New York, Europe Brief News – UN scientists laid out a plan that they believe could help people avoid the worst impacts of rising temperatures.
The report, by the UN ‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), essentially calls for a revolution in how we produce energy and power our world.
To avoid very dangerous warming, carbon emissions need to peak within three years, and fall rapidly after that.
Even then, technology to pull CO2 from the air will still be needed to keep temperatures down.
Here are five key ideas that the researchers say are critical to keeping the world safe.
The 63 dense pages of this IPCC report are littered with qualifications and dense footnotes.
But all the verbiage can’t hide the scientists’ central message. If the world wants to steer clear of dangerous warming, fossil fuels are toast.
Keeping the world under 1.5C requires emissions to peak by 2025, the researchers say, and shrink by 43% by the end of this decade.
Ukraine war deepens the crisis
The most effective way of making that switch is to generate energy from sustainable sources like wind and solar.
The authors point to the collapse in costs of these technologies, down around 85% across the decade from 2010.
And while the war in Ukraine is making governments in Europe flirt with carbon-rich coal once again, there’s wide political acceptance that cheap, sustainable energy is the only road to Putin-free power.
So for the temperature of the planet (as well as the politics of the present), the IPCC believes that coal should finally be retired for good.
“I think that’s a very strong message, no new coal power plants. Otherwise, you’re really risking 1.5C,” said Prof Jan Christoph Minx, from the University of Leeds, and an IPCC co-ordinating lead author.
“I think the big message coming from here is we need to end the age of fossil fuel. And we don’t only need to end it, but we need to end it very quickly.”
One of the big differences with this report from previous releases is that social science features heavily.
This is mainly focussed on the ideas of reducing people’s demand for energy in the areas of shelter, mobility and nutrition.
This covers a multitude of areas – including low carbon diets, food waste, how we build our cities, and how we shift people to more carbon friendly transport options.
