1. Have global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels peaked?

@KenCaldeira and I have made a Long Bet @longnow. I say they have. Ken says they haven't. Neither of us is feeling particularly confident in our position.

Thread

https://longbets.org/848/ 

2. Back in May, when Ken first proposed the bet, I felt more certain, in part because it looked like it might take several years before a vaccine was ready and a full global recovery was underway. https://twitter.com/TedNordhaus/status/1263634542276960256?s=20

3. I was skeptical of a V-shaped recovery and thought that given a year or two of very little global economic growth, longer term trends would assure we had reached the peak by the time growth fully came back.

4. As vaccines have been developed and approved in stunningly rapid fashion, I have felt a lot less confident about that. A very fast global recovery, with people all over the world making up for lost time, might very well result in another year or two of increasing emissions.

5. Wouldn't be good for my bet, but good for world, irrespective of climate and emissions. Long-term, a richer, healthier, more interconnected world will be better able to both mitigate and adapt to climate change, irrespective of when emissions exactly peak

6. In recent days, I've become a bit more confident for all the wrong reasons, as the logistics of mass global vaccination sufficient to restart global economy are daunting. The pandemic will end, but perhaps not as quickly as I had hoped a few weeks ago.

7. What I do feel much more confident about is that peak emissions are near, certainly this decade. There are several reasons for this.

8. First, long term global GDP growth will be slower in coming decades than it has been since turn of the century. "Secular stagnation" in developed economies + huge populations have made transition to middle class already + slow industrialization in late developing countries.

9. Second, slowing population growth almost everywhere, with absolute population declining in many of most consumptive places.

10. Third, peak coal, peak oil, falling clean energy costs, net zero commitments across much of Asia backed up by powerful state planning bureaucracies.

11. Fourth, older, more energy and emissions intensive capital stock (think power plants, aircraft, production lines, etc) has been stranded by economic downturn. Much of it will never come back online.

12. So the peak is coming, sooner than a lot of people think. But that of course is only the beginning. Peak emissions is a far cry from stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of CO2. For that, emissions need to fall to near zero.

13. But you can't start to cut emissions until you stop increasing. In the shorter term, an emissions plateau is more likely than rapid decline. But longer term, I do think we will get to zero in the latter half of this century.

14. Stated policies globally get us close to 2C stabilization. I don't put too much stock in long-term emissions commitments. But as noted above, fact that they are coming from China, Korea, Japan is promising and backed by serious industrial planning.

15. So even if we don't exactly hit those marks, I expect they will accelerate decarbonization trends, as serious state investment pours into low carbon technology and infrastructure. Win or lose, that is the direction of travel in my view. FIN/