A mainly coal-fueled, post-lockdown economic recovery boosted carbon dioxide emissions by 6% in 2021, the highest increase ever recorded in human history, according to a new report.
The increase more than offset the previous year’s pandemic-induced lull, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday in a new analysis.
Carbon dioxide emissions in 2021 hit a whopping 36.3 billion metric tons, the agency said, warning that Earth continues careening into the habitability danger zone.
In 2020, lockdowns imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic pushed emissions down by 5.2%, the IEA said. But that was jolted back up as economies reopened. Global pollution tumbled by 17% during the peak of the lockdowns, a study published in May 2020 found, and its authors predicted the drop in carbon emissions.
“However, the world has experienced an extremely rapid economic recovery since then, driven by unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus and a fast — although uneven — roll-out of vaccines,” the agency said in its report, Global Energy Review: CO2 Emissions in 2021. “The recovery of energy demand in 2021 was compounded by adverse weather and energy market conditions, which led to more coal being burnt despite renewable power generation registering its largest ever annual growth.”
In the end, the COVID-19 lockdown had an undetectable effect on greenhouse gas buildup, as warming emissions stoked temperatures, the World Meteorological Organization reported in October 2021.
The new report’s increases vastly offset any reductions.
“The numbers make clear that the global economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis has not been the sustainable recovery that IEA executive director Fatih Birol called for during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020,” the agency said in a statement. “The world must now ensure that the global rebound in emissions in 2021 was a one-off — and that an accelerated energy transition contributes to global energy security and lower energy prices for consumers.”
A good 40% of the overall CO2 global growth came from coal, which topped records at 15.3 billion metric tons, the IEA said. Gas and oil also contributed, though the limited recovery in global transport last year, mainly in the aviation sector, kept those numbers down. Natural gas-attributed carbon emissions rebounded way above 2019 levels.
In terms of countries, China was the only one that registered growth in both 2020 and 2021, and it was the biggest emissions-increase driver, the agency said. With an increase of more than 11.9 billion metric tons, China accounted for 33% of the global total. India’s CO2 emissions also rose, the report said.
U.S. and European Union CO2 emissions last year dropped 4% and 2.4% from 2019 levels, the IEA said.
The world is hurtling toward irreversible climate damage that will worsen weather and have an impact on public health, as the U.N. Governmental Panel on Climate Change said last week in another report. Even more indications surfaced on Tuesday, when an analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that hurricanes and tropical storms overall hike up the death rate even beyond the storms themselves.
“The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health,” the U.N. report said.
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