8 Special report Stabilising the climate The Economist October 30th 2021
new round of “nationally determined contributions” (ndcs) that
countries are volunteering under the rules of the Paris agreement
reflect that progress.
Yet the increased ambition in the ndcs should not be mistaken
for anything like victory; at best it shows that the world is just
about staying in the game. As the collapse in Copenhagen made
clear, the unfccc, despite being a treaty that was signed by almost
all the countries in the world, cannot be used to force those coun
tries to take action. The Paris agreement worked around this im
potence with a sort of cognitive dissonance. Together, the member
countries set demanding temperature targets; individually, they
committed themselves to voluntary ndcs that offered far too little
by way of emission reductions for those targets to be met.
So although the ndcs being offered at Glasgow—the Paris
agreement calls for a new set every five years—are more ambi
tious, they always had to be. To come even close to achieving the
temperature goals requires a lot more progress, much of it in areas
where alternatives are less well developed than renewables were
at the time of Paris, and a lot of it already assumed in this round of
ndcs. There is still a lot of fundamental work to be done on how to
decarbonise things which cannot be electrified. Nor is turning the
easy deployment of cheap renewables into stable, reliable electric
ity grids a problem that is anything like fully solved.
Even if progress does continue, it is not going to produce emis
sion reductions that are deep enough to meet the target of keeping
overall warming as low as 1.5°C. The inclusion of efforts towards
meeting that goal in the Paris agreement was a central demand for
climatevulnerable countries. For some lowlying island states, it
was an existential issue: “one point five to
stay alive,” as the chant had it. More gener
ally it was seen as a way of ratcheting up
the ambition of the whole unfcccprocess.
Its supporters were willing to give ground
on other things in order to see it adopted. It
would be going too far to dismiss the lim
it’s inclusion in the text of the agreement
as “the tribute vice pays to virtue”, the pithy
definition of hypocrisy by La Rochefou
cauld, a 17th century aphorist. But it was
easier to accept the less than stellar ndcs
on offer from many large countries in the context of the increased
longterm ambition of the 1.5°C limit.
The biggest problem with this is that, even in Paris, it was clear
that the 1.5°C limit could not be met by emission reductions alone.
They would have to be supplemented by something else: the with
drawal of CO 2 from the atmosphere by means of “negative emis
sions”. In a few years CO 2 removal went from a largely sidelined
topic to a central one. But substance has not kept up with in
creased salience; mechanisms which can provide lots of reliable
CO 2 removal remain, at best, embryonic.
At the same time, the amount of work that negative emissions
may be required to do is getting ever greater. Analysis in the World
Energy Outlook published by the International Energy Agency (iea)
in the runup to Glasgow finds that the pledges so far made in the
ndcs are too small to provide a good chance of staying under 2°C,
let alone 1.5°C. And this is despite some ambitious pledges with
significant negative emissions built in: a netzero America by
2050, a netzero China by 2060.
Stabilising the climate will always be challenging; but the low
er the residual emissions, the better the odds of meeting the chal
lenge. Unfortunately, decarbonisation at a rate anywhere close to
that required by Paris still looks highly unlikely to happen. To see
why, this reportturns next to the region where most emissions
now come from,andwhere the largest share of cuts in future will
be needed: Asia.nThe Paris agree-
ment worked
around this
impotence with a
sort of cognitive
dissonanceThe Asian century’s emissionsEastern approaches
M
ihir, a 25 -year-oldwho lives near the Indian city of Durga
pur, has big plans. They all depend on coal. Every day, he
rides his bicycle around collieries and depots gathering sacks of
coal slipped to him by conniving workers or security guards. Once
he has stacked the bike with as much as it can carry he pedals off to
a brickworks or a small forge and sells all ten or 11 sacks. After the
necessary bribes and kickbacks have been paid, Mihir makes
enough not only to keep him, his mother and sister clothed and
fed, but also to save for a motorbike. That will allow him to double
the scale of his operation, which should provide enough money to
build a second storey on the family’s tiny house. When that is done
he will be able to propose to his sweetheart.
Durgapur’s coal deposits first came to commercial attention in
the 1770s, the decade in which James Watt revolutionised the
steam engine. In the 19th century, developed in part by the grand
father of Rabindranath Tagore, India’s most famous poet, they
provided the fuel for the subcontinent’s growing railway network
and its steamships. After independence Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s
first prime minister, ordered a huge steel mill to be built in the city
to make use of them.
Even now nobody in Durgapur can imagine life without coal.
Few have heard of climate change. Those who have assume that it
is someone else’s problem. To Mihir, the very idea that the govern
ment might one day impose restrictions on coal is absurd. “Why
on earth would they do that?” he asks. After all, the racket in which
he plays the tiniest of parts is a big source of funds for political
parties, he says. Very important people have a big stake in keeping
it going. According to the Central Bureau of Investigation, a na
tional lawenforcement agency, they include the government of
West Bengal state. Bijan, a former maintenance worker at a mine
in Durgapur who is now an environmental activist, sighs, “It is dif
ficult to understand how coalmining can be reduced, let alone
stopped. You need a complete paradigm shift for that.”
Asia (including Australia) produces and consumes threequar
ters of the world’s coal. Roughly half of China’s electricity comes
from it. For India the figure is threequarters. Of the 1,002 coal
fired plants planned or under construction around the world, ful
ly 865 are in Asia and the Pacific, according to Global Energy Mon
itor, a watchdog group. Asia also produces most of the world’s ce
ment and steel, activities which release copious quantities of
greenhouse gases. And as its people get richer, they buy more cars
and take more flights.
In 1990 the AsiaPacific region’s burning of fossil fuels pro
duced six gigatonnes of CO 2 , according to the iea, representing
about a quarter of the world total. In 2020 Asia emitted 16.5Gt, or
49%. Theieareckons that under national governments’ stated cli
mate policies the total will grow by about 9% by 2030 before fall
ing back to 95% of today’s level in 2050. That is a larger climb than
in the rest of the world bar Africa, and a smaller longterm cut.
Asian governments, like those elsewhere, have pledged to do
better. In 2020, with the world watching, Xi Jinping, China’s presi
dent, told the ungeneral assembly that his country’s ndcfor Glas
gowwould commit it to netzero emissions by 2060. Japan and
South Korea, perhaps embarrassed to be beaten to the punch by
China, both promised shortly afterwards to reach netzero byHow hot the world will get before the climate is stabilised
depends largely on what happens in Asia