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Governments 'Not on Track' To Cap Temperatures at Below 2 Degrees: UN (reuters.com)
Governments are not on track to meet a goal of the 2015 Paris agreement of capping temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) before the end of the century, a United Nations official said on Sunday ahead of climate-change talks in Bangkok this week. From a report: Patricia Espinosa, head of the Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which steers the climate talks, said both the public and private sector need to act with urgency to avoid "catastrophic effects". The Paris climate agreement, adopted by almost 200 nations in 2015, set a goal of limiting warming to "well below" a rise of 2 degrees C above pre-industrial times while "pursuing efforts" for the tougher goal of 1.5 degrees C. "1.5 is the goal that is needed for many islands and many countries that are particularly vulnerable to avoid catastrophic effects. In many cases it means the survival of those countries. With the pledges we have on the table now we are not on track to achieve those goals," Espinosa told Reuters in a telephone interview on Sunday in Bangkok.
So why is your country, one of the highest emitters, with the most money, going all in on gas?
Why are you still pushing crappy fuel economy cars when transport is your biggest emitter?
Why are your levels so much higher than Europeans?
Why try to lecture others when you are basically the worst offenders?
China increased about 3.1 per cent in the first half of 2018 compared with the same period last year. The main driver of that was coal-fired power generation. Figures from the National Bureau of Statistics show a leap of 9.4 per cent in electricity use across the same period.
So electricity is up 9% but coal is only up 3%...
Coal's % of electricity is decreasing. Other sources are rising twice as fast as coal.
As we know from your previous comments, only America is entitled to use so much coal.
You remember , that country with twice the per capita CO2 emissions.
I think that he means USA produces more carbon dioxide per capita than China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Main shale byproduct is methane. Methane when burned for energy produces about half CO2 compared to coal. The only other byproduct of the burn is water.
Parent is trying to spin a sarcastic narrative, possibly to mask the fact that main reason why US has been reducing its CO2 output more than for example Germany because of success of fracking and replacement of other burner plants with CCGTs burning methane.
Switch to methane to massively reduce CO2 emissions isn't an element unique to US, as most other Western countries with ready access to methane try to do it as well (example: UK). However methane is notoriously difficult to transport over the sea routes, and is best transported over pipelines as that doesn't require the energy expenditure to compress it into liquid form.
Such infrastructure is only really possible due to shale revolution in US, which made methane basically a free waste product, which states and federal government could mandate to build pipe networks to transport across the country (and now is starting to feed Mexico due to excess availability, likely resulting in solution to many of Mexico's energy and lowering its CO2 emissions). Second best infrastructure in the world after that is methane from Russia being piped to Europe, alongside similar pipes from Norway, Scotland and North Africa.
Methane is the short to medium term solution to getting CO2 emissions under control. Cutting burner emissions to two thirds to a half is a great stepping stone to the solution. Absolutist crazies will of course continue with their "but my solar and wind" mantra, never realizing that the main reason for their proliferation in US in Europe is the proliferation of CCGTs that can in fact function as spinning and cold reserve in economic fashion due to cheap fuel and fast spin-up and load-accepting times.
You're not the only one. I've seen the stone-faced "green" activists back when the company I was a temp in did a project in Narva, which transformed what was essentially the most polluting power plants in the world into far less wasteful. This is not an exaggeration, those plants burn shale rock, which is essentially 70% various deep underground elements and 30% oil-like mixture. Soviet era plants literally could not work for more than two weeks at a time because it would develop what locals called a "goat", the massive amount of sticky, toxic residue from burn process that would cling to the heat exchangers in the burner. And the stuff that actually burned just spread all that toxic stuff out of the pipe in the form of particulates in well over hundred kilometre radius. Not to even mention the NOx and SO2 related acid rain issues.
I've read analyses that something like 5-7% of trees within the range of exhaust raining down from those plants literally died standing due to the extreme toxicity of that exhaust. And airways-related illnesses in the region were very high. Said activists were invited to showcase that our tech basically pushed SO2 and NOx exhaust from horrifyingly high to zero, and the post-filter which ensured that the toxic ash would also go to zero in the exhaust.
They sat there stone-faced, and when I listened to them after the lecture was done, it was all about "how this will justify existence of this plant". Basically fuck the people who had to breathe the toxic stuff and were getting their power and livelihood from it. Just fuck them, in the name of the utopia. It disillusioned me with the entire movement.