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NASA Satellite Shows How We Can Track Local CO2 Emissions From Space : ScienceAlert

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In 2013, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) had reached 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time since the Pliocene Era (ca. 3 million years ago).

According to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), “excess carbon dioxide” in our atmosphere will result in a global average temperature increase of between 1.5 and 2 °C by 2030.

This will significantly affect ecological systems worldwide, including species extinction, droughts, wildfires, extreme weather, and crop failures.

Aside from curbing emissions, these changes call for mitigation and adaptation strategies and climate monitoring. This is the purpose of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) 2 and 3 missions, twin satellites that make space-based observations of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere to understand the characteristics of climate change better.

Using the world’s fifth-largest coal-fired power plant as a test case, a team of researchers used data from OCO 2 and 3 to detect and track changes in CO2 and quantify the emissions produced below.

The research was led by Ray Nassar, a senior researcher with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto (UofT). He was joined by researchers from ECCC, UofT, Colorado State University, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The paper that describes their findings was published on 28 October 2022 in Frontiers in Remote Sensing.

Their findings demonstrate that space-based observations can be used to track CO2 emission changes at a local scale.

Launched in 2014, the OCO-2 satellite maps natural and anthropogenic CO2 emissions on regional and continental scales. This is done indirectly by measuring the intensity of sunlight reflected off Earth’s surface and directly by measuring the amount of CO2 absorbed in the column of air between the surface and the satellite.

The OCO-2 satellite also has spectrometers calibrated to detect the specific signature of CO2 gas. Its companion (OCO-3) was built using OCO-2’s spare parts and was launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2019.

This instrument includes a mapping mode that can make sweeping observations over entire areas, allowing researchers to use OCO-3 to create detailed mini-maps on the scale of major cities – where excess carbon emissions are concentrated.

Using data obtained during multiple overpasses between 2017 and 2022, the research team analyzed the emissions of the largest single-emissions source in Europe – the Belchatów Power Station in Poland.

From this, they detected changes in CO2 levels that were consistent with hourly fluctuations in the plant’s electricity production.

The Belchatów Power Station has been in operation since 1988 and will remain open until the end of 2036 (according to the Polish government). It is currently the largest coal-fired power plant in the world (with a reported capacity of 5,102 megawatts).

It uses brown coal (lignite), which typically generates higher emissions per megawatt than hard coal (anthracite). Large facilities, such as power plants and oil refineries, account for about half of the global carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

Neither satellite was originally designed to detect emissions from specific individual facilities such as Belchatów.

In a NASA press release, OCO-3 mission project scientist Abhishek Chatterjee explained how this made their results a “pleasant surprise” and how he and his colleagues look forward to future research opportunities:

“As a community, we are refining the tools and techniques to be able to extract more information from the data than what we had originally planned. We are learning that we can actually understand a lot more about anthropogenic emissions than what we had previously expected. It is really exciting to think that we will get another five to six years of operations with OCO-3. We are seeing that making measurements at the right time and at the right scale is critical.”

According to Nasser, most CO2 emissions reports are created from estimates or data collected at Earth’s surface level. This consists of accounting for the mass of fossil fuels used, calculating the expected emissions, and generally doesn’t involve atmospheric measurements.

Said Nasser: “The finer details about exactly when and where emissions occur are often not available. Providing a more detailed picture of carbon dioxide emissions could help to track the effectiveness of policies to reduce emissions. Our approach with OCO-2 and OCO-3 can be applied to more power plants or modified for carbon dioxide emissions from cities or countries.”

In the future, climate scientists will benefit from the mapping mode of observations of OCO-3, which could serve as a “pathfinder” for next-generation satellite missions. NASA recently announced that mission operations with OCO-3 aboard the ISS will be extended for several more years.

The instrument will operate alongside another greenhouse gas observation mission, the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT).

These and other efforts to monitor climate change and CO2 emissions in real time will prove invaluable to mitigation and adaptation efforts.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

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US receives stinging criticism at Cop27 despite China’s growing emissions | Cop27

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The US, fresh from reversing its 30 years of opposition to a “loss and damage” fund for poorer countries suffering the worst impacts of the climate crisis, has signaled that its longstanding image as global climate villain should now be pinned on a new culprit: China.

Following years of tumult in which the US refused to provide anything resembling compensation for climate damages, followed by Donald Trump’s removal of the US from the Paris climate agreement, there was a profound shift at the Cop27 UN talks in Egypt, with Joe Biden’s administration agreeing to the new loss and damage fund.

The US also backed language in the new agreement, which finally concluded in the early hours of Sunday morning after an often fraught period of negotiations between governments, that would demand the phase-out of all unabated fossil fuels, only to be thwarted by major oil-producing nations such as Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Despite these stances, the US continued to be the leading target of ire from climate activists who blame it for obstruction and for failing to reckon with its role as history’s largest ever emitter of planet-heating gases. On Friday, the US was given the unwanted title of “colossal fossil” by climate groups for supposedly failing to push through the loss and damage assistance at Cop27.

The US US delegation in Sharm el-Sheikh chafed at this image, with John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, using his closing remarks to shift the focus on to China, now the world’s largest emitter. Kerry said that “all nations have a stake in the choices China makes in this critical decade. The United States and China should be able to accelerate progress together, not only for our sake, but for future generations – and we are all hopeful that China will live up to its global responsibility.”

Kerry and his team were by the end of the talks “sick” of shouldering the blame, according to Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser, now with the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington DC. “Somehow the US became the villain despite aggressive action on emissions, meanwhile Russia and China’s emissions are growing like crazy and yet they are not in the crosshairs of activists, it’s confusing,” he said.

“I mean it’s absurd. If we don’t get hold of China’s emissions the climate will spin out of control.”

Nate Hultman, who was part of Kerry’s negotiating team for Cop26 last year, said the US entered the climate talks “with its head held high” after Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act over the summer, which included more than $370bn (£313bn) in spending to advance renewable energy and electric cars. “The US is acting as one of the key leaders in getting the climate outcome the world wants, I just reject this caricature of the US being obstructionist,” he said.

The US and China, the world’s two largest emitters, had been in a sort of diplomatic deep freeze on climate issues following the visit of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, to Taiwan in August. Cop27 saw the beginnings of a thaw in this relationship, with the overlapping G20 summit resulting in Biden resuming dialogue with Xi Jinping.

China’s emissions are now nearly three times as large as America’s and while it has become the pre-eminent renewable energy superpower, it is ramping up its use of coal at a rate that scientists say will push the world disastrously beyond 1.5C in global heating. “Our planet is still in the emergency room,” said António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, on the lack of progress in cutting emissions in the Cop27 deal.

“We need to drastically reduce emissions now and this is an issue this Cop did not address. The world still needs a giant leap on climate ambition.”

China, and many climate activists, point to America’s long history of being the lead carbon polluter and its failure to honor past commitments on climate finance to developing countries strafed by heatwaves, droughts, floods and other impacts. Biden has promised $11bn (£9bn) for this effort, although this spending will probably be blocked by the House of Representatives when it falls under Republican control in January, barring a last-gasp funding deal before Christmas.

“A quarter of the CO2 in our atmosphere is red, white and blue,” said Ed Markey, a Democratic senator who visited the Cop27 summit. “The United States has a moral and planetary responsibility to partner, not prohibit, on equitable climate finance. We cannot leave the countries least responsible for the climate crisis to be sacrifice zones and bear this horrific burden alone.”

The summit also saw criticism of a glut of new oil and gas projects in the US, Biden’s call for a short-term leap in oil production to help bring down gasoline prices that have spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a new carbon-trading scheme announced by Kerry.

The carbon offsets “will only further condemn the African continent and global south nations to a future of pollution and environmental chaos, all for the benefit of the fossil fuel industry and big business,” according to Ozawa Bineshi Albert, co-executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance.

Back at home, Biden will face pressure from activists to declare a climate emergency to bypass Republican intransigence and to curb the leases still being liberally handed out for oil and gas drilling. The focus of the president on climate, however, will be “China, China, China”, according to Bledsoe.

“That is the only game in town, we’ve got to get Beijing to bend its emissions downwards, whatever it takes, even if it’s carbon border tariffs,” he said. “No matter what, that’s the priority of Biden. If you want to blame two groups for the climate impasse, blame communist China and America’s Republican party. That’s the truth of it.”

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COP27 delivers climate fund breakthrough at cost of progress on emissions

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  • COP27 climate summit ends after marathon weekend negotiations
  • Final deal delivers on creating historic climate finance fund
  • Negotiators say some blocked tighter emissions targets

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 20 (Reuters) – Countries closed this year’s U.N. climate summit on Sunday with a hard-fought deal to create a fund to help poor countries being battered by climate disasters, even as many lamented its lack of ambition in tackling the emissions causing them.

The deal was widely lauded as a triumph for responding to the devastating impact that global warming is already having on vulnerable countries. But many countries said they felt pressured to give up on tougher commitments for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order for the landmark deal on the loss and damage fund to go through.

Delegates – worn out after intense, overnight negotiations – made no objections as Egypt’s COP27 President Sameh Shoukry rattled through the final agenda items and gavelled the deal through.

Despite having no agreement for a stronger commitment to the 1.5 C goal set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, “we went with what the agreement was here because we want to stand with the most vulnerable,” Germany’s climate secretary Jennifer Morgan, visibly shaken, told Reuters.

When asked by Reuters whether the goal of stronger climate-fighting ambition had been compromised for the deal, Mexico’s chief climate negotiator Camila Zepeda summed up the mood among exhausted negotiators.

“Probably. You take a win when you can.”

LOSS AND DAMAGE

The deal for a loss and damage fund marked a diplomatic coup for small islands and other vulnerable nations in winning over the 27-nation European Union and the United States, which had long resisted the idea for fear that such a fund could open them to legal liability for historic emissions.

Those concerns were assuaged with language in the agreement calling for the funds to come from a variety of existing sources, including financial institutions, rather than relying on rich nations to pay in.

The climate envoy from the Marshall Islands said she was “worn out” but happy with the fund’s approval. “So many people all this week told us we wouldn’t get it,” Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner said. “So glad they were wrong.”

But it likely will be several years before the fund exists, with the agreement setting out only a roadmap for resolving lingering questions including who would oversee the fun, how the money would be dispersed – and to whom.

U.S. special climate envoy John Kerry, who was not at the weekend negotiations in person after testing positive for COVID-19, on Sunday welcomed the deal to “establish arrangements to respond to the devastating impact of climate change on vulnerable communities around the world.”

In a statement, he said he would continue to press major emitters like China to “significantly enhance their ambition” in keeping the 1.5 C goal alive.

FOSSIL FUEL FIZZLE

[1/7] A screen shows COP27 President Sameh Shoukry delivering a statement during the closing plenary at the COP27 climate summit in Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, November 20, 2022. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany

The price paid for a deal on the loss and damage fund was most evident in the language around emission reductions and reducing the use of polluting fossil fuels – known in the parlance of U.N. climate negotiations as “mitigation.”

Last year’s COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, had focused on a theme of keeping the 1.5C goal alive – as scientists warn that warming beyond that threshold would see climate change spiral to extremes.

Countries were asked then to update their national climate targets before this year’s Egypt summit. Only a fraction of the nearly 200 parties did so.

While praising the loss and damage deal, many countries decried COP27’s failure to push mitigation further and said some countries were trying to roll back commitments made in the Glasgow Climate Pact.

“We had to fight relentlessly to hold the line of Glasgow,” a visibly frustrated Alok Sharma, architect of the Glasgow deal, told the summit.

He listed off a number of ambition-boosting measures that were stymied in the negotiations for the final COP27 deal in Egypt: “Emissions peaking before 2025 as the science tells us is necessary? Not in this text. Clear follow-through on the phase down of coal? Not in this text. A clear commitment to phase out all fossil fuels? Not in this text.”

On fossil fuels, the COP27 deal text largely repeats wording from Glasgow, calling up parties to accelerate “efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.”

Efforts to include a commitment to phase out, or at least phase down, all fossil fuels were thwarted.

A separate “mitigation work programme” agreement, also approved on Sunday, contained several clauses that some parties, including the European Union, felt weakened commitment to ever more ambitious emissions-cutting targets.

Critics pointed to a section which they said undermined the Glasgow commitment to regularly renew emissions targets – with language saying the work programme would “not impose new targets or goals”. Another section of the COP27 deal dropped the idea of annual target renewal in favour of returning to a longer five-year cycle set out in the Paris pact.

“It is more than frustrating to see overdue steps on mitigation and the phase-out of fossil energies being stonewalled by a number of large emitters and oil producers,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said.

The deal also included a reference to “low-emissions energy,” raising concern among some that it opened the door to the growing use of natural gas – a fossil fuel that leads to both carbon dioxide and methane emissions.

“It does not break with Glasgow completely, but it doesn’t raise ambition at all,” Norway’s Climate Minister Espen Barth Eide told reporters.

