Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: A jump in greenhouse gas pollution in the US helped push global emissions higher in the first half of this year. This could be an omen of what’s to come, with Donald Trump’s pro-fossil fuel agenda set to significantly slow down the emissions cuts required to avoid disastrous climate impacts, a new forecast has found, according to a Guardian report.
The “most abrupt shift in energy and climate policy in recent memory” that has occurred since Trump re-entered the White House will have profound consequences for the global climate crisis by slowing the pace of US emissions cuts by as much as half the rate achieved over the past two decades, the Rhodium Group forecast states.
The US is still expected to reduce its planet-heat emissions by between 26% and 35% by 2035 compared with 2005 levels, according to the report. But this is well down from a 38% to 56% reduction by 2035, which Rhodium forecast just last year during Joe Biden’s presidency.
None of these scenarios will be sufficient to allow the US, the world’s largest historic emitter of carbon pollution, to play its full part in helping the world avert a worsening climate breakdown coming from 2C (3.6F) or more in global heating. The US and other governments agreed a decade ago in Paris to avoid this threshold but are badly off-track in required emissions reductions. Even under the best-case scenario, whereby fossil fuels become much more expensive and cheap renewable energy is swiftly deployed, the US will cut its emissions by just 43% by 2040.
