Despite decades of
warnings from scientists about the dangers of climate change, the world is on
track to hit a new record high for climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions
from burning fossil fuels.
By year’s end, fossil fuels will have flooded the atmosphere with about 36.8 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2019 — up from 36.57 billion tons in 2018, according to monthly emissions data reported by and estimated for different regions. And increasing use of oil and natural gas means those emissions levels will probably keep rising, researchers predict online December 4 in Environmental Research Letters.
Many countries are harnessing
renewable energies. In the United States alone, wind power generation rose about
8 percent in 2019 from 2018, while solar went up an estimated 11 percent. But that
trend hasn’t been enough to stem the global emissions that are driving climate
polar ice caps and revving up hurricanes (SN: 9/25/19).
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“Most of the renewables being built today aren’t displacing coal and other fossil fuels — they’re [just] adding new energy,” says environmental scientist Rob Jackson of Stanford University. In another paper published December 4 in Nature Climate Change, Jackson and colleagues argue for global climate policies that directly cut fossil fuel use, such as retiring coal-fired power plants and deploying technology that siphons carbon from the atmosphere.
“Coal is the only
fossil fuel that has shown a hint of declining,” Jackson says. Global coal
usage is down slightly, by 0.9 percent in 2019 — with a 10.5 percent drop in
the United States and a 10 percent decline in the European Union, his team
estimates. But global natural gas and oil use rose 2.6 percent and 0.9 percent
respectively, canceling out the benefit of coal’s marginal decline.
CO2 emissions are still rising in China, India and much of the developing world, but U.S. and European emissions dropped by about 1.7 percent. That’s promising, Jackson says, but the United States is still using “more than our fair share of fossil fuels.” In 2018, the average global citizen generated about 4.8 metric tons of CO2 emissions; the average American was responsible for 16.6 tons.