Fossil fuels account for 81 percent of primary global energy demand today, but their rate of production and use will need to reverse and decline rapidly to meet internationally agreed climate goals, according to new research.
That is the hard truth, say researchers in a study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. Specifically, close to 60 percent of the world’s remaining oil and natural gas and 90 percent of its coal reserves should remain in the ground by 2050.
The study also underscores the fact that most regions around the world must reach peak fossil fuel production now or within the next 10 years to avoid the critical climate threshold set by the Paris Climate Accord.
The consequences of climate change are already upon us, and worsening – extreme weather, irreversible ecosystem shifts, loss of life and economic hardship – and to avoid the very worst of them, scientists say the world must limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, reports CTV News Canada.
“Dramatic cuts in fossil fuel production are required immediately in order to move towards limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees,” Dan Welsby, the lead author of the report and researcher at University College London, said at a Tuesday news conference.
“But the current and indicated fossil fuel production trajectories globally are moving us in the wrong direction.”
What the research is telling us
New research quantifies exactly what it would take: keeping a vast majority of Earth’s remaining fossil fuels tucked underground. Using computer modeling and taking into account real-world constraints, namely, the speed at which global economies can move away from fossil fuels, the scientists found that the results were pushed to the very limit of a 50 percent chance to stave off the worst climate change impacts.
The authors also noted that their findings may be an underestimate, since their model doesn’t consider future Earth system feedbacks, nor does it take into account underlying uncertainties around the deployment of technologies needed to curb emissions.
And those technologies need to be put into place now, and not down the road, because we need to be making rapid, severe cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneously removing carbon from the atmosphere.
“An option is to really start decarbonizing now, rather than either plateauing global emissions or increasing them,” James Price, co-author of the study and research associate at the University College London, told CNN. “We need to decarbonize as fast as possible to improve our chance of staying below 1.5 degrees.”
Specifically, oil and gas production, according to the study, need to decline by 3 percent each year until 2050 to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, signaling severe implications for producers who are banking on continued profits from fossil fuel production.
As for oil, all regions should be peaking now or by 2025, according to the study. For gas, researchers say the outlook varies depending on the region. Coal has already reached peak production, even though many countries still rely on coal.
“We found that in parts of Europe, the US and Russia and the Caspian, gas production needs to peak now,” Welsby said, according to CNN News. “This production decline is offset by increased production to the 2030s in the Middle East, Africa and other parts of developing Asia. The majority of this increased production in those regions is due to robust domestic demand growth, particularly in power generation and industry.”
And here is something that is disheartening – According to a 2020 report by the Stockholm Environment Institute and the UN Environment Programme, countries that had established strict targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions are actually projecting an average increase in fossil fuel production of 2 percent annually.
The study is quite clear in its response to the report. This needs to change immediately. The countries with the largest fossil fuel reserves have the largest global influence to limit climate change.
“There’s a lot that developed countries can do to help support a just transition,” Pye said. “And that’s the only way that we’re going to get buy-in from a broader range of countries to actually diversify economies away from oil and gas.”