The climate minister of the Maldives, which faces future inundation from climate-driven sea level rise, lamented the lack of ambition on curbing emissions.

“I recognise the progress we made in COP27” with the loss and damage fund, Aminath Shauna told the plenary. But “we have failed on mitigation … We have to ensure that we increase ambition to peak emissions by 2025. We have to phase out fossil fuel.”

Reporting by Valerie Volcovici, Dominic Evans and William James; Writing by Katy Daigle

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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US

Biden to Announce Restrictions on Methane Emissions at COP27

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SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt—President Biden is moving to tighten restrictions on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and boost funding for developing countries to adapt to the effects of climate change and transition to cleaner technologies, according to the White House. 

Mr. Biden is expected to announce the measures in a speech before a United Nations climate conference, known as COP27, according to a fact sheet released by the White House ahead of the address. The measures include plans for the Environmental Protection Agency to require oil-and-gas companies to monitor existing production facilities for methane leaks and repair them, according to administration officials.

Methane is 80 times as potent at trapping heat from solar radiation as carbon dioxide over its first 20 years in the atmosphere. It is responsible for about half a degree Celsius of global warming since the preindustrial era, and its levels are rising fast, according to measurements made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

The planned rules affect hundreds of thousands of U.S. wells, storage tanks and natural-gas processing plants, and require companies to replace leaky, older equipment and buy new monitoring tools.

EPA Administrator

Michael Regan

said flaring—a technique used by gas producers to burn off excess methane from oil and natural-gas wells—would be reduced at all well sites under the planned rules. Owners would be required to monitor abandoned wells for methane emissions and plug any leaks, he said.

“We’ve tightened down to limit flaring as much as possible without banning it,” Mr. Regan said.

President Biden met on Friday with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi in Sharm El Sheikh.



Photo:

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents U.S. oil and gas producers, said it was reviewing the proposed rule. 

“Federal regulation of methane crafted to build on industry’s progress can help accelerate emissions reductions while developing reliable American energy,”

Frank Macchiarola,

API’s senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs, said in a statement.

Lee Fuller of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, a Washington, D.C., trade group that represents many smaller producers, said his group would be reviewing the regulations closely. 

“While everyone wants to produce oil and natural gas using sound environmental procedures, there will always be a need to assure that the regulatory structure is cost effective and technologically feasible,” he said in a statement. 

Rachel Cleetus, lead economist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group, said in a statement that the EPA had “taken an important step forward by issuing a robust standard for methane emissions from oil-and-gas operations.”

Mr. Biden is walking a political tightrope during his brief stopover in Egypt on his way to summits in Cambodia and Indonesia. The war in Ukraine has unleashed turmoil in energy markets, underscoring the world’s continued reliance on fossil fuels.

Control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives still hinged on races that were too close to call as of early Friday morning, with both parties girding for a final outcome that might not be known for days. If Republicans win control of either chamber it would mean more power to a party that is deeply skeptical of Mr. Biden’s climate agenda and reluctant to spend billions of dollars to help other countries transition to cleaner sources of energy.

The White House said Mr. Biden is expected to announce an additional $100 million for the United Nations Adaptation Fund, which helps countries adapt to floods, droughts and storms that climate scientists say are increasing in frequency and severity as the earth’s atmosphere and oceans warm. The U.S. has yet to pay the $50 million it pledged to the fund at last year’s climate talks in Glasgow.

As world leaders gather for the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, WSJ looks at how the war in Ukraine and turmoil in energy markets are complicating efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Photo: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

The U.S. also owes $2 billion to the U.N. Green Climate Fund, which finances renewable energy and climate adaptation projects in the developing world. The administration has asked for $1.6 billion for the fund in the fiscal 2023 budget.

The White House said Mr. Biden would also pledge $150 million to a U.S. fund for climate adaptation and resilience across Africa; $13.6 million to the World Meteorological Organization to collect additional weather, water and climate observation across Africa; and $15 million to support the deployment of early-warning systems in Africa by NOAA in conjunction with local weather-forecasting agencies.

The U.S. pledges don’t address demands from poorer nations to provide money for damage they say is the result of climate-related weather events—a new category of funding known as “loss and damage.” This week at the summit, Belgium and Germany pledged a combined 172 million euros, equivalent to $176 million, to support loss-and-damage payments to developing countries. Scotland pledged $5.8 million and Ireland pledged $10 million.

Developing countries have made a renewed push to set up a mechanism for loss-and-damage payments after severe floods in Pakistan this summer that caused $30 billion in losses, according to World Bank estimates, killed more than 1,700 people and displaced 33 million residents. Sen.

Sherry Rehman,

Pakistan’s federal minister for climate change, said she is hoping for more resources from the U.S. and other nations to help her country.

U.S. negotiators are concerned the concept of loss and damage exposes wealthier nations to spiraling liability. There is also the scientific uncertainty of determining which effects can be tied to human-induced climate change and which are part of normal seasonal variation. However, U.S. climate envoy

John Kerry

said this week at the conference that he is open to discussing loss and damage.

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“We need more,” Ms. Rehman said in an interview. “What you hear everywhere at COP is ‘action now.’ Everything else is fluff.”

Mr. Biden arrived at the climate summit Friday after most world leaders have departed. He met privately with Egyptian President

Abdel Fattah Al Sisi

at the conference, located at a resort town along the Red Sea. The U.S. and Germany were expected to announce Friday a $250 million financing program to build 10 gigawatts of new wind-and-solar energy facilities in Egypt while decommissioning 5 gigawatts of inefficient natural-gas power plants.

The Biden administration’s efforts to curb methane emissions follow an agreement reached on the sidelines of the Glasgow summit a year ago, in which China and the U.S. pledged to work on reducing emissions of the gas. Beijing this week announced a plan to cut methane emissions but hasn’t yet included the new measures in its climate plans submitted to the U.N. 

Nigeria announced its first-ever regulations, including limits on flaring, to cut overall methane emissions by more than 60% over 2020 levels. Canada said Thursday it plans to cut emissions of methane from its oil-and-gas industry by more than 75% over 2012 levels by 2030. 

Emissions from flaring are far higher than previous government and industry estimates, according to an analysis of 300 wells in four states published in September in the journal Science.

The White House says 260 billion cubic meters of gas are wasted every year from flaring and methane emissions within the oil-and-gas sector. 

Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, countries aim to limit global warming to well under 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and preferably to 1.5 degrees. The gap between the emissions cuts pledged by 166 nations, including the U.S., and their current emissions puts the world on track to warm 2.5 degrees Celsius, or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century, according to a recent U.N. report.

