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Ready to change: tram and car in front of the Rhine Bridge in Düsseldorf
Photo: Olaf Döring / IMAGO
Now or never - that is the central message of the dramatic report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Monday.
It is still possible to limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, with luck to 1.5 degrees.
But even the minimum target can only be achieved if global emissions of CO₂ and other climate-damaging gases begin to fall by 2025 at the latest.
For the first time, the UN body has presented a detailed calculation of which options, based on the current state of research, can contribute how much to climate protection, by when - and how much they cost.
Physicist Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research highlighted "the most important graphic" from the 3675-page report on Twitter on Tuesday: "Where the big levers are to avert the climate catastrophe".
The overview shows a cost-benefit calculation for climate protection up to the year 2030, summarized from Chapter 12 of the IPCC report.
The longer the bars, the more tons of CO₂ equivalent could still be saved in this decade.
The biggest contributors could be more wind and solar power, followed by protecting forests from deforestation, storing methane emissions from agriculture, afforestation and switching industrial processes to lower-carbon fuels.
All sectors red except traffic
However, the color of the bars reflects the associated costs: the darker the red coloration, the more expensive it is for users.
Yellow can still be realized for less than 20 US dollars per ton of CO₂, blue even means savings over the lifetime.
It is striking that only small short-term contributions are realistic in the transport sector, which add up to around 3.8 billion tons of CO₂ equivalent by 2030.
But in no other area is climate protection so cheap.
The blue color dominates here.
In the case of wind and solar power, this only applies to the first two to three billion tons, each additional output is more expensive.
Most of the measures related to buildings, industry, agriculture and forestry, on the other hand, cost a lot of money.
Protect the climate and save at the same time?
According to the IPCC, this can be done in traffic by using the options that already exist today:
reduce the fuel consumption of cars
Electric cars instead of combustion engines
switch to public transport
Organize shipping traffic more efficiently
Drive trucks more economically
Saving fuel in aviation
Use electric drives in goods transport
switch to bicycles and e-bikes
The graphic for electric cars and trucks was colored gray instead of blue because the cost advantage seemed too uncertain.
In the text part of the report, however, savings from the user's point of view were assumed.
The only measure listed by the IPCC that has a cost of up to $100 per tonne of CO₂ saved is the use of biofuel.
The big renovation is yet to come
However, most of the transport-related emissions would remain even if all these registers were pulled at the same time.
According to the IPCC report, transport was responsible for 8.7 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent in 2019, 23 percent of all global emissions from energy use.
Therefore, the program mentioned above would only be a necessary, not a sufficient step to avert the climate catastrophe.
By 2050, traffic would also have to be almost completely decarbonized.
In this period, electrification of most transport routes would be a key option, they say.
By then, alternative fuels such as biofuel, hydrogen or “potentially” synthetic e-fuels would have to be developed for long-distance trucks, ships and airplanes.
The cost of this conversion was not estimated.
The head of the Federal Environment Agency, Dirk Messner, spoke of “immense changes in global infrastructure investments” to the editorial network Germany.
These are not only possible, but also necessary.
Even if it is likely to become more expensive for the individual users, the balance sheet would be clear from a global economic perspective: »Saving the climate is significantly cheaper than not doing it.«
ak/AFP
