An article previously published by Globe Banner brings to light information from Carbon Brief regarding CO2 emissions levels for the world coming out of the pandemic and for the last decade. According to the article, the Global Carbon Project (GCP) has found that emissions from fossil fuels and cement have rebounded by 4.9% after falling 5.4% in 2020 due to the restrictions of COVID-19.
Carbon Brief is a British-based website specializing in the science of policy change.
The same study also reveals that, based on reassessing “historical emissions from land-use change,” CO2 output around the globe actually may have been flat for the last decade. This assessment is based on new data that actually lowers the amount of cropland expansion, most significantly in the tropical region.
Jason Isaac
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“Emissions from land-use change in the new GCP dataset have been decreasing by around 4% per year over the past decade, compared to an increase of 1.8% per year in the prior version,” writes Zeke Hausfather for Carbon Brief.
Jason Isaac, the director of Life: Powered at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said the data is compelling.
“This study offers even more evidence against the climate doomsday narrative,” Isaac told Globe Banner. “If we can’t even agree whether carbon dioxide emissions are really increasing, or at what rate, why should we be forced to support unreliable energy sources in the name of climate change? This new information about emissions from land use further undermines the apocalyptic projections touted by the climate movement, which rely on fundamentally flawed statistical models and are becoming increasingly suspect in the scientific community.
“This study offers more ammunition for Americans who understand that renewable energy is not the way of the future," he added. "Instead of fixating on minute — and now potentially nonexistent — increases in greenhouse gas emissions, we should focus instead on enacting policies that help people in our communities and around the world escape poverty and achieve human flourishing thanks to affordable, reliable energy.”
The GCP warns that there are still real uncertainties involving land use change emissions, and that “this trend remains to be confirmed,” Carbon Brief reports.
According to Science Direct, land use change is the “process by which human activities transform the natural landscape, referring to how land has been used, usually emphasizing the functional role of land for economic activities.”
The GCP study has yet to be peer reviewed and is the 16th annual installment of its “global carbon budget.”
The study highlights China and India as large drivers of the resurgence of emissions in 2021, and makes a specific note of Chinese coal, power, and industry as being main contributors.
This data would turn the current CO2 emission understanding on its head.
“The new data shows that global CO2 emissions have been flat — if not slightly declining — over the past 10 years,” the GCP study notes.
Isaac said it’s unlikely this new information will meaningfully change the political landscape.
“We’ve seen climate doomsday predictions fail to come true time and time again," he said. "In fact, the state of our environment and the human condition are better than they’ve ever been yet the Left continues to support radical climate activists’ anti-energy policies. I hope this study is taken seriously by the international community, but based on the farce that was the U.N. climate summit, it’s more likely the international community will continue to care more about virtue-signaling than scientific rigor.”
Through the first six months, 2021 was on pace to be the sixth-warmest year in the 142-year record. In addition, there was an increase in extreme weather events such as fires and storms.
GCP previously depicted an increase of CO2 emissions by an average of 1.4 gigatonnes of CO2 per year from 2011-19. The new estimate brings that annual increase down to 0.1 GtCO2 over the same time period. If 2020 and 2021 are included, global CO2 emissions have actually been slightly declining. Both of those years are outliers, however, due to the declines seen over those two years due to the worldwide changes of COVID-19.
The study notes that the revision in emissions is almost entirely driven by the revised land use emissions data as global fossil emissions remained essentially unchanged within the new data.
Three different datasets used by the GCP that previously reached different conclusions all show declines in emissions through the past decade. The main current difference lies in the magnitude of decline, prompting the GCP to state that “there is a decrease in net CO2 emissions from land-use change over the last decade, in contrast to earlier estimates of no clear trend across LUC estimates."
The authors do warn that the deforestation taking place in Brazil may not be captured in the new data, and it does not include forest degradation.
As professor Julia Pongratz, director of the Department of Geography at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a member of the GCP team, explained to Carbon Brief, “It is too early to infer robust trends. More regional analysis is needed and accurate, high-resolution monitoring of land-use dynamics. Only then can we reduce the uncertainty around land-use emissions and their trends and their contributions to emissions reduction targets.”
Data from 1959 to the present show that China and India have been the largest drivers in the increase of CO2 emissions.
“The global growth in fossil CO2 emissions mainly arises from the growth in coal use in the power and industry sectors in China," the GCP said, according to Carbon Brief.
Fossil CO2 emissions have been increasing globally, but the per capita global emissions have been relativity flat for not only the last decade, but since at least 1959. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that fossil-fuel carbon emissions globally have "significantly increased" since 1900 and CO2 emissions have increased almost 90% since the 1970s. The top carbon dioxide emitters as of 2014 were China, the United States, the European Union, India, the Russian Federation and Japan.
Isaac, a former Texas legislator, said there are major ramifications to the political use of scientific information.
“This is just one more example of why the ‘net zero’ mindset is worth about as much as its name and why the misguided policies of the Biden administration, especially energy discrimination in the financial sector, are not only wrong for America, but the entire world,” he said. “The progressive campaign to force businesses to march in lockstep on climate issues threatens not just our energy industry, but our entire financial system, economy and way of life.”