![]() Jeff Merkley, a Democratic senator from Oregon, said US negotiators will be “unable to lead the phaseout of fossil fuels” at Cop28. Three bar charts showing the projected upward trends of US oil and gas production.īut the proliferation of domestic oil and gas drilling has alarmed scientists and some of Biden’s allies, who fret that it undermines efforts to avert a looming 3C in global heating that Guterres has described as “hellish”. US energy emissions, meanwhile, have been edging downwards and are expected to drop 3% this year, albeit at a slower rate than needed to meet its own climate goals. The US president’s administration has fashioned new pollution rules to slash emissions from cars, trucks and power plants and recently struck a renewed agreement with China, the only country that emits more carbon than the US, to do more to stem the climate crisis. Under Biden, the US has passed its first major climate legislation, called the Inflation Reduction Act, which has spurred record investment in clean energy such as solar and wind, as well as propel sales of electric vehicles. “It’s out of sync and it needs reckoning.” “The US is locking in production for years that makes it hard to meet climate goals,” he said. “It’s particularly alarming to see the projections of record US oil and gas production year after year until 2050,” said Michael Lazarus, a senior scientist at Stockholm Environment Institute, which helped produce a recent UN report finding the world is planning double the amount of fossil fuel production consistent with remaining within a 1.5C (2.7F) global temperature rise compared with pre-industrial times. The US’s surging fossil fuel production casts a pall over such ambitions, however. “Cop28 must send a clear signal that the fossil fuel age is out of gas, that its end is inevitable,” he said. António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, has called fossil fuel production the “poisonous root” of the climate crisis that should be dismantled. A third of the world’s planned oil and gas expansion in this period will occur in the US, a recent report found.Īt the Cop28 climate summit, starting in Dubai this week, the European Union and a cadre of “high ambition” countries that range from Kenya to Samoa will push for an agreed “phaseout” of fossil fuels. ![]() Tellingly, the US government expects this frenzy of oil and gas activity to continue at near-record levels right up to 2050, a point at which scientists say planet-heating emissions must be eliminated to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown. Records will also be broken this year for gas production, with a glut of new export terminals on the Gulf of Mexico coast facilitating a boom that will see US exports of liquified natural gas (or LNG) double in the next four years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |