From Britain, Denmark and New Zealand to Myanmar, Senegal and the Marshall Islands, more than 120 countries, rich and poor, have set their sights on the same goal to avoid the worst impacts of climate change: cutting their emissions to net-zero.
Some have put the target into law with a 2050 deadline while others are discussing ways to formalise it, according to the UK-based Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
The UN climate science panel has said global greenhouse gas emissions need to be slashed to ‘net-zero’ by mid-century to have a 50 per cent chance of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, the lowest goal in the Paris pact.
But the discussions on how to get there often overlook a crucial aspect — how to do it in a way that is fair, said Niall Mac Dowell, a professor at Imperial College London.
He cited France’s “yellow vests” movement, which began in November 2018, as an example of what can go wrong. Named after the fluorescent jackets all French motorists carry in their cars, it started as a protest against a levy on fuel. The tax was one of the ways the French government hoped to implement the 2015 Paris Agreement, by making it more costly to drive petrol and diesel vehicles, and boost clean alternatives.
“But if you’re like most people in France who don’t live in Paris and don’t have access to good or any public transport, (the tax) is just a punitive, regressive, unfair measure,” said Mac Dowell, who leads Imperial’s Clean Fossil and Bioenergy Research Group.
“It’s really important that the way in which these agreements and ambitions are implemented are — in fact and in perception — progressive and fair,” he added.
Mac Dowell co-authored a recent paper that argued current approaches to decarbonising energy focus too much on costs and technologies and not enough on “a socially equitable transition”, raising the risk of “deeper social divisions”.
Lee Beck, a director at the Clean Air Task Force who was not involved in the study, said it covered “an important blind spot because... everyone’s life will be impacted by phasing out fossil fuels”.
The Paris accord says doing so will be necessary by the second half of this century, to keep global warming within relatively safe levels.
The net-zero goals now being set to achieve that aim involve producing no more planet-warming emissions than can be absorbed by trees naturally or by technologies that capture carbon from power plants and other industries and store or use them.
The Imperial paper analysed Britain, Spain and Poland, which have different energy mixes, socio-economic structures and ambitions to tackle climate change.
For Poland — which has one of Europe’s lowest GDP levels per capita and relies on coal for 80 per cent of its energy — turning to wind and solar would have significant costs, the paper said.
A full switch to renewables — a central pillar of the European Union’s plan to achieve net-zero by 2050 —could lead to 48 per cent unemployment in Poland’s mining sector and only “modest” 5 per cent growth in manufacturing jobs, it added.
“This could cause economic upheaval and social inequality,” the paper said. Poland might be better off continuing to use coal while taking the emissions out of the air using carbon capture and storage technologies, it concluded. —Reuters
Thin Lei Win
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
