Carbon Brief and the Global Carbon Project are the gold standard of carbon reporting
I’ve been using Global Carbon Project’s annual summary for years as a comprehensive, easily accessible, easy to understand presentation of the annual change in the carbon balance sheet. Just recently, the 2019 update was released which covers the period to the end of 2019..
An equally another gold standard, referenc the UK organisation CarbonBrief covers carbon news of importance as it happens. It specializes in “clear, data-driven articles and graphics to help improve the understanding of climate change” and succeeds admirably. Its weekly email should be the first thing opened by every politician on Friday night Sydney time when it pops up in the inbox.
I can’t improve on their reporting, but I can think about implications from some of the findings. First, a couple of the charts that most influence my world view from the Carbon Project.
There is nothing particularly new in these figures, but in no way does that detract from their relevance and the need to constantly refresh the view. There are close to 90 charts most of which are well worth looking at. But I have chosen just 3.
Fossil fuel emissions are 62% higher than in 1990 and rose perhaps 0.6% in 2019 over 2018. Asia is the driver of the increase and China and India are the main problems.
These six emitters represent 67% of all emissions. Australia supplies coal to China and India and perhaps a few tonnes to Europe. We supply gas to China and Japan.
I don’t show per capita emissions but China’s per capita number of 7 tonnes per person is now above the European average.
Oil is now nearly as important as coal and gas emissions are now a major problem
And incredibly gas emissions are now as high as coal emissions were in 1980. As the figure shows gas sourced carbon emissions, which include fugitive gas, grew 5.4% last year.
For my own analysis I used the underlying data to make a Marimekko chart at 20 year intervals.
How about COP 25 and Article 6
A very helpful backgrounder on “Article 6” of the Paris agreement is available on Carbon Brief. Article 6 has 3 separate voluntary cooperation mechanisms towards climate goals. Two based on markets and one on non markets. The undefined rules around this are arguably the most important discussion points at the current Madrid and next Glasgow meetings.
Approach 1: Any country that has beaten its Paris pledge can sell the overachievement to an underachieving country.
Approach 2: A new international carbon market run by the UN
Approach 3: Ill-defined but provides a formal framework eg developmental aid. But this was discussed in terms of “higher ambition”.
Article 6 states that the market mechanism must deliver “overall mitigation in global emissions” The market mechanism is a more effective version of the “Clean Development Mechanism” of the Kyoto Protocol.
CDMs are a failure, because they were manipulated. In ITK’s view this is typical of the way markets develop, just as in the EEC carbon scheme the learnings from initial failures and manipulations are gradually transformed, albeit too slowly, into an effective market.
As ITK sees it there are many benefits for a “properly regulated” international market. It provides an incentive to overachieve for a country and an incentive for the private sector to participate.
It allows the areas where mitigation is cheapest (i.e. in renewable electricity) to be transferred to sectors or countries where it is more difficult (ie energy intensive globally competitive manufacturing). A market is easier to sell politically than a law.
Corsia – another name you will hear in the future
As the Carbon Brief explainer notes, Corsia is the scheme, agreed by 192 countries in 2016, run through the UN Aviation agency that aims to ensure any rise in international aviation emissions above 2020 levels are offset elsewhere. Aviation is about 2.4% of global CO2 emissions, that is about 1.8 times what Australia emits.
China solar steps backward to 30GW in 2019, will it again go on the front foot?
The two charts below I generally put in conference and client presentations
The figures are particularly important for thinking about the learning rates for the two technologies.
The learning rate is the expected unit cost reduction for a doubling of global installed capacity. For solar its been very high probably closer to 30% than 20%.
The learning rate has an inbuilt brake. Each doubling of global installed capacity takes longer than the previous one. Therefore the pace of cost reduction slows over time. This is an empirical observation but holds true over many things.
So it’s important to understand how long it’s going to take to double installed capacity. Right now annual installations are around 100 GW – that’s roughly the same as 2017, and global cumulative installations are about 400-410 GW.
So at current rates it will take four years to double global installed capacity once, and eight years to double it again. This is already a dramatic slow down over history.
As figure 5 shows, the major contributor to global growth in the 2015 – 2017 period was China where annual installations went from 15GW to 53GW.
However, an article in Caixin, the English language China business news service, starts with the statement that:
“China added 50% less new solar power generation capacity in the first 10 months of this year versus 2018 as state support waned “. Year to date China installations were just 17.5GW. Wang Bohua, secretary general of the China PV association, forecast 30GW for this year compared to 44GW in 2018.
That’s 14GW extra the rest of the world has to pick up just to stand still on annual production. It may be able to do that.
China will need 100s of GWs of new solar and 100s of GW of new wind, as over time it’s forced to wind down its coal fuelled generation.
There are also calls in China for coal generation plants to be closed – not to reduce overall coal fuelled electricity production, but to improve profitability for the remaining generators by increasing capacity utilization from the abysmal 50% level and to make room for the new capacity still being built.
This somewhat depressing news is another reminder of just how important for the world, for China and for Australia, China’s next electricity plan is.
