CO2 emissions flatline

Another indication that the international economy (the real economy, not the ponzi one), is tanking big-time.

For the first time in 40 years, 

CO2 levels did not rise

http://www.alberniweather.ca/cyclone-smashes-vanuatu-arctic-powers-a-drunken-jetstream-co2-plateau-signals-path-forward/

The BBC just reported that the International Energy Agency’s new stats show “Annual global emissions remained at 32 gigatonnes in 2014, unchanged from the previous year.”

This is a big deal.  Why did it happen?  According to Prof Corinne Le Quere, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia:

“An important factor could be that China’s coal consumption fell in 2014, driven by their efforts to fight pollution, use energy more efficiently and deploy renewables. ”

“Efforts to reduce emissions elsewhere will have played a role, but there are also more random factors such as the weather and the relative price of oil, coal and gas.”

So lets look at China’s energy consumption, again from the BBC:

China is now the world’s biggest investor in renewable energy, particularly in power generation. In fact, the country has seen more than $400bn (£267bn) invested in clean energy in the past 10 years, and is ranked number one in the world in consultancy EY’s renewable energy country attractiveness index.

$400 Billion!  Here’s a great chart showing the world’s investments in renewable energy that would have also contributed to that halt in increases of CO2 emission.

Notice Canada is in the list for most spent in 2014… but not over the last decade or in installed capacity.  That shows we have a lot of work to do to catch up to other world leaders.  With the sheer size of land mass available to us and our proximity to one of the worlds top energy consumers, we should have both ample ability and motivation to massively increase our renewable energy portfolio.

It is not enough for our CO2 emissions to stop rising… they have to fall… and given the science on the Carbon cycle (large IPCC doc)  have to fall all the way to zero before the end of this century.

The removal of human-emitted CO2 from the atmosphere by natural processes will take a few hundred thousand years (high confidence). Depending on the RCP scenario considered, about 15 to 40% of emitted CO2 will remain in the atmosphere longer than 1,000 years. This very long time required by sinks to remove anthropogenic CO2 makes climate change caused by elevated CO2 irreversible on human time scale.

So, since 15-40% of the CO2 we emit will stay there for longer than we can reasonably contemplate, the only way to limit the effect is to ensure as little is ejected into the atmosphere in the first place.