What the highest producers of greenhouse gases are doing to reduce the amount of emissions
United States of America
Russia
India
China
European Union
Five days before the talks at COP26 began in Glasgow, the cabinet of China issued a plan to reduce waste, promote renewables and unconventional fuel, and reform its electricity network.
Summary
In this mind-map, I will be illustrating what the top five producers of greenhouse gases are doing to reduce the amount of emissions. As I go through this, please keep in mind that these nations only set these goals last year, so there won't be much immediate action, but I'll go over their plans nonetheless.
The Prime Minister of India announced at COP26 that they would aim for a 45% reduction of emission intensity by 2030, which is incredibly ambitious compared to their previous goals.
Like the US, the EU has also set a target of 50% reduction in emissions by 2030. But unlike the US, they made incredible progress on their previous target, reaching a 22% reduction in emissions three years before 2020.
In April 2021, American President Joe Biden announced a new target of a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. This was part of his plan to re-enter the Paris Agreement that Donald Trump withdrew from.
Russia has aimed for carbon-neutrality by 2060, but they have a slightly different problem.
Unlike the other countries on this mind-map, Russia’s extensive array of pipelines have been leaking methane to the point where it has become a serious issue.
China's government said that energy-intensive industries like steel, aluminium, cement and oil refining should ensure that more than 30% of their production capacity meets tighter energy efficiency standards by 2025.
Even before the COP26 talks in Glasgow, the Council of the European Union was pushing towards a better future with the "European Green Deal," a climate law that was adopted in late 2021.
Judging by their previous actions, the EU will have no problem meeting their emission reduction goal. Aside from that, they have pledged to contribute €23.2 million to funding climate action beyond their borders. They've also vowed to shift 30% of the expenditure from multi-annual financial framework towards climate-related projects.
They also plan to meet at least 50 percent of their energy requirements from renewable energy and reduce the total projected carbon emissions by 2030. These four points were followed by the final fifth: All of this shall be done by 2030 so that India can achieve the target of Net Zero by 2070.
This statement was part of the Prime Minister's five-pronged plan of action, known as the panchamrita. The panchamrita states that four goals will be met by 2030. The second point is to get India's non-fossil fuel energy capacity to 500 gigawatts (GW) by 2030
As well as new solar and wind farms, new hydroelectric dams would also be built on the upper reaches of the Yangtze, Mekong and Yellow rivers, and China will also make more use of new-generation nuclear technology, including small-scale offshore reactors.
Finally, on December 13th, 2021, Joe Biden and the National Climate Task Force released a full climate-action plan for the federal government. Going off of his earlier statements, Biden signed an executive order to make the federal government carbon-neutral by 2050, aiming for a 65 percent reduction in planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and an all-electric fleet of cars and trucks five years later.
From Day One in his presidency, Joe Biden said he intended to use the federal government as a model and to help spur the markets for green energy. After the initial statement in April, he said that the plan would be fully released by the newly formed National Climate Task Force in following months.
Even Russia's plan for carbon neutrality doesn't have much logic behind it. In preparation for COP26, Putin announced that Russia's climate plan towards carbon neutrality would focus on how much carbon can be absorbed by the vast expanses of trees in their territory. This caused a large portion of the scientific community to become skeptical about this plan.
On top of that, Putin didn’t publicly believe that climate change was caused by humans until recently, and many say that he’s only announced Russia’s carbon-neutrality goal for political reasons.
It proposed several initiatives including a plan to improve European biodiversity, a plan to shift the current EU food system towards a more sustainable model, as well as a plan to decrease emissions from the transport sector by 90% by 2050.
