In the wake of the United Nations Climate Action Summit, a federal agency is projecting that global carbon dioxide emissions from energy-related sources will continue to grow in the coming decades.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in its 2019 International Energy Outlook, released last week, that global energy-related CO2 emissions will grow 0.6% per year through 2050 but that future growth is not evenly distributed across the world.
Relatively developed economies collectively show no emissions growth, so all of the future growth is among the group of countries outside the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD.
Countries outside of the OECD collectively have more population, a larger gross domestic product, more energy consumption and higher energy-related CO2 emissions compared with aggregated values from OECD countries, EIA said.
Non-OECD countries include China, which emits the most energy-related CO2 emissions in the world, India and Russia.
EIA projects that coal-related CO2 emissions in non-OECD countries, especially China, will grow at the slowest rate among fossil fuels as natural gas replaces coal in power generation and in industrial applications. Although India’s coal-related CO2 emissions increase 2.8% annually from 2018 to 2050 — the highest among the eight countries in EIA’s International Energy Outlook — China remains the single largest emitter of coal-related CO2 emissions in the world.
The United States remains the largest emitter of energy-related CO2 emissions among OECD members and the largest emitter of natural gas-related emissions among all countries, regardless of OECD membership, EIA said.
