A report published by a team of scientists suggests that China, India, and the aviation industry are leading the rising amount of fossil fuel emissions.
They found that this year, the world pumped 1.1% more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere compared to last year. This was primarily caused by increased pollution from China and India.
Rise in Global Fossil Fuel Emissions
The revelation of the increase in emissions was made on Tuesday at international climate talks where world leaders are trying to discuss ways to cut emissions by 43% by 2030. Instead, carbon pollution was found to have risen again.
The team noted that this year, 36.8 billion metric tons of carbon pollution poured into the atmosphere. The Global Carbon Project, a group of international scientists who produce the gold standard of emissions counting, said that this number is twice the amount that was recorded nearly four decades ago.
The lead author of the study, Pierre Friedlingstein said that it now seems that the world will go beyond the 1.5 degrees Celsius target written in the Paris Agreement. This means that leaders who attended the COP28 Climate Summit will have to accelerate efforts in cutting fossil fuel emissions to even keep the 2 degrees Celsius target possible, as per the Associated Press.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chairman Jim Skea said that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees is "just possible." However, he argued this is only by a slight margin and with massive emission cuts. Friedlingstein added that the world is clearly not going in the right direction.
The burning of fossil fuel this year as well as the manufacturing of cement have added the equivalent of putting 2.57 million pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every second. Friedlingstein said that if China and India were to be excluded from that count, world carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning and cement manufacture would have dropped.
Achieving Temperature Thresholds
The world was found to have increased its annual emissions by 398 million metric tons. China was found to have increased its fossil fuel emissions by 458 million metric tons compared to last year while India was found to have increased its own by 233 million metric tons. On the other hand, aviation emissions increased by 145 million metric tons.
A senior researcher at the Cicero Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Glen Peters said that while renewables are growing to record levels, fossil fuels are also growing to record highs, according to the Washington Post.
Even though the United States and the European Union are seeing a drop in emissions, it is not fast enough to achieve temperature targets. In the U.S. emissions are projected to drop by 3% this year while the EU is set to cut emissions by roughly 7%.
Peters argued that supporting renewables is not enough to solve the current climate crisis plaguing the world. He added that there have to be two policies that ensure that fossil fuels actually go down, said the New York Times.
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