ECO followed with mathematical curiosity Brazil’s announcement of its new NDC target yesterday. There we found a stunning exercise of number-crunching that might earn the Brazilian environment minister a Fields Medal, a Nobel Prize – or, more likely, a Fossil of the Day. The Brazilian government, lo and behold, has discovered a way to increase ambition without cutting a single gram of carbon dioxide.
The recipe to such an arithmetical tour de force involves, first of all, updating the first NDC in 2020 with a deliberate increase of 700 million tonnes of CO2e to emissions in the baseline year of 2005. Then, keeping the same percentage cut already applied as an indicative target back in 2015 – 43% by 2030. This will grant an extra 400 megatonnes to freely dump in the atmosphere while somehow still claiming to meet the target, and rendering the NDC a total fudge. That will result in getting sued for violating the Paris Agreement (this pesky piece of paper that says NDCs can only move in one direction, upwards) and being singled out by UNEP as the only G20 country to actually decrease ambition in its NDC update.
But worry not! Here comes the neat part: in Glasgow, before the eyes of the world, the baseline year emissions will be updated again, so in 2005 that remains a still lofty 400 million tonnes higher than the original NDC projection, and the percentage cut will be ratcheted up even further to 50% (who doesn’t love round numbers?). That ends up with the exact same amount of emissions in 2030 as in the 2015 pledge, and yet John Kerry and Alok Sharma, who will tout this greenwashing as a “significant GHG reduction”, will slap Brazil on the back.
Maybe inspired by the air of the British Isles, Brazil seems to have followed the advice of Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” ECO urges other countries, for the sake of our planet, not to emulate the Latin American giant – and never, ever, use the maths of the Brazilians to update your own NDCs.