White House officials point to Mr. Biden’s support of the Democrats’ climate, health and tax legislation that allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to climate and energy programs, including tax credits for buying electric vehicles and investments in clean technologies.

Administration officials said the legislation has helped put the U.S. on track to meeting Mr. Biden’s goal of cutting domestic emissions 50% below 2005 levels by 2030.

—Matthew Dalton and Scott Patterson contributed to this article.

Write to Eric Niiler at eric.niiler@wsj.com

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World

COP27 climate summit: Here’s what to watch

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CNN
 — 

As global leaders converge in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for the UN’s annual climate summit, researchers, advocates and the United Nations itself are warning the world is still wildly off-track on its goal to halt global warming and prevent the worst consequences of the climate crisis.

Over the next two weeks, negotiators from nearly 200 countries will prod each other at COP27 to raise their clean energy ambitions, as average global temperature has already climbed 1.2 degrees Celsius since the industrial revolution.

They will haggle over ending the use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, which has seen a resurgence in some countries amid the war in Ukraine, and try to come up with a system to funnel money to help the world’s poorest nations recover from devastating climate disasters.

But a flood of recent reports have made clear leaders are running out of time to implement the vast energy overhaul needed to keep the temperature from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius, the threshold scientists have warned the planet must stay under.

Reports from the United Nations and the World Meteorological Association show carbon and methane emissions hit record levels in 2021, and the plans countries have submitted to slash those emissions are beyond insufficient. Given countries’ current promises, Earth’s temperature will climb to between 2.1 and 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Ultimately, the world needs to cut its fossil fuel emissions nearly in half by 2030 to avoid 1.5 degrees, a daunting prospect for economies still very much beholden to oil, natural gas and coal.

“No country has a right to be delinquent,” US Climate Envoy John Kerry told reporters in October. “The scientists tell us that what is happening now – the increased extreme heat, extreme weather, the fires, the floods, the warming of the ocean, the melting of the ice, the extraordinary way in which life is being affected badly by the climate crisis – is going to get worse unless we address this crisis in a unified, forward-leaning way.”

Here are the top issues to follow at COP27 in Egypt.

Developing and developed countries have for years tussled over the concept of a “loss and damage” fund; the idea which suggests countries causing the most harm with their outrageous planet-warming emissions should pay poorer countries, which have suffered from the resulting climate disasters.

It has been a thorny issue because the richest countries, including the US, don’t want to appear culpable or legally liable to other nations for harm. Kerry, for instance, has tiptoed around the issue, saying the US supports formal talks, but he has not given any indication of what solution the country would sign on to.

Meanwhile, small island nations and others in the Global South are shouldering the impact of the climate crisis, as devastating floods, intensifying storms and record-breaking heat waves wreak havoc.

The deadly flooding in Pakistan this summer, which killed more than 1,500 people, will surely be an example the countries’ negotiators point to. And since September, more than two million people in Nigeria have been affected by the worst flooding there in a decade. At this very moment, Nigerians are drinking, cooking with and bathing in dirty flood water amid serious concerns over waterborne diseases.

It is likely loss and damage will have space on the official COP27 agenda this year. But beyond countries committing to meet and talk about what a potential loss and damage fund would look like, or whether one should even exist, it is unclear what action will come out of this year’s summit.

“Do we expect that we’ll have a fund by the end of the two weeks? I hope, I would love to – but we’ll see how parties deliver on that,” Egypt’s chief climate negotiator Ambassador Mohamed Nasr recently told reporters.

Former White House National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy told CNN she thinks loss and damage will be the top issue at the UN climate summit this year, and said nations including the US will face some tough questions about their plans to help developing nations already being hit hard by climate disasters.

“It just keeps getting pushed out,” McCarthy said. “There’s need for some real accountability and some specific commitments in the short-term.”

People will be watching to see if the US and China can repair a broken relationship at the summit, a year after the two countries surprised the world by announcing they would work together on climate change.

The newfound cooperation came crashing down this summer when China announced it was suspending climate talks with the US as part of broader retaliation for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

Kerry recently said the climate talks between the two countries are still suspended and will likely remain so until China’s president Xi Jinping gives the green light. Kerry and others are watching to see whether China fulfills the promise it made last year to submit a plan to bring down its methane emissions or updates its emissions pledge.

The US and China are the world’s two largest emitters and their cooperation matters, particularly because it can spur other countries to act, too.

Separate from a potential loss and damage fund, there is the overarching issue of so-called global climate finance; a fund rich countries promised to push money into to help the developing world transition to clean energy rather than grow their economies with fossil fuels.

The promise made in 2009 was $100 billion per year, but the world has yet to meet the pledge. Some of the richest countries, including the US, UK, Canada and others, have consistently fallen short of their allocation.

President Joe Biden promised the US would contribute $11 billion by 2024 toward the effort. But Biden’s request is ultimately up to Congress to approve, and will likely go nowhere if Republicans win control of Congress in the midterm elections.

The US is working on separate deals with countries including Vietnam, South Africa and Indonesia to get them to move away from coal and toward renewables. And US officials often stress they want to also unlock private investments to help countries transition to renewables and deal with climate effects.

COP27 is intended to hold countries’ feet to the fire on fossil fuel emissions and gin up new ambition on the climate crisis. Yet reports show we are still off-track to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

A UN report which surveyed countries’ latest pledges found the planet will warm between 2.1 and 2.9 degrees Celsius. Average global temperature has already risen around 1.2 degrees since the industrial revolution.

Records were set last year for all three major greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

There is a spot of encouraging news: the adoption of renewable energy and electric vehicles is surging and helping to offset the rise in fossil fuel emissions, according to a recent International Energy Agency report.

But the overall picture from the reports shows there is a need for much more clean energy, deployed swiftly. Every fraction of a degree in global temperature rise will have stark consequences, said Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program.

“The energy transition is entirely doable, but we’re not on that pathway, and we have procrastinated and wasted time,” Andersen told CNN. “Every digit will matter. Let’s not say ‘we missed 1.5 so let’s settle for 2.’ No. We must understand that every digit that goes up will make our life and the life of our children and grandchildren much more impacted.”

The clock is ticking in another way: Next year’s COP28 in Dubai will be the year nations must do an official stocktake to determine if the world is on track to meet the goals set out in the landmark Paris Agreement.

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Nations ‘nowhere near’ emissions cuts needed to avoid climate disaster, U.N. says

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The amount of methane in the atmosphere is racing ahead at an accelerating pace, according to a study by the World Meteorological Organization, threatening to undermine efforts to slow climate change.

