Global greenhouse gas emissions are expected to stall and possibly fall in 2015, researchers said on Monday, noting that it would be the first time such a decline has occurred during global economic growth. “This is because energy needs for growing economies still rely primarily on coal, and emissions decreases in some industrial countries are still modest at best”, said Corinne Le Quéré, the director of the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia, according to The Hill. “An acceleration in the transformation of energy use and production is needed to set global emissions on course to complete decarbonization, as required for climate stabilization”. Its emissions growth slowed to 1.2 percent in 2014, which is expected to decline by around 4 percent in 2015.
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Despite the world’s good news, Kiwi climate scientist James Renwick said it might be too soon to celebrate.
Lead author and Stanford University’s professor Rob Jackson said, “If India’s emissions continue under the current trend, they will match the EU’s emissions before 2020”.
As the world’s biggest carbon emitter, the changes China makes could have great influence over these global emissions rates. It appears as if global plant growth has, in fact, increased over the past 30 years.
“It is not whether emissions stop growing that matters, it is whether they stop, period”, Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, who wasn’t involved in the research, told Climate Central. Emissions in the United States and the 28-country European Union have been falling for a decade. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere can dictate climate change and these will grow continuously when emissions are positive.
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A real wild card in future emissions is whether today’s low-income economies lock in a high-carbon development path or develop clean energy systems from the very beginning with the help of the advanced economies. But almost 60 per cent of the increase in primary energy use in the last two years was met by renewable and nuclear power. “A lot of emerging economies are based on coal, and in just a few years emissions are going to go up really rapidly”. The country has estimated that as much as $2.5-trillion (U.S.) would have to be spent by 2030 to to implement an ambitious carbon-output reduction program.
