Glen Peters
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Glen Peters
@glenpeters.bsky.social

Energy, emissions, & climate
CICERO Center for International Climate Research, Oslo, Norway
https://cicero.oslo.no/en/employees/glen-peters

Glen Vecchione is an American composer, lyricist, poet, and writer. With David Dusing he co-authored the music and lyrics to the musical The Legend of Frankie and Johnny. He is the author and illustrator of several non-fiction books for children and young adults; many of them written on science related topics or on children's games. He has also published poetry for adults in several literary journals. Under the pseudonym Glen Peters he wrote the novel Where the Nights Smell Like Bread. .. more

Environmental science 41%
Economics 22%
Pinned
📢Global Carbon Budget 2025📢

Fossil CO2 emissions continue to rise in 2025 while the terrestrial carbon sink recovers to pre-El Niño strength.

The key findings are covered in two reports this year:
* ESSDD (preprint): essd.copernicus.org/preprints/es...
* Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Yes, that last ~10% there is a discussion. I am very happy to have that discussion, when we are showing evidence of heading in that direction...

He, he. I am not the only one that flipped at that sentence...

I would nuance Roger's point much more. At the aggregate, Paris appears to have little effect on emissions. True.

Digging into the details, there is positive news in many countries. We highlight 35 in the Global Carbon Budget (statistical significant).

So policy works, there is just little!

/10

There are bigger issues as well.

Climate policy is only really changing CO2/Energy, but we need much more action on Energy/GDP. There are even signs improvements in this are slowing (e.g., if E/GDP did not slow in China, Chinese emissions would have peaked already).

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It is much stronger to look at the US, for example, where the CO2/Energy effect is strong, fossil CO2 is going down, but CO2/GDP does not appear to be budging.

Sure, the effect of policy has been small (perhaps due to the small size of policy, not that it doesn't work).

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This thread is a bit of a reaction to @thehonestbroker.bsky.social's argument that there no acceleration in CO2/GDP (implying policy has little to no effect). rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-paris-...

Roger & I are using the same data, I would just say Roger should be looking at CO2/Energy!

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Is this policy* (first post) or technology or ?

That requires additional attribution. But, there is quite strong evidence that there are policies driving renewables deployment and innovation. There are also studies on the links between policy and emissions.

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It is possible to go through countries and it is the same story (with few exceptions):

Energy/GDP is not changing much. Energy / climate policy are not effecting energy efficiency.

CO2/Energy is going down: Climate policy is shifting away from coal to gas & renewables.

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India is different. It is actually carbonising! CO2/Energy is increasing!

It is possible to show this is due to two opposing factors: A negative component due to declining fossil share (increasing renewables) & more carbon intensive fossil system (perhaps since bioenergy has zero emissions).

4/

For the US, again, the CO2/GDP figure shows no recent changes in trend, but a close link between the CO2/Energy trend and emission reductions.

We can show this is due to coal to gas and growth in renewables (see article in previous post).

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This figure shows the rate of change of these components (and some others).

We have good evidence CO2/energy is changing, even in 2017 rdcu.be/eRQQ7, and we can further split this into the role of coal to gas and to renewables (see article).

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Has climate policy* worked?

There is an argument that CO2 per unit GDP has not accelerated in 50 years (top left).

This term is made of two componets:
* Energy per GDP (bottom left) which has not changed
* CO2 per Energy (top right), this is where the action is

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We need CDR at some level. That is also more or less 100% agreed (there are some holdouts). But, it still remains, all the heavy lifting is in emission reductions.

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I don't think what I say is disputed in any way, remotely. Even CDR advocates say this. But, the perception is often (my original post), that they substitute "CDR is costly, THEREFORE we need more reductions". It is "we need reductions, and CDR is an ADDITIONAL tool in the toolbox".

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Within a declining cap, you could say they substitute. Eg, if you had a fixed cap from today to zero in 2050. So you could say we could just produce 40GtCO2/yr of CDR. Not sure there exists a scenario or pathway or storage for that. The vast bulk of the lifting is done with reductions.

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If you emit 1 and remove 1, you end at zero. For CDR to have any point, you have to emit 0 and remove 1. At the margin, you could say they are substitutes, but when we emit 40GtCO2, at aggregate, they are most definitely not substitutes.

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I am not sure there is a discussion to be had (or I misunderstood you). No matter what scale of CDR (within limits we currently know), emissions need to go down >90%. IPCC language would say "virtually certain (high confidence)" or something like that. CDR is not a replacement for reductions.

And this lack of understanding, also amongst experts, is why CDR is basically a 'moral hazard'. Just to make myself unpopular for the day...

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Reposted by Jussi T. Eronen

The biggest misunderstanding of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), IMHO, is that many assume it is a replacement for emissions reductions. As in, more CDR, less emission reductions. No. Emissions need to go down as fast as possible, even faster, no matter how much (~feasible) CDR you have.

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The costs of Direct Air Capture will not fall as much as hoped. "Efforts to reduce carbon emissions should therefore* continue at pace, says the research team."

*Therefore is problematic here, as it implies that if DACCS was cheap less reductions are needed. No, no, no.

ethz.ch/en/news-and-...

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Yes, but then Mani Hussaini, Chair of The Standing Committee on Energy and the Environment, the Labour Party, took it next level. When he got questions on renewables, he even managed to swing them around to make the case for oil & gas.

Reposted by Glen P. Peters

The Nepalese EV transition.
In simple terms, brown on this graph is India's share and blue is China's share.
The trigger? India effectively halted all imports of petroleum into Nepal in 2015, an "undeclared blockade", which was "masked as constitutional concern".
robbieandrew.github.io/carsales/

Oh, seems you cant play back. Damn...

Putting both points together, he was more or less saying / implying the IEA got it wrong, now they have revised it, and show we need more oil and gas than previously thought, and we need to go into new areas.

The way he framed it, from memory, was that new projections have revised up expectations of oil. I understood him to say that the IEA projected lower oil demand, but now, they project higher demand. (basically, they added the CPS).
I should double check: www.equinor.com/about-us/202...
Autumn Conference 2025
We have invited our speakers to set off a thorough conversation on trust and cooperation at a time of unpredictability, conflict and geopolitical tension.
www.equinor.com

Yes, good point. I think we should say "exceeded 1.5C". The overshoot part is a bit like peak emissions. Unless you actually start declining, or go back below the "threshold", then we cant say overshoot has happened. It is a hypothetical. Exceeding is not.

I must say, the Labour Party is extremely pro oil and gas. Zero ambiguity. They want to find and extract as much oil and gas as possible.

I can't see. But I am sitting at the back... In any case, no chance for him to correct.

Oh this continues...

He is saying oil demand is higher than expected a few years ago. No. The opposite is true.

The IEA added a new scenario. Compare the last time that scenario was done in 2019...

He keeps comparing across scenarios, not across how the same scenario changes in time

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