This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The private consortium that oversees the model building codes for much of the United States and parts of the Caribbean and Latin America stripped local governments of their right to vote on future energy-efficiency codes earlier this month.

The decision came more than a year after the construction and gas industry groups that wield heavy influence at the International Code Council, or ICC, objected to aggressive new energy codes for which government officials had voted.

The change, though technical and wonky, marks what environmental advocates say is one of the most consequential roadblocks to decarbonizing the U.S. economy. It also illustrates the limits of both the new Biden administration’s powers and the causes for which activists can mobilize public support. Local governments, members of Congress, environmentalists, and architects overwhelmingly opposed the proposal.

Under the new system, the building codes that govern energy systems and insulation ― once subject to a vote by the city and state governments tasked with implementing them ― will instead fall under a separate “standards” process that, despite soliciting input from local officials, will give industry more control over the outcome.

The ICC said it would create a new body to help oversee the process and give government officials “the strongest voice on the committee,” promising “one-third of the seats” on that entity to “government regulators.” It’s unclear which groups would occupy the other two thirds.

“Well, my sense is the committee will be comprised of people who have an interest in energy efficiency and building science,” Dominic Sims, the ICC’s chief executive, said in a phone interview. “So, I don’t know that there’s that big of a separation between people.”

The committee is a significant departure from the old process, which allowed government officials from across the country — including representatives from cities’ sustainability and energy departments — to register to vote on the codes.

Sims said it would actually hasten the transition away from fossil fuels.

“I will say this: The impetus and the discussion around this issue is not just about the last 12 months,” he said.“Each code cycle, it’s been different. There’s been winners and there’s been losers.That sort of unevenness has not produced quick enough results, or else we’d be at net-zero already.”

But city officials saw the move as a way for “private industry to maximize profit” and warned that it could encourage governments to shift away from using the ICC’s code.

“This is a classic example of leaving the fox to guard the hen house,” said Kim Havey, the sustainability director for the city of Minneapolis, who cast a vote in the last code-making cycle. “City leaders and their supporters will be meeting to discuss our options. One may be to ask the White House and Congress to throw the ICC in the compost bin of history and create a new oversight body to develop an energy code that works for the benefit of the people and our planet.”

The American Institute of Architects called the decision “a step backwards for climate action” that “will no doubt erode progress towards the modern codes that are desperately needed to heal our planet.”

Industry groups that supported the change cheered the March 4 announcement as a victory. The American Gas Association said it “supports the new framework released today by the International Code Council and believes that the new standards process is inclusive of the stakeholders needed to help ensure reasonable, viable efficiency improvements for the built environment.” The National Association of Home Builders called it “an important change that we expect to result in a model energy code that meets the needs of consumers, builders, building officials and energy efficiency advocates.”

In late 2019, hundreds of new government officials registered to vote with the ICC, drawing scrutiny from industry groups ― particularly the National Association of Home Builders and the American Gas Association. The last two rounds of codes, which are voted on every three years, had made only paltry 1 percent energy efficiency increases, so cities across the country enlisted more officials from sustainability, energy, and building departments to cast ballots.

Prior to 2019, most officials had been unaware that they qualified to vote in the highly technical process but were seeking new ways to slash emissions from buildings, the top source of climate pollution in most cities. Buildings use roughly 40 percent of all energy produced in the U.S. for heating, power, and cooking appliances, and generate a proportional share of the country’s planet-heating gases.

The government officials were clear about what they wanted. By a margin of 3 to 1, the voters whose ballots were tallied in December 2019 approved a slate of new measures to increase energy efficiency of the latest codes by up to 14 percent and require builders to include the circuitry needed to hook up electric vehicle chargers and fossil-fuel-free appliances.

“Many local governments don’t have their own building code authority, so they are really relying on this process,” said Amy Turner, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. But now, she said, “it certainly seems that the ICC is setting the stage for an enhanced voice to be given to these trade groups.”

The measures sought to codify a trend already underway. More than half of homes built from 2010 to 2017 use electricity for space heating, water heating, cooking and clothes drying, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. In February, Seattle became the latest city to start phasing out natural gas hookups in new buildings, following San Francisco and New York City.

