Following the release of a major climate report last year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a looming “climate time bomb”. Standing behind a podium emblazoned with the UN symbol of a globe surrounded by olive branches, Guterres declared:“Our world needs climate action on all fronts, everywhere, at the same time.”
Its call to action (probably inspired by the movie) Same name) provides a good summary of what is needed to address rising carbon emissions. The new study was published Thursday in the journal ScienceTo date, countries have been successful in achieving significant reductions in emissions by imposing carbon prices, but the biggest reductions have come from adopting a combination of policies: 70% of cases in which countries have made significant gains involve multiple actions that create “synergies”.
“There’s really no silver bullet,” said Felix Pletis, a co-author of the study and a professor of economics at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. “It’s a bit at odds with the conventional wisdom that economists have been saying that carbon pricing is the only thing we should be pushing for.”
Pletis and colleagues from Germany, France, and the UK looked for large reductions in countries’ emissions and compared the results to policies previously adopted. Using machine learning, they analyzed 1,500 policies in 41 countries from 1998 to 2022 and found only 63 cases in which countries significantly reduced their emissions. These reductions totaled between 600 million and 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.
“There’s a lot of pessimism about climate action and it feels like nothing is happening, but we’re actually making a lot of progress,” Pletis said.
One reason the study found only 63 success stories is because the hurdles to reducing emissions were high, Pletis said. “But at the same time, we’re seeing a lot of ineffective policies being implemented.” Governments are falling about 10% short of the climate targets set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement. 23 billion tons of CO2The study suggests that the problem is not simply caused by a lack of ambition, but also by a lack of knowledge about what policies actually work.
Carbon pricing, whether a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, can lead to large-scale emissions reductions on its own and is a “notable exception” in that it has been particularly effective on emissions from industry and electricity, the study said. But “it can be even more effective when complemented and packaged as a policy mix,” Pletis said.
For example, in the UK, emissions from the power sector fell by 19% between 2012 and 2018 after the European Union introduced a carbon price for electricity producers. Around the same time, the UK implemented a number of other measures, including stricter air pollution standards. Incentives for building solar and wind power plantsChina also announced plans to phase out coal-fired power plants. Similarly, China reduced its industrial emissions by 20 percent between 2013 and 2019 through a pilot emissions trading program, as well as by reducing fossil fuel subsidies and increasing funding for energy efficiency investments.
The study shows that a combination of measures is even more effective in reducing emissions from transportation and buildings. Regulation is the most powerful policy to reduce emissions from transportation and is effective when used in conjunction with carbon pricing and subsidies. The study also highlights that different policies may be more effective in different contexts. The researchers found that carbon pricing is less effective in developing countries, where regulations to limit pollution and investments in green technologies may be more appropriate.
Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, said the study shows what measures to curb carbon emissions were politically possible, but shouldn’t necessarily guide future policymaking: “It doesn’t capture policies that never passed, including policies that would have been very effective but never passed.”
Wagner said the limited scope of the study also overlooked some of the most important climate policies, pointing to the carbon tax passed by the Swedish government in the early 1990s and the Inflation Reduction Act that President Joe Biden will sign in 2022. The U.S.’s landmark climate law will invest hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy and provide tax credits for low-carbon technologies such as heat pumps. The law would reduce emissions by 10 percent. 40 percent by 2030Compared to 2005 levels,
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see this initiative repeated over the next five to 10 years, as it becomes clear that inflation-busting legislation will result in significant reductions in emissions,” Wagner said.