The WMO’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin said that “global emissions have rebounded since the COVID-related lockdowns” and that the increases in methane levels in 2020 and 2021 were the largest since systematic record keeping began in 1983.

“Methane concentrations are not just rising, they’re rising faster than ever,” said Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford University.

The study comes on the same day as a new U.N. report which says that the world’s governments haven’t committed to cut enough carbon emissions, putting the world on track for a 2.5 degree Celsius (4.5 degree Fahrenheit) increase in global temperatures by the end of the century.

The analysis said that the level of emissions implied by countries’ new commitments was slightly lower than a year ago, but would still lead to a full degree of temperature increase beyond the target level set at the most recent climate summits. To avert the most catastrophic consequences of climate change, scientists say, humanity must limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

“Government decisions and actions must reflect the level of urgency, the gravity of the threats we are facing, and the shortness of the time we have remaining to avoid the devastating consequences of runaway climate change,” said Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat. “We are still nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions required.”

Instead, the U.N. report found, the world is barreling toward future of unbearable heat, escalating weather disasters, collapsing ecosystems and widespread hunger and disease.

“It’s a dismal, horrendous, incomprehensible picture,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Program, said of the world’s current warming path. “That picture is just not a picture we cannot accept.”

The quickest way to affect the pace of global warming would be cutting emissions of methane, the second largest contributor to climate change. It has a warming impact 80 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. The WMO said the amount of methane in the atmosphere jumped by 15 parts per billion in 2020 and 18 parts per billion in 2021.

Scientists are studying whether the unusually large increases in atmospheric methane levels in 2020 and 2021 are the result of a “climate feedback” from nature-based sources such as tropical wetlands and rice paddies or whether they are the result of human-made natural gas and industrial leakage. Or both.

Methane emitted by fossil sources has more of the carbon-13 isotope than that produced from wetlands or cattle.

“The isotope data suggest it’s biological rather than fossil methane from gas leaks. It could be from agriculture,” Jackson said. He warned that “it could even be the start of a dangerous warming-induced acceleration in methane emissions from wetlands and other natural systems we’ve been worrying about for decades.”

The WMO said that as the planet gets warmer, organic material decomposes faster. If the organic material decomposes in water — without oxygen — this leads to methane emissions. This process could feed on itself; if tropical wetlands become wetter and warmer, more emissions are possible.

“Will warming feed warming in tropical wetlands?” Jackson asked. “We don’t know yet.”

Antoine Halff, chief analyst and co-founder of the firm Kayross, which does extensive analysis of satellite data, said “we’re not seeing any increase” in methane generated by fossil sources. He said some countries, such as Australia, had cut emissions while others, such as Algeria, had worsened.

Atmospheric levels of the other two main greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide — also reached record highs in 2021, WMO study said. “The increase in carbon dioxide levels from 2020 to 2021 was larger than the average annual growth rate over the last decade,” it said.

Carbon dioxide concentrations in 2021 were 415.7 parts per million (or ppm), methane at 1908 parts per billion (ppb) and nitrous oxide at 334.5 ppb. These values represented 149 percent, 262 percent and 124 percent of preindustrial levels.

The report “underlined, once again, the enormous challenge — and the vital necessity — of urgent action to cut greenhouse gas emissions and prevent global temperatures rising even further in the future,” said WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas.

Like others, Taalas has urged the pursuit of inexpensive techniques for capturing the short-lived methane, especially when it comes to capturing natural gas. Because of its relatively short life span, methane’s “impact on climate is reversible,” he said.

“The needed changes are economically affordable and technically possible. Time is running out,” he said.

The WMO also pointed to the warming of oceans and land, as well as the atmosphere. “Of the total emissions from human activities during the 2011—2020 period, about 48 percent accumulated in the atmosphere, 26 percent in the ocean and 29 percent on land,” the report said.

The WMO report comes shortly before the COP27 climate conference in Egypt next month. Last year, in the run-up to the climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, the United States and European Union took the lead in promoting the Global Methane Pledge, which set a goal of reaching a 30 percent reduction in the atmosphere by 2030. They estimated that could shave 0.2 degrees Celsius off the rise in temperatures that would otherwise take place. So far, 122 countries have signed up for the pledge.

White House climate negotiator John F. Kerry said that in the US-China joint declaration issued in Glasgow, China vowed to release “an ambitious plan” for this year’s climate summit that would move to cut its methane pollution. So far, however, that has not happened and China still has not issued an up-to-date “nationally determined contribution” or NDC in the lingo of the United Nations.

“We look forward to an updated 2030 NDC from China that accelerates CO2 reductions and addresses all greenhouse gases,” Kerry said.

“To keep this goal alive, national governments need to strengthen their climate action plans now and implement them in the next eight years,” he said.

Yet the United States is also among the vast majority of nations that have not updated their NDCs this year, something that all countries promised to do when the Glasgow summit ended one year ago.

Just 24 countries have submitted new pledges in the past 12 months — and few of the updated commitments represent a meaningful improvement over their past promises, the United Nations report found. Australia made the most significant changes in its national climate goal, which previously hadn’t been updated since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015.

Postcards from our climate future

Altogether, the combined 193 climate pledges made since Paris would increase emissions by 10.6 percent by 2030, compared with 2010 levels. This reflects a slight improvement over last year’s assessment, which found that countries were on a path to increase emissions by 13.7 percent by 2030, compared with 2010 levels, the United Nations said.

But nations must reduce their carbon outputs to about 45 percent of their 2010 levels to avoid warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — a threshold at which scientists say humanity can avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

Just under half of countries have also submitted long-term plans for bringing their emissions down to zero. If these countries make good on their promises, the U.N. report found, global emissions in the middle of the century could be 64 percent lower than they are now. Scientists say these cuts could keep temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), bringing humanity somewhat closer to tolerable warming levels.

“But it is really not clear if countries will actually pull this off,” warned Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who specializes in global warming pathways.

There are huge discrepancies between nations’ near-term climate pledges and their long-term plans, he noted. For most countries, the emissions trajectories implied by their NDCs would make it almost impossible to achieve a net zero target by the middle of the century.

The U.N. findings underscore a simple, sobering fact, Andersen said: In waiting so long to act on climate change, humanity has denied itself a chance to make a slow and orderly transition to a safer and more sustainable future. Countries must constantly bolster their ambitions, rather than making modest carbon-cutting pledges that get updated every five years. No nation can rest easy until every country has eliminated planet-warming emissions and restored natural systems that can pull carbon out of the atmosphere, she said.

“We need to see more and faster,” she said. “Today you stretch and tomorrow you stretch and the day after you stretch.”

