Because of oil shocks reverberating from the Iran war than anything the world has done to fight climate change, scientists said in a new study, global carbon pollution dropped this year ever so slightly, but it’s more.
“So in a way, a little bit of good news, but for the wrong reasons. So he thinks the global peak of carbon emissions is near or here. In 2026, the world emitted 42.2 billion tonne of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. It’s a 0.4% decrease from last year, according to the scientists of the Global Carbon Project, which publishes its estimates in the journal Earth System Science Data Discussions . The international team of more than 140 scientists use data from around the world to calculate the yearly emissions figure, with estimates for the last few months of the year, and then present them at the UN climate negotiations in Antalya, Turkey.
Because of both the timing and type of fuel emission drops, peters said they are certain that this was related to the war-triggered energy shocks.
“It’s downwards which sounds good, but this is largely driven by the war in Iran, what’s happened in the Strait of Hormuz,” said study co-author Glen Peters, a scientist at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Norway. If the overall carbon dioxide emission drop were due solely to a rise in renewables and a systemic drop in fossil fuel use, oil emissions “would slowly come up to a peak and then slowly decline afterward, whereas what we see this year is oil emissions are going up and then suddenly BANG, down 2 per cent,” Peters said. In those past two crises, people hoped the recovery from the shocks would emphasise clean energy, Peters said, “but at the end of the day, we seem to go back to where we were before. Niklas Höhne, co-founder of Germany’s NewClimate Institute, said “permanent shifts are happening” especially with skyrocketing switches to electric cars and trucks, especially in Asia.
But Malte Mienshausen, a climate science and policy expert at the University of Melbourne in Australia, said oil producing nations and companies not affected by the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz reaped “tremendous windfall gains,” and it boosts their efforts to look for oil outside the Middle East. That, he said, will dampen any short-term effects of reduced carbon emissions from the war.
