Carbon Emissions Set To Set New Highs This Year

Global fossil fuel emissions are continuing to rise
in 2025, despite increases in renewal sources
like solar and wind. 

The only real way to blunt climate change is to reduce and even end humans' nasty habit of belching ton after ton of fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere.  

So far, it's not working. 

Per the Washington Post: 

"Fossil fuel emissions are projected to rise by 1.1 percent, amounting to 38.1 billion metric tons of fossil carbon dioxide emissions in one year, the report found." 

This is another nail in the coffin for the goal to keep Earth beneath a 1.5 degree Celsius warming threshold that many experts said would constitute catastrophic warming. 

"Catastrophic" is in the eye of the beholder of course. But the world is still slightly below that 1.5 degree threshold, and climate change is already killing thousands of people annually at minimum, and is causing billions of dollars in damage. 

Going past the 1.5 degree warming Greenland ice sheet melting would accelerate to sea level rise enough to threaten cities around the world. Heat and humidity would make big swaths of the world essentially uninhabitable. 

Crop failures, disease and weather disasters would greatly accelerate, according to scientists. 

Already, right now, heat waves are much worse and more frequently than they used to be. Storms are stronger, deadlier and more destructive. 

In another recently released report. the International Energy Agency says that under current policies, the world will have warmed nearly 3 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Even if nations stick to strict clean energy policies that would make worldwide coal and oil demand peak by 2030, warming would still be close to 2.5 degrees. 

United States emissions will probably increase by 1.9 percent this year. Driving the increase was a somewhat colder winter than the previous two. Plus, natural gas prices went up, so there was a corresponding increase in coal consumption. 

It looks like big emitters like China and India will have only slight increases in 2025. China's annual emissions unto increases until recently have been huge, but it has slowed way down in recent years, they've plateaued. This year, their fossil emissions are expected to increase just 0.4 percent over last year. 

India's emissions will only increase by 1.4 percent this year, less than previous years. But that might be because record heat was less widespread in India this year than recent seasons so air conditioning use was lower. 

The bottom line is renewable energy is growing by leaps and bounds, but energy demand is outstripping that. 

It does seem like the goal post for peak fossil fuel emissions keep moving. Over the past few years, we keep getting told that peak fossil fuel emissions are imminent, and would soon start to decline. But it never happens. 

Per the Washington Post:

"'The expectation is that Chinese and global fossil CO2 emissions should peak soon based on growth in renewable energy,' said Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research and one of the Carbon Budget report's authors 'But emissions keep growing, making the peak always seem like it is one year away.'"

BRIGHT SPOTS

Although global fossil fuel emissions are rising more slowly over this decade so far than previous decades, so the hope of an eventual reversal in emissions is still alive. Maybe barely, but alive.

 There are some bright spots in the annual emissions reports. Emissions in at least 35 countries have decreased in the past decade while their economies have grown. Many developing countries have radically increased their solar and wind power capabilities. 

Also, the BBC tells us:

"Electricity generated from fossil fuels is forecast to flatline or even decline slightly this year, according to the think tank Ember, for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic". 

That's despite the fact that electricity demand increased sharply this year. The extra demand has been more than met by solar generation, and to a somewhat lesser extend, wind power.