Don’t Bank On The Rest Of The World To Cut CO2
By Paul Homewood
Lord Deben, formerly Gummer, likes to claim that that many other countries are following our lead, by committing to cutting CO2 emissions, as in his response to Owen Paterson.
His claims, however, have little to do with reality.
GLOBE, the organisation of which Deben was President, and is now Honorary President, keeps track of climate legislation worldwide, and this is where he gets his “66 countries” from.
http://globelegislators.org/studies/legislation/climate
Fortunately, GLOBE also offer an interactive map to check the details of what each country is doing.
Using this tool, I have analysed how many countries have actually made pledges to reduce CO2 emissions. This turns out to be only 22, of which 11 are in the EU.
The non EU countries are :
Canada
USA
Mexico
Chile
Dominica
Ukraine
South Africa
South Korea
Indonesia
Australia
New Zealand
Worse still, only Mexico has legislation in place with specific targets to cut CO2. (As we saw last week, Mexico’s commitment is not worth the paper it is written on.)
While some of these countries,and others, may have plans to expand renewables, save energy etc, none of them yet are committed legally to reduce CO2 emissions, or do anything else they don’t want to do.
So, I am afraid that it looks as if the UK and the rest of the EU are going to be leaping off the cliff on their own.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
who says (here on this site) more Co2 is bad?
‘Gummer … many other countries are following our lead”: yeah, Envy of the World we are, and no mistake.
Qn Paul : Out of those 11 in the EU who “have made pledges” how many have made legally binding targets without huge get out clauses like dependant on other countries paying us, or connected to a certain GDP figure etc ?
Do you mean EU, or non EU?
Many of the EU ones are conditional on others “doing their bit”. (There’s a post coming out later on this).
But, to a large extent they are hemmed in by EU policy. What is interesting is the other 17 states that don’t appear on the GLOBE list!
thanks, yes we already know that last weeks EU CO2 targets meeting, is a joke cos it has commitments for whole EU, but get outs for the individual countries. Plus it’s all conditional on other countries making commitments Paris 2015
Re ‘many other countries are following our lead’, see my comments on this report: http://www.rtcc.org/2014/10/23/road-to-paris-eu-2030-climate-package-holds-key-to-un-deal – I enjoyed penning the second.
BTW when The Times reported this morning on the five Tory MPs who had issued a statement calling on the government to ‘to suspend the Climate Change Act’s unilateral targets’, it claimed that ‘only Finland and Mexico have adopted similar targets’ (to those in the CC Act). But that appears not to be true: as I pointed out here last week and as you mention above, Mexico’s ‘commitment’ is meaningless. And even Finland’s statement seems (the Google translation from Finnish is unclear) to be subject to some odd provision about the private sector being exempt. The Times article (behind a paywall but you can read the Mexico/Finland bit) is here: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/environment/article4251083.ece The MPs’ full statement can be read here (scroll down to the most recent post): http://www.bishop-hill.net/discussion/post/2313902?lastPage=true
It’s funny that the GLOBE database does not even list Finland!
China is listed as having pledged to
“Reduce CO2 emissions per unit of GDP by 40–45% by 2020 compared to the 2005 level”
With 8% GDP growth to 2020, it can still achieve the upper target AND increase its emissions from 2013 to 2020 by over five times the UK’s total 1990 emissions.
India is listed as having pledged to
“Reduce CO2 emissions per unit of GDP by 20–25% by 2020 compared to the 2005 level”
With 7% GDP growth to 2020, it can still achieve the lower target AND increase its emissions from 2013 to 2020 by 1.7 times the UK’s total 1990 emissions AND still have emissions per capita of 1/4 of the UK’s in 1990. But India is unlikely to achieve this, so the emissions growth to 2020 with be more than twice the UK’s total 1990 emissions.
We should recognize that both China and India have twenty times the population of the UK’s 63 million, and about 50% more people in each country than in what used to be called the First World.
The 11 non-EU countries increased their total emissions by 16.6% between 1990 and 2013.
Due to emissions rising much faster elsewhere, the global share of this group’s emissions from 33% to 24%,
The only country with reductions is the Ukraine, which (as Paul Homewood has already highlighted) have more than halved. Indonesia’s emissions have increased by 230%, Chile’s by 160% and South Korea by 150%.