AFP UK

Dozens of countries on Tuesday joined a United States and European Union pledge to cut emissions of methane — the most potent greenhouse gas — by 30 percent this decade, in the most significant climate commitment so far at COP26.

The initiative, which experts say could have a powerful short-term impact on global heating, followed an announcement earlier Tuesday in which more than 100 nations agreed to end deforestation by 2030.

“One of the most important things we can do between now and 2030, to keep 1.5C in reach, is reduce our methane emissions as soon as possible,” said US President Joe Biden, referring to the central goal of the 2015 Paris agreement. 

He called the pledge, which has so far been signed by more than 80 nations, a “game-changing commitment” that covered countries responsible for around half of global methane emissions.

European Commission head Ursula Von der Leyen said that the methane cut would “immediately slow down climate change”.

“We cannot wait until 2050. We have to cut emissions fast and methane is one of the gases we can cut the fastest,” she said.

Heads of state and government are gathered in Glasgow for a two-day high-level summit that host Britain is hoping will kick start ambitious climate action during the two-week COP26. 

Organisers say the ensuing shuttle diplomacy and painstaking negotiation will be crucial for the continued viability of the 2015 Paris Agreement, and its goal to limit temperature rises to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius. 

While the summit’s first day passed with much rhetoric but only lukewarm climate pledges, Tuesday’s twin announcements were broadly welcomed by campaigners.

– Stronger than CO2 –

Decades of climate pledges have been rooted in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Yet methane (CH4) is more than 80 times more potent than CO2, and its sources, such as open pit coal mines and livestock, have received relatively little attention until now.

The United Nations last month said that global methane emissions could be slashed by 20 percent at little or no cost using existing practices or technologies.

A report from earlier this year showed that “available targeted methane measures” could see CH4 levels reduced by 45 percent by 2030. 

This would shave 0.3C off projected warming, save a quarter of a million air pollution deaths and increase global crop yields by 26 million tonnes, the UN’s Environment Programme said.

“Cutting  methane emissions is essential to keep global warming from breaching 1.5C,” said Helen Mountford, from the World Resources Institute.

“Strong  and rapid action to cut  methane emissions offers a range of benefits, from limiting near-term warming and curbing air pollution to improved food security and better public health.”

– Access issues –

Earlier Tuesday, countries made a multibillion-dollar pledge to end deforestation by 2030. 

But the promise was met with scepticism from environmental groups, and although details were sparse, it appeared to largely resemble a similar pledge made by more than 200 countries and organisations in 2014. 

The British government said that the plan to drum up around $20 billion in public and private funding had been endorsed by more than 100 leaders representing over 85 percent of Earth’s forests, including the Amazon rainforest.

The summit pact to “halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030” encompasses promises to secure the rights of indigenous peoples, and recognise “their role as forest guardians”.

While British Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the pledge as “unprecedented”, a UN climate gathering in New York in 2014 issued a similar declaration to end deforestation by 2030.

An assessment earlier this year found that seven years on from the pact, virtually no government was on course to fulfil their responsibilities.

Trees continue to be cut down on an industrial scale, not least in the Amazon under the far-right government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Humans have already cut down half of Earth’s forests, a practice doubly harmful for the climate when CO2-sucking trees are replaced with livestock or monoculture crops.

The laundry list for COP26 remains daunting, with pressure on leaders to commit to faster decarbonisation and provide billions to nations already dealing with the fallout of climate change.

Meanwhile, chaotic scenes continued on Tuesday around the COP26 venue, with attendees queueing around the block awaiting security checks. 

By early afternoon, the UN organisers sent a text alert asking people to stay away from the venue “in order to ensure compliance with Covid-19 measures”. 

Accessibility issues in the locked down city centre were highlighted as Israel’s energy minister, who uses a wheelchair, was unable to enter the venue on Monday.

At the foot of an Icelandic volcano, a newly-opened plant is sucking carbon dioxide from the air and turning it to rock, locking away the main culprit behind global warming.

Orca, based on the Icelandic word for “energy,” does its cutting-edge work at the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant in southwest Iceland.

It is the world’s largest plant using the direct air capture technology (DAC) increasingly lighting up the imagination as the world struggles to avert catastrophic global warming.

Yet DAC is the least developed of the carbon removal technologies promoted as the key to compensating for the slow switch away from fossil fuels.

