Climate scientist Corinne Le Quere from the University of East Anglia, in the United Kingdom, says there’s one main reason for the good news: “It’s mostly down to China’s use of coal”, she says. An earlier report showed its carbon output between 2000 and 2013 was about 3 billion tonnes less than previously estimated.
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US emissions in 2015 dropped by about 1.5 percent. China’s plans don’t have the country hitting carbon dioxide peak emissions until 2030, which is 15 years from now.
Up until this year, carbon emissions had been growing by more than 2 per cent annually for a decade. That’s the most exciting piece of this puzzle: “We’re seeing a flattening or decline in emissions at a time when the global economy is still growing robustly”.
“Emissions in India are at the same level as China in the 1990s”, said Glen P. Peters, an analyst with a climate center in Oslo who spoke at a news conference here.
If this is done, India is likely to become the main consumer of coal in the coming years, leading to a further rise in its carbon emissions.
Negotiations on the draft agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions, blamed for warming the planet and disrupting the climate, were extended by a day on Friday to Saturday to try to overcome stubborn divisions among the 195 countries taking part.
And then there’s the fact that we already have emitted two-thirds of the total carbon allocation to the atmosphere that would ensure at least a 66 percent chance of limiting global temperature increases to below 2 C – a reality that is undoubtedly weighing heavily on the world leaders in Paris for COP21.
This is the first two-year period in a multi-decade record where the global economy shows clear signs of decoupling from fossil fuel emissions.
Chinese growth has slowed markedly, the country is transitioning toward a service economy, and it is pushing hard on renewable power as a way to limit greenhouse gases.
The work provides an important step forward in the understanding of how plants may respond (or not respond) to rising atmospheric CO2, as well as highlights ways scientists from different specialties can work together to reach a deeper understanding of how ecosystems will respond to global change, says Sasha Reed, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist and co-author of the paper.
Coal exports… China’s move away from coal consumption is bad news for Australia’s mining operations.
According to a recent analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2014 witnessed a drop in consumption of coal by coal-intensive industries in China such as steel, cement and fertilizer, and as a result, overall coal production and use dropped dramatically.
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One factor may be issues concerning emissions reporting accuracy with China – and the monitoring and verification of emissions is a major hurdle in climate talks. If India’s development follows the same path as China’s, India’s emissions could eventually equal those of China. This slowed to 1.2 per cent in 2014, and this year emissions are expected to extraordinarily fall by almost four per cent.