The European Union already requires all buildings constructed in 2021 to be “nearly net-zero.” While industry groups warned that the stricter energy codes U.S. cities voted for risk raising the costs of building new homes, governments and advocates say adding energy efficiency retrofits to existing structures is even most expensive and politically challenging.For example, New York state proposed carve-outs earlier this year for landlords to circumvent New York City’s landmark law requiring big buildings to slash energy use in what advocates dubbed “a giant giveaway to real estate.”

Weeks after the 2019 vote, industry groups started to push back, arguing that the new mandates were too costly. The National Association of Home Builders, which had previously called low participation rates among government officials “a real problem,” said the record turnout now amounted to “voter manipulation.” The Leading Builders of America, another construction trade group, accused “special interests” of campaigning to “manipulate” the process. The American Gas Association appealed to the ICC to overturn many of the approved code requirements.

The ICC had long boasted that its governmental voting process left “the final determination of code provisions in the hands of public officials who, with no vested financial interest, can legitimately represent the public interest.”But it ultimately overturned some of the measures, including the requirement to ready new homes for electric vehicle chargers.

“We had more appeals than we have ever had, enough that it postponed the publication of our energy code by about six months,” Sims said. “That’s kind of telling.”

The ICC’s appeals board failed to find evidence to support challenges to the voters’ eligibility.Instead, the board, which included a longtime member of the National Association of Home Builders, proposed its own solution: Switching the energy code to a standard and limiting how much input government officials could have.

“We thought maybe this topic needs to be a standard and needs to be developed through the standards methods, which would be more deliberative,” Anne Anderson, a member of the appeals board, told HuffPost in February.

The proposal proved divisive within the ICC but narrowly passed in various committee votes. In January, when the ICC held a public hearing on the proposed change, opponents outnumbered supporters as city officials and architects pressed the nonprofit for answers on why this required an urgent change and pleaded for the executive board to abandon the plan.

“Please, please reconsider,” Kevin Burns, the mayor of Geneva, Illinois, said during his testimony.

“What’s the point of disenfranchising the voices of thousands of governmental members when this process has been so successful?” Christopher Chwedyk, a representative for the American Institute of Architects, asked during the hearing. “This is 100 percent unacceptable.”

Federal officials had limited power over the process since ICC codes are largely enshrined into state laws. But the proposed change attracted scrutiny from the nation’s capital.

Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and chairman of the powerful House Committee on Energy and Commerce, pressed the ICC to explain why the National Association of Home Builders wields unique power over the group’s byzantine code-making bureaucracy. In a tweet the morning of Wednesday, March 3, he said he had “deep concerns over” the ICC’s “plan to silence state and local voices in the building energy code process.”

Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Representative Peter Welch of Vermont, both Democrats, said in a letter sent to the ICC that same day that the existing system has “resulted in substantial energy savings over time” and warned that the proposed change “will likely derail and slow this progress.”

The Biden administration echoed the concerns at the end of February. In a letter to ICC leadership, Kelly Speakes-Backman, the Energy Department’s acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, asked the code-making group to “not proceed with these proposed changes until these questions and concerns can be adequately addressed.”

The ICC responded a day later, saying its proposed changes were “time sensitive.” A delay would be detrimental to “the adoption of the suite of I-Codes” for 2024, Sims wrote, referring to the various building codes the ICC creates. “Therefore, if the development process is to change, the process will need to be in place to realize a timely release.”

After the ICC’s decision, Welch called on the council to “reverse its decision and refocus on a forward-looking codes process that values a consensus based approach, driving energy efficiency and resiliency for the future.

“This decision is bad for local communities, the environment and green jobs,” Welch told HuffPost. “The ICC has decided to shelve the voices of local officials and the communities that they represent at the request of private entities looking out for their bottom lines.”

The Energy Department said its “position remains consistent to what was outlined in the February 25 letter to ICC.”

Unlike the hearing in January, the March 3 executive board meeting, where the ICC deliberated its final decision on the energy codes, took place behind closed doors. Sims said the 18-member executive board voted with “almost unanimity” to approve the changes. An ICC spokeswoman said it was 16 to 2.

“We need a broader consensus and we need a more energy-efficient code,” Sims said. “We need to walk and chew gum.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After championing greener building codes, local governments lose right to vote on Mar 15, 2021.

This post was originally published on Grist.

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Kim Havey had a problem. Minneapolis was generating more and more of its electricity from renewables, dropping climate-warming pollution from power to record lows. But emissions from natural gas, which is used to heat buildings and stovetops, were climbing ― overtaking power plants as the city’s top source of carbon pollution in 2017.

Nearly three-quarters of Minneapolis’ emissions came from buildings, and the city was undergoing a construction boom to accommodate a population growing faster than at any point since the 1950s. So Havey, the city’s sustainability director, helped craft new rules mandating more efficient standards for all those new buildings.

But there was a hurdle. Buildings over 50,000 square feet ― medical offices, corporate headquarters, apartment buildings ― fell under state jurisdiction. And Minnesota, like most states, used the International Code Council’s model national energy code as its standard. The ICC ― which, as one newspaper once put it, like the World Series, primarily concerns the U.S. ― is a nonprofit consortium of construction industry groups, architects and local government officials that creates the standard building codes used in towns and cities in all 50 states.

Then Havey learned that as a government official responsible for buildings and energy codes in his city, he could register to vote on the ICC’s next round of energy codes in November 2019. He wasn’t alone in this endeavor. The slow progress in reducing emissions from buildings and a decade of virtually unchanged ICC codes were frustrating officials across the U.S., and hundreds applied that year to vote in a process that takes place every three years.

By the time votes were tallied, this army of Leslie Knopes had won an overwhelming victory. The ballots went 3 to 1 in favor of mandates to ratchet up energy efficiency and require new homes and buildings to include wiring to hook up electric vehicle chargers and electric appliances.

But the triumph was short-lived. The building industry groups that have long wielded dominance over policy at the ICC soon began challenging not only the approved measures, which they called costly and unrealistic, but the members’ right to vote at all.

The National Association of Home Builders, whose influence over the ICC has drawn scrutiny from Congress, demanded the organization reconsider the eligibility of dozens of city departments that cast ballots in 2019. Havey and his entire department were among them.

“We were taking this very seriously,” Havey said. “We followed the process to the letter of the law.”

Now, the ICC is deciding whether to end all future voting. A final decision from the nonprofit’s executive board, which is made up of 18 government officials from across the country, could come as early as next Wednesday.

The developers and building industry groups that want to end voting say doing so will help ensure the integrity of model energy codes, which they say were damaged with votes from misinformed government officials who don’t understand building codes. Among the organizations that have backed the voting change are some of the nation’s largest and most powerful industry lobbies, including Leading Builders of America, the American Gas Association and the National Association of Home Builders. They say the get-out-the-vote campaign that led to the biggest turnout in ICC voting history amounted to “manipulation” by “special interests.”

But critics of changing the process ― namely city officials, environmentalists and architects ― say this was just the latest example of the building industry deploying its disproportionate influence over the ICC. The proposed change, they say, amounts to voter suppression and threatens to delegitimize the code itself, risking splintering the national standard if states and municipalities keen to reduce emissions stop using it.

Why pollution from buildings matters

When most people think of the pollution changing the planet’s climate, the images that come to mind are billowing smokestacks at power plants or the smoggy haze that settles over traffic-jammed highways as exhaust pours from automobile tailpipes. Yet blocks of suburban homes and city skylines themselves may deserve similar attention. Buildings account for 40% of all energy consumed in the U.S. and a comparable portion of greenhouse gases produced.

Buildings are also now increasingly the venue for the next big fight over climate policy. A growing number of cities are setting deadlines to ban natural gas in new construction. San Francisco, New York City and Seattle are three of the latest. That has led some states to push back. Last year, Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee all passed state laws barring their cities from exacting such bans. Another 12 states ― Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, and Utah ― are now considering preemption bills of their own, prodded by lobbying and advertising campaigns from gas utilities that see the hookup bans as an existential threat.

The ICC’s energy code appears to be another phase of that conflict.

Since the ICC’s energy code became the standard in cities and towns across all 50 states and much of the Caribbean and Latin America more than two decades ago, the model, known as the International Energy Conservation Code, has only undergone two major periods of adjustment. In 2009, advocates pressed for significant improvements, ultimately increasing the efficiency of the code by 11 percent over the 2006 level. In 2012, the code ramped up again, this time with efficiency levels 37 percent greater than 2006.

