carbon emissions still going up?
By SARA SCHONHARDT
POLITICO Surge reported renewables booming while global carbon emissions rise, with UN admitting 1.5C climate warming target lost.
Conventional wisdom once held that if renewables were cheap and available, fossil fuel use would decline — along with planet-warming emissions.
Instead, clean energy is booming and the planet is still on a path to damaging climate change.
The United Nations said as much this morning.
“The opportunity to limit warming to 1.5°C without overshoot has been lost,” the organization said in its annual Emissions Gap Report.
In other words, a report that has spent more than a decade telling countries how to close the gap between climate goals and projected emissions is admitting that the climate goal is now impossible.
The world is on track to warm 2.6 degrees by the end of the century — and that’s if countries follow their climate plans. Since the 1.5 target is now in the rearview mirror, the U.N. is measuring the gap against a new target of 1.7 or 1.8 degrees.
The idea is that countries would overshoot 1.5 degrees but then could use aggressive policies to bring temperatures back down.
The problem: Getting there means a combination of “faster, deeper and more sustained” emissions reductions and large-scale carbon removal — a task that countries were already struggling to achieve, plus the widespread deployment of a technology not yet proven at scale.
…
But the scale and speed of the transition has been far too slow to arrest global warming as climate pollution continues to build up in the atmosphere.
