BENEATH grey skies in China’s Sichuan province, a . Its mission: to release silver iodide into the atmosphere in a scientifically dubious attempt to trigger rainfall and help combat a drought associated with the worst heatwave the world has seen since records began. A few thousand kilometres to the west, meanwhile, authorities in Pakistan declare a “” – caused not by a lack of rain, but by far too much of it, resulting in deadly floods.
The events of just one day – 25 August 2022, to be exact – are stark evidence of our new climate reality. Never have the dangers of global heating been so terrifyingly obvious.
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Yet in terms of global action, we are in many ways going backwards. It is a year since representatives from nearly 200 countries met at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK. Key commitments made there haven’t been kept, partly because of the energy crisis triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There is little reason to hope that next month’s COP27 summit, in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, will change much either.
But dig a little deeper and there are some encouraging signs. Renewable sources of power are more economically competitive than ever. Sales of electric vehicles are taking off. Even the current energy crisis, which has sparked a dash for fossil fuels this year, may ultimately help speed up the clean energy transition. Although it is easy to be pessimistic about climate change policy, is there room for a little optimism about the future?
To understand where climate change policy is at ahead of COP27, it helps to go back to the Paris climate agreement of 2015. This set a goal of limiting global warming to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures – and preferably 1.5°C.
What countries didn’t do is commit to taking the emissions-cutting actions needed to achieve this. They didn’t have to, because under the agreement, it is up to each country to say what it will do to tackle climate change by 2030. These voluntary plans are known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs.
The yawning chasm between aspiration and promises, let alone action, was meant to be closed by a ratchet mechanism. Countries are supposed to regularly increase their ambitions and submit strengthened NDCs. The first turn of the ratchet was due to happen before the COP26 meeting, which was delayed by a year because of the covid-19 pandemic.
To a limited extent, this did happen. Some high-income countries and political organisations, including the European Union, Japan, the UK and the US, did submit strengthened NDCs ahead of the Glasgow meeting, though many others didn’t.
According to the – an independent group that estimates the impact of climate policies and plans – prior to the Paris agreement, the world was heading for 3.6°C of warming by 2100, though with “a considerable margin of error due to the uncertainties of the climate system”. The policies in place today would lead to warming of roughly 2.7°C – give or take a degree or so – by 2100. If countries fully implement their NDCs, it would be around 2.4°C by 2100.
So, on the one hand, there has been some progress since Paris, with more than a degree of warming probably averted. On the other, during COP26, the Climate Action Tracker described the when it comes to limiting warming to 1.5°C. Indeed, the average global temperature rise could temporarily exceed 1.5°C in the next five years and may permanently pass this level sometime in the 2030s.
This is going to lead to extreme weather and ever higher losses of lives and property. Adapting infrastructure to cope better will help reduce this, but adaptation is costly too – leading to questions about who should pay (see “It’s all about the money”, below).
This is why limiting warming is so important. In an effort to keep the 1.5°C target alive, the Glasgow Climate Pact agreed at COP26 called on countries to submit strengthened NDCs ahead of COP27. The deadline was 23 September, but and . Australia has long been a climate laggard, however. Its strengthened NDC merely brings it more in line with other high-income countries. It has gone from being “highly insufficient” to “insufficient”, according to the Climate Action Tracker’s ratings.
In fact, not one country has an NDC that is compatible with the 1.5°C target, according to the Climate Action Tracker. Arguably, the only major economy with targets that come close is the UK, where the plan is to reduce emissions by 68 per cent compared with 1990 levels by 2030. But progress towards meeting these targets isn’t on course.
“The UK is massively off track,” says Tom Evans at independent climate change think tank E3G in the UK. What’s more, recent UK government policy announcements, such as reversing a ban on fracking in England and efforts to extract more North Sea oil and gas, mean the country is going even further awry.
The bottom line is that with time running out fast, the world isn’t even close to doing enough to limit warming to 1.5°C.
“Unfortunately, there is a growing sense that the ,” Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry, who will preside over COP27, acknowledged in a video statement on 19 September.
Shoukry went on to call for countries to act more swiftly and decisively, but the Egyptian government isn’t in the best position to persuade other countries to increase their targets at COP27. This year, Egypt did submit an updated NDC – which, as with the NDCs of many low-income countries, is conditional on international support – but it didn’t contain a stronger target. The Climate Action Tracker estimates that Egypt’s emissions would increase by around 50 per cent above today’s levels by 2030 under this NDC and .
A major reason why some countries are backsliding on climate goals is the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian president Vladimir Putin seems to have thought he could by withholding supplies of Russian natural gas, which many countries in the region rely on. That has proved largely wrong, but it has left these countries scrambling for other sources, helping drive fossil fuel price surges that are having knock-on effects around the world.
Niklas Höhne at the NewClimate Institute in Germany, one of the organisations behind the Climate Action Tracker, says countries facing a gas shortage had three options: reduce their energy usage, accelerate renewable projects or find alternative sources of fossil fuels. All were necessary, but the emphasis has been almost entirely on fossil fuels, he says. “There’s a lot of things going in the wrong direction,” says Höhne. “There’s a gold rush for new fossil fuels.”
European countries have been to use for electricity generation instead of gas, and coal generation produces higher emissions. Some coal plants that were due to shut down will now continue operating, while a few that had just closed are resuming operations.
Countries in Europe have also found an alternative to Russia’s gas in the form of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, which is being imported in ships, rather than pipes, from countries like the US and Qatar. But this switch isn’t looking like a temporary measure soon to be replaced by low-carbon sources. Instead, new infrastructure for compressing and exporting LNG, and for importing and turning it back into a gas, is being planned and built around the world. Germany is reportedly . “If all this infrastructure is built and used, we will miss the 1.5°C target,” says Höhne. “That’s very clear.”
