December 3 2024
By Minhoo Jeong
Climate change, caused by excessive atmospheric carbon, needs to be urgently reduced, as understood by all. But despite these misgivings, it would appear that fossil fuel emissions keep increasing. This indicates an obvious slowing pace of trying to tackle global warming.
While recent investments in renewable energy and electric vehicles have reached twice the size of investments in fossil fuels, experts counter that the subsidies for fossil fuel projects quadrupled between 2021 and 2022, thereby offshifting the benefits clean energy investments have made.
According to the Climate Action Tracker-a team of international scientists-global governments' climate actions have failed to reduce global temperature rise projections over the past three years. At present, no new nationally determined contributions have come, no net-zero targets; thus, in 2024, it continues under current policies in the temperature-increase scenario by +2.7°C. Temperature projections have stayed stuck in place for the past three years, meaning the urgent reality of climate change - and what needs to be done via government policies to cut emissions - simply is not gelling.
The CAT has further reviewed a potential impact in the US. The retreat of President Donald Trump's climate policy, dubbed "Project 2025." Although this is a policy shift in the U.S. only, scientists estimate that the pro-fossil fuel position of Trump could raise the world temperature by about 0.04°C. Though the rise appears minute, this scenario could be worse if the U.S. were to withdraw from the Paris Agreement or cut climate financing, leading to a delay in climate actions among other nations.
The moment will definitely not reverse the momentum of climate action worldwide, and even less so in the U.S., given the current Biden Administration's clean energy initiatives," said Bill Hare, chief executive of the climate think tank Climate Analytics.
While CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have continued to rise over the last decade, the contribution from land-use changes went down by a fraction - this stabilized overall emissions. Both elements, however, are about to rise this year: not just from the droughts themselves, but partly because carbon is released due to deforestation and the wildfire pattern with which El Niño generally associates during 2023-2024.
In particular, 2024 is turning out to be one of the hottest years on record in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The extraordinary heat of 2023 has been overtaken, with successive months of temperature rises above 1.5°C. According to scientists, carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels-oil, gas, and coal-will rise to new record levels in 2024. There are few indications that emissions of pollutants responsible for global warming are nearing their peak.
During the recently held 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan, negotiations are underway to achieve the goals set in the 2015 Paris Agreement: rapid reduction of emissions toward net-zero and limiting global temperature rise. Emissions from fossil fuel use and land-use change, including deforestation, are higher than in 2023, according to the latest annual global carbon budget assessment prepared by the UK's Global Carbon Project team. Fossil fuel combustion is likely to push up global carbon emissions by 0.8% in 2024 to 37.4 billion tons.