Carbon emissions are going in the wrong direction
Between 2014 and 2016, global carbon emissions stayed flat. That may have been false hope. New projections suggest that emissions in 2017 are likely to increase, thwarting the drive toward keeping global temperatures from continuing to rise.
Under the Paris accord, the world needs to hit net-zero emissions by about 2050, meaning that we either stop burning fossil fuels or only burn them when we can capture and bury their emissions. Otherwise we won’t be able to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century—a threshold beyond which dangerous changes to the climate may be irreversible.
The latest estimates were released at the climate talks in Bonn by the Global Carbon Project. Emissions have gone into reverse for a variety of reasons, with those from India and China rising faster than expected and those from the US and Europe failing to decline as quickly as expected.
