CO2 emissions « JoNova

Even the EU, the motherlode of climate action, backs away from Climate Plans

By Jo Nova

The great global carbon back-down continues:

The EU wants to keep their target while exploring every possible option not to keep it.

They’re contemplating a “non linear” path, meaning, a much slower approach now, while they think up excuses to bail out later.

EU exploring weaker 2040 climate goal

Politico, [Formerly paid by USAID]

The European Commission wants to keep a 90 percent emissions-cutting target but to change how countries calculate their progress.

To start, officials are contemplating a “nonlinear” path between the EU’s 2030 emissions-cutting target of 55 percent and its 2040 goal — rather than a straight line. That could mean slower emission cuts to start, compensated by rapid declines later in the 2030s. It would also mean more pollution in total over the decade.

But as well as the delayed plan, there is the cheap-foreign-escape clause, the forestry-option and domestic-swap games.

Now that everyone knows renewables are no good, and EVs won’t replace fuel cars, there are no end of creative accounting techniques to “meet targets” without spending much or admitting defeat.

The EU might return to letting European countries buy cheap international carbon credits. This […]

Those Green Australians! Our emissions per person fell 28% since 1990

Get ready for the startling news that Australians have been great corporate “green” citizens — on a per capita basis, all of us are so much more carbon-efficient (sic) than we were 25 years ago. Back then, in those dark days, people frivolously heated and cooled their homes without a thought to how many sinful cyclones they were creating in the Philippines. They drove recklessly in fossil fueled cars, and windmills were used to pump water a mere 10 metres, not to stop floods in Pakistan.

The amazing thing is that Australia’s population has grown by a whopping 38% since 1990. And our emission have grown with that, but the emissions per person has declined by 28% per person. Why aren’t the Greens more excited?

As with all these statistics, watch the pea for the real story. Most of that decline is not due to solar panels, pink batts, bird blending wind towers, energy efficiency, or even economic trends — it is predominantly due to cutting down fewer trees. The “improvements” are in the “land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF)” sector, of which the “LUCF” basically means deforestation, afforestation and reforestation. The decline is mostly thanks to farmers like […]