Carbon dioxide emissions rising globally, but drop in China

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (AP) — The world’s burning of coal, oil and natural gas this year is putting 1% more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air than last year, bad news for the fight against climate change but with an odd twist, according to scientists who track emissions.

China’s carbon pollution was down 0.9% this year compared to 2021, while emissions in the United States were 1.5% higher, said a study by scientists at Global Carbon Project released early Friday at international climate talks in Egypt. Both are opposite long-term trends. American emissions had been steadily dropping while Chinese emissions had been rising — until this year.

In both cases, it is a reaction to the pandemic and perhaps a bit of the energy crisis created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, study lead author Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter told The Associated Press. He said those two factors make this year’s data chaotic and hard to draw trends from. China’s lockdown in 2022 to try to control renewed COVID-19 is a major factor in that country’s drop, he said.

Much of the jump was in transportation — cars and air travel — with people’s limits on travel during the pandemic wearing off, Friedlingstein said.

While global carbon pollution is still increasing, it isn’t increasing at as fast a rate as 10 or 15 years ago. But overall scientists said this is bad news because it is pushing Earth closer to hitting and then passing the globally adopted threshold of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.

“It means we better get ready to blow past the target and enter a world that humans have never experienced,’’ said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who wasn’t part of the research team.

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