How to Stop 30 Years of Failing to Cut Emissions
Picking the precise moment when the world’s leaders had unmissable evidence of climate change is a matter for unsolvable debate, but there’s a strong case to be made for 1990. That year the elite researchers who serve as the volunteer scientists on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published their first report on the state of global warming science.
Based on the report’s findings, more than 150 countries were able to agree on two key things: Burning fossil fuels increases the concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, and additional emissions would result in a hotter planet. Five years later, political leaders from more than a hundred countries gathered in Berlin for the first Conference of the Parties (COP).
There have since been 24 more COP meetings, all of which have demonstrated that agreeing on scientific evidence isn’t the same thing as building a consensus on what to do about it. In the three decades since 1990, as countries such as China and India followed the same development path as the U.S. and Europe, human civilization burned ever-increasing amounts of fossil fuels. Rich countries, in particular, had any number of opportunities to take stock and reverse course. Most refused.
Now it’s a race against those emissions.
No Time to Waste
1989
There’s only so much carbon the atmosphere can absorb before catastrophic changes are locked in. Each year that the pumping of greenhouse gases continues, the closer that limit gets—and the more drastic the reductions needed to avoid hitting it.
Bloomberg Green worked with the Center for International Climate Research to show the paths not taken to keep warming below 1.5° Celsius. The world could have conceivably met that temperature target by 2100 without reaching net-zero emissions, but that outcome is no longer feasible without far more heroic efforts. Today we need to eliminate carbon dioxide by midcentury to have an even moderate chance of reaching that goal.
1990
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues its first report. The authors write that human activity adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and acknowledge the risk of warming. But the historic document stops short of saying that an “enhanced greenhouse effect” has actually occurred.
1995
COP1 is held in Berlin under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, formed three years earlier. Representatives argue over how responsibility for cutting emissions should be fairly divided, given that wealthy developed nations spew so much and less developed countries account for so little.
The issue continues to hang unresolved and will be a major point of contention at the 26th COP meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, in November.
1997
COP3 in Kyoto, Japan, ends with the adoption of the first international climate change resolution, known as the Kyoto Protocol. The agreement ultimately fails to have any meaningful impact on global emissions, which continue to rise and even accelerate.
It was probably a mistake to have Kyoto before you had a reasonable political consensus in the U.S. By that time the issue had become polarized, with Republican leaders aligned against the issue.
2001
China joins the World Trade Organization, leading to a burst of industrial activity. The country’s emissions rise 148% in the next 10 years, putting China on course to become the world’s dominant polluter.
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2005
The European Union begins the Emissions Trading System, the world’s first and still only large-scale market for the buying and selling of carbon allowances. The U.S. tries and fails to establish a similar system in 2010. After years of delays, China’s carbon market began trading this year, but experts are skeptical it will have a meaningful impact anytime soon.
European carbon prices have doubled in 2021 to more than €65 a ton.
2008
The U.K. passes the world’s first law restricting emissions. That goal has been updated several times and currently calls for a 78% cut in emission levels by 2035—the world’s most ambitious emissions objective. The ultimate target is net zero by 2050.
Even so, British lawmakers have faced an uphill battle to implement the country’s green policies, which nonprofit Climate Action Tracker still says are insufficient to keep global warming to 1.5°C.
2009
Contrary to expectations, COP15 in Copenhagen fails to achieve a global agreement to reduce emissions. After a one-year dip in the wake of the global financial crisis and recession, emissions spike by a record 5.9% in 2010.
2015
COP21 in Paris produces an agreement to keep warming “well below” 2°C, while “pursuing efforts” to limit it to 1.5°C. The resolution, now enshrined in the Paris Agreement, is non-binding and allows countries to determine their own emissions-reduction plans.
Plans submitted under the agreement, as of 2020, would reduce global emissions by just 0.5% from 2010 levels by the end of the decade
2018
The IPCC publishes a special report analyzing the difference between the two temperature targets outlined in the Paris Agreement. It finds that 2°C of warming would produce much more harmful effects than 1.5°C, and says that to achieve that lower warming goal, nations would have to reduce their net greenhouse gas emissions by half before 2030 and to zero by 2050.