Chris Mooney contributed reporting

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US

The IRA is predicted to reduce emissions by 40%. It’s not that simple.

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The Inflation Reduction Act — the health care and climate bill that was signed into law by President Biden on Tuesday — marks the largest climate action ever taken by the federal government. With roughly $370 billion earmarked for clean energy, electric vehicles and carbon capture storage, the bill will certainly decrease the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The question is by how much.

The most popular number — the one that has been repeated by the president, scientists and journalists alike — is 40 percent. In a statement released shortly after the deal was reached, Democratic senators Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) claimed the new bill would, by 2030, cut emissions 40 percent from 2005 levels. That figure was later supported by results from three independent modeling teams. Rhodium Group, an economics and energy research firm, estimated that the bill would cut emissions by 31 to 44 percent by 2030; Energy Innovation, a climate think tank, predicted a reduction of 37 to 41 percent; and a group of Princeton University researchers called the REPEAT project calculated a carbon dioxide cut of around 42 percent.

The agreement between the senators’ claims and the projections is no surprise — the modeling teams were advising Capitol Hill staff on the likely impacts of the deal before it was made public, said Jesse Jenkins, one of the leaders of the Princeton REPEAT modeling project.

That 40 percent number will be repeated at international climate negotiations and in presidential speeches for years to come. It marks progress toward the president’s signature climate goal — to cut emissions in half by 2030 — and may offer some hope to the millions of young people who have been drawn to climate action in recent years.

But is it correct? That depends — on how you’re measuring, and what you’re measuring against.

At the heart of these predictions are scientists’ highly complicated models of how the economy works, including how energy is used, which can both provide helpful forecasts for the future and are always somewhat inaccurate. As one popular modeling saying goes: “All models are wrong; some are useful.”

The energy models used by Rhodium, Energy Innovation and the Princeton researchers are complex systems of equations, spreadsheets and data that try to represent all the energy used in the United States over a period of time. These models can estimate how many solar farms will be built once tax credits are in place to make them cheaper, or how many Americans will buy electric cars in the next 10 years.

The fact that all three independent modeling groups yielded similar findings is a good sign for the results. But there are still reasons to think that the reality could be different from what the models suggest the bill’s impact will be — or what the public might expect it to be.

On the one hand, the models predicting a 40 percent drop in carbon emissions may be overly optimistic. Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor, says that one of the major problems is predicting how quickly consumers, utilities and businesses will switch over to clean technologies.

“The biggest thing in our model that is an abstraction of the real world is the assumption that financial considerations drive decision-making,” he explained. Models assume that human beings are rational actors who base their decisions off costs and benefits; in the real world, that’s not always true.

That means that if it’s cheaper to build a wind farm than a natural gas plant, or cheaper to buy an electric car than a gas-powered car, the model predicts that more wind farms will be built and more electric cars purchased. The REPEAT model currently predicts that all cars sold in 2030 will be electric vehicles, since by that time EVs are projected to be lower cost than gas-powered cars. But in the real world, some consumers will be afraid to switch to EVs even if they are cheaper, simply because they don’t see enough car chargers in their neighborhoods.

Similarly, wind farms and solar panels may be stymied by locals who find them ugly to look at. Long-distance transmission lines, which will be needed to carry renewable electricity from one state to another, could also be held up by red tape.

External economic factors could also slow the push away from fossil fuels. Ben King, associate director of climate and energy at Rhodium Group and one of the authors of the group’s analysis of the IRA, says that cheap fossil fuel prices and faster-than-expected growth could lead to a slower-than-predicted shift to clean energy sources.

2) There’s potential upside

There are also reasons to think that 40 percent is an underestimate for the effects of the bill. Jenkins notes that none of the models can effectively predict technological advancement spurred by government cash — for example, funding for research and development that causes costs for solar, wind, carbon capture and storage or batteries to plummet. Those cost changes, he argues, could cause the clean energy transition to go even faster than expected — but they’re hard to predict in an energy model.

The models also don’t try to predict any changes in state and federal policies. But over the next few years, many states and cities are likely to implement new climate policies, such as requiring electricity to come from renewable sources or phasing out gas-powered vehicles.

“This bill makes it cheaper for every other jurisdiction in the country to increase their ambition and policies,” Jenkins said.

It will also make it easier for the Biden administration to impose stricter limits on emissions from cars and power plants — which in turn could reduce CO2 emissions even more.

Still, there is no “sure thing” in modeling. The emissions reductions from the IRA may be higher or lower than the 40 percent estimate; at the moment, modelers can only provide their best guess of how the future will pan out. But, Jenkins argues, the result is not that different from estimates for the cost of the bill.

Since the IRA’s clean energy provisions are made up mostly of tax credits, it’s hard to predict how many of those credits will ultimately be claimed and how much the bill will cost the government and taxpayers.

“Forty percent is an imperfect estimate,” Jenkins said. “But I think it’s a pretty good estimate.”

3) Progress is already baked in

Depending on how you read that 40 percent estimate, it could be a bit misleading. This is a case of where the models may be correct, but not widely appreciated. The bill is expected to cut emissions by 40 percent compared with 2005 levels — not compared to current U.S. emissions. That’s because emissions have already decreased substantially since 2005. Between 2005 and 2020, CO2 emissions dropped by about 21 percent, thanks largely to a shift from heavily polluting coal to less-polluting natural gas. (The COVID-19 pandemic also caused a dramatic decline in emissions, as millions of cars and planes ground to a halt virtually overnight.)

Over the next eight years, emissions are expected to continue to trend slowly downward, thanks to cheap solar and wind power and a gradual shift to electric vehicles.

Indeed, according to the same three modeling groups, by 2030, emissions are expected to decline by 24 to 32 percent — even without the Inflation Reduction Act.

That doesn’t mean that the bill is without impact, of course. While it might not be as dramatic a shift as it seems initially, in a world in which every extra ton of CO2 not emitted into the atmosphere can help can help curb global warming, an additional 10 to 15 percent reduction in emissions will help to avert serious environmental damage.

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Business

State Department ‘bureaucrat’: ‘I prefer high gas prices’ because of less emissions

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A State Department official is drawing criticism after tweeting that he prefers high gas prices because it means less driving and less carbon emissions.

“I prefer high gas prices = less driving, less CO2,” Senior State Department Foreign Service Officer Alan Eyre tweeted on Friday in response to a tweet from President Biden claiming American families are paying less per month on average than they were during “peak prices.”

Eyre describes himself as a “gov’t bureaucrat” in his Twitter bio along with the phrase “kindness, always kindness.”

Eyre’s tweet was widely criticized on social media including from former Republican California state senate candidate Ron Bassilian who called Eyre a “ghoul” and pointed out that gas demand is “inelastic.”

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE BOASTS ABOUT FALLING GAS PRICES IN WHITE HOUSE TWITTER VIDEO: ‘THIS IS SO EXCITING, GUYS’

“Perhaps, but I don’t think it is inelastic and I remember in the 1970s the oil embargo led to a massive increase in renewables,” Eyre responded along with the hashtag #BeKind.

Basilian responded with criticism that was echoed by several other Twitter users pointing out that gas prices have caused significant struggles for Americans across the country.

MEDIA LOVE BIDEN’S HIGH GAS PRICES WHILE ORDINARY AMERICANS STRUGGLE WITH PUMP RECORDS

“Be kind?” Basslian said. “Perhaps be kind to the billions of people left high and dry in this situation you praise. Saying a famine is a good way to start a diet is not kind.”

LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND- MARCH 18: Alan Eyre, left, the Persian language spokesman for the US State Department speaks with Iranian reporters during the Iran nuclear talks in Lausanne, Switzerland, March 18, 2015. 
(Credit: Carol Morello/ The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

Following the publication of this article, Eyre’s Twitter account appears to have been deactivated or deleted.  

Eyre’s comment comes shortly after Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg faced criticism for suggesting that higher prices at the pump were actually beneficial for transitioning to electric vehicles.

BIDEN, WITH COVID, MAKES UNSCHEDULED VIRTUAL APPEARANCE TO TALK ABOUT GAS PRICES

During an interview on a radio program earlier this month, Buttigieg said the Biden administration was trying to cut the cost of electric vehicles “because when you have an electric vehicle, then you’re also gonna be able to save on gas, but you’ve got to be able to afford it in the first place.” 

“The more pain we are all experiencing from the high price of gas, the more benefit there is for those who can access electric vehicles,” the former presidential candidate added while testifying before Congress recently. 

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on ABC’s “The View” on April 8, 2022 and discussed high gas prices and inflation. (Screenshot/ABC)
(Screenshot/ABC)

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The national average gas price, as of Thursday, was around $4.40. While the price is down about 20 cents from last week’s average, it is still over a dollar higher than prices this time last year and two dollars more than when Biden first took office.

Fox News’ Bradford Betz and Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.

Andrew Mark Miller is a writer at Fox News. Find him on Twitter @andymarkmiller and email tips to AndrewMark.Miller@Fox.com.



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World

Nearly $2tn of damage inflicted on other countries by US emissions | Climate crisis

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The US has inflicted more than $1.9tn in damage to other countries from the effects of its greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new analysis that has provided the first measurement of nations’ liability in stoking the climate crisis.

The huge volume of planet-heating gases pumped out by the US, the largest historical emitter, has caused such harm to other, mostly poor, countries through heatwaves, crop failures and other consequences that the US is responsible for $1.91tn in lost global income since 1990, the study found.

This puts the US ahead of China, currently the world’s leading emitter, Russian, India and Brazil as the next largest contributors to global economic damage through their emissions. Combined, these five leading culprits have caused a total of $6tn in losses worldwide, or about 11% of annual global GDP, since 1990 by fueling climate breakdown.

“It’s a huge number,” said Chris Callahan, a researcher at Dartmouth College and lead author of the study, of the overall economic loss. “It’s not surprising that the US and China are at the top of that list but the numbers really are very stark. For the first time, we can show that a country’s emissions can be traced to specific harm.”

The Dartmouth researchers combined a number of different models, showing factors such as emissions, local climate conditions and economic changes, to ascertain the precise impact of an individual country’s contribution to the climate crisis. They looked for these links over a period spanning 1990 to 2014, with the research published in the journal Climatic Change.

What they found was a perniciously uneven picture – rich nations in northerly latitudes, such as those in north America and Europe, have done the most to fuel climate change but have not yet been severely harmed by it economically. Countries such as Canada and Russia have even benefitted from longer agricultural growing seasons and reduced deaths from the cold as winters have warmed.

Bar chart of the countries that have contributed the most economic losses to the rest of the world through emissions

Conversely, poorer countries, such as those found in the tropics or low-lying Pacific islands, have done the least to harm other nations and yet are suffering the brunt of the economic damage from climate change. The research didn’t factor things not included in GDP, such as biodiversity loss, cultural harm and deaths from disasters, meaning the damage is in reality far greater.

“In places that are already hot you are seeing it becoming harder to work outside, mortality from the heat is on the rise, it’s harder to grow crops,” said Justin Mankin, a geographer at Dartmouth and co-author of the paper. “If you layer that on top of which countries have emitted the most you get an almost perfect storm.

“There is this huge inequity. Countries like the US have disproportionately damaged low-income countries in the global south and disproportionately benefited cooler, higher income countries in the global north.”

Developing countries and climate activists have pushed for “loss and damage” payments to be made to those who are suffering the most from global heating through heatwaves, floods and drought. But the US, which is responsible for around a quarter of all emissions to date, has resisted setting up such a fund, citing fears that it would be held legally liable for the damages caused by its voracious appetite for fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas.

The pressure to alter this stance is ramping up again ahead of UN climate talks to be held in Egypt later this year, with an alliance of young activists from more than 40 countries recently writing to the talks’ president to urge action on the loss and damage issue.

The climate crisis has “escalated humanitarian crises disproportionately affecting the poor countries in the global south”, the letter states, noting that the UN estimates that as many as 3.6 billion people around the world now live in areas that are highly vulnerable to climate disasters.

“For far too long, efforts to reduce emissions and scale up adaptation have been utterly inadequate exceeding people’s ability to adapt. Therefore, loss and damage is now part of the reality of climate change and must be addressed.”

Progress, however, has been fraught. Wealthy countries have dawdled on a promise to provide $100bn in climate aid to vulnerable countries and any legal avenue to extract damages from the US or China is complicated by the fact neither country recognizes the jurisdiction of the international court of justice in the Hague.

“The chief impediment to claims by one country against another for climate damages isn’t their scientific basis, it’s their legal basis,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. “Countries enjoy sovereign immunity against most kinds of lawsuits unless they have waived it.”

This impasse means some sort of negotiated deal remains the most likely way that the inequity of climate impacts is ameliorated. “It’s a positive step that this study is beginning to quantify the harms these national actors, we can see the scale of harm is enormous,” said Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law.

“We are moving slowly towards some sort of accountability for this. As the evidence mounts and the record of US obstructionism in the climate context is established, I don’t think it and other countries will be able to escape their liability in perpetuity,” Muffett added.

