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At COP26, Modi pledges net-zero emissions but India isn't quitting coal : NPR
At COP26, Modi pledges net-zero emissions but India isn't quitting coal : NPR

By 2070.  A promise from a politician to get somewhere by 2070.

A politician who promises a result well outside his tenure in office is, well, silly in my view.  At best, he could offer a realistic plan, at best, but that won't happen. 

No plans exist.  Anywhere.  I've looked.

The plan will probably be following China, again. Not only are they committing to nuclear energy, they are clearly trying to make it an economic prize - they are pretty much the only country that seems intent on innovating on nuclear energy. Also committed to a fusion reactor, like everyone else.

Germany is an interesting place - they have made a strong commitment to solar and wind and such. But their prices are the highest in the world. Good for limiting emissions, but hard to say that feels very sustainable. 

UN's Patricia Espinosa warns of 'catastrophic' consequences of inaction (cnbc.com)
UN's Patricia Espinosa warns of 'catastrophic' consequences of inaction (cnbc.com)


“Of course, we’re coming to this conference with the clear message that the numbers we have in terms of emissions are not good,” she added. “So that means that we really must come out of here with clarity on how we are going to move forward.”

The Global Carbon Project (GCP) projects that fossil emissions in 2021 will reach 36.4bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), only 0.8% below their pre-pandemic high of 36.7GtCO2 in 2019.

The researchers say they “were expecting some sort of rebound in 2021” as the global economy bounced back from Covid-19, but that it was “bigger than expected”.

While fossil emissions are expected to return to near-record levels, the study also reassesses historical emissions from land-use change, revealing that global CO2 output overall may have been effectively flat over the past decade.

The 2021 GCP almost halves the estimate of net emissions from land-use change over the past two years – and by an average of 25% over the past decade.

These changes come from an update to underlying land-use datasets that lower estimates of cropland expansion, particularly in tropical regions. Emissions from land-use change in the new GCP dataset have been decreasing by around 4% per year over the past decade, compared to an increase of 1.8% per year in the prior version.

However, the GCP authors caution that uncertainties in land-use change emissions remain large and “this trend remains to be confirmed”.

The GCP study, which is not yet peer-reviewed, is the 16th annual “global carbon budget”. The budget also reveals:

China and India both surpassed their 2019 emission peaks in 2021. Chinese emissions grew by 5.5% between 2019 and 2021, while Indian emissions grew by 4.4%.
Chinese coal use was a particularly large driver of the global rebound in emissions, with the power and industry sectors in China the main contributors.
Coal, oil and gas all fell during the pandemic, but both coal and gas emissions have already surpassed their pre-pandemic levels, with a 2% increase in gas emissions and a 1% increase in coal emissions between 2019 and 2021.
Oil emissions remain around 6% below 2019 levels and this persistent reduction is one of the main reasons 2021 emissions did not set a new record.
The new updates to global CO2 emissions in the GCP substantially revise scientists’ understanding of global emissions trajectories over the past decade. The new data shows that global CO2 emissions have been flat – if not slightly declining – over the past 10 years.

However, falling land-use emissions have counterbalanced rising fossil CO2 emissions, and there is no guarantee these trends will continue in the future. 


https://www.carbonbrief.org/global-co2-emissions-have-been-flat-for-a-decade-new-data-reveals

Really interesting piece in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/how-bad-will-climate-change-get/620605/

One passage that really stuck out to me:

It is hard to know how to feel. A future of possibly 5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming seems like an unknown country. Is it a civilization-ending crisis? Or is it a more familiar version of awful—a bit sweatier, more chaotic, and less just than the world we currently inhabit?

Brian O’Neill, the director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Maryland at College Park, has a clearer view of this question than most of us. He was one of the lead architects of the five different futures—called “shared socioeconomic pathways,” or SSPs—developed for the latest IPCC report.

These five futures aren’t just versions of 2100 at different temperatures. Each started with a different idea about how society might develop. The SSP 1 pathway, which keeps us under that 1.5-degree-Celsius goal, for example, is the “Sustainability” path. In this scenario, the global economy still expands, but humanity “shifts toward a broader emphasis on human well-being, even at the expense of somewhat slower economic growth over the longer term.” The highest-temperature scenarios are SSP 4, in which inequality accelerates to even more grotesque levels, but advanced technology zaps some emissions, and SSP 5, where the world simply charges forward with fossil-fuel-powered turbo-capitalism.

The path we seem to be on, at least for now, looks closer to SSP 2, which the authors call “Middle of the Road.” This is a world in which “social, economic, and technological trends do not shift markedly from historical patterns.” A world, in other words, in which we do not heroically rise to the occasion to fix things, but in which we also don’t get much worse than we already are.

So what does this SSP 2 world feel like? It depends, O’Neill told me, on who you are. One thing he wants to make very clear is that all the paths, even the hottest ones, show improvements in human well-being on average. IPCC scientists expect that average life expectancy will continue to rise, that poverty and hunger rates will continue to decline, and that average incomes will go up in every single plausible future, simply because they always have. “There isn’t, you know, like a Mad Max scenario among the SSPs,” O’Neill said. Climate change will ruin individual lives and kill individual people, and it may even drag down rates of improvement in human well-being, but on average, he said, “we’re generally in the climate-change field not talking about futures that are worse than today.”

Very interesting that the people arguing hard for reduced emissions basically say that if we do essentially nothing, i.e. patchwork window-dressing on curbing emissions but not heroic action, things won't really change much. 


Even in the worst scenarios, the future on average is better than today.