Glasgow talkfest has net-zero credibility

It’s already evident governments won’t have the stomach for the price increases required to bring about the net-zero emissions nirvana.

A participant at the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow on Monday. Picture: AFP

The 25,000 attendees descending on Glasgow’s climate conference can rest easy that the carbon dioxide emissions generated by their business-class flights won’t be counted towards their governments’ national emissions totals.

Under rules drawn up for the Paris 2015 climate agreement, allocating international air travel emissions across countries, which until Covid-19 had been the fastest-growing sort, was deemed too difficult.

But that’s the least of the reasons the global push for “zero emissions by 2050” will fail. For a start, look at the track record. Since 1995, when the first “COP” UN climate change meeting took place, in Berlin, global carbon dioxide emissions have increased by more than 56 per cent to about 36 billion tonnes a year. A statistical genius couldn’t pick when the world started taking an interest in them from looking at a chart.

Despite ever larger, more frequent and earnest conferences and climate change “policies”, emissions show little sign of changing from their steady upward course, whatever profound sentiments emerge from this week’s climate jamboree.

If governments seriously believe they can get 36 billion tonnes down to near zero by 2050, they will have to take drastic and painful action soon, including the biggest emitters – China, the US and India.

Emissions whack-a-mole has been the reality as rich countries send their manufacturing to poor countries, which don’t care so much about their emissions, which at the end of the day, are the same everywhere. China now emits more than the US and EU combined every year.

Britain, host of COP26, boasts it will engineer the biggest reduction in emissions of any major country by 2035 – by 78 per cent on 1990 levels. That sounds impressive, but Britain’s emissions are at least 40 per cent higher if the imports its people enjoy are factored in, according to analysis by the UK Office for National Statistics.

No wonder governments of rich countries prefer to compare their emissions based on production rather than the goods and services used by their people. Meatless Mondays and fishless Fridays won’t be anywhere near as popular as feel-good wind farms far away.

The energy mix hasn’t changed as much as the zeitgeist would suggest. In 1973, coal, the most hated form of energy among net-zero emissions advocates, made up 24 per cent of the world’s energy; in 2019 it was 25 per cent, according to readily available public data. Revered wind and solar fulfil less than 4 per cent of the globe’s energy needs after decades of subsidies. Oil, gas and coal still satisfy 85 per cent.

When the International Air Transport Association in Boston last month released the airline industry’s plan to achieve net zero by 2050, it was careful to gloss over the impact of the $US2 trillion cost on airline tickets, which will inevitably see significant increases in price.

Similarly, governments have so far hidden the cost of the radical economic restructuring that will be required to fulfil 2050 aspirations. To be sure, politically popular wind and solar boondoggles, cobbled on to ageing electricity grids, have pushed up power prices. But no government has taxed imports according to the carbon dioxide emissions required to manufacture them. They will have to if they are taking the 2050 goal seriously.

The gap between net-zero emissions rhetoric and economic and political reality have become so great, even elite international organisations appear to be mocking the whole enterprise. The International Energy Agency in May released Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector, making it clear it’s a road map that has no hope of being followed. The five assumptions, all necessary apparently, have no hope of being fulfilled.

First, coal demand will have to fall to almost nothing, yet China since 2019 has been building the equivalent of a new coal plant every week. Renewable – or unreliable, depending on one’s preferred spin – energy must increase from almost nothing to two-thirds of all energy supply.

Total global energy demand must fall – which hasn’t happened – and trillions of dollars are needed to update energy infrastructure and grids, even in overtaxed and hugely indebted rich nations.

Demand for oil must fall by three-quarters by 2050. Electric vehicles are barely 2 per cent of new vehicle sales and a sliver of the outstanding stock of cars.

It’s already evident governments won’t have the stomach for the price increases required to bring about the net-zero emissions nirvana. A doubling of the global oil price over the past year – exactly the sort of thing required to curb consumption of oil – has prompted the US and Japan to ask oil-producing nations to pump more oil. The climate appears to have come a distant second to political reality.

Xi Jinping, leader of the world’s biggest-emitting nation, hasn’t even bothered to attend the Glasgow conference this week, and has promised China will be net zero in 2060, long after his reign has ended.

And US President Joe Biden, who’s made fighting climate change one of his top priorities, arrives in Scotland without the legislative machinery to make his April promise to slash US emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 a reality. Even his Democrat congress baulked last week at a plan to phase out coal and gas power stations quickly in favour of wind and solar. If the congress becomes Republican in a year, as widely expected, there’s next to no chance of significant new policies.

As for India, it’s made it clear repeatedly it won’t be curbing emissions unless it receives significant financial compensation from rich countries, who still haven’t found a fraction of the $US100bn promised in 2015.

It’s a hopeless situation for climate change advocates.

If Glasgow foreshadows the start of highly disruptive policies to make the targets seem less than fanciful, the most anticipated global climate conference in history could end up the high watermark of mass political support for “doing something”.

In the more likely case it doesn’t foreshadow the start of such drastic policies, the periodic talkfest becomes even more of a farce.