Electric cars sales are booming but so are coal’s, strongly supported by the banks. The Kyoto and Pari agreements fail to keep tabs on military forces’ greenhouse gas emissions.
Electric car sales accelerate
Global sales of electric cars have gone from zero in 2010 to 6.6 million in 2021. There was steady growth until 2019 and a trebling of sales over the last two years. As a proportion of total car sales, electric cars’ share doubled in 2021 (see figure below). As ever when we discuss energy, whether it’s fossil fuels or renewables, China leads the way. Over half of the world’s sales were in China, although Europe with 2.3 million sales is doing pretty well. Between them, China, Europe and the USA account for 96 per cent of sales. In Australia, electric cars made up just 2 per cent of the market in 2021. In countries that have experienced the largest increases in sales, government incentives have been a strong stimulus to market growth. Future challenges for the industry include: governments getting the types of incentives right, and the timing, both the starting and the stopping times; chokes in the supply chains of battery materials; and rolling out battery charging infrastructure.
Online climate Q&As
Inside Climate News (ICN) is a US-based news organisation that reports on climate change, energy and the environment through several online publications delivered free to your inbox. It is a valuable source of ideas and information for my weekly roundup. Last year ICN created Climate 101, a database of answers to common questions about the environment. The number of Q&As on Climate 101 has increased immensely since I first looked at it about six months ago and it is growing all the time as the editors respond to readers’ questions.
Over eighty countries have now committed to a net-zero emissions target. At another Q&A site, the World Resources Institute answers common questions about “net-zero emissions”: What does it mean? Net-zero by when? Should all countries get there at the same time? How? Are we on track? Isn’t it all just greenwashing? and the like. The advice for countries is to:
- Cover all greenhouse gases, not just CO2
- Cover all sectors of the economy, not just the easy to transition ones
- Aim for net-zero by 2050 or earlier (in a webinar I attended during the week, Will Steffen said that we had delayed meaningful action for so long that it now needs to be net zero by 2035) …
- … then go net-negative
- Include your absolute emissions reduction target (this is the crucial one for me)
- Avoid or limit the use of offsets.
To which I’d add:
- Stop making decisions that make the task even more difficult
- Set interim targets
- Stop talking about it and get on with it.
Complementary advice is contained in this graphic:
Wanna know about a coal mine in Mozambique?
If I didn’t completely satiate your appetite for information about coal three weeks ago, have a look at this Global Coal Mine Tracker website. It provides detailed information on over 3,000 mines and over 1,300 mine owners in 67 countries. Collectively the mines produce over seven billion tonnes of coal per year. China takes the gold medal, of course, with a current three billion tonnes per year and an additional half a billion planned. Australia’s current contribution to this collective suicide is half a billion tonnes annually (about the same as the USA, Russia, Indonesia and India). Australia, Russia and India all have new mine proposals in the pipeline that will produce an additional third of a billion tonnes a year in each country. That’s just a smidgeon of the information on offer. You can, for instance, examine for each country and company the number of operating and proposed mines and the coal production and greenhouse gas emissions from the mines. There’s a great interactive map that gives you details about all 3,000 mines, should you want to know what’s happening in Niger or Venezuela or even WA.
Banks continue massive support for coal
Fossil fuels are, of course, the major source of CO2 emissions and coal remains the major contributor among the fossil fuels (coal 40 per cent, oil 32 per cent and gas 21 per cent). Having tracked along with oil for forty years after 1960, coal has forged ahead since the early 2000s, as the graph below demonstrates. Coal and Mark Twain have much in common.
An examination of who is providing the financial backing for the coal industry’s expansion, and with how much, is very revealing. Between January 2019 and November 2021, commercial banks provided over US$1.5 trillion (that’s a trill not a bill) to the industry. About a fifth of this was in loans and the rest through underwriting – selling bonds or shares to institutional investors, including pension funds and insurance companies, on behalf of coal companies. Just twelve banks (ten of which are members of the Net Zero Banking Alliance) provided almost half of the loans, and an overlapping twelve provided about 40 per cent of the underwriting. Banks from only six countries (China, USA, Japan, India, UK and Canada) provided 86% of the overall finance (see pie chart below – GCEL = Global Coal Exit List), and many of the top lending banks are Chinese. However, Barclays, Citigroup and JP Morgan are also among the major lenders.
Equally revealing is the list of investors who are purchasing the bonds and shares. Surprise, surprise, it’s the same six countries accounting for 80 per cent of the investments, but with the positions of China and the USA reversed. And which institutional investor is top of the list? Blackrock. Despite its green posturing, Blackrock invested US$34 billion to help, among other things, the construction of over 200 GW of new coal fired capacity around the world.
Lots of fine words from politicians, banks and institutional investors at international conferences, in media releases and on websites but not much action to back them up.
Uncounted military emissions
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was a major breakthrough – it was the first international agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Had it been implemented properly and had the signatories built on it – i.e., had the world started to actually reduce emissions 25 years ago – we wouldn’t be in the desperate situation we now face. But that’s another story. My point today is that there was a loophole in the Kyoto Protocol for countries’ military forces: basically most of their emissions were exempted from the Protocol and so were not included in each country’s calculations – much like the emissions from international shipping that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
The 2015 Paris Agreement changed things marginally. Countries can now choose for themselves whether to report their military’s emissions, and what to count. The result is that we have a pretty good idea that the world’s armies, navies and air forces have substantial greenhouse gas emissions but we don’t know exactly how substantial. We can make some order of magnitude estimates though. First, military expenditure accounts for about 2.5 per cent of global GDP. We know that greenhouse gas emissions track GDP pretty closely so it’s a fair bet that the emissions from the world’s armed forces are equivalent to at least 2.5 per cent of the currently reported total global emissions.
Second, we know how much each nation spends on, and the size of, their military forces, and we know that the USA’s so-called ‘defence’ forces consume about 40 per cent of global military expenditure. So we know that the USA’s military is by far the biggest emitter, responsible for the equivalent of about 1 per cent of currently reported total global emissions. The irony is that the USA was a major player in getting the military exemption into the Kyoto Protocol and then they never signed it anyway. One estimate is that the USA’s military has produced more than 1.2 billion tons of greenhouse gases over the last 20 years. An F35 fighter jet burns about 5,600 litres of fuel per hour; one tank of gas produces almost 28 tons of CO2 equivalent. So it’s no surprise that 70 per cent of the overall military fuel consumption is jet fuel.
Eucalypt of the Year
You have a month to vote for your favourite eucalypt in the Eucalypt of the Year 2022 poll. Even if you don’t want to vote, it’s worth looking at the website for the pictures of lots of our gorgeous trees. I voted for one that isn’t listed and justified my choice with a fifty word encomium:
Attractive but perhaps not as showy or majestic as some of its cousins, the name says it all: Eucalyptus socialis, because it lives closely with other Eucalypt species in mallee communities. A Eucalypt that is symbolic for our time when we need strong relationships with other humans and with nature.
Peter Sainsbury is a retired public health worker with a long interest in social policy, particularly social justice, and now focusing on climate change and environmental sustainability. He is extremely pessimistic about the world avoiding catastrophic global warming.
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