If the fight to avoid catastrophic global warming were a football game, then team Let’s Maybe Not Have an Apocalypse would be stuck on its own two-yard line, trailing by a touchdown with less than a minute to go. Also, the starting quarterback has a torn anterior cruciate ligament. A victory is still possible, but it would take legendary effort.
The International Energy Agency on Tuesday released an update of the energy sector’s progress toward reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The sector is the world’s biggest source of atmospheric carbon, so reaching this target is critical to limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial averages, keeping the climate from becoming even more hostile to human life. On this front, there is good and bad news.
First, the good news.
The good news is that in the two years since the agency’s first net-zero progress report in 2021, sales of solar power, electric-vehicle (EV) and battery storage capacity have all boomed. Roughly a third of all the photovoltaic solar installations in human history have happened between 2021 and last year, the agency said. Those two years also accounted for more than half of all the EV sales and battery installations ever recorded.
This has gone a long way toward curbing the energy sector’s emissions of planet-heating carbon. Other gains, such as efficiency improvements and methane capturing, should be relatively easy to accomplish. At the moment, even if governments, businesses and consumers decided to quit trying, the progress they have made already could limit global warming to 2.4°C, the agency figures. That is a far cry from some of the more apocalyptic scenarios thrown around in the years before the Paris Agreement of 2015, when most countries on Earth set 1.5°C of warming as a target.
However, even 2.4°C of warming is still too much. Consider how chaotic the climate has already become after just 1.2°C. July was Earth’s hottest month ever amid what would surely be history’s hottest year. The oceans heat records are being smashed. The US has already experienced an unprecedented number of billion-dollar natural disasters in a calendar year, and it is only September. Canada is suffering its worst wildfire season ever, with the smoke it produced travelling down and choking US cities and southern states. Antarctic sea ice had its weakest expansion on record during the region’s latest winter, continuing a trend that could trigger even more heating. All of this might seem like a pleasant memory if global warming should double in the future.
Unfortunately, that outcome still feels likelier than nailing the 1.5°C target, as the bad news in the agency’s report takes a little longer to list than the good news. The agency’s carbon emissions have set a new record of 37 billion tonnes last year, driven by the post-COVID-19 economic rebound and the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which inspired a scramble to produce and burn more fossil fuels, particularly in China and other developing economies.
The agency still expects emissions to peak soon, along with fossil fuel demand, as well as a collapse in coal, oil and natural gas capacity by 2040.
However, a lot has to go right with renewables to make that collapse happen, and the agency believes natural gas still plays a large role in the near future. As Bloomberg Opinion columnist Javier Blas has said, the agency might be playing fast and loose with the definition of the word “peak.” The better geological analogue at the moment seems to be “uncomfortably high mesa.”
Meanwhile, wind power has been struggling lately, making it far more difficult to achieve the tripling of renewable-power capacity the agency says is necessary by 2030 to stay on the path of 1.5°C. Soaring costs and political pushback have stalled many of the big wind projects necessary to fully decarbonize energy.
The agency’s net-zero scenario also relies on carbon capture and storage, an expensive, unwieldy technology that is far from realizing its promise. Without it, we would not be able to suck carbon out of the emissions of utilities and factories, making heroic renewable investments even more critical.
The agency calls for a doubling of electrical grid investment by 2030 while also acknowledging that planning, permitting and building transmission lines can take a decade to complete. Without the politically tricky permitting reform necessary to connect clean power to the grid, it might not make much sense to triple down on it. The growing political backlash and backsliding in the US, the UK, China and elsewhere makes planning even trickier.
Like the football team stuck deep in its own territory, we have to be optimistic in order to succeed. It is certainly still too early to give up, but on balance, we have spent the past two years digging ourselves into a slightly deeper hole.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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