Average but deserving student who, in order to succeed, should seriously decide to put in the work in all the subjects. This is what the assessment accompanying the annual note of the France student in its commitment to fight against the effects of climate change could look like. The 2022 Carbon Neutrality report of the High Council for Climate (HCC), the body created in 2018 and responsible for giving opinions and recommendations on the public policies implemented to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in France, shows both severe and encouraging.
In the 180-page document, posted online in its entirety by the institution on Wednesday evening, the institution notes that “France’s response to global warming is progressing but remains insufficient and adaptation policies are suffering from a lack of strategic objectives, means and follow-up. And to recall the commitments: to reduce our CO2 emissions by 40% by 2030 compared to 1990 but also to contribute to the respect of the objective, at European level, of a reduction of at least 55% of here in 2030 and to achieve climate neutrality in 2050. A leap is necessary because “major risks of not achieving the objectives set by France for the reduction of greenhouse gases persist”, underlines the text .
A doubling of the annual rate of reduction of emissions
The more years pass, the greater the effort required. In its previous report, released a year ago and called “Strengthening mitigation, engaging adaptation”, the HCC noted “a mixed improvement in the rate of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the monitoring of public policies . “The two years of the pandemic have given us a little breather but, as the HCC regrets, “greenhouse gas emissions in France have increased by around 6.4% from 2020 to 2021 to reach 418 million tons of CO2 equivalent. »
They nevertheless remain “3.8% below their 2019 level, and 23.1% below their 1990 level. The estimated rate of reduction over the 2019-2021 period (-1.9% per year) is close to the rate observed over the decade 2010-2019 (-1.7% per year). The raising of the Europe-wide objectives (-55% by 2030) places the target to be achieved even further and “implies a doubling of the annual rate of reduction of emissions to reach approximately -16 Mt eqCO2 (-4.7%) on average over the period 2022-2030, which must be compared to the observed annual reductions of -8.1 Mt eqCO2 (-1.7%) since 2010.
In the detailed analyzes of the HCC experts, all economic sectors do not deliver the same performance. The drop is “well established and structural in the building industry” with a drop of 1.9 Mt CO2 eq per year over the 2015-2018 period but less, by only 0.2 Mt CO2 eq per year, over the 2019-2021 period. “The annual reduction will have to exceed 3-4 Mt eqCO2 between 2022-2030, to anticipate the ambition” of the new European objectives, underlines the HCC, satisfied to note, since 2015, a reduction in consumption of fuel oil and gas and a growth for electricity and thermal renewable energies, especially linked to the development of heat pumps.
Insufficient deployment of renewable energy sources
For agriculture, which represents 19% of national emissions, the “trajectory respects at this stage the budgets set” but “the National Strategic Plan for the future Common Agricultural Policy 2023-2027 would contribute to achieving only half of the objectives set for 2030 For its part, energy, the only sector whose emissions are well below the decarbonization target, mainly thanks to nuclear power, the HCC points to the insufficient deployment of renewable energy sources. Finally, for transport, the sector that emits the most greenhouse gases in France, the HCC considers that it is necessary to “significantly accelerate the rate of reduction of emissions” to exceed 4.5 Mt eqCO2 per year on the period 2019-2021.
If the share of electric cars (9.8%) is increasing in new registrations, the deployment of the network of charging stations is seriously behind schedule. Same negative remark for air, where funding is not guaranteed over time to make innovations operational allowing planes to depend less on kerosene.