Fossil fuel emissions still increasing

November 13, 2022 / activist360

‘This year we see yet another rise in global fossil CO2 emissions, when we need a rapid decline.’

By Brendan Montague, The Ecologist (Creative Commons 4.0)

Global carbon emissions in 2022 remain at record levels – with no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed to limit warming to 1.5°C, according to the Global Carbon Project science team.

If current emissions levels persist, there is now a 50% chance that global warming of 1.5°C will be exceeded in nine years.

The new report projects total global CO₂ emissions of 40.6 billion tonnes (GtCO₂) in 2022. This is fuelled by fossil CO2 emissions which are projected to rise 1.0% compared to 2021, reaching 36.6 GtCO₂ – slightly above the 2019 pre-COVID-19 levels. Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to be 3.9 GtCO₂ in 2022.

Schematic representation of the global carbon cycle — Global Carbon Budget 2022 — Schematic representation of the overall perturbation of the global carbon cycle caused by anthropogenic activities averaged globally for the decade 2012–2021. See legends for the corresponding arrows and units. The uncertainty in the atmospheric CO2 growth rate is very small (±0.02 GtC yr−1) and is neglected for the figure. The anthropogenic perturbation occurs on top of an active carbon cycle, with fluxes and stocks represented in the background and taken from Canadell et al. (2021) for all numbers, except for the carbon stocks in coasts, which are from a literature review of coastal marine sediments (Price and Warren, 2016). (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License)

Atmospheric

Projected emissions from coal and oil are above their 2021 levels, with oil being the largest contributor to total emissions growth. The growth in oil emissions can be largely explained by the delayed rebound of international aviation following COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

The 2022 picture among major emitters is mixed: emissions are projected to fall in China (0.9%) and the EU (0.8%), and increase in the USA (1.5%) and India (6%), with a 1.7% rise in the rest of the world combined.

The remaining carbon budget for a 50% likelihood to limit global warming to 1.5°C has reduced to 380 GtCO2 (exceeded after nine years if emissions remain at 2022 levels) and 1230 GtCO2 to limit to 2°C (30 years at 2022 emissions levels).

To reach zero CO₂ emissions by 2050 would now require a decrease of about 1.4 GtCO₂ each year, comparable to the observed fall in 2020 emissions resulting from COVID-19 lockdowns, highlighting the scale of the action required.

Land and ocean, which absorb and store carbon, continue to take up around half of the CO₂ emissions. The ocean and land CO₂ sinks are still increasing in response to the atmospheric CO₂ increase, although climate change reduced this growth by an estimated 4% (ocean sink) and 17% (land sink) over the 2012-2021 decade.

Meaningful

This year’s carbon budget shows that the long-term rate of increasing fossil emissions has slowed. The average rise peaked at +3% per year during the 2000s, while growth in the last decade has been about +0.5% per year.

The research team – including the University of Exeter, the University of East Anglia (UEA), CICERO and Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich – welcomed this slow-down, but said it was “far from the emissions decrease we need”.

The findings come as world leaders meet at COP27 in Egypt to discuss the climate crisis.

“This year we see yet another rise in global fossil CO2 emissions, when we need a rapid decline,” said Professor Pierre Friedlingstein, of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, who led the study.

We are at a turning point and must not allow world events to distract us from the urgent and sustained need to cut our emissions.
—Professor Corinne Le Quéré, Royal Society Research Professor at UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences

“There are some positive signs, but leaders meeting at COP27 will have to take meaningful action if we are to have any chance of limiting global warming close to 1.5°C. The Global Carbon Budget numbers monitor the progress on climate action and right now we are not seeing the action required.”

Emissions

Professor Corinne Le Quéré, Royal Society Research Professor at UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences, said: “Our findings reveal turbulence in emissions patterns this year resulting from the pandemic and global energy crises.

“If governments respond by turbocharging clean energy investments and planting, not cutting, trees, global emissions could rapidly start to fall.

“We are at a turning point and must not allow world events to distract us from the urgent and sustained need to cut our emissions to stabilise the global climate and reduce cascading risks.”

Land-use changes, especially deforestation, are a significant source of CO₂ emissions (about a tenth of the amount from fossil emissions). Indonesia, Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo contribute 58% of global land-use change emissions.

Transparent

Carbon removal via reforestation or new forests counterbalances half of the deforestation emissions, and the researchers say that stopping deforestation and increasing efforts to restore and expand forests constitutes a large opportunity to reduce emissions and increase removals in forests.

The Global Carbon Budget report projects that atmospheric CO₂ concentrations will reach an average of 417.2 parts per million in 2022, more than 50% above pre-industrial levels.

The projection of 40.6 GtCO₂ total emissions in 2022 is close to the 40.9 GtCO₂ in 2019, which is the highest annual total ever.