Climeworks, a Swiss start-up that has just built the plant around 30 kilometres from the capital Reykjavik in a tie-up with Icelandic companies, is not deterred.

“You have to learn to walk before you can run,” said Julie Gosalvez, in charge of marketing for the company.

Her firm works with Iceland’s Carbfix, which has pioneered underground carbon storage, and ON Power, a local geothermal electricity provider.

The enterprise uses Carbfix’s method that mimics, in accelerated format, a natural process that can take hundreds of thousands of years.

By pulling CO2 from ambient air, the plant is different from more traditional types of carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects at highly-polluting industrial smokestacks.

The giant steel structure resting on cement slabs and linked to a maze of pipes is powered by the nearby geothermal power plant.

The facility is made of eight containers similar to those used in maritime transport, stacked up in pairs. 

Fans in front of the collector draw in ambient air and release it, largely purified of CO2, through ventilators at the back.

Project manager Lukas Kaufmann said “very selective filter material inside our collector containers” catch carbon dioxide.

– Turned to rock –

“As soon as the filter is full, we close it off, and then we heat it up to around 100 degrees Celsius” to separate the pure gas, Kaufmann added.

Once free of impurities after treatment in the adjoining process hall, the carbon dioxide is then piped underground a distance of three kilometres (1.8 miles) to an area where grey, igloo-shaped domes dot a lunar-like landscape.

Dissolved in fresh water, the gas is then injected under high pressure into the basalt rock between 800 and 2,000 metres underground.

The solution fills the rock’s cavities and the solidification process begins — a chemical reaction turning it to calcified white crystals that occurs when the gas comes in contact with the calcium, magnesium and iron in the basalt.

It takes up to two years for the CO2 to petrify.

Carbfix insists the method is the safest and most stable to stock carbon for now.

The carbon dioxide would only be re-released into the air if the rock were to heat up to very high temperatures, as in a volcanic eruption, Didier Dalmazzone, head of the chemistry laboratory at French engineering school ENSTA Paris, told AFP.

The volcanic activity level here is considered low, with the last eruption 1,900 years ago.

The Orca plant, which cost $10-15 million to build, can suck up around 4,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.

The amount is tiny by global standards. Climate modelling suggests the world needs to eliminate several billion tonnes per year by 2050.

– Costly process –

CCS is one of the methods advocated by experts to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C from pre-industrial levels by 2100.

That is the bar seen as the only way to prevent catastrophic global warming.

Other CCS methods capture CO2 before it enters the atmosphere, pulling it immediately from highly-concentrated industrial pollution zones.

But the direct air capture (DAC) process, like the one in Iceland, aims to capture past emissions already in the atmosphere.

A large share of CO2 emissions is diffuse and can’t be captured immediately at the source, such as those from planes, cars and ships.

However, the DAC method is in its early days and is hampered by the small concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. 

While the world’s global CO2 concentration beat a new alarming record in 2020, it represents just a tiny amount of the total air, at 0.041 percent.

Orca has to process two million cubic metres of air to capture just one tonne of CO2 — a costly process that requires large amounts of energy, though Climeworks would not divulge any details.

According to Dalmazzone, one option would be to capture just two-thirds of the CO2 in the air. 

“That could be less costly and would be good enough, because the aim is to remove some carbon dioxide from the air, not all the CO2.”

Iceland is an ideal place to use the technique, with its abundance of water and 70 percent of its primary energy coming from geothermal sources.

But the method may not be viable everywhere.

Carbfix therefore plans to test injecting salt water to see if the method can be adapted. 

Meanwhile, a carbon transfer and storage hub will soon open in Straumsvik Bay, on the outskirts of the capital Reykjavik.

Dubbed Coda Terminal, it will process carbon captured at industrial sites in Northern Europe and shipped to Iceland for storage.

A first operations vessel is expected to be able to process 300,000 tonnes of CO2 per year by 2025, with a goal of 10 times more in 2030.

World leaders on Tuesday issued a multibillion-dollar pledge to end deforestation by 2030, a promise met with scepticism by environmental groups who say more urgent action is needed to save the planet’s lungs.

