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According to a Tuesday report, rich countries must reduce their oil and gas production by 2034 in order for global warming to be contained at 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The Analysis of 76 pagesThe Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University announces that nearly 200 countries have begun a two-week negotiation in order to validate a landmark assessment on options for reducing carbon pollution, and extracting CO2 out of the air.
According to the Tyndall Centre report, while only a small portion of the world’s greenhouse gasses are produced by poorer countries, their dependence on fossil fuel revenues means that they could lose their economic and political stability.
Apart from oil and gaz production, countries such as South Sudan, Gabon and the Republic of Congo do not have much economic revenue.
By contrast, Those countries that are wealthy and have major producersEven if fossil fuel income were eliminated, they would still be wealthy.
Oil and gas revenue, for example, contribute eight percent to the United States’ GDP, but the country’s GDP per capita would still be about $60,000 – the second highest in the world among oil and gas producing nations – without it, according to the report.
“We use the GDP per capita that remains once we’ve removed the revenue from oil and gas as an indicator of capacity,” said lead author Kevin Anderson, a professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester.
There are 88 countries around the globe that produce oil and natural gas.
“We calculated emissions phase-out dates for all of them consistent with The Paris Agreement temperature goals,” Anderson said. “We found that wealthy countries need to be at zero oil and gas production by 2034.”
First coal then oil & gas
According to the calculations, the very poorest nations can continue to produce up to 2050. Other countries, such as China or Mexico, are somewhere in between.
The 2015 Paris climate treaty recognized that wealthy countries should take faster and more drastic steps to decarbonise and provide financial support for poorer countries to get off fossil fuels.
This principle has been applied to coal-power generation. The United Nations calls on rich countries to phaseout coal use by 2030 and the rest of world by 2040.
The new report Phaseout Pathways for Fossil Fuel Production, uses the same approach to oil or gas.
To reduce global temperature rise to 1.5C (2.7F), 19 countries whose per capita GDP is above $50,000 must stop producing oil and gas by 2034. This will give them a 50 percent chance.
This tranche includes the United States, Norway, Canada, Australia, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Another 14 “high capacity” nations where per capita GDP would be about $28,000 without income from oil and gas must end production in 2039, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Kazakhstan.
The next group of countries – including China, Brazil and Mexico – would need to end output by 2043, followed by Indonesia, Iran and Egypt in 2045.
‘Urgent phase-out’
Only the most poorest oil- and gas-producing countries, such as Angola, Libya, and Iraq could continue to pump crude oil and extract gas up to mid-century.
“This report illustrates only too clearly why there also needs to be an urgent phase-out of oil and gas production,” said Connie Hedegaard, former European Commissioner for climate, and Danish minister for climate and energy.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, she noted, has “made it abundantly clear that there are numerous reasons why the world needs to get off its dependence on fossil fuels”.
Romain Ioualalen, global policy lead at Oil Change International, said the report is a “stark indictment of the climate failure” of wealthy nations.
“Rich countries have 12 years to end their production of oil and gas but none has any plans to do so,” he said.
“In fact, not only do they still account for more than a third of global production, but they also plan to produce five times as much oil and gas by 2030 as is compatible with the trajectory outlined in this report.”
