According to a new report by BloombergNEF, a global research organisation, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, India has reduced its funding to the fossil fuel industry from 2015 to 2019 by 4%. The G20 countries provided $636 billion in direct support for fossil fuels in 2019, which is just 10% less than that in 2015, wrote the H.T. Times.
The report added that among the G20 countries, India had minimised its dependence on the fossil fuel industry, it has still a long way to go. India still has 66 coal power plants in the pipeline, just next to China, which has 247 coal power plants. Indonesia has 33 coal power plants.
Moreover, it also mentioned that most G20 countries had introduced ambitious climate plans to fulfil the agenda of the Paris agreement, which is to reach a temperature below 1.5 degrees celsius before the pre-industrial levels. At the same time, however, these countries have also spent $3.3 trillion on coal, oil, gas, and fossil-fuel power between 2015 and 2019, which could have been used to fund 232GW new solar power plants or over 3.5 times the size of the current U.S. electricity grid.
The G20 has reduced a total of 10% in total from 2015 to 2019. The major contribution to this reduction has been done by Argentina, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, and the U.K. However, variation lies within the countries’ consumption at the global level as there are eight countries, including Australia, Canada, and the U.S., which increased their support for fossil fuels in the meantime. In this process, they also saw a rise in the production and utilisation of fossil fuels.
Eight of the countries that have adopted emission pricing have seen mixed results. Either it is due to its relaxed policies due to low prices of carbon or the concessions to emitters are too generous. For example, in the U.S., state-level programs cover less than one-tenth of national emissions, collectively, and prices are relatively low. Several G-20 countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Brazil, have yet to price greenhouse gas emissions, wrote BloombergNEF in its Press Release.
“Given that the G-20 accounts for nearly three-quarters of global emissions, progress from those governments in these three areas would mark a huge step forward toward tacking climate change. So far, they have yet to step up to the plate,” commented Victoria Cuming, head of global policy at BloombergNEF and lead author of the factbook.
Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies and the U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, said, “Winning the fight against climate change requires urgent and bold action across every industry, and we need governments to lead the way. We hope that G-20 members take this report to heart, use its recommendations to hit their Paris Agreement targets, and show the world the health and economic benefits of building a resilient, sustainable global economy.”
Reducing the support for fossil fuels to as minimal a limit as possible is listed as one of the major aims of the upcoming United Nations COP26 climate convention. However, the report observes that a substantial amount of funding is going to fossil fuels in all the 19 individual countries of the G20.