Tribune. Is it possible to contain global warming below 1.5 ° C or 2 ° C without ever blacklisting fossil fuels, which are the source of nearly 90% of global CO2 emissions?2 ? No. Yet this is what international climate negotiations have been doing for nearly thirty years.
As if the States had agreed to discuss the symptoms, the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere, without addressing the causes, these astronomical quantities of fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil) that fuel our unsustainable global economy. This is insane. Extravagant even.
But an implacable reality: since the first COP organized in 1995 in Berlin, there has never been any question of limiting the production of coal, gas and oil at the source. The tens of thousands of pages of official documents from the 26 COPs contain no trace of a proposal to leave all or part of the fossil fuel reserves in the ground.
Constantly increasing production
Better still, the term “energy” appears only once in the 2015 Paris Agreement, when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is mentioned therein (article 16). The data of the problem are, however, known: the bowels of the earth contain enough oil, gas and coal to fuel a global warming greater than + 5 ° C to 7 ° C, jeopardizing the conditions for the sustainability of human existence. the surface of the planet: unless you are climate skeptic or completely foolish, everyone can agree that we are facing an overflow of fossil fuels (and not a shortage).
We have no shortage of scientific studies to support this observation. The latest in the matter, published on September 29 in the journal Nature, estimates that 60% of current oil and gas reserves and 90% of coal reserves must remain in the ground to have any chance of containing global warming below 1.5 ° C. This would amount to organizing a drop in gas and oil production of 3% per year until 2050 and 7% for coal. A difficult task, but which turns out to be impossible if it is not even mentioned.
Organizing the decrease in the production of fossil fuels is paradoxically not what the Paris agreement provides, nor what is on the agenda of COP26. On the contrary: according to the United Nations Environment Program, states plan to produce twice as much fossil fuels as needed to stay below 1.5 ° C. TotalEnergies thus wants to increase its hydrocarbon production by 25% by 2030. At the same time, public support for fossil fuels is increasing, including in France (+ 23.8% between 2015 and 2019), as is the cost to the community of their combustion ($ 5900 billion per year – $ 11 million per minute according to the IMF).
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