“The costs of climate damages are mounting and ultimately someone will have to pay that cost. The question is who will that be and how it will be done.”

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Business

Ships get older and slower as emissions rules bite

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  • Average age of vessels up more than two years since 2017
  • New emissions rules may force older ships to go slower
  • One-fifth of ships fitted with energy saving devices
  • New vessels and alternative fuels the long-term solution

LONDON, July 11 (Reuters) – If shipping is the beating heart of global trade, its pulse is about to get slower.

Faced with uncertainty about which fuels to use in the long term to cut greenhouse gas emissions, many shipping firms are sticking with ageing fleets, but older vessels may soon have to start sailing slower to comply with new environmental rules.

From next year, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) requires all ships to calculate their annual carbon intensity based on a vessel’s emissions for the cargo it carries – and show that it is progressively coming down.

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While older ships can be retrofitted with devices to lower emissions, analysts say the quickest fix is just to go slower, with a 10% drop in cruising speeds slashing fuel usage by almost 30%, according to marine sector lender Danish Ship Finance.

“They’re basically being told to either improve the ship or slow down,” said Jan Dieleman, president of Cargill Ocean Transportation, the freight division of commodities trading house Cargill, which leases more than 600 vessels to ferry mainly food and energy products around the world.

Supply chains are already strained due to a surge in demand as economies rebound from lockdowns, pandemic disruptions at ports and a lack of new ships. If older vessels move into the slow lane as well, shipping capacity could take another hit at a time when record freight rates are driving up inflation. read more

At the moment, only about 5% of the world’s fleet can run on less-polluting alternatives to fuel oil, even though more than 40% of new ship orders will have that option, according to data from shipping analytics firm Clarksons Research.

But the new orders are not coming in fast enough to halt the trend of an ageing fleet across all three main types of cargo vessels: tankers, container ships and bulk carriers, the data provided to Reuters by Clarksons Research shows.

The average age of bulk carriers, which carry loose cargo such as grain and coal, had jumped to 11.4 years by June 2022 from 8.7 five years ago. Container ships now average 14.1 years, up from 11.6, while for tankers the average age was 12 years, up from 10.3 in 2017, according to the data.

“Some ship owners have preferred to buy second-hand vessels because of the uncertainties around future fuels,” said Stephen Gordon, managing director at Clarksons Research.

TALL ORDER

Orders for new container ships surged to a record high in 2021 and are still coming in at healthy clip this year, but as the appetite for new tankers and bulk carriers is much lower, the current order book across all three types of vessel only stands at about 10% of the fleet, down from over 50% in 2008.

Shipping companies are responsible for about 2.5% of the world’s carbon emissions and they are coming under increasing pressure to reduce both air and marine pollution.

The industry’s emissions rose last year, underlining the scale of the challenge in meeting the IMO’s target of halving emissions by 2050 from 2008 levels. The organization is now facing calls to go further and commit to net zero by 2050.

Some companies are testing and ordering vessels using alternative fuels such as methanol. Others are developing ships that can be retrofitted for fuels beyond oil, such as hydrogen or ammonia. There’s even a return to wind with vast, high-tech sails being tested by companies such as Cargill and Berge Bulk. read more

But many of the potential low-carbon technologies are in the early stages of development with limited commercial application, meaning the majority of new orders are still for vessels powered by fuel oil and other fossil fuels.

Of the vessels on order, more than a third, or 741, are set to use liquefied natural gas (LNG), 24 can be driven by methanol and six by hydrogen. Another 180 have some form of hybrid propulsion using batteries, Clarksons data shows.

Many shipping firms are hedging their bets mainly because prolonging the life span of vessels is cheaper and lower risk than new builds. They also gain breathing space while waiting for the winning new technologies to become mainstream.

“We have a clash between an industry that is very long-term investment oriented and a very fast pace of change,” said John Hatley, general manager of market innovation in North America at Finnish marine technology company Wartsila (WRT1V.HE).

Cargill says that as of now it doesn’t expect to have many new-build ships in its fleet, instead fitting energy saving devices to older vessels and prolonging their use, while there’s still uncertainty about future technology.

They’re not alone, with more than a fifth of global shipping capacity fitted with such devices, according to Clarksons.

Devices include Flettner rotors, tail spinning cylinders that act like a sail and let ships throttle back when it’s windy, or air lubrication systems that save fuel by covering the hull with small bubbles to reduce friction with seawater.

While energy saving devices go a long way to tackling emissions, ultimately, newer vessels are a better bet, said Peter Sand, analyst at shipping and air cargo data firm Xeneta.

“The next generation of fuel oil ships will be much more carbon efficient, they will be able to transport the same amount of cargo emitting only half of the emissions that they did over a decade ago,” he said.

THE POSEIDON PRINCIPLES

Shipping firms are set to come under growing pressure to comply with targets set by the IMO, which will rate the energy efficiency of ships on a scale of A to E, as the ratings will have a knock-on effect when it comes to finance and insurance.

In 2019, a group of banks agreed to consider efforts to cut carbon emissions when lending to shipping companies and established a global framework known as the Poseidon Principles.

The Poseidon Principles website shows that 28 banks, which include BNP Paribas (BNPP.PA), Citi , Danske Bank (DANSKE.CO), Societe Generale (SOGN.PA) and Standard Chartered (STAN.L), have committed to being consistent with IMO policies when assessing shipping portfolios on environmental grounds.

“Lending decisions on second-hand ships are going to become an issue on older tonnage,” said Michael Parker, chairman of Citigroup’s global shipping, logistics and offshore business, adding that environmental factors would be taken into account when lenders decided whether to refinance vessels.

“Second-hand ships will continue to get financing, provided that the owner is doing the right things about keeping that vessel as environmentally efficient as possible,” he said.

One early adopter of new technology is shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk . It has ordered 12 vessels which can run on green methanol produced from sources such as biomass, as well as fuel oil as there is not yet enough low carbon fuel available.

The Danish company doesn’t intend to use LNG because it is still a fossil fuel and it would prefer to shift directly to a lower carbon alternative.

Wartsila, meanwhile, is launching an ammonia-fueled engine next year, which it says is generating a lot of interest from customers, as well as a hydrogen engine in 2025.

Ship owners are facing a lot of uncertainty over how to “future proof” their fleets and avoid regretting investment decisions now within a couple of years, said Wartsila’s Hatley.

“They would rather wait for maybe the whole life of the ship of 20 years, but that’s even more uncertain now because of the pace of change.”

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Reporting by Sarah McFarlane; Editing by Veronica Brown and David Clarke

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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