According to summit hosts the British government, the pledge is backed by almost $20 billion in public and private funding and is endorsed by more than 100 leaders representing over 85 percent of the world’s forests, including the Amazon rainforest, Canada’s northern boreal forest and the Congo Basin rainforest.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the agreement on deforestation was pivotal to the overarching goal of limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius — the most ambitious Paris Agreement target.

“Climate change and biodiversity are two sides of the same coin,” Johnson said Tuesday.

“We can’t deal with the devastating loss of habitat and species without tackling climate change and we can’t tackle climate change without protecting our natural environment and respecting the rights of indigenous people.”

“So protecting our forests is not only the right course of action to tackle climate change, but the right course for a more prosperous future for us all,” he said.

Signatories include Brazil and Russia, which have been singled out for accelerating deforestation in their territories, as well as the United States, China, Australia and France.

The forests pact was the first of two anticipated announcements in Glasgow on Tuesday, with governments set to unveil a global agreement to reduce emissions of methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — by 30 percent this decade.

A senior US administration offical told AFP that 90 countries including “half of the top 30 major methane emitters” had signed up to the pledge.

– Not new – 

The summit pact to “halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030” encompasses promises to secure the rights of indigenous peoples, and recognise “their role as forest guardians”.

While Johnson described the pledge as “unprecedented”, a UN climate gathering in New York in 2014 issued a similar declaration.

That deal saw more than 200 countries, companies and indigenous groups promise to halve the rate of deforestation by 2020, and end it by 2030.

However an assessment earlier this year found that seven years on from the pact, virtually no government was on course to fulfil their responsibilities.

Trees continue to be cut down on an industrial scale, not least in the Amazon under the far-right government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Deforestation in Brazil surged in 2020, leading to a 9.5-percent increase in its emissions.

Humans have already cut down half of Earth’s forests, a practice doubly harmful for the climate when CO2-sucking trees are replaced with livestock or monoculture crops.

Almost a quarter of all man-made emissions of carbon dioxide can be attributed to land use activity such as logging, deforestation and farming.

And a growing body of research shows that large swathes of the Amazon basin are at risk of tipping from a carbon sink to a source of emissions due to deforestation and drought.

US President Joe Biden on Tuesday said that forests were an “indispensable piece of keeping our climate goals within reach” and urged leaders to seek to eliminate deforestation with the “same seriousness” as they pursued emissions cuts.

– 10 more years –

Greenpeace criticised the Glasgow initiative for effectively giving the green light to “another decade of deforestation”.

“Indigenous peoples are calling for 80 percent of the Amazon to be protected by 2025, and they’re right, that’s what’s needed,” said Greenpeace Brazil executive director Carolina Pasquali.

“The climate and the natural world can’t afford this deal,” she said.

Many studies have shown that the best way of protecting forests worldwide is to keep them under the management of locals with generations of preservation knowledge.

The commitment comes a day after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres harangued the gathered leaders to act to save humanity.

“It’s time to say: enough,” he said.

“Enough of brutalising biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.”

The UN COP26 conference will continue for another two weeks to try to craft national plans to forestall the most devastating impacts of global warming.

World leaders on Tuesday issued a multibillion-dollar pledge to end deforestation by 2030, a promise met with scepticism by environmental groups who say more urgent action is needed to save the planet’s lungs.

According to summit hosts the British government, the pledge is backed by almost $20 billion in public and private funding and is endorsed by more than 100 leaders representing over 85 percent of the world’s forests, including the Amazon rainforest, Canada’s northern boreal forest and the Congo Basin rainforest.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the agreement on deforestation was pivotal to the overarching goal of limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius — the most ambitious Paris Agreement target.

“Climate change and biodiversity are two sides of the same coin,” Johnson said Tuesday.

“We can’t deal with the devastating loss of habitat and species without tackling climate change and we can’t tackle climate change without protecting our natural environment and respecting the rights of indigenous people.”

“So protecting our forests is not only the right course of action to tackle climate change, but the right course for a more prosperous future for us all,” he said.

Signatories include Brazil and Russia, which have been singled out for accelerating deforestation in their territories, as well as the United States, China, Australia and France.

The government of Brazil, much criticised for its environmental policies, announced Monday at the summit that it would cut 2005-level greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 — up from a previous pledge of 43 percent.

“We are presenting a new, more ambitious climate goal,” Environment Minister Joaquim Leite announced in a message transmitted from Brasilia to Glasgow.

