Almost a decade after virtually every country in the world signed the Paris Agreement, committing to slow global warming, greenhouse-gas emissions hit a record high last year. And according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Program, they’re on track to rise again significantly this year.
The current trajectory puts average global temperatures on track to increase by 3.1 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, more than twice the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees. Now, the UN’s new report says, even if these countries were to meet their goals for transitioning to renewable energy, it would only limit warming to an increase of 2.6 to 2.8 degrees. And yet the vast majority of countries are hardly curtailing their use of coal, oil, and natural gas at all. Meanwhile, global demand for electricity is on the rise.
Around the world, the UN report has been met with no small measure of anxiety. As Bill Hare, an environmental scientist and the CEO of the Berlin-based policy institute Climate Analytics, expressed it, “Governments are sleepwalking toward climate chaos.” The UN released the report just a few weeks before COP29, its annual climate summit—this year, in Azerbaijan, a major oil producer—where participating countries have failed to agree on a plan for wealthy countries to provide some US$1 trillion annually to help poorer countries transition from fossil fuels. What’s going wrong?
Rachel Cleetus is a researcher and the policy director in the climate and energy program of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Cleetus says there are a lot of factors at play—including unexpected new demands for electricity that have arisen from more frequent heatwaves and the massive expansion of energy-hungry data centers. But the crux of the issue is in the power sector itself—which now far outpaces any other as a source of greenhouse gases. And the dynamics shaping this sector are challenging: Fossil-fuel companies continue pushing to build power plants that rely on coal, oil, and natural gas—while renewable-energy plants don’t yet have the capacity to transmit electricity to where demand is highest, or to store the excess energy they produce …
Michael Bluhm: To start with, what are the main sources of emissions today globally?
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