_(cropped).jpg){kind=link}
Essay by Eric Worrall
Even though President Biden is spending hundreds of billions on climate change, “… those cuts are not enough to offset increases in other nations, particularly China and several midsize economies.”.
‘We are not prepared’: Disasters spread as climate change strikes
The warming planet is causing havoc under the strain from record heat, floods, storms and wildfires. And scientists warn the toll will get worse.
By ZACK COLMAN
07/15/2023 07:00 AM EDTThe floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme heat sweeping the globe are offering a dose of the climate future that scientists have warned about for decades — and all the ways the world is not ready.
…
“If you don’t like what you’re seeing today, stick around — it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University.
…
“We don’t have a lot of time,” the president said this week in Vilnius, Lithuania, calling climate change “the single greatest threat to humanity.”
…
Even with the U.S. and European climate pollution on a downswing, those cuts are not enough to offset increases in other nations, particularly China and several midsize economies.
…
Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/14/we-are-not-prepared-disasters-spread-as-climate-change-strikes-00106439
Even if you believe in the carbon demon, if China is completely cancelling all attempts to cut emissions, what is the point of wasting money on further attempts to cut emissions?
China is never going to cut emissions, so long as the communists are in charge. The Chinese Communist claim to political legitimacy is based on delivering economic development.
Even if the communists fall, there are still a lot of poor people in China, who will demand whatever government replaces Communism prioritises continued fast paced economic development.
If China falters, there are vast numbers of poor people who will step in and take their place. India, under their brilliant technocratic leader Prime Minister Modi, is racing ahead. African nations like Nigeria, Kenya, Algeria, Mozambique and Ghana, despite ongoing political and economic turmoil, are quietly well on the way to becoming prosperous.
The billions of people who in some cases are tasting prosperity for the first time in their nation’s history will not allow Western climate cultists to stand in the path of their economic development, regardless of how much CO2 their economic development produces.
When BP released their “Statistical Review of World Energy” last year it included a “CO2e Emissions” tab, which was what the IPCC would (probably ?) call “Fossil-Fuel and Industry (FF&I) GHG emissions.
NB : LULUCF (Land-Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry) / AFOLU (Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land-Use) emissions are not included in the above, but fairly constant since 1990 (at ~1 GtC per year IIRC ???) according to the IPCC.
The table of “Carbon Dioxide Equivalent Emissions from Energy, Process Emissions, Methane, and Flaring” data, in GtCO2e per year, was only provided from 1990, but I idly did a “sorted list of deltas to 2021” graph anyway.
EI’s updated spreadsheet has the same tab (sheet 9 of 83) with the same start year (1990), so it was easy enough to update my graphic … which is attached below.
Notes
– Of the ~15.4 GtCO2e increase in “World” (absolute, FF&I only, GHG) emissions from 1990 to 2022, ~9.35 Gt came from China. That’s just over 60% …
– The second-largest increase, a long way behind, was the ~2.2 Gt (just over 14%) from India.
– The largest decreases from individual countries — — ironically enough given the current geopolitical situation — — came from Russia (minus 699 Mt) and Ukraine (minus 667 Mt).
– The next best “good guys” were Germany (-375 Mt) and the UK (-261 Mt), a fair distance away from the top 2.
– Obviously, “cherry picking” a different start year will give different results. Note especially that for China those “FF&I CO2e emissions” actually decreased slightly last year (from ~11.97 Gt in 2021 to ~11.88 Gt to 2022) according to EI.
Following on from my last point, there are several reasons why US presidents since Barack Obama have pushed for emission reductions to be measured “since / from 2005“.
The attached version of my graph highlights just one of them.
Note that the two y-axes have the same range (2.6 GtCO2e), but have to be offset by six GtCO2e to accommodate the “World” and “China” datapoints …