Leite also said Brazil would aim to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

– Not new – 

The summit pledge to “halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030” encompasses promises to secure the rights of indigenous peoples, and recognise “their role as forest guardians”.

While Johnson described the pledge as “unprecedented”, a UN climate gathering in New York in 2014 issued a similar declaration to halve the rate of deforestation by 2020, and end it by 2030.

However, trees continue to be cut down on an industrial scale, not least in the Amazon under the far-right government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Deforestation in Brazil surged in 2020, leading to a 9.5-percent increase in its emissions.

Humans have already cut down half of Earth’s forests, a practice doubly harmful for the climate when CO2-sucking trees are replaced with livestock or monoculture crops.

Almost a quarter of all man-made emissions of carbon dioxide can be attributed to land use activity such as logging, deforestation and farming.

President Joko Widodo of resource-rich Indonesia said his own archipelago’s rainforests, mangroves, seas and peatlands were key to restricting climate change.

“We are committed to protecting these critical carbon sinks and our natural capital for future generations,” he said in a statement.

– 10 more years –

Greenpeace criticised the Glasgow initiative for effectively giving the green light to “another decade of deforestation”.

“Indigenous peoples are calling for 80 percent of the Amazon to be protected by 2025, and they’re right, that’s what’s needed,” said Greenpeace Brazil executive director Carolina Pasquali.

“The climate and the natural world can’t afford this deal,” she said.

Many studies have shown that the best way of protecting forests worldwide is to keep them under the management of locals with generations of preservation knowledge.

The commitment comes a day after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres harangued the gathered leaders to act to save humanity.

“It’s time to say: enough,” he said.

“Enough of brutalising biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.”

The UN COP26 conference will continue for another two weeks to try to craft national plans to forestall the most devastating impacts of global warming.

Delhi police have seized four tonnes of illegal polluting firecrackers as the Indian megacity heads into its winter smog season when its 20 million people regularly choke on putrid grey-yellow air.

Traditionally, millions of firecrackers are set off during Diwali, the Hindu festival of light, which takes place later this week across the nation of 1.3 billion people.

In Delhi their smoke mixes with car exhaust, factory emissions, construction dust and burning crop stubble from nearby states to worsen a poisonous cocktail that regularly exceeds safe limits by up to 20 times.

Seeking to reduce the pollution, authorities like in previous years have banned firecrackers in cities with particularly bad air.

On Monday four tonnes of firecrackers were seized from various locations in Delhi after police raided markets and arrested dozens of people illegally selling the explosives.

Media reports said some of the firecrackers were procured from illegal factories and brought into Delhi from the neighbouring states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

Delhi on Monday experienced its first day of the season with “poor” air while the suburbs of Ghaziabad and Noida recorded “very poor” air on a government index.

Twenty-two of the world’s 30 most polluted cities are in India, with Delhi being the most polluted capital city, according to a world air quality report released last year.

A Lancet report last year said 67 million deaths were attributable to air pollution in India in 2019, including almost 17,500 in Delhi.

Earlier this year the Delhi government opened its first “smog tower” containing 40 giant fans that pump 1,000 cubic metres of air per second through filters.

The $2-million installation halves the amount of harmful particulates in the air but only within a radius of one square kilometre (0.4 square miles), according to engineers.

China said it has increased daily coal production by over one million tonnes, easing its energy shortage as world leaders gather in Britain for climate talks billed as one of the last chances to avert catastrophic global warming.

The world’s biggest coal importer has battled widespread power cuts in recent months that have disrupted supply chains, due to strict emissions targets and record prices for the fossil fuel.

But the crisis is now winding down thanks to a boost in domestic coal output, according to a Sunday statement from China’s top economic planning body.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said average daily coal production has risen to above 11.5 million tonnes since the middle of October, up by 1.1 million tonnes compared with the end of September.

The production surge comes as world leaders — but not Chinese President Xi Jinping — convene in Glasgow for COP26 talks to secure more ambitious global greenhouse gas emissions.

Xi, whose country is the world’s largest emitter of planet-heating gases, has instead submitted a written statement to the summit.

In recent months, several Chinese factories were forced to halt operations due to power outages, raising concern about global supply chains.

