The International Energy Agency says renewable forms of energy, along with the growth in the electric vehicle market, is starting to slow the increase in global greenhouse gas emissions. File Photo by Pat Benic/UPI |
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Oct. 19 (UPI) -- The increase in global emissions of carbon dioxide could've been triple what it was from last year if not for major deployments of renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.
The Paris-based IEA estimated that global CO2 emissions are on pace to reach 33.8 billion tons this year, an increase of nearly 300 million tons should forecasts prove accurate. That's substantially lower than the 2-billion-ton increase from 2020 levels last year.
Some of that can be attributed to the move toward electric vehicles. The agency has estimated that nearly 7 million electric vehicles were sold in all of 2021. In just the first quarter of 2022 alone, however, that reached 2 million, a 75% increase year-over-year.
U.S. consumers were awarded heavy subsidies that would support the purchase of an electric vehicle under President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. The Energy Department, meanwhile, estimated that gasoline consumption is trending lower because of efficiency improvements for conventional vehicles.
For renewables, the IEA said solar and wind power are on pace to hit a record in terms of capacity this year. Without those gains, global CO2 emissions would be 600 million tons higher than 2021 levels.
Fatih Birol, the executive director of the IEA, said the global energy crisis triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused major economies to keep looking for fossil fuels. Russia is a major supplier of crude oil and natural gas and importers are searching desperately for alternatives.
The encouraging news, he said, is that some of the Russian void is getting filled by wind and solar energy.
"This means that CO2 emissions are growing far less quickly this year than some people feared -- and that policy actions by governments are driving real structural changes in the energy economy," he said.
All this suggests that some of the momentum for clean energy technology that was lost during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to return. Nevertheless, the IEA said oil demand is on pace to accelerate more than any other fossil fuel this year, contributing some 180 million tons to global CO2 emissions.
