We kinda knew this.
Among the many dramatic ways society must transform to limit the worst effects of climate change, the world is only moving fast enough on one of them — the uptake of electric vehicles, according to a new report from seven climate organizations looking at 42 indicators of climate progress.
On the other 41 points of transformation, change is either too slow, too hard to measure, or going in the wrong direction. For example, the global rate of deforestation ticked up last year. The carbon intensity of steel production is increasing when it needs to be falling. Government financing for fossil fuels has risen for the first time since 2018.
While the takeaway is familiar — that the world is well shy of its stated goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — the State of Climate Action report provides a detailed diagnosis of the factors leading the planet astray. Those factors touch on almost every aspect of life, from how power is generated, how people commute, how food is produced, how buildings function and how readily finance flows to developing countries.
“We are woefully off track,” said Kelly Levin, the chief of science, data and systems change at the Bezos Earth Fund, one of the groups involved in the research. (The fund was created by Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post.)
The 42 indicators are not formally written into the Paris agreement, but were instead derived by the nonprofit organizations, which analyzed how various sectors would need to transform by 2030 to meet the 1.5 goal. Using similar methods last year, the groups found that the world was off track on every count.
The rise of EVs, then, points to a bright spot in the effort to cut down on emissions. Last year, EVs accounted for 10 percent of all new vehicles sold — up from 1.6 percent in 2018. Prices are falling. Incentives, particularly in developed countries, are juicing growth. The report judged that EVs are at the early stage of a stratospheric leap, and can meet the goal of accounting for at least 75 percent of sales by 2030.
Still, road transport accounts for less than 6 percent of total global emissions.
Finance for low-carbon solutions and other climate projects is growing — just nowhere fast enough, the report said. Joe Thwaites, a senior advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that most of the growth in climate finance has been happening in a few major economies — the United States, Europe, China, India and Brazil.
“Now to be clear, increased investment in these countries is absolutely a good thing,” Thwaites said. “The problem is, the poorest and most vulnerable countries are getting left behind.”
Developing countries, not counting China, need an estimated $2.4 trillion annually in climate investment by 2030 to keep pace with the 1.5 goal.
“Yet at present they’re getting about a tenth of it,” he said. “So it needs to grow by an order of magnitude.”
There is no 1.5 goal. We are going past 2. we need the people talking as if those are possible to stop lying & take the problem seriously.