9. Fuels
Between 2005 and 2024 the CO₂ of today's high-income economies fell by 2,453 Mt. Coal alone fell by about as much, 2,484 Mt, while gas rose.
Over the same years oil fell by 778 Mt and gas rose by 843 Mt. Gas went from 23% to 34% of what the group emits and oil from 40% to 42% of it, so oil and gas together are now 76% of what is left.
So what. Twenty years of rich-world decarbonisation is, net, the story of burning less coal, and part of the coal was replaced by gas. What remains is mostly oil, much of it transport, and gas, much of it heating and industry. Those are cut by replacing vehicles, boilers and furnaces one at a time, not by closing a few hundred power stations, so a reduction rate measured over the coal years is a poor guide to the next twenty.
Who acts: whoever builds a decarbonisation roadmap, or prices carbon exposure, off a historical trend. Cost of getting it wrong: a trajectory that holds while there is coal to close and stalls when it runs out, with the target still set on the old slope.
Country by country
The pattern holds for the large emitters whose totals fell. The US cut more coal than its whole net fall, and gas took back part of it. Across most of the table oil is now the largest line and coal one of the smallest. Japan is the outlier: its fall came mostly from oil, because after 2011 its grid leaned on coal and gas to replace nuclear.
The panel is the 45 high-income economies that publish every fuel line in every year since 1990, which between them are almost all of the group's emissions.