Fight against greenhouse gases stalls as emissions soar to new record

Progress in the fight against global warming has taken a big step backward, according to research published Wednesday, which projects greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels will hit a record high this year after a recent and promising lull.

And next year, emissions are expected to be even higher.

The research by the Global Carbon Project, with work out of Stanford University, blames the uptick on the explosive growth of the global economy. While many wealthy nations like the U.S. are turning to clean energy to spur the boom, they aren’t doing so quickly enough to make up for the dirty coal plants in India and China that continue to spew out pollution.

This year’s projected 2.7 percent emissions bump will mark a second year of rising greenhouse gases after three years of little or no growth. The change in direction casts doubt on whether nations will meet the climate goals laid out in the 2015 Paris accord and head off the fallout from global warming, which has already resulted in more wildfires, more drought and more flooding.

“We hoped that we had seen the peak in carbon emissions,” said Rob Jackson, professor of Earth system science at Stanford and one of the primary contributors to the Global Carbon Project. “We know now that this wasn’t the case.”

The emissions research, published in three scientific journals this week, comes as world leaders and environmental experts, including many from California, meet in Katowice, Poland, to flesh out a strategy for reducing greenhouse gases as prescribed in the Paris Agreement.

The challenge at the two-week summit could hardly be greater. The new emissions research is just the latest in a series of reports that show how dire the situation has become. Last month’s U.S. National Climate Assessment found that disruptions from heat-trapping gas are happening much faster than expected. These include the deadly fires and choking smoke in California.

The political environment, meanwhile, continues to sour on climate action. President Trump, on a recent cold day, again questioned the science of rising temperatures, tweeting, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?” His decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris deal has been followed by concern that other nations like Brazil and Australia are also losing interest.

“The Poland meeting really should be a series of mea culpas by a number of countries,” said Dan Kammen, professor of energy at UC Berkeley, who has attended many of the U.N.-sponsored climate summits, but is not attending this one. “We can remain hopeful that the countries that are part of the Paris accord will really double down.”

Kammen said another year of rising greenhouse-gas emissions does not bode well for meeting the Paris targets.

The accord calls for limiting greenhouse gases enough so that global temperatures don’t rise more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century. This is the point at which the atmosphere is expected to be too warm to prevent catastrophic and irreversible problems. Temperatures have already risen about 1 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution.

“We really need to see a reduction now,” Kammen said, noting that heat-trapping gases should drop nearly half by 2030 to stay on course.

The new emissions report estimates that the world’s discharge of fossil-fuel-generated carbon dioxide, the gas most responsible for rising temperatures, will be 37.1 billion tons in 2018. The mark represents a 2.7 percent increase over 2017, which follows a 1.6 percent increase over the prior year. Emissions between 2014 and 2016 were largely flat.

The biggest contributor to this year’s increase is China, according to the report. As the year comes to a close, emissions in the world’s most-polluting nation will have risen 4.7 percent as the country makes additional iron, steel, aluminum and cement to feed the expanding economy, according to the projections. More coal plants have opened to provide the necessary energy.

India, which produces about a third as much greenhouse gas as China, is expected to see a 6.3 percent increase in emissions this year. The spike is not only driven by economic growth but the need to simply furnish power for millions who don’t have it.

The U.S., too, is projected to see a jump in greenhouse gases, about 2.5 percent. The world’s second-biggest polluter saw a dramatic drop in the use of coal in 2018, yet increases in oil and natural gas, which is considered a greener alternative to coal, are expected to offset the decrease. Energy demands grew in the U.S. largely because of air conditioning during an exceptionally hot summer and heating during a cold winter in the East, according to the report.

This year will mark the first uptick in emissions in the U.S. since 2014. Despite efforts by the Trump administration to roll back climate regulations, however, the country is expected to see declining greenhouse gases next year. Federal deregulation has been slow to take hold while market forces are likely to continue pushing out coal in favor of wind and solar energy.

Worldwide, though, global emissions are forecast to continue rising in 2019, based on current trends, according to the report. The authors did not speculate by how much.

The emissions research was published in the journals Environmental Research Letters, Nature and Earth System Science Data.

“For three years, we had decreases (in greenhouse gases) in wealthier countries that counterbalanced increases in places like India,” Jackson said, noting that the red-hot economy doesn’t have to be an impediment to emission reductions. “Countries can still grow while cutting fossil fuel use, but there just aren’t enough countries doing this.”

Attendees at the 24th annual U.N. climate conference in Poland hope to get more nations on board with alternative energy. Three years ago in Paris, nearly 200 countries committed to cleaning up their economies, though the details of their promises were left to be worked out at future summits. It’s also appearing that these pledges will fall well short of the targets.

Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board who is representing California in Katowice, said the state is participating to encourage ambitious climate action.

“I think it’s important that we show, especially in a time when other countries and our country are behaving in an erratic way, our commitment,” she said, before boarding her flight to Europe. “California is a steadfast member of the international community.”

The White House has sent a national delegation to Poland, but it’s not expected to be active in discussions. The U.S. technically remains in the Paris Agreement until 2020, the first year it can officially withdraw.

Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of the early speakers at the climate conference, told a cheering crowd in Katowice that many in the U.S. are still in the fight against global warming.

“America is more than just Washington or one leader,” he said, calling Trump “meshugge” for his decision to snub the Paris agreement. That’s Yiddish for “crazy.”