Guest essay by Eric Worrall

National Geographic has just noticed the top fossil fuel producers and consumers are acting as if the Paris Agreement doesn’t exist.

Dangerous levels of warming locked in by planned jump in fossil fuels output

Plans by the world’s biggest oil, gas, and coal producers to vastly increase their output guarantees those countries will miss their stated Paris climate goals.

BY STEPHEN LEAHY

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 20, 2019

Global governments plan to produce 120 percent more fossil fuels by 2030, drastically at odds with the 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) warming limit they all agreed to under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. All major fossil fuel-producing nations—including the United States, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, Canada, and Australia—have ambitious plans to increase production, according to a new report by leading research organizations and the United Nations.

Carbon emissions from fossil fuel use totaled 37.1 billion tonnes in 2018, a new record. Substantially reducing those emissions will never happen without reducing fossil fuel production, says Michael Lazarus, a lead author of “The Production Gap Report” and the director of Stockholm Environment Institute’s U.S. Center.

Using publicly-available government documents, the report found that countries’ plans to increase production of coal, oil, and gas amounts to 120 percent more in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting global warming to 2.7 degrees F. Those plans include producing 280 percent more coal. That puts the world on a path to more than 7.2 degrees F (4 degrees C) of warming, says Lazarus.

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Read more: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/11/world-fossil-fuel-production-rise-guarantees-missing-paris-climate-goals/

Who could have guessed that Paris Agreement pledges were just a political smokescreen for increased fossil fuel production?