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U.S. off track for meeting Obama's Paris pledge
Emissions in the United States last year were about 13.8 percent lower than 2005 levels — a positive sign but still behind the Obama administration's pledge to cut emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, according to a new report.
CLIMATEWIRE | The United States is not on pace to meet emissions targets set by the Obama administration under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, despite eye-popping advances last year in green energy production and electric vehicles sales.
That's according to a report released this week by BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. It estimates that U.S. emissions last year were about 13.8 percent lower than 2005 levels — a positive sign, but still behind the Obama administration's original pledge to cut emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
The report's authors noted there was a brief moment when it appeared as if the 2025 goal was still plausible — that was when the Covid-19 pandemic prompted a drop in U.S. emissions. But as the United States emerged from the pandemic, its emissions rebounded significantly.
"While the downtick in emissions in 2020 offered a sliver of hope that the US could honor its original Paris pledge, the sharp rebound in 2021 followed by 2022’s incremental year-on-year increase has set the country back from hitting its goals," wrote the authors.
The Biden administration since has pledged to cut emissions 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The report acknowledged that the passage last year of the Inflation Reduction Act — which included $369 billion in climate and energy spending — puts the United States "far closer to the Biden administration goal of halving economy-wide CO2 emissions by 2030 (vs. 2005)."
According to the report, the U.S. renewable energy sector faced a number of obstacles last year — which hindered efforts to reduce U.S. emissions more. But broadly, experts say that rapidly cutting U.S. emissions remains a significant challenge.
“Everything has to continue to happen, but faster, if you want to actually address the climate crisis," said Ethan Zindler, head of Americas for BloombergNEF.
Last year, a "record-shattering" $141 billion was invested in clean energy, which allowed renewables to meet 23 percent of all electricity demand, according to the report. Zero-carbon sources — which includes nuclear — supplied nearly 41 percent of all power output in 2022, setting another record.
The advances occurred despite high commodity prices, supply chain disruptions, inflation pressures and high interest rate, the report notes. Prices for polysilicon, a key material for solar panels, “touched [a] new high in August 2022,” while a key element for batteries, lithium carbonate, once “traded at 14 times its January 2021 price,” according to the report.
Spiraling inflation not only made raw materials for new facilities more expensive but also triggered the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, increasing the cost of borrowing for a renewable energy sector heavily reliant on cheap money, Zindler said.
A silver lining came from the transportation sector, he said.
Last year, EV sales jumped 50 percent to nearly 1 million vehicles, or 7.1 percent of all new cars. And carbon emissions from transportation remain well below pre-pandemic levels — partially due to more than a million EVs deployed after 2020.
The report points to the low fuel cost of EVs, which Zinder attributed as a key driver to the explosive growth of EV sales in 2022. Last year, gasoline was on average 2.5 times more expensive than electricity, according to the report.
The report also identified the difficulty in obtaining federal permits as a major obstacle to new renewable projects. A large majority of infrastructure projects take between two and six years “to secure all sign-offs,” and a quarter of such projects take longer than six years just for regulatory process, according to the report.
