China’s EV growth helping global emissions decline

Two international climate agencies predict global emissions have reached a critical point and this year could see the start of the decline.

Emissions must peak before 2025 to avoid dangerous warming, the UN’s leading climate science reports.

Fossil fuels are increasingly being replaced with renewable energy while EV uptake is accelerating with China leading the way, says the ABC.

Bloomberg NEF’s head of Australian research Leonard Quong says people often struggle to understand the magnitude of the current transition, the ABC says.

“The simplest way we can put it is that global energy systems are facing the biggest, most rapid change since the Industrial Revolution and it’s happening right now,”

Independent research firm Bloomberg NEF and the international Climate Analytics institute say it is possible we will see global emissions fall in 2024 and 2023 will have been the peak of global emissions, says the ABC, pointing out these predictions will be known at the end of 2024 and that electricity is doing most of the work to 2030.

“Last year, 30% of the world’s electricity came from renewables, pushing out more and more fossil fuels.”

Quong says the energy sector is the most rational and affordable place to begin to reduce carbon emissions, the Bloomberg NEF report saying, “the era of fossil fuels’ dominance is coming to an end” and expecting renewables to cross a 50% share of electricity generation at the end of this decade.

The International Energy Agency says international investment in solar will grow to US$500 billion this year, higher than all other forms of energy generation.

China is leading the world in renewables deployment and investment, installing more solar last year than the rest of the world combined, says the ABC, adding China has also invested heavily in EVs.

“Electric car sales in 2023 were 3.5 million higher than in 2022, a 35% year-on-year increase. This is more than six times higher than in 2018, just five years earlier,” according to International Energy Agency data.

The ABC says as many electric cars were sold in the first quarter of this year as all of 2020 with China having half the EVs on the planet.

Bloomberg NEF expects EV growth to continue and therefore global demand for oil could start to fall within a few years.

China also leads battery production.