Rich countries and developing economies alike will have to significantly advance their already ambitious carbon neutrality targets, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Tuesday, emphasizing that the rise of “clean energy” was the main lever. to keep climate goals within reach.
“Advanced economies” such as the United States and the European Union will have to anticipate their carbon neutrality objective by 5 years – from 2050 to 2045 – and China by 10 years to 2050, to stay on target. the Paris agreement and thus give the world a chance to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial era, the IEA estimated in a new report.
“The energy sector is evolving faster than many people think, but there is still much to do and time is running out,” said the OECD energy agency based in Paris.
While welcoming the “very impressive” growth of clean energies in the United States, the European Union, China and India, these investments in this sector will have to increase from 1,800 billion dollars to 4,500 billion by 2030, stressed the head of the IEA, Fatih Birol.
Its report comes a few weeks before crucial negotiations at the 28th United Nations Climate Conference in Dubai where the future of fossil fuels is expected to give rise to fierce debates.
This is the update of its “Net Zero Roadmap”, a roadmap for carbon neutrality in 2050, the publication of which in 2021 had left its mark by calling on the world to abandon “now” any new oil or gas projects. gas.
Two years later, what is the assessment? Over the past two years, “emissions from the energy sector have remained stubbornly high, reaching a new record of 37 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2022,” notes the IEA.
But progress is there, as evidenced by the rapid growth of solar electricity and the electrification of the vehicle fleet, which according to the IEA makes it possible to keep within reach the most ambitious climate objectives of the agreement. Paris in 2015.
“The path to (the objective of) 1.5°C has narrowed over the last two years, but the growth of clean energy technologies keeps it open”, wants to believe the IEA, which also calls for “energy efficiency”. “We have legitimate reasons to be optimistic” even if the task promises to be “Herculean”, declared the head of the IEA Fatih Birol during a press briefing.
According to the IEA, the development of clean energies is the main lever for reducing the demand for fossil fuels by more than 25% this decade and their growth leads to a reduction in CO2 emissions in energy by 35% by 2030.
“As COP28 approaches, the latest scientific data is unequivocal: the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end,” commented Laurence Tubiana, president of the European Climate Foundation.
The IEA recently claimed that peak demand for all fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal – will be reached “in the next few years” of the decade, thanks to the surge in cleaner energy and electric cars.
“Encouraging” certainly but “not sufficient to achieve the 1.5°C objective”, insists the Agency, stressing that “almost all countries must bring forward their carbon neutrality target dates”. In particular, “advanced economies” will have to be on the front line to “accelerate the energy transition even more and more quickly,” Laura Cozzi, director of foresight at the IEA, told the press.
With current warming of around 1.2 degrees compared to pre-industrial times, the world is already experiencing a rise in destructive climate disasters, hitting vulnerable populations hardest.
A delay in ambitions would make countries more dependent on CO2 capture technologies that are nevertheless “expensive” and still “unproven on a large scale”, estimates the IEA, while criticism mounts over these technologies promising to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and store it sustainably.
If such technologies fail to achieve the required scale – including filtering 0.1% of the atmosphere each year by 2100 – reducing temperature rise to 1.5°C “would not be possible”, warns the IEA.
09/26/2023 14:04:39 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP