Dr. Joeri Rogelj:

I fully agree with the intervention made by Professor McMullin. I just want to respond to the question on the different purpose of emissions and whether that is taken into account. The answer is a resounding “Yes”. In these modelling exercises for how we estimate where emissions can be reduced, we are not necessarily interested in emissions, but we are interested in services that we, as a society, require. These services we need such as energy - calories and nutrition - and others we need are, for example, wood products for building and so on. In the modelling, the question of how these necessary services can be delivered or supplied with as few emissions as possible is then asked. You get a very strong differentiation because the answer depends on, for example, how essential a service is and which opportunities and alternatives exist. That is why, looking at just methane, reductions in fossil methane are much deeper and go even to zero compared to the suggested reductions of methane in the agricultural sector. They also reduce, but to a lesser degree, and they do not go to zero. That is because there is a fundamental service, which is providing food to the global population, that needs to be guaranteed. As long as we do not have alternatives to, for example, providing calories via rice or rice paddy production, that kind of floor of methane emissions will not disappear, even if we produce rice in the best and most efficient way possible. There is a clear differentiation and this is taken into account in these calculations as well.