The squeeze worsened as Beijing’s Covid-19 border restrictions hindered shipments of raw materials from overseas, while a trade tiff with Australia exacerbated the drop in coal imports.

But at one point in late October daily output hit 11.72 million tonnes, a record in recent years.

One large coal mining company in northern Shanxi province told state broadcaster CCTV it was operating at full capacity in an effort to ensure supplies.

“We structured our original production plan so that it could be organised to manage a 30,000-tonne per month increase,” said Wang Yonggang, the Communist Party secretary at one of the firm’s mines.

Spot prices for the fuel are also “falling fast”, the NDRC said.

A sales director from another mining firm told the broadcaster that it had reduced the factory price.

China generates about 60 percent of its energy from burning coal.

Beijing submitted a renewed climate plan to the United Nations days before the COP26 climate summit, confirming its goal to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 and slash its emissions intensity — the amount of emissions per unit of economic output — by more than 65 percent.

World leaders meeting at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow will on Tuesday issue a multibillion-dollar pledge to end deforestation by 2030 but that date is too distant for campaigners who want action sooner to save the planet’s lungs.

According to summit hosts the British government, the pledge is backed by almost $20 billion in public and private funding and is endorsed by more than 100 leaders representing over 85 percent of the world’s forests, including the Amazon rainforest, Canada’s northern boreal forest and the Congo Basin rainforest.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the agreement on deforestation was pivotal to the overarching ambition of limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“These great teeming ecosystems –- these cathedrals of nature — are the lungs of our planet,” he was expected to say in Glasgow, according to Downing Street.

“Forests support communities, livelihoods and food supply, and absorb the carbon we pump into the atmosphere. They are essential to our very survival,” said Johnson, who is chairing the summit.

“With today’s (Tuesday’s) unprecedented pledges, we will have a chance to end humanity’s long history as nature’s conqueror, and instead become its custodian.”

The signatories include Brazil and Russia, which have been singled out for accelerating deforestation in their territories, as well as the United States, China, Australia and France.

The government of Brazil, much criticised for its environmental policies, announced Monday at the summit that it would cut 2005-level greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 — up from a previous pledge of 43 percent.

“We are presenting a new, more ambitious climate goal,” Environment Minister Joaquim Leite announced in a message transmitted from Brasilia to Glasgow.

Leite also said Brazil would aim to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

– India targets net-zero 2070 –

For his part, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a target of net-zero emissions by 2070.

India’s commitment was eagerly awaited, as the South Asian giant is the fourth biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind China, the United States and the European Union.

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg urged the leaders gathered for COP26 to act and stop their “blah blah blah” during a demonstration in Glasgow.

Almost a quarter of all man-made emissions of carbon dioxide can be attributed to land use activity such as logging, deforestation and farming.

President Joko Widodo of resource-rich Indonesia said his own archipelago’s rainforests, mangroves, seas and peatlands were key to restricting climate change.

“We are committed to protecting these critical carbon sinks and our natural capital for future generations,” he said in a UK government statement.

– 10 more years – 

The summit pledge to “halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030” encompasses promises to secure the rights of indigenous peoples, and recognise “their role as forest guardians”.

While Johnson described the pledge as “unprecedented”, a UN climate gathering in New York in 2014 issued a similar declaration to halve the rate of deforestation by 2020, and end it by 2030.

However, trees continue to be cut down on an industrial scale, not least in the Amazon under the far-right government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Humans have already cut down half of Earth’s forests, a practice doubly harmful for the climate when CO2-sucking trees are replaced with livestock or monoculture crops.

Greenpeace criticised the Glasgow initiative for effectively giving the green light to “another decade of deforestation”.

“Indigenous peoples are calling for 80 percent of the Amazon to be protected by 2025, and they’re right, that’s what’s needed,” said Greenpeace Brazil executive director Carolina Pasquali.

“The climate and the natural world can’t afford this deal,” she said.

Many studies have shown that the best way of protecting forests worldwide is to keep them under the management of locals with generations of preservation knowledge.

The commitment comes a day after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres harangued the gathered leaders to act to save humanity.

“It’s time to say: enough,” he said.

“Enough of brutalising biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.”

Summit host Johnson warned of the “uncontainable” anger of the younger generations if the leaders failed to act decisively on climate change.

