Rich countries must stop using oil and gas by 2034

This is the opinion of the British Tyndall Center, which brings together researchers from different universities, in a report of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

No exceptions

Scientists led by Dr. Dan Calverley and Professor Kevin Anderson say time is running out. To keep the fifty-fiftieth chance of a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees and staying below 2 degrees, as agreed in the Paris climate agreement, governments must cut carbon dioxide emissions much faster than they currently plan. They need to phase out fossil fuel production more quickly and even stop it completely. There are no exceptions. This applies to all countries, according to scholars.

Ireland’s biggest polluter

The report focuses primarily on oil and gas because the researchers assume that the use of coal will stop early. They shifted oil and gas production to per capita use in countries. So it’s not a country like Russia or Saudi Arabia that tops the list of top producers and CO2 emitters, but Ireland. Moreover in the top five are the United States, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria. According to the report, these types of rich countries should be the first to stop using oil and gas and thus implicitly in their production.

Reached the maximum in ten years

According to the Global Carbon Project, the world released 37.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide in 2020. It expects this to rise to 40.5 gigatons by 2021. This analysis is not yet final. This means that the world is allowed to emit another 421 gigatons of carbon dioxide, otherwise 1.5 degrees of warming is no longer possible. At the current rate, that limit will be reached within ten years.

solid numbers

Researchers say the numbers are clear. To keep the Paris target in sight, the world could emit the current amount of carbon dioxide for a maximum of ten years. To hold a 67% chance of getting a degree and a half up to seven years. The production and use of coal by rich countries must halve within five years and stop by 2030. The richest countries, the fastest in the energy transition, must have cut their oil and gas consumption by three-quarters by 2030 and It stops completely by 2034. For the low-emission countries, that is, in 2043 and for the poorest countries in 2050.

Forget about negative emissions

According to senior scientific researcher Detlev van Vuen of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), Tyndall’s research numbers are correct, but the conclusions are sometimes short-sighted. “There are also opportunities such as reforestation, bioenergy use, or carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) that causes negative emissions.” If you include this, a different time frame is possible.

“Linking to switch options is a good idea, but it’s still an envelope-back computation,” he says. The models used by Van Vureen and the models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are used, depending on different policies and technology development scenarios, where fossil fuels, for example, become automatically obsolete if they become too expensive, in part due to emissions prices. per ton of carbon dioxide.

not enough

Organizations such as the IPCC and the International Energy Agency (IEA) have been saying for some time that an accelerated decline in the use of oil, gas and coal is necessary to achieve climate goals. Van Vuuren: “If you add all the countries’ plans to cut CO2, it’s not enough. Recently, many countries have said when they want to achieve zero emissions, but often they don’t. So it has to be faster.”

Read here how Professor van Vuuren thinks about how to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals†