Page 6 - AsiaElec Week 45 2022

AsiaElec COMMENTARY AsiaElec

No fairness but some

hope at COP27

COP26 has not delivered so far on the promises and China’s LNG imports rebound.
COMMENTARY made in Glasgow in November 2021, with com-
panies failing to move towards zero emissions Missed targets
pledges and the world as a whole not meeting At stake at Sharm el-Sheikh is the 1.5°C tar-
the targets and aspirations laid down. get, laid down in 2015 in Paris, which requires
As global leaders again gather for the annual far more commitment, and more importantly
UN climate conference, now known as COP27, action, from governments and corporation.
in Egypt, relations between rich and poor gov- Even just after COP26, Our World in Data,
ernments are set to undergo major stress tests. which uses data from Oxford University, warned
The global north is now exposed to accu- that the Paris 2015 target of keeping temperature
sations of hypocrisy and double standards by rises to 1.5°C would be missed, while tempera-
governments of emerging economies that have tures would rise to between 2.7°C and 3.1°C by
watched Europe buy up gas stocks in 2022 to 2100 instead, unless emissions are cut by 15% a
replace Russian supplies, causing market vola- year from now on.
tility and a fuel price crisis that affects everyone. However, the UN Environment Programme
The EU spent €57bn on Russian fossil fuels in warned at the end of October that there was “no
the first 100 days of the war in Ukraine, even as credible pathway to 1.5C in place.”
European governments made policy announce- The UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report said that
ments to accelerate transitions away from oil and the world was instead now heading for a 2.8°C
gas towards renewables. rise in global warming by 2100 unless govern-
ments urgently improved their emissions targets.
Europe’s initiative Urgent action is needed, otherwise the window
Despite the binge on fossil fuels, European gov- of opportunity to take the required climate
ernments are taking an aggressive line at COP27 action will slam shut.
and are seeking to maintain the global leadership United Nations Secretary-General António
they exerted at COP26. Guterres warned that nothing less than a “rapid
However, over the past year the fine words transformation of societies” was needed to limit
of the COP26 declarations have in the main not the impact of climate change.
been turned into action. Meanwhile, in the month leading up to
Alok Sharma, the British chair of COP26, COP27, there have been a number of warnings
warned in Glasgow that action would be needed that the world is now far from achieving 1.5
throughout 2022 to meet the goals of the Glas- degrees.
gow Climate Pact, especially the 1.5°C target. UN Climate Change said in its 2022 NDC
In January after COP26, he warned: “There synthesis report that although countries were
is no doubt that the commitments we secured managing to bend the curve of global green-
at COP26 were historic. Yet at the moment they house gas (GHG) emissions downwards, it was
are just words on a page. And unless we honour not enough to reach 1.5°C. It forecast 2.5°C of
the promises made, to turn the commitments global warming by 2100 if the current combined
in the Glasgow Climate Pact into action, they climate pledges of 193 governments were fol-
will wither on the vine. We will have mitigated lowed through.
no risks. Seized no opportunities. We will have However, the report’s only bonus was that
fractured the trust built between nations. And emissions would level out before 2025.
1.5°C will slip from our grasp.” In the longer term, UN Climate Change
However, Europe’s performance on the said in a separate report that with long-term,
gas markets this year has not given cause for low-emission development strategies that
encouragement. Governments and traders have GHG could be roughly 68% lower in 2050 than
aggressively bought LNG cargoes. They have in 2019, if all the long-term strategies are fully
even circumvented sanctions on Russia by buy- implemented on time.
ing cargoes from China that in fact originated in Meanwhile, in January, the International
Russia, while also using complex swap deals to Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) found in
gain access to gas that has a Russian provenance. its own assessment of the NDCs that the pledges
Despite the buying, New IEA analysis iden- would limit global warming by 1.8°C by 2050
tifies a challenging 30bn cubic metre supply-de- and 2.1°C by 2100. This means that current NDS
mand gap next summer at a key time for refilling are nowhere near those required to meet the
EU storage if Russia halts all pipeline deliveries 1.5°C target for 2100, or the 2050 net-zero target.

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