In Hottest Year On Record, US Cut Carbon Emissions. Good Start!

Just need to cut three times as much going forward to reach climate goals. Um. Easy!

An AI ‘cat’ from the uncanny valley enjoys basking in the ‘sun.’ Image generated by DreamStudio AI.

As pretty much everyone expected, 2023 is now officially the hottest year on record, according to data from Europe’s climate change service, Copernicus. 2023’s global average temperature was 14.98 degrees Celsius, or 58.96 Fahrenheit, a jump from the previous record of 14.81 degrees Celsius (58.66 F) in 2016. On top of that, several months (July, August, and December) were the warmest in recorded history, too.

Fortunately, there’s also some good news, as energy analysts at The Rhodium Group report today: The US managed to cut its carbon emissions even as its economy grew, for the first time since before the pandemic, when emissions dropped, but the economy was in the shitter. As the world started returning somewhat to normal again, so did emissions. So it’s actually kinda something that in 2023, after two years of increasing, Rhodium Group estimates that

emissions were down 1.9% year-on-year in 2023, while the economy expanded by 2.4% over the course of the year. US emissions remained below pre-pandemic levels and dropped to 17.2% below 2005 levels.

And now the bit you knew was coming after: as with all climate progress these days, it’s not enough to get us out of trouble, because we have to make up now for 30 years of inaction since scientists went to Congress and warned we’d be in big trouble if the world kept burning fossil fuels. As Kurt Vonnegut said of artists and writers trying to call attention to the horrors of the Vietnam War, the canary chirped and keeled over, but nothing changed.

The Rhodium analysis credits the 2023 decrease in emissions primarily to two factors. For starters, in the power sector, emissions dropped eight percent, largely due to utilities moving away from burning coal to burning methane (“natural”), gas, which continues to be far cheaper — and let’s remember, kids, that solar is now the cheapest source of electricity, and it just keeps getting cheaper.

The second big factor was that a milder winter than 2022 meant that emissions from heating up homes and businesses declined by four percent.

Offsetting those decreases were increases in emissions from our two biggest CO2 sources, transportation (up 1.6 percent) and the industrial sector (one percent), mostly from increased oil and gas production.

The report also said that it’s simply too soon to tell whether the incentives in Joe Biden’s two biggest achievements on climate, the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, “will fully achieve their projected emissions impacts.” At the time the IRA was passed, Rhodium was among several analysts whose models predicted it would likely meet its goal of reducing US carbon emissions reductions by up to 40 percent of 2005 emissions by 2030. The new report doesn’t reject that finding, but cautions — as everyone in clean energy also did after IRA passed — that there’s a whole lot more that’s needed:

A decline in economy-wide emissions is a step in the right direction, but that rate of decline needs to more than triple and sustain at that level every year from 2024 through 2030 in order to meet the US’s climate target under the Paris Agreement of a 50-52% reduction in emissions.

So yep, we knew all that. Good start, let’s do everything we can, and other parts of the analysis highlight some surprising — to nonexpert me, at least — bright spots as well. For instance, it’s not great for the climate that US production of crude oil and gas is on track to set records in 2023, although that’s probably good for Joe Biden’s reelection prospects (voters like low gas prices, damn us, and won’t it be great when widespread EV adoption takes pump prices out of our politics).

But what’s interesting is where the resulting higher emissions are coming from: the bulk of the one percent increase in emissions from industry were driven, the report says, by “leaking, venting, and flaring of methane and CO₂ during production and transportation of these fuels” — and here’s the tarnished silver lining to those particular emissions:

This growing contribution should be staunched by the EPA’s newly finalized oil and gas methane rules, which they estimate will reduce GHGs from the oil and gas sector by nearly 40% of today’s levels in the late 2020s.

Of course, there’s also the immediate “yes, but,” because again, we’re 30 to 40 years behind:

But turning the tide on industrial emissions will also require meaningful decarbonization progress in other parts of the sector, like iron and steelmaking, cement manufacturing, and chemical production.

Did they say “cement”? Here’s a happy nerd story on what looks like a scalable, affordable breakthrough that should make cement production largely carbon-free. It’s in both podcast and transcript form so even pod-haters like Yr Editrix can enjoy it. [I won’t, though — Rebecca]

So yes, the challenge of reaching that three-times-greater-reductions-than 2023 goal is pretty big, but I actually think it’s kind of hopeful that the energy sector reached those carbon reductions mostly without trying to reduce carbon, mostly because gas was cheaper than coal. As policies aimed at actively decarbonizing kick in, as clean energy keeps growing, and as new clean energy sources like enhanced geothermal (drink!) start living up to their potential (and generating revenue), the goal really feels reachable.

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[ABC News / Rhodium Group / NYT / ABC News]

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