Climate-related risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth are projected to increase with global warming of 1.5°C and increase further with 2°C.
2020
Years of policy failure meant the impacts of global warming became more apparent and dangerous. More than 92,000 square miles of forest burned in what became known as Australia’s Black Summer. A heatwave made 600 times likelier by climate change ignited fires in Siberia after temperatures spiked in the Arctic region. With pandemic raging, Californians were stuck in their own homes as fires turned the sky orange and filled the air with soot.
Every time we failed to bend the emissions curve over the past three decades, it created the dual burdens of needing to do more to slow global warming and to do it faster. Today we have to reach net zero within 30 years to have any chance of avoiding the worst effects of climate change.
Still, there’s good reason to take courage. The latest IPCC report shows that reaching net-zero CO2 emissions will stabilize global temperatures relatively quickly. The sooner we get to zero, the more destruction we can avoid.
The gathering of nearly 200 countries for COP26 in Glasgow will attempt to build out the final sections of the road to net-zero emissions. Among the negotiators’ many difficult tasks will be to extract $100 billion per year from wealthy countries, in order to help impoverished nations adapt and prepare for the future. Delegates will also try to set rules governing the international trade of carbon credits while simultaneously convincing many of the world’s largest emitters—including the U.S.—to phase out their use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.
Even if all goes smoothly and COP26 is a resounding success, there will be hard work ahead. This past May, the International Energy Agency modeled the hundreds of milestones the world will need to hit net zero by midcentury, the deadline prescribed in the IPCC’s 2018 special report on 1.5°C. Achieving that kind of speed will require the involvement of private industry as well as coordination among countries that’s been elusive since the 2015 Paris Agreement.
It’s Not Too Late
2021
Every sector of the global economy will play a part in reaching net zero. Here’s how the IEA sees that happening for emissions from energy use.
2021
Approvals for new oil and gas developments, coal mines, and mine extensions must cease immediately.
2030
All new buildings must be compatible with a zero-carbon world. That means being energy efficient, fully electrified, and temperature controlled either by heat pumps or district-level heating. Sales of fossil-fuel boilers should have already ended in 2025, and at least 50% of existing buildings will have to be retrofitted for zero carbon by 2040.
2035
Shifting gears on transport, sales of internal combustion cars should dwindle to zero, while electrics should comprise 50% of the heavy truck market. By 2040 half of all aviation fuel needs to be low emission.
2040
The entire world will have zero-emission electricity, once all remaining coal- and gas-fired power plants without carbon capture—technology that traps CO2 from smokestacks and stores it away—are phased out. Advanced economies should have achieved this goal by 2035.
2045
In addition to new solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear capacity, there will also need to be heavy investments in hydrogen power and plants that suck CO2 directly from the air. Specifically: 435 million tons annually of low-carbon hydrogen by 2045, and 7.6 billion metric tons of total carbon captured by midcentury.
2050
Heavy industry will be the most challenging sector to decarbonize. Many of its processes require huge amounts of energy and involve chemical reactions that also release CO₂. By now, though, more than 90% of production must be low emission, if not zero emission.
Some of these transitions are getting easier by the day, even as delayed action on emissions requires more. The costs of solar and onshore wind power have dropped 83% and 59%, respectively, in the past decade. For more than two-thirds of the world’s population, solar and onshore wind are the cheapest forms of power generation.
Similarly, the cost of lithium-ion batteries has undergone a steep decline. Most large automakers have now fully committed to phasing out gasoline-powered cars for battery electrics within the next 15 years.
In other sectors, however, progress has been slow. Heavy industries such as cement and steel lag in developing the technologies to decarbonize. Agricultural practices vary vastly around the world, making it difficult to adopt widespread tools to curb emission. Humanity’s hunger for meat continues to grow, even though cattle are responsible for a significant portion of global emissions.
“Is it possible that the global energy sector, which is fossil-fuel dominated today, in 2050 comes to net zero?” Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, asked earlier this year. “This pathway is a narrow one, but still achievable if the governments take bold and immediate action.”