Compliance with the Paris Agreement will require large countries of an unprecedented refusal of coal and gas consumption as the main sources of energy. This conclusion came scientists from Sweden and Norway, which analyzed the episodes of reducing the use of fossil fuels in 105 countries from 1960 to 2018. According to the results of the study published in the ONE Earth magazine, people have less consumed oil in response to the threats of energy security in the 1970s and 1980s and replaced it with coal, gas and nuclear energy. Briefly about scientific work is described in a press release on PHYS.ORG.
According to the Paris Agreement, large countries should make every effort to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuel by 2050 to limit the growth of global temperatures in this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. Scientists analyzed the scale of such efforts and their impact on the development of carbon-intensive technologies that will have to be replaced by more environmentally friendly alternatives.
Researchers revealed 147 episodes when the consumption of coal, oil or natural gas was reduced by more than five percent over the decade. In history, the rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels is usually limited to small countries, such as Denmark, but such cases are less relevant for global warming scenarios, where the reduction should occur on the scale of continents.
Nevertheless, the use of certain types of fossil fuels, especially oil, was quickly reduced in the 1970s and 1980s in Western Europe and other industrialized countries, such as Japan. Historically, this was not associated with the transition to other sources of energy, however, contributed to the development of competing technologies in order to avoid threats to energy security.
As for the prevention of serious climate change, the consumption of coal, including in Asia and OECD countries (the organization of economic cooperation and development), should be reduced the most strongest. About half of the scenarios compatible with the goals of the Paris Agreement, assume that the use of coal in Asia will be reduced faster than in any of the historical episodes. More than half of coal reduction scenarios in OECD countries also proved unprecedented.