Greenhouse Gas Emissions Gap Grows as Climate Pledges Founder - Bloomberg

By Alex Morales - 2012-05-24T09:00:00Z

The gap between the emissions cuts needed to contain global warming and actual reductions by 2020 is at risk of widening as countries including the U.S., Brazil and Mexico fail to meet pledges, Climate Action Tracker said.

At best, commitments would lead to emissions 9 gigatons (9 billion tons) higher than the 44 gigatons needed in 2020 to stop the planet warming more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) since industrialization, the project said in Bonn, Germany, where two weeks of United Nations treaty talks end tomorrow.

A temperature increase of at least 3.5 degrees Celsius on the current greenhouse-gas trajectory may accelerate as nations suggest they will miss 2020 pledges, Climate Action Tracker said after analyzing presentations made by countries at the talks.

“Many governments are nowhere near putting in place the policies they have committed to, policies that are not enough to keep temperature rises to below 2 degrees Celsius,” said Bill Hare, director of Climate Analytics, one of three groups that set up the project. “We’ve already identified a major emissions gap and the action being taken is highly unlikely to shrink that gap -- indeed it seems that the opposite is happening.”

The UN discussions have failed to yield any increase in the ambition of emissions reductions, Bangladeshi negotiator Quamrul Chowdhury said today in an interview in Bonn.

Deadlocked Talks

The talks are split into three tracks: One to define what nations bound by targets under the existing Kyoto Protocol will do when they expire at the end of 2012; another to define what those without targets will do, including the two biggest emitters, the U.S. and China; and a third strand to devise a new climate treaty by 2015 that will take force from 2020.

The first two tracks are in danger of not being completed at year-end talks in Doha, Qatar, as UN budgetary constraints threaten to cancel a week of interim negotiations in Bangkok before then, said Chowdhury. The third strand is in deadlock over a procedural debate about how to structure the discussions, pitting 36 countries that include China and India against the rest of negotiators, he said.

Aside from Potsdam, Germany-based Climate Analytics, the tracker project is run by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the consultant Ecofys, which has offices in the U.S., China, Germany, the U.K. and the Netherlands.

The project’s estimate of the “emissions gap” exceeds the low end of the 6 to 11 gigatons estimated by the UN in November.

Coal Power

It said policies announced by the U.S. on coal-fired power stations and fuel efficiency in vehicles leave the world’s biggest historical emitter 350 million tons short of its “inadequate” 2020 pledge. President Barack Obama has committed to cut U.S. emissions 17 percent for the 15 years through 2020 so long as Congress passes domestic legislation.

Brazil’s proposed forest code may reverse the trend that’s seen its deforestation rate fall to a historic low, the tracker said. President Dilma Rousseff is due to make a decision on the proposal tomorrow, it said.

Mexico has introduced “solid new framework legislation” on climate change, while failing to implement policies, and is set to achieve only 12 percent of its pledge to cut emissions by 30 percent from a business-as-usual trajectory by 2020, it said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in Bonn at amorales2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net