Carbon emissions will drop just 40% by 2050 with countries' current pledges

[The Fifty Stateman]

(This piece originally appeared in The Guardian. I am using this Grist repost because I am not registered with TG.)

Rob Davies
Oct 14, 2021

Current plans to cut global carbon emissions will fall 60 percent short of their 2050 net zero target, the International Energy Agency has said, as it urged leaders to use the upcoming COP26 climate conference to send an “unmistakable signal” with concrete policy plans.

In its annual World Energy Outlook, redesigned this year as a “guidebook” for world leaders attending the summit in Glasgow, the IEA predicted that carbon emissions would decrease by just 40 percent by the middle of the century if countries stick to their climate pledges.

The organization said the difference between current plans and the change necessary to reach the net zero target was “stark”, requiring up to $4 trillion in investment over the next decade alone to bridge the divide.

The IEA’s executive director Fatih Birol told the Guardian that major economies recovering from COVID-19 were already missing the opportunity to spur investment in clean energy.

“We are witnessing an unsustainable recovery from the pandemic,” he said, pointing to sections of the report that show coal use growing strongly, contributing to the second-largest increase in CO2 emissions in history.

Full Article

World "leaders" will take truly serious action when their children start spontaneously combusting before their eyes.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. In thirty years large parts of the planet will be uninhabitable.

Perhaps the best thing we can hope for is that some truly terrible disease erupts killing three-quarters of all humans. Even then, the population would still be at nearly two billion, which is probably still above the carrying capacity of the planet.

There are too many people here by several orders of magnitude, that's the simple truth. Humans are far too good at reproducing, not so good at living within our means.

[jimfields33]

2. I wish just the countries not taken it seriously would be affected,

but alas, it doesn’t work that way. The United States could stop daily living and stay in the house and it still wouldn’t help unless other countries….China! Do at least a respectable amount.

[NNadir]

3. People have been talking joyfully about low carbon energy 30 years out for more than half a century.

It didn't come. It isn't here. It won't come.

The asshole Amory Lovins was spewing this crap in 1976. In October of 1976 when he published his "genius" anti-nuke "renewables will save us" ("us" being bourgeois consumers like himself) paper in Foreign Affairs, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide was around 329 ppm. For the first week in October of 2021, 45 years later, it was 413.63 ppm, for the week beginning October 3, 2021.

Facts matter.

If one actually reads the World Energy Outlook, year after year after year, one always finds a rosy scenario compared with "Business as Usual."

The rosy "stated policies" never pan out. Right now we are burning more dangerous fossil fuels than we have ever burned, and it is accelerating because countries like "green" Germany have to start burning coal because there isn't enough gas to cover up the grotesque failure of Energiewende because of European Dunkelflaute.

In the last quarter of a century "business as usual" has always won.

What's more, things are getting worse faster than ever. The main reason for that is that people who write in places like Grist want to tell everyone that so called "renewable energy" and electric cars will allow them a "green" bourgeois lifestyle, where everything will be cheap and easy.

The reality is that so called "renewable energy" is lipstick on the gas pig, as we're seeing in places all around the world because the wind isn't blowing.

Betting the future of humanity and the planet on the weather while working actively to destabilize the weather should have obviously been a bad idea, but somehow it has been the subject of wild international cheering, with the result that we saw, for the first time in human history, concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide of 420 ppm in the planetary atmosphere this April, less than 10 years after we first saw 400 ppm.

Wishful thinking and happy talk about how the people who are now toddlers and infants will be burning less carbon than we do as adults, not because we have to do so, but because we can't think clearly, is obscene. They will live in a world where all the best ores have been mined and the tailing dumped haphazardly, the atmosphere is destroyed, deserts grow, fires rage, cities are submerged, a world with famines, plagues, destroyed wilderness and few resources.

They will hate us of this generation as a result.

We thought nuclear energy was "too dangerous." Compared to what?

History will not forgive us, nor should it.