G20 Fails to Phase Out Fossil Fuel Subsidies Despite Climate Emergency Warnings

The G20 poured record levels of public money into fossil fuels last year despite having promised to reduce and wind down production, a report has found. Fossil fuel companies benefited from a record $1.4tn (￡1.1tn) in 2022. according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The G20, a group that includes countries such as the UK, US, EU, and China, agreed back in 2009 to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies “over the medium term” as far back as 2009. Later, at the COP26 climate summit a decade later, world leaders agreed to accelerate these efforts.

Now moving forward to early 2023, the group then failed to reach a consensus on the process for phasing down fossil fuels and the hotly rumoured tripling of renewable energy capacities by 2030, not coming to fruition.

This additional setback is just another notch on the current long list of recent failures, failures that are going to have increasingly harsher consequences, with net zero seemingly taking a back seat.?

Fossil Fuels Continue to be Subsidised in the Trillions

Back in February, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published its sixth report. The report issued a ‘final warning’ for humanity – act now, or it’ll be too late. If temperatures are to exceed 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels, the damage to the climate will be irreversible.

After the IPCC delivered their report, NASA followed suit, publishing a world map, showing regions of the planet that would no longer be habitable in 30 to 50 years’ time, due to climate change.

Despite this fossil fuels continued to be subsidised at a rate of ￡10.3m a minute.

Ipek Gen?sü, an expert at the ODI thinktank, said:

?“The IMF report shows that, at a time when the world is starting to experience worsening impacts of climate change, governments continue to pour fuel onto the fire by providing record levels of subsidies for fossil fuels.”

According to the IPCC report, no continent is safe from extreme weather, so countries cannot take an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach.?

Globally, frequent waves of abnormal weather events have already begun to take place. In 2022, temperatures reached over 40°C in the United Kingdom and increasingly aggressive hurricanes have battered the American coastline. Floods decimated Pakistan and wildfires have raged through Australia.?

Most recently California experienced its first tropical storm in 84 years. It’s not impossible to notice that furthering greenhouse emissions is having a profound effect on the pace of climate change.

Climate Change Set to Make Large Parts of the World Uninhabitable Within Decades

If fossil fuels continue to be subsidised at this level and global warming still isn’t perceived as a ‘today’ threat, The southern hemisphere is the most likely at risk from the most devastation.?

The Middle East is currently warming at twice the global average and by 2050 is predicted to be 4 degrees above the 1.5°C benchmark. Temperatures in the region have already routinely started to push 50°C and greenhouse gas emissions have more than tripled in the region over the last three decades.?

Somewhat more frightening, the area of the Earth’s land surface occupied by inhospitably hot temperatures (greater than 29°C on average) can be expected to rise from a current level of only 0.8% today to 19% in 2070.

This large expansion in uninhabitable land could affect 30% of the projected human population, a massive three billion people. The humanitarian emergency from the mass migration of billions of people would cause irreversible shockwaves through society and would likely contribute to recession and increased poverty.

The Rhodium Group, a think tank that focuses on environmentalism, showed in new data that climate damage will wreak havoc on the southern third of the country, the United States of America erasing more than 8% of its economic output and likely turning migration from a choice to an imperative. If these levels continue, the indications are that by 2100, most of the low and mid-latitudes will be uninhabitable because of heat stress or drought; despite stronger precipitation.?

The short-sighted view of continued fossil fuel usage and in this instance, scaled-up usage seems impossible to comprehend. Considering the bigger losers from severe climate change are considerably the biggest emitters in The Middle East, China, and India. It doesn’t make sense to have this self-destructive attitude in not committing to a viable transition plan. Leaving the troubles for future generations, when, in a drastic scenario, there might not be a country left to save, is selfish.?