The United Nations climate summit in Poland this week will emit more carbon dioxide than the yearly average of 8,200 American homes, according to Environmental Protection Agency and U.N. estimates.
COP24, as the summit is called, is expected to emit approximately 55,000 tons of carbon dioxide over the course of the 60-day conference in Katowice. This much carbon dioxide, according to the EPA, is also equivalent to the emissions from 11,700 cars driving for one year and 728 tanker trucks worth of gasoline.
These estimates do not account for air travel to and from the summit so emissions are expected to be significantly higher, environmental economist Richard Tol told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “[It is] probably unusually high as Katowice would require multiple stops for anyone who’s not from Europe,” Tol said.
The U.N. plans to pay the Polish State Forests agency to plant 6 million trees to offset the emissions from COP24.
Tol figures that the total cost of COP24 will rise above $130 million. He said this was probably a low estimate, however, because Katowice had to build new facilities to accommodate the 30,000 people expected to attend the conference.
The goal of the summit is to further implement the Paris climate accord, which took effect in 2016. President Trump announced last year that the U.S. would be withdrawing from the international agreement.
The U.N. has faced criticism in the past for its wasteful emissions and spending. A former U.N. environment director was asked to resign in November over his expensive and constant travel, and the 2015 climate summit was estimated to have emitted 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide.
An October U.N. report said a $27,000-per-ton tax on carbon was needed by the end of the century to counteract the effects of global warming.
