In an article published today in Grist Shannon Osaka considers if global carbon emissions peaked in 2019. 2020 saw emissions fall by 7%, or 2.4 billion metric tons. Clearly 2020 has been a weird year, and the fall may be due mainly to the Covid19 pandemic. As the above graph shows emissions have sometimes dipped in certain years, due to various crises, only to rebound the following year. It is of course too early to say for sure if emissions have peaked and if and how quickly they will then descend.
In December 2015 I wrote a blog wondering, and hoping, that carbon emissions had peaked in that year. Instead they rose again from 2016 to 2019. In that blog I posted two graphs, the first highlighting the small decrease in emissions in 2015, the second from the UN assuming a peak in emissions in 2030 and what the UN called an impossibly steep cut in emissions thereafter.
The fall in emissions in 2020 has been dramatic. Most opinion is that post Covid there may be some rebound toward higher emissions, or that emissions may jog along not going up or down a great deal. There is of course another possibility that emissions will plummet every year from now on until we reach net zero, and then into net negative, where the Earth is sequestering more carbon than is being emitted.
If we look at the graph below it shows how various energy technology costs have changed over the last decade. Solar photovoltaic panels have been coming down in price for many years. Between 1976 and 2019 the price of solar modules has fallen by 99.6%., and as the graph shows the fall in the last decade has been 89%.
Wind, both onshore and offshore, concentrating solar thermal and many forms of energy storage such as batteries and green hydrogen have all also fallen in price by considerable amounts. Fossil fuels and nuclear are slowly pricing themselves out of the market. Worldwide more coal power stations are closing than are being built, and this trend will only accelerate.
Of course to get to net zero as soon as possible will require more than just market forces. We need to change almost every aspect of our global turbo charged capitalist throw-away society. More and more people understand this and are busy creating the new economy. Millions of activists are raising their voices in calls for change. Most of our politicians are utterly inadequate for the task at hand, but even they may move in the right direction. Some better politicians are emerging in many countries, and over the coming months I’ll highlight a few of the best.
For now I just want to stress that the Covid pandemic, combined with falling costs of renewable energy, give us a window of opportunity to reconsider our collective future as a species. Let us cooperate to rapidly bring down emissions, and build a better future. We live in a multifaceted emergency, out of which something better may just be beginning to emerge.