And Now The Gap Begins To Widen Between What We'd Like And What Climate Likely Will Do
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"My guess is that when our successors look back at Statistical Reviews from around this period, they will observe a world in which there was growing societal awareness and demands for urgent action on climate change, but where the actual energy data continued to move stubbornly in the wrong direction," Spencer Dale, BP's chief economist, observed in a post outlining the oil company's findings. He framed it "a growing mismatch between hopes and reality."
The BP report shows why. Renewables grew by 14.5% worldwide in 2018, a robust if slightly lower rate than previous years. But much of those gains were erased by global energy demand, which surged by 2.9%. That pushed up demand for coal by 1.4% and natural gas by 5.3%. The trend was especially prevalent in the United States, where energy consumption rose by 3.5% in 2018, reversing a decade of declines. The figure is the highest spike in American energy demand in three decades.
More countries and states than ever are employing carbon-pricing policies like cap and trade or carbon taxes, the World Bank found. It reported that 46 countries and 28 subnational entities employ carbon pricing, covering about 20% of global emissions. Yet those prices were often too low to spur the sort of emissions cuts needed to avoid the worst impacts of global warming, the report found. Only Sweden, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Finland and France employ carbon taxes within or above the $40-$80-per-ton range recommended by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Carbon pricing is not the only area where the world is falling short, but it is indicative of the wider challenges facing climate policy, said Robert Stavins, an economics professor who studies carbon pricing at Harvard University. "You're asking voters in a representative democracy to incur costs now, when a lot of benefits are going to go to people in other countries and to future voters," he said. "This is a huge challenge. It won't be addressed this year or next year. An important step in my view is the Paris climate agreement, in that the first rung on the ladder is the initial set of NDCs [nationally determined contributions]."
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https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2019/06/12/stories/1060554779