The Global Carbon Budget report, produced by an international team of more than 100 scientists, examines both carbon sources and sinks. It provides an annual, peer-reviewed update, building on established methodologies in a fully transparent manner.

Feed humans before livestock – World Wildlife Fund

July 10, 2022 / activist360

Transform UK farmland to boost food resilience and tackle nature crisis, says WWF.

By, Brendan Montague, The Ecologist (Creative Commons 4.0)

Half of the UK’s wheat harvest each year – equivalent to 11 billion loaves of bread – is being used to feed livestock in an “inherently inefficient” process that is fuelling climate change, a WWF report reveals.

The report shows the extent of farmland used to grow crops that are being used to feed animals instead of people. It explores the benefits for people, climate and nature of using more of the UK’s arable land to grow crops for human consumption instead, such as addressing the climate and nature crises and boosting the UK’s food resilience.

The latest report in WWF’s Future of Feed series highlights the fact that dairy and meat products provide only 32 percent of calories consumed in the UK and less than half of protein despite livestock and their feed making up 85 percent of the country’s agricultural land use.

Habitats

Growing crops like cereals to feed farm animals accounts for a significant proportion of this land-use footprint, according to the analysis in the report.

Wheat and barley grown to feed farmed animals in the UK using 2 million hectares of land – 40 percent of the UK’s arable land area.

Wheat grown in the UK each year to feed livestock – mostly chickens and pigs – makes up half of our annual wheat harvest and would be enough to produce nearly 11 billion loaves of bread.

Oats grown in the UK to feed livestock each year make up a third of our annual oat harvest and would be enough to produce nearly 6 billion bowls of porridge.

The UK imports large quantities of soy to feed pigs and poultry, fuelling the destruction of precious habitats overseas, like the Brazilian Cerrado.

Affordable

Replacing animal feeds like soy and cereal with alternatives like grass, by-products from the food supply chain, and innovative feed ingredients such as insect meal, would free up land to grow food for people, including high-value crops like fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and could be at the heart of a transition to nature-friendly regenerative agriculture.

The report recognises that this approach to feeding farm animals would necessitate a reduction in the overall numbers of livestock in the UK.

Kate Norgrove, executive director of advocacy and campaigns at WWF said: “We can’t afford to stay locked into a food system that’s not fit for purpose, with food prices soaring.

“Far too much of the food we eat is produced in ways that are fuelling the climate crisis and driving catastrophic nature loss, yet failing to deliver affordable, healthy food for all.

Biodiversity

“To make our food system truly shock-resistant we need to accelerate a shift to sustainable production, including rethinking the way we are using huge quantities of the UK’s most productive land to grow food for livestock instead of people.

She added: “UK governments can future-proof our food and bring huge benefits for nature and climate at the same time by ramping up support for farmers to transform our landscapes, making space for nature in farms and forests, fields and fens.”

Focusing purely on the carbon footprint of food production risks fuelling agricultural intensification and masking other negative environmental impacts, like pollution from the slurry or land conversion for feed production in chicken farming, which can have a low carbon footprint in comparison with pasture-fed beef, the report states.

It also highlights the importance of looking at a wider range of measures to evaluate the environmental impact of all aspects of food production, taking account of pressures on land, water, and biodiversity before drawing conclusions.

A law unto themselves

May 29, 2022 / activist360

Why don’t we have any proper system of environmental law?

By David Renton, The Ecologist (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

A series of legal rights has emerged in recent years as if from nothing, and each has become thickened with all sorts of rules and exceptions.

It used to be that the only employment law was, in practice, the law relating to strikes. Half a century later, we have a generalised system of individual employment law.

The main book collecting employment law regulations runs to a tightly-printed 3,000 pages and weighs over two kilogrammes.

Extinction

We did not use to have any information law: now we have the Data Protection Act, the Freedom of Information Act, a specialist enforcement body and an appeals tribunal.

Immigration law has grown from a tiny area, the reserve of a few dozen specialists to provisions so complicated that even the judges complain.

“Immigration law is a total nightmare,” said immigration judge Nicholas Easterman in 2017. “I don’t suppose the judges know any more about it than the appellants who come before them.”

But while these areas have grown, environmental law has seen no similar expansion.

In Britain there is still no system of environmental law despite half a century of growing public awareness of environmental degradations, of species extinction and the poisoning of the rivers and seas.

Regulating

We have hints of it: in the criminal law for example, when lawyers defend protesters.

When central or local government makes a decision which has an environmental impact that decision can be judicially reviewed in the High Court.

The First-Tier Tribunal contains an Environmental Chamber which hears appeals by business after they have been fined under regulations dealing with eco-design, single user carrier bags, waste, etc.

But these hints fall short of constituting a proper system of environmental justice, in which the people who pollute and poison our world can, for example, have their property removed from them.

