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Even if you follow these things closely, it can be hard to understand where the world’s fight against climate change stands. On the one hand, news abounds of the clean energy revolution, as wind farms and solar panels pop up in communities across the globe and automakers promise to go electric. On the other hand, scientists continue to warn that fossil fuels have placed the planet and everyone who lives on it on an unavoidable collision course with catastrophe.
A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) published Wednesday explains the dynamic in sharp detail: the world has begun a momentous shift in how we power the economy that will touch virtually every corner of human society, with investment in oil and gas slowing and spending on clean energy rising. But it’s not happening fast enough to avoid dangerous levels of warming.
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“A new global energy economy is emerging,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol tells TIME. But when it comes to the necessary levels of investment in clean energy, there is “a gross mismatch.”
The IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook is designed to inform policymakers about the state of global energy markets as well as the emerging trends expected to define energy in the years to come. Its origins are undeniably wonky, but this year’s report takes on new significance with climate change on the rise in public consciousness and on the international stage. The agency released the 2021 report a month early to help inform talks among the delegates who will gather in Glasgow, Scotland, in early November for the biggest United Nations climate summit in years.
Perhaps nothing is more urgent than the report’s key message that countries need to dramatically accelerate their efforts to cut emissions for the world to have any hope of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C, the level at which scientists say we might expect to see widespread catastrophic effects of climate change. Current pledges from countries…
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Source : time
