“Low Carbon Economy Index,” a report released by the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers, has numerous stark warnings. Sadly they are unlikely to be heeded by those that matter – big companies, governments and people like you and me – because those are the culprits identified in the report.
According to the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, “the gap between what we are doing and what we need to do has again grown, for the sixth year running.” The report adds that at current rates, we’re headed towards 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by the end of the century—twice the agreed upon rate. Here’s a breakdown of the paper’s major findings.
The report notes that the world is going to blow a hole in its carbon budget—the amount we can burn to keep the world from overheating beyond 3.6 degrees:
PricewaterhouseCoopers paints a bleak picture. The timeline is unforgiving. The IPCC and others have estimated that global emissions must peak by 2020 to meet a 2°C budget. So emissions from developed economies need to be consistently falling, and emissions from major developing countries have to start declining from 2020 onwards. G20 nations will need to cut their annual energy-related emissions by one-third by 2030, and by just over half by 2050.
None of that is happening, so we all better change habits ourselves. We must consume less and share more, especially technology.
City Lab by The Atlantic: A Major Accounting Firm Just Ran the Numbers on Climate Change
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