In addition to finding alternatives to Russian gas, many countries have also introduced schemes to help people and businesses cope with the shock rises in energy costs. But here, too, most governments are supporting the status quo rather than accelerating the transition to a greener economy. For instance, help with energy bills should be targeted at those on low incomes, says Höhne. He adds that shielding wealthier people from price rises diminishes their incentive to reduce energy use – by turning down the heating, for instance – or to invest in energy-saving measures, such as installing insulation.
The response to the energy crisis is thus a lost opportunity. “We are not seeing governments universally realising that a stronger double-down on renewable energy, on energy efficiency, would actually be the best path out of this,” says Evans.
However, the energy crisis isn’t universally bad news for the climate. Producing LNG, transporting it and then turning it back into a gas may take a lot of energy, but, surprisingly, Europe’s switch to LNG may result in , according to some estimates. This is because the long Russian pipelines to Europe are thought to leak so much methane that this outweighs all the additional energy associated with LNG.
The longer-term impact of the energy crisis might have environmental benefits, too. Russia has no way of selling as much gas to countries outside of Europe. Its capacity to export gas as LNG via ships is limited because it lacks the infrastructure and a second planned pipeline to China isn’t due to be finished until 2030 and will have less capacity than the ones to Europe, says intelligence analyst . What’s more, Russia’s pipeline and LNG infrastructure are dependent on components made in the West that companies are no longer allowed to sell to Russia.
“I don’t see China getting too much of their gas from Russia. They won’t put themselves in a similar situation to Germany,” says Alexander. “China will, at some point, also try to pivot away from natural gas.”
If economic sanctions imposed on Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine stay in place, the country’s gas exports may remain lower than they would otherwise have been for years. Its domestic emissions, meanwhile, may fall because the country’s economy will be smaller as a result of the sanctions.
There may be other ways in which the energy crisis will ultimately lead to a fall in fossil fuel use and a boost for climate action. It is, after all, a stark reminder of the , as Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, wrote in the Financial Times in September: “After winter comes spring. The oil shocks of the 1970s resulted in major progress in energy efficiency, nuclear power, solar and wind. Today’s crisis can have a similar impact and help speed up the shift to a cleaner and more secure energy future.”
The EU, for instance, is currently below 1990 levels by 2030. It has made some of these policies more ambitious in response to the crisis and could now exceed that target. This should , though that won’t happen before COP27.
Beyond the energy crisis, there have been promising developments in the US this year. In August, the country passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been called the . Among other things, it requires $370 billion to be invested in a wide range of clean technologies. While the act is focused on the US, it will also have a global impact both politically and by helping lower prices for clean technology.
Then there is the adoption of electric vehicles, which is proceeding much faster than seemed possible a decade or so ago. Many countries now plan to stop the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines, with Norway set to do so in 2025.
Perhaps the greatest reason for optimism is that, over the past decade or so, renewables have gone from being prohibitively expensive to the cheapest option in many cases.
“We’ve seen a dramatic reduction in the cost of clean technology, and those costs are continuing to come down,” says Evans. “Renewables are now by far the cheapest energy source almost everywhere.”
, up from 20 per cent in 2008. That is still not nearly enough – we need low-carbon energy sources to be displacing fossil fuels, leading to declining fossil fuel use even as global energy consumption rises. But that turning point is getting closer. “The economics of renewables is incredibly competitive and will continue to be so,” says Evans.
This means the current rush to exploit more fossil fuels and build more fossil fuel infrastructure is likely to be a temporary blip. In fact, Höhne thinks much of the fossil fuel infrastructure currently on the drawing board will never be built or used – especially coal-fired power stations. “You cannot run them economically,” he says.
The hope of many is that we are nearing an economic, social and political tipping point where the pace of decarbonisation will accelerate dramatically. We aren’t there yet, says Damon Matthews at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, but as costs fall and the terrifying consequences of global heating become ever more obvious, politicians may be emboldened to take ever more ambitious action.
“The way political and social change works is a whole bunch of incremental changes and then a step change,” he says. “At some point, we are going to reach that.”
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It’s all about the money
To reduce carbon dioxide emissions and adapt to a hotter world with ever-more extreme weather, each country must invest huge amounts of money. But lower-income nations don’t have much to spend.
At the COP15 climate meeting in 2009, high-income countries promised to provide $100 billion a year in climate funding, mostly in the form of loans. This target has yet to be achieved. For instance, according to Oxfam, the reported amount of funding for 2017/18 was $60 billion, but the .
Part of this climate funding is meant to go towards adaptation, such as improving flood defences. Last year at COP26, high-income nations promised to double adaptation funds to $40 billion a year. Once again, much of this money has failed to be provided, with .
In the lead-up to COP27, many lower-income countries and activists are again pushing hard for an agreement on “loss and damage” – the idea that the high-income nations responsible for most of the global warming so far should compensate the less wealthy countries that are being hit hardest by warming-fuelled extreme weather. These events are pushing many countries further into debt. For instance, the .
“ because flooding, cyclones and typhoons are washing away all economic development that our countries have been struggling to get,” said Ineza Umuhoza Grace at the at a recent webinar hosted by Carbon Brief, a UK-based website covering climate science and policy. “When disaster happens, there’s no international process that listens to the cry of a country.”
High-income nations have long resisted any kind of compensation becoming part of global climate agreements, and there is , US climate envoy John Kerry told a conference in New York in September. “,” he said.
