Canada and Climate Change by William Leiss

Author:William Leiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

AVOIDING 1.5°C AND 2°C WARMING

A number of key considerations relating to the achievability of global warming targets are of vital importance. Fully half of all GHG emissions for the entire period from 1750 to 2011 occurred within the last forty years of that epoch, highlighting the most recent era as the apparent source of the world’s current climate-change problems. However, as noted earlier, it is not only the recent GHG emissions that are driving climate change, but the total accumulation over more than a century. This raises the first of at least three fundamental equity issues in climate-change action, for it signals again the importance of the distinction between historic cumulative emissions and current ones. In 1990, the year often used in international negotiations as a baseline for emissions-reductions targets, the historical shares of emissions were as follows: the United States (31 per cent), the EU-28 (30 per cent), and Japan (7 per cent), for a total of 68 per cent (“Cumulative CO2 Emissions by World Region,” Ritchie and Roser 2020, interactive graphic; see also Popovich and Plumer 2021). At that time, China’s share stood at 5.36 per cent and India’s at a mere 1.52 per cent.

It would therefore appear that the burden of any corrective actions applied specifically to the relative weighting on historic emissions would fall squarely on just those three nations and regions where significant emissions-reduction commitments in the NDCS have already been registered and expected: the United States, the EU-28 (following Brexit, EU-27+1), and Japan. However, it is very difficult to foresee how any further major adjustments could be made to these three NDCS in order to address this equity issue. (In the references section, see the article by Hof et al. 2017 on abatement costs for enhanced NDCS.) There are, of course, no enforcement mechanisms in the Paris Agreement, so any enhanced pledges would have to be voluntary.

The second equity issue is related to the fact that in the earlier stages of modernization all national economies have a higher level of energy intensity and GHG emissions relative to GDP than they do when they later develop greater energy efficiency. This is why making progress in this area is a part of some of the developing nations’ initial NDCS under the Paris Agreement. Historical fairness demands that this be recognized as a legitimate contribution on their part to mitigation efforts. This is also why assistance from developed to developing nations has been stipulated in all stages in the UNFCCC processes (including the clean-development mechanisms, joint implementation, technology transfer, financial flows, and capacity building). But this unavoidable economic disadvantage can only be overcome slowly and doing so is expensive; consequently, this area is unlikely to be the source of any significant new achievements in emissions reductions.

The third equity issue also involves current emissions and is something that has always been explicitly recognized in agreements under the UNFCCC; namely, the marked differences around the world in per-capita GHG emissions. As shown in table 6.2, per-capita emissions among just the top six emitters in 2019 range from a low of about 2 tonnes (India) to a high of 15.

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