The UN COP26 conference will continue for another two weeks to try to craft national plans to forestall the most devastating impacts of global warming.

As camels munch on the fringes of Thar desert, an oasis of blue solar panels stretches further than the eye can see at Bhadla Park — a cornerstone of India’s bid to become a clean energy powerhouse.

Currently, coal powers 70 percent of the nation’s electricity generation, but Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pledged that by 2030, India will produce more energy through solar and other renewables than its entire grid now. 

“First, India will increase its non-fossil energy capacity to 500 gigawatts… Second, by 2030, 50 percent of our energy requirements will come from renewable resources,” Modi told the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

The arid state of Rajasthan, where Bhadla Park takes up an area almost the size of San Marino, sees 325 sunny days each year, making it perfectly placed for the solar power revolution, officials say. 

Once an expanse of desert, authorities have capitalised on the sparsely populated area, claiming minimal displacement of local communities. Today robots clean dust and sand off an estimated 10 million solar panels, while a few hundred humans monitor.

This pursuit of a greener future is fuelled by necessity. 

India, home to 1.3 billion people and poised to overtake China as the most populous country, has a growing and voracious appetite for energy — but it is also on the frontline of climate change. 

In the next two decades, it has to add a power system the size of Europe’s to meet demand for its swelling population, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), but it also has to tackle toxic air quality in its big cities. 

“India is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world for climate change and that is why it has this big push on renewables to decarbonise the power sector, but also reduce air pollution,” Arunabha Ghosh, climate policy expert from the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, told AFP.

But experts say the country — the world’s third-biggest carbon emitter — is some way from reaching its green targets, with coal set to remain a key part of the energy mix in the coming years.

– ‘Huge transformation’ –

Although India’s green energy has increased five-fold in just over a decade to 100GW this year, the sector now needs to grow by the same proportion again to meet its 2030 goals. 

“I believe this is more of an aspirational target… to show to the world that we are moving in the right direction,” Vinay Rustagi from renewable energy consultancy Bridge to India, told AFP. 

“But it would be a big stretch and seems highly unrealistic, in view of various demand and supply challenges,” Rustagi said.

Proponents point to Bhadla Solar Park, one of the largest in the world, as an example of how innovation, technology, and public and private finance can drive swift change. 

“We’ve huge chunks of land where there’s not a blade of grass. Now you don’t see the ground anymore. You just see solar panels. It’s such a huge transformation,” Subodh Agarwal, Rajasthan’s additional chief secretary for energy, told AFP.

Authorities are incentivising renewables firms to set up in the region, known as the “desert state”. Agarwal says demand has “accelerated” since 2019.

“It will be a different Rajasthan. It will be the solar state,” he said of the next decade. 

If this surge is sustained then coal-fired power for electricity generation could peak by 2024, according to Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) projections. 

Currently, solar power accounts for four percent of electricity generation. Before Modi’s announcement the IEA estimated solar and coal will converge at around 30 percent each by 2040 based on current policies. 

India’s billionaires, including Asia’s two richest men Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, are pledging huge investments, while Modi is setting up a renewables park the size of Singapore in his home state of Gujarat.

– Show me the money –

But reshaping an entire power network takes time and money, analysts warn.

Around 80 percent of India’s solar panels are still imported from China, the world’s biggest producer.

Gyanesh Chaudhary, chief executive of Indian panel manufacturer Vikram Solar, insisted there should be “more than 30” local firms like his already. 

“That’s the kind of demand (and) ecosystem that India would essentially need… It should have happened sooner.”

Experts say domestic growth has been stymied by insufficient policies, funding shortages, cheaper panels from China, and infrastructure and energy storage issues. 

“A lot of these plants are located at very long distances from power stations, so you have to think of linking them,” explained Apurba Mitra, World Resources Institute India’s climate policy chief.

Modi, who announced at COP26 that India would be carbon neutral by 2070, made it clear that such emissions-cutting pledges would require finance from rich, historic emitters.

“India expects developed countries to provide climate finance of $1 trillion at the earliest. Today it is necessary that as we track the progress made in climate mitigation, we should also track climate finance,” he told more than 120 leaders at the critical talks.

– Empowering lives – 

Farmer and doctor Amit Singh’s three-acre family farmland in Rajasthan’s Bhaloji village was running out of water and hit by frequent power outages.

“I always saw the sun and its rays and wondered… why not harness it to generate electricity?,” he said. 

Singh first installed rooftop panels at his small hospital which generated half of its energy needs.

He then invested family savings into a government-linked project on his land.

The mini-solar farm cost 35 million rupees ($450,000) and Singh sells electricity to the grid for 400,000 rupees a month.

“It’s the ultimate source of energy, which is otherwise going to waste… I feel I’m contributing to the developmental needs of my village,” he added. 

Ghosh said it was vital to bring down costs.

“When a farmer is able to generate power from their solar plant near their farm and pump out water — we are then able to bring the energy transition closer to the people,” he added. 

Pratibha Pai, the founder-director of Chirag Rural Development Foundation which has brought solar to more than 100,000 villagers, believes in clean energy’s transformative role.

She said: “We start with solar power… we end with safe drinking water, power for dark village roads, power for little rural schools which will hopefully script the story of a ‘big’ India.”

In a gleaming new building in the northern Swedish town of Lulea, steelmaker SSAB is using a new manufacturing method that could revolutionise the highly-polluting industry by eliminating nearly all its CO2 emissions.

But making the method work at scale poses major challenges and the technique may not be the ‘silver bullet’ everyone is hoping for. Critics argue it may just push emissions elsewhere.

Finding ways to decarbonise steel, an indispensable component of modern industry, is one of the keys to drastically reducing carbon emissions to meet climate goals.

Among heavy industries, iron and steel production is the number one contributor to CO2 emissions, according to the International Energy Agency.

The World Steel Association  estimates the industry accounts for about seven to nine percent of man-made emissions worldwide, with an estimated 2.6 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted in 2020.

In Lulea, the sterile appearance of the new building stands in stark contrast to the nearby soot-covered blast furnace it’s meant to replace.

Alight with the signature orange glow of melted metal as liquid iron spews out, the blast furnace is the main method for producing steel today.

“By switching technology from a normal blast furnace where we use coal and emit CO2, we end up with regular water instead,” SSAB site manager Monica Quinteiro tells AFP during a visit to the HYBRIT pilot facility.

“We can reduce the CO2 emissions from steelmaking by 90 percent,” she adds.

HYBRIT is a collaboration between steelmaker SSAB, state-owned utility Vattenfall and mining company LKAB.

– Removing oxygen –

The iron ore that comes out of a mine is usually rich in oxides, chemical compounds made up of iron and oxygen, the most well-known form of which is rust.

To make steel, that oxygen needs to be removed.

Air heated to more than 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 F) is fed into the blast furnace, causing coke to react with the oxygen which is then released as CO2, resulting in nearly two tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of steel produced.

In the HYBRIT facility, the oxygen is removed differently.

“Instead of using heated air, we are circulating hot hydrogen gas,” Quintero explains.

The hydrogen, like the carbon in the coke, binds with the oxygen in the iron ore, instead creating water.

While so-called direct reduction of iron isn’t totally new, HYBRIT distinguishes itself by using hydrogen — produced from electrolysis — and ensuring that all of the electricity in the production process is from renewable sources.

While steel is made up of mostly iron, some carbon needs to be added.

“But that’s a very, very small amount that we need to add at the end of the manufacturing process,” Martin Pei, SSAB chief technical officer and HYBRIT project initiator, tells AFP.

If the successful pilot scheme can be scaled up, “We can in principle solve the root cause of the CO2 emissions,” Pei explains.

– Challenges remain –

In August, SSAB shipped the first batch of steel plates — 25 tonnes — made with the new process — which it labels fossil-free — to truckmaker Volvo.

It’s a drop in the ocean compared to the 1.86 billion tonnes of steel shipped by steelmakers in 2020, according to the World Steel Association.

But SSAB aims to make 1.5 million tonnes of “fossil-free steel” a year as of 2026, compared to its current production of 7.5 million tonnes a year.

The biggest hurdle to full-scale production is access to electricity, especially that produced from renewable sources.

To operate at scale, SSAB would need an estimated 15 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity a year, and for their mining operations LKAB needs 55 TWh.

Together that represents roughly a third of Sweden’s total electricity consumption.

– Hidden costs? –

Not everyone is a fan of the approach.

