RIYADH: The COP26 gathering of world leaders in Glasgow that ends on Saturday should focus on the creation of a viable market in carbon “offsets” in order to help the world reach carbon neutrality goals, according to one of the leading experts on energy economics.
Christof Ruehl, former chief economist for BP — now a senior research scholar at the Centre for Global Energy Policy at New York’s Columbia University — told Arab News that increasing commitments to net-zero deadlines raised a “huge and widely under-appreciated problem” for energy policymakers.
“We already know that, without fundamental technological breakthroughs, it will be in very many cases impossible to realize these decarbonisation pledges without deploying offsets — measures which reduce carbon emissions or take carbon out of the atmosphere — elsewhere. Yet there is no market for these offsets, no globally accepted certification, and no regulatory standard,” he said.
“The desperate need for offsets which I see coming risks to create fraud at an unprecedented scale, bigger even than in the (much more limited) European experience a few years back. This has the potential to undermine not only existing decarbonisation pledges but also other efforts at global coordination,” he added.
Saudi Arabia recently committed to net zero by 2060 as part of the Saudi Green Initiative, and earlier this year announced it was to launch a voluntary exchange for carbon offset trading in a plan backed by its sovereign Public Investment Fund and the Tadawul stock market.
Ruehl — responding to a survey organized by Arab News among leading energy experts ahead of both the Glasgow meeting and the G20 talks on climate in Italy that ended in late October — pointed to other challenges faced at the COP26 gathering, especially in relation to the nationally determined contributions set by countries as targets to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions.
“There may be agreements by some countries to raise NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions), but this does not mean that these targets are in any way binding, enforceable or realistic. For some countries could be cynical and say the more promises proliferate today, the easier it will be to collectively break them later,” Ruehl said.
He took a skeptical view on the prospects for progress at the Glasgow meeting.
Ruehl said: “COP26 is supposed to further consolidate national commitments and hence global alignment behind a pathway which eventually would allow the world to reach the Paris target of a 1.5 degree Celsius average global temperature rise.
“Given the way this target is calculated, this would require a tightening of national development goals; progress on establishing an international carbon price; and rules to regulate the greenhouse gas ‘offsets’ without which we will fail to reach our more ambitious decarbonisation targets.
“Except on the first point, limited to non-binding promises, I do not see much progress on the cards,” Ruehl said.
