Does UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres really have any hope of persuading rich countries to commit to achieving net zero by 2040? This was a target he declared was vital as he launched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Sixth Assessment Report yesterday.
He will have his work cut out. The trouble is that while a handful of mostly European countries have enthusiastically set legally-binding targets to eliminate carbon emissions, mostly by 2050, the list is not really growing very fast at all. According to the ‘net zero tracker’ published by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, there are currently 17 countries which have bound themselves by legal net zero commitments. A further 45 countries have written net zero targets into policy documents, 14 have made declarations or pledges and 43 have proposed or discussed such a target.
It is hard to see many other countries opting to make legally-binding net zero targets in the near-future
To take that first group of 17 countries, which includes the United Kingdom, all but two have set their target at 2050, the exceptions being Germany and Sweden, both of which have 2045 targets. The list contains some very small countries such as Luxembourg and Fiji, but it does not contain the world’s two largest emitters, China and the US, which between them account for 45 per cent of global greenhouse emissions. Moreover, there is little to suggest that any of these countries are on course to achieve their legally-binding targets. Germany, for example, has reopened coal mines over the past year. The country’s environment agency announced last week that, in spite of the coal mines, it had cut emissions by 1.9 per cent over the past year, in line with average reductions of 2 per cent over the past decade. Yet it would have to cut emissions by 6 per cent year on year even to reach its 2030 targets, let alone to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
As for the world as a whole, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says that emissions increased by 0.9 per cent in 2022, to reach a new record of 36.8 giga tonnes. This is almost certainly going to grow for years yet. China, which alone accounts for a third of global emissions, has set itself an ambition to reach net zero by 2060, but will only say that it hopes to reach peak emissions ‘by 2030’. As for the US, Joe Biden may be considered a climate hero by some, but he has shown no inclination as yet to set a UK-style legally-binding net zero target by any date. The US’s main target is to halve emissions – on 1990 levels – by the early 2030s.
In contrast to Guterres’ demands, net zero targets look like they will continue to be what they have been for the past four years: a mechanism which a handful of countries will take seriously, but which most others will continue to avoid writing into law. Given the opposition to measures to slash emissions in countries which are taking their targets seriously – the German car industry has just squashed EU plans to ban cars with internal combustion engines by 2035, saying it wants to allow them if they run on biofuels – it is hard to see many other countries opting to make legally-binding net zero targets in the near-future. Guterres’ target looks like a very large pie in the sky.
Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won’t Even Save the Planet) by Ross Clark is published by Forum Press
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