The Department of Energy found that the development cycles in both years slashed homeowners’ annual energy costs by 32 percent.

But tighter rules drew builders’ ire. In 2011, the National Association of Home Builders brokered what The New York Times described as a “secret deal” to stack bureaucratic committees within the ICC and block code changes it opposed. The subsequent 2015 and 2018 codes made only modest 1 percent efficiency improvements. (The National Association of Home Builders defended the agreement, saying it “provides builders a reasonable voice.”)

“The governmental officials realized the only way to change all this and end this drought in efficiency improvements was to vote,” said Bill Fay, the director the Energy Efficient Codes Coalition, which pushed for more aggressive standards.

Groups like the coalition and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which represents cities with populations over 30,000, responded by organizing a get-out-the-vote campaign for ICC, letting government officials from the fire, health, housing, sustainability and utilities departments know they likely qualify to vote.

Hundreds applied to vote. Not all successfully registered. John Phelan, an energy services manager working for the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, said the ICC rejected four of his colleagues’ registrations. But 30 were able to vote.

“It was a huge moment,” he said. “Nobody knew until 2018 or 2019 that there was this process built into code adoption that wasn’t being used.”

The campaign helped secure a code that increased efficiency for commercial buildings more than 10% and efficiency for residential buildings 8% to 14%. That amounts to reductions of as much as 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2030, equal to shutting down 47 coal-fired power plants.

The backlash

Yet the record voter turnout drew swift backlash. In a video posted to YouTube, Leading Builders of America Chairman Allan Merrill said the votes raised “serious concerns that the code development process was manipulated to the benefit of special interest groups at the expense of future homebuyers.”

The National Association of Home Builders decried “an influx of voters who were incorrectly validated for the 2019 code cycle” in a February 2020 letter to ICC CEO Dominic Sims.

“If the efforts taken to influence and direct the outcome … are left unchecked, the future code development cycles will become a free-for-all,” wrote Gerald Howard, the association’s chief executive.

Along with the American Gas Association, a trade group for natural gas utilities, the building industry heavyweights appealed 25 measures the ICC’s voters had overwhelmingly approved. The ICC’s three-member appeals board overturned five provisions, including ones making it easier to switch to electric water heaters and requiring builders to include the circuitry for electric vehicle hookups.

The appeals board then took an unusual step. Though the body normally made suggestions based solely on ideas appellants proposed as part of their appeals, the board introduced its own solution: End voting altogether. It could do so by changing the energy code to a standard, which undergoes a separate bureaucratic process that takes governmental opinion into consideration but does not put the final product to a vote.

In a lengthy statement, ICC spokesperson Madison Neal said the group “regularly reviews the code development process.” The appeals board, Neal said, concluded that the energy code “would benefit from the additional time for debate and continual updating that is afforded by a standard development process.”

Advocates saw the proposal as another example of the industry’s influence over the ICC’s bureaucracy. One of the three appeals board members was Anne Anderson, a longtime member of the National Association of Home Builders who has worked closely with the group’s code-making process. The other two were ex-government officials: former New Jersey state official John Terry and former Michigan state code department official Henry Green.

“You had a person with deep, deep relations with the NAHB who was put on a three-person appeals board that’s going to make a decision on an NAHB-filed appeal,” Fay said.

The National Association of Home Builders said it “did not ask the ICC appeals board or any appeals board member including Anne Anderson before, during or after the hearing to change the ICC process to a standards process.”

Anderson denied that she proposed the idea, and said this was her first time serving on an appeals board, so she didn’t know whether it was unusual for members of the board to put forward their own solutions. The idea, which she said one of the other two board members proposed, came in response to an appeal challenging the eligibility of officials from certain city agencies.

“We couldn’t find enough evidence that there was any voter ineligibility or anything wrong with what happened, per se, per the procedures outlined by the ICC,” Anderson said.

Still, she said the new majority of voters made mistakes. In one case, she said, the author of a proposal to improve battery storage in solar-equipped homes retracted the proposal, stating during a hearing that there was an error in how it was written. But energy efficiency advocates gave the idea their blessing, and voters approved the flawed proposal anyway, