Climate protection …
is the key task to be solved well before 2050
Situation dramatic
- Greenhouse gas emissions are continuously increasing and lead to
- Temperature/sea level rise with melting polar ice caps, thawing permafrost and methane release, which in turn drive the greenhouse effect in feedback loops spiralling and triggering tipping points with “points-of-no-return”.
- Environment, economy, society are irreversibly damaged.
requires
- limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C (Paris 2015, IPCC 2018).
- the limitation of the greenhouse gas budget to around 500 billion t CO2 equiv..
- the immediate massive reduction of climate-damaging greenhouse gases towards zero … otherwise the budget would be exhausted after less than 1 decade already
- in parallel, increasingly the recovery of greenhouse gas surpluses from the atmosphere.
Climate change mitigation pathway: GHG fossil reduction (red) and land use (grey), GHG removals (blue). Source Rockström et al. (Science 2017)
Decisive cause-related action …
is urgently needed
- Priority must be given to rapid GHG reduction* (at least halving per decade, see above, and decimating by 2050), starting at the sources and emitters. This is where the greatest impact can be achieved. A reversal, on the other hand, is always associated with a considerable time delay, additional costs and often an uncertain outcome.
- The main focus should be on CO2, because CO2 is the dominant GHG component and has a very long residence and effect time in the atmosphere (>500 years). CO2 is mainly produced by the continuing extensive burning of fossil energies, caused by buildings, industry, transport and climate-damaging land use, so that energy and emission saving potentials must be consistently exploited in these applications (motto: the kWh of energy not needed and the tonne not emitted are the best kWh and the best tonne respectively). Buildings, with a GHG share of 40%, are the main source of emissions*. Building operation (heating, WW, appliances) contributes 3/4 of this, manufacturing/conversion (cement, concrete, burnt clinker, bricks …) about 1/4, with manufacturing leading over time, which increases its weight.
- Other GHGs are not negligible despite lower emission amounts, with methane dominating CH4 … and being around 30 to 80 times as effective as CO2 per unit emission depending on the time period considered. Methane is emitted mainly from agriculture/livestock, natural gas extraction and distribution (“fracking”, “slippage”) and increasingly from thawing permafrost. The amounts are often underestimated. Moreover, it is much more short-lived than CO2 (around a factor of 50!) and therefore unfolds its effect especially in the next critical years, where it must consequently be assessed with the higher factor of 80, deviating from the usual equivalence consideration. The reduction of natural gas demand and its underestimated “slip losses” as well as the reduction of demand for animal products and therefore has a higher significance than often assumed.
BSMC makes targeted contributions …
- at international conferences (see sources)
- through consistent integration into daily extension work
- through consistent operation, support and promotion of climate-friendly building and renovation with demanding standards (see Buildings).
- Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) ***