China to the climate rescue – sorta

Bloomberg reports that global emissions have peaked and will start falling from here for the first time since the industrial revolution. Good news, but it's not enough.

Finally some good climate news: not only have Chinese emissions probably peaked well ahead of schedule, but because it is so big and is such a big emitter of GHGs that probably means that global emissions have also peaked.

China is the grown up in the room when it comes to the Climate Crisis. The speed of its green transformation is breathtaking. Two thirds of the world’s solar panels are in China and half the EVs on the road are on Chinese roads.

Of course, it is not doing this out of pure altruism. The cost of making renewables have fallen so precipitously in the last few years that it makes perfect economic sense to build solar and not coal-fired plants simply as it's cheaper and the energy they produce is “free”. Plus China has a nasty smog problem.

The rest of the world is playing catch up but the same economic logic applies to India which has the same energy insecurity and environment problems and is in second place. Germany shares the energy insecurity thing and is in the renewables lead in Europe.

Welcome as this news is, it is still not enough. Even with falling emissions, the rate they are expected to fall, according to Bloomberg NEF will put us on track for a 2.6C degree temperature rise by the Paris deadline – so no cigar. That still dooms us to catastrophic climate damage, more extreme weather like Storm Boris and Hurricane Helene that will hit Florida this week – and each year from now these extreme weather events are expected to get worse. I know I keep banging on about this but it is an existential crisis and no one seems to be taking it seriously enough.

And the USA I'm looking at you when I say this. There is lots of investment going into renewables and the falling costs make that easier and easier, but the main problem is that fossil fuel use reduction is just not happening.

I'm sure you have seen lots of charts showing the explosive growth of renewable generating capacity, which is very encouraging, but check out this graph that compares that with the growth in the US production of shale gas since the start of that revolution in 2007.

As bne IntelliNews reported, emissions are at an all-time high yet US President Joe Biden has been issuing a record number of new oil and gas exploration and production permits this year. The pace of production of hydrocarbons is accelerating, not falling.

I'm sorry the chart is so blurry but I have been looking for a better one and can’t find one. This should be a front-page story – the growth of US shale is so much faster than renewables, you will notice the y-axis is a logarithmic scale – but it seems few journalists have bothered to make this comparison.

Now compare that with this chart that shows where the emissions come from by activity: three quarters from energy and that ain’t renewable energy we are talking about. The size of the failure to deal with the main climate issue – reducing the use of fossil fuels – is being swept under the rug.

The COP28 summit was a cop-out. It confused the problem by focusing on phasing out “unabated” fossil fuels, i.e. fossil fuels where the CO₂ can’t be carbon captured and stored (CCS).

CCS is also at the heart of the alternative “solution” being proposed: switch from gas to hydrogen. But as we just reported hydrogen won’t work because way not enough is being made, no investment is going into making more and the CCS it needs to make blue hydrogen (from methane), which is the commercially viable option, are insufficient to cope and never will be able to cope with the volumes of CO₂ we are talking about if this was a real solution.

Green hydrogen (made from electrolysis) would have been an option, but only if we had started building the renewables at the speed we are now a decade ago. You need an order of magnitude more green power to make enough hydrogen to replace gas and even with the rapid acceleration in green power installations, there is simply not enough time to build the massive excesses to leave enough power over after supplying the grid to make enough hydrogen. And the AI revolution means that even what we are building now won’t be enough to power the mushrooming data centres that are going up now, according to Wall Street bank research.

The point of the COP28 abatement debate is to sneak in the clause to the “agreement” that you can burn as much “abated” fossil fuels as you like – except that CCS abatement technology doesn’t exist.

On Sunday in New York UN Secretary General António Guterres launched a two-day, climate-themed "Summit for the Future" that is going on as part of the UN General Assembly meeting that starts today.

This is likely to be the main climate summit for this year, as reports say a lot fewer people will make it to Baku for the COP29 summit in November, according to reports. That means as the Climate Crisis gathers momentum (this month’s floods?!) the global climate response is being scaled down. I have been reading a lot more of the scientific press in covering this story, and the academics have gone beyond being distressed; they are increasingly giving up.

The academics say that 1.5C has already been missed. It is no longer possible to hold temperatures to a 1.5C increase, even if we pulled out all the stops. Officially temperatures are already up 1.2C, according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (actually they were up 1.5C over the last two years, but the official number is a statistical counting thing) and some of them are talking about 3C being the likely number now. It doesn’t sound like a lot but believe you me, that means hundreds of millions of people will die from heat and food shortages, half the planet’s animals go extinct and so on. I don’t want to come across as a doomsayer, but I think we need to be very very worried.

Let's see what comes out of New York today, but sincerely doubt there will be a compact to cut the burning of oil and gas. And that is what needs to happen.