“It takes such massive amounts of electricity, at a time when electricity production is already strained,” Christian Sandstrom, an associate professor at the Jonkoping International Business School, told AFP.

Sandstrom and two colleagues wrote a paper criticising the project in October and questioning the “fossil-free” label.

“The net effect of this hydrogen-based steel is a higher consumption of electricity and from what we can see there are no signs that electricity is going fossil-free,” Sandstrom said.

Scaling up SSAB’s production would hardly make a dent in emissions from steel globally: in terms of tonnage, SSAB only ranked 52 among global steel producers in 2020, according to the World Steel Association.

But others are betting this may be the future. 

In February, the newly formed Swedish company H2 Green Steel announced plans to build a facility that would be operational in 2024.

And China’s HBIS, the world’s third-largest steel producer, in May announced it had started production on a demonstration facility for its own direct reduction of iron using hydrogen.

As warnings have intensified about the massive damage that climate change will have on the world in the coming decades, big business has started to make commitments to reduce carbon emissions.

But are these companies making a genuine attempt to fight global warming, or simply “greenwashing” their brands to try to divert criticism while still reaping huge profits from their carbon-based industries?

With the COP26 summit in Glasgow coming after the UN warned the world was barrelling towards “climate catastrophe”, analyses by consultants and think tanks show there is still much more that can be done.

– The omissions of ‘net zero’ emissions –

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says that industry accounts for almost 40 percent of the world’s energy consumption and still overwhelming uses fossil fuels: oil, gas and particularly coal, which all hugely contribute to human-induced global warming.

The IEA said that “a number of companies around the world have set ambitious targets, but their potential impact remains uneven”.

Out of 1,300 companies surveyed by the Boston Consulting Group, only 11 percent said they had reached their carbon emission targets over the last five years. And just nine percent accurately measured their emissions.

The InfluenceMap think tank’s “A-List” assessed the climate ambitions of hundreds of companies, but found just 15 were sufficient.

Twelve of the 15 companies were European, with Unilever, Ikea, Nestle and Tesla among the few industry heavy-hitters using their corporate clout to push for ambitious policies.

InfluenceMap’s Kendra Haven said that “large parts of the corporate world appear to remain ambivalent or actively opposed to bold climate action”.

The London-based think tank disqualified companies that maintain memberships to “obstructive lobby groups”, so firms like Microsoft and Siemens AG did not make the cut because they are associated with either the National Association of Manufacturers or the US Chamber of Commerce. 

The number of companies that have said they aim to reduce emissions to “net zero” in the future has increased more than six-fold since 2019 to over 3,000, BP said in a July report.

However the phrase “net zero” can hide many emissions, depending on how the company chooses to define it. 

Many firms have said their direct emissions would hit net zero in the coming decades — but depending on what they produce, their indirect emissions could be far larger. 

For example, major oil producers could commit to zero direct emissions while not including the vast carbon consequences of the oil they supply.

“Carbon offsets” such as support for reforesting projects can also be abused to bend the figure towards zero.

However for a transition in line with the targets of the Paris climate agreement, companies can get certified by the Science-Based Targets initiative, which brings together experts, NGOs and the UN Global Compact.

– ‘Greenwashing’ –

There are also steps the financial sector could take to help, including better tracking of the environmental performance of investments that are labeled as carbon neutral.

Out of 16,500 investment funds analysed by the Carbon Disclosure Project, only 0.5 percent are currently in line with the goals of the Paris agreement.

“The reality of traditional climate investing strategies does not live up to the promises,” a study by the French Edhec business school’s scientific beta research chair found, lashing out at “greenwashing”.

“Speaking of climate investment when the companies’ climate performance only accounts on average for 12 percent of the weight of their stocks in the portfolios is at best a misnomer and at worst misinformation.”

When it comes to the fossil fuel industry, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said that attention has so far been on American and European energy companies, but producers in the rest of the world also need to be put under pressure.

“All these companies should be reporting in a transparent way how much investment they are putting on clean energy, how much emissions they are responsible for and what are their plans to face this,” Birol told AFP.

Saying that “greenwashing” has posed a challenge, he added that the IEA has been tracking how these companies invest in clean energy.

“Two years ago, one percent of all their investments were going to clean energy, and this year it’s five percent. So there is an increase,” Birol said.

“But 95 percent is still going to their usual practices”.