Often the problem is said to be one of “standing”. In other words, that unless and until trees and mountains can sue in their own name, then no-one will be able to restrict the decisions made by government in planning and regulating industry.

Interference

And it is true that this absence hampers lawyers: destroy a creature’s habitat and the harm to them will aways be greater than the second-hand suffering done to the people who care for nature.

Yet, standing is only a part of the problem. Over the past 25 years, the group of charities who have been empowered to bring judicial review cases has widened. But it remains true that most such claims are brought, fought hard, and lost.

Until we can sue and expropriate the worst of the polluters, it is hard to see how business will feel any pressure to change.

The answer is not a cadre of judges willing to be bolder in their application of judicial review. For that is a remedy against government.

And most damage to the environment is done by businesses rather than the state, and if a company pollutes the air or the water or contributes to global warming, the citizen has almost no meaningful redress against them.

More than a century ago, Victorian judges developed the idea of a private nuisance, a harm which happens when one person causes an unreasonable interference to the use and enjoyment of a person’s property.

Neoliberalism

Yet a claim in nuisance cannot only be brough by a landowner. Imagine, the owner of a commercial forest which has been damaged by acid rain. Who would the owner sue?

The time between an act of environmental destruction and its consequences may be protracted. The distance between the release of a pollutant and the harm it causes may be hundreds of miles. What, if the polluter is outside the United Kingdom? Nuisance assumes that pollution is incapable of crossing borders.

After fifty years of growing public consciousness we should have – but no court has actually recognised – a system of economic wrongs – “torts” – done against nature, and a series of remedies including both compensation and confiscation.

Only then would there be the intellectual infrastructure so that claims brought in the name of trees or mountains would have effect. But that would only be the first step. And its creation now would be too late.

The irony is that for the last forty years, we have lived through a political moment – “neoliberalism” – which has been open to the creation of new laws.

Right

Under neoliberalism, the whole of existence is understood as an opportunity for the creation of markets – in water, in housing, in utilities – which require rules and people to enforce them.

No mechanism has been accepted for changing how business behave, except through market creation, and business regulation and reward. The vast majority of people are left out of these dynamics.

Think of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EEUTS), the main policy mechanism of the EU for resisting climate change which was set up in 2005 to use market solutions to prevent global warming.

Although this is “European law”, UK politicians enthusiastically supported these proposals. On Britain’s departure from the European Union, a UK Emissions Trading Scheme was drawn up, closely modelled on it.

The idea was that 10,000 or so factories, power stations, and similar companies responsible for around half the EU’s CO₂ emissions would each be permitted a certain maximum volume of greenhouses gases which they could release. If they wanted to produce more than their cap, they would have to buy the right to produce extra carbon.

Punishment

States give companies a carbon budget which they are entitled to trade. The scheme has therefore worked via a series of subsidies to business – like so much supposed regulation in recent years.

Companies have been provided with an asset – a hypothetical entitlement to produce greenhouse gases – which they can sell on the market.

So, between 2008 and 2015, cement producers were gifted between over 5 billion euros of windfall profits; and this to the European representatives of a commercial sector which produces one in twelve of all carbon emissions worldwide.

The point was not to prevent emissions but to enrich those who held property. An OECD report found in 2018, that the firms within the scheme had on average 16 percent more fixed revenues than they would have had they never been regulated.

The scheme has been widely criticised: initially for oversupplying emissions allowance, causing the price of carbon so low that there was no punishment for polluters.

Cement

It has incentivised false accounting: by rewarding companies which make promises to plant trees – even if there is no prospect of them being planted, or to invest in technology to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, even where that technology does not exist; or by buying up the nominal credits arising from the legacy of old industrial technologies and washing them through the system repeatedly, in order to allow business to keep on expanding.

The verdict on the EEUTS appears to be that it caused a one-off reduction of around ten percent in European carbon emissions but that, despite repeated attempts to tighten it, the scheme has diminishing effect every year.

A fall of ten percent in carbon emissions is not to be dismissed; but the EU’s carbon reduction goal is to reach 40 percent within eight years.

The problem with the EEUTS, and with its British counterpart, is that there is no mechanism for the citizen to complain, say, if a cement company misses its carbon targets.

Polluters

It is left to the same governments to enforce which ignore commercial fraud and money laundering, which prosecute people who are overpaid welfare benefits but refuse to prosecute businesses when they have taken millions in grants to which they were not entitled.

Under the EEUTS and under all the Regulations made over the past 40 years, mere voters are not parties to the litigation; we cannot demand that a business be fined or have its property taken away because of its reckless stewardship of its environmental resources.

Perhaps there is a debate to be a had about whether we as a society truly want to make citizens enforcers. There are things to be learned from the way in which employment law has grown at just the same time that trade union have been weakened, a balance is needed between the law and social movements.

But until we can sue and expropriate the worst of the polluters, it is hard to see how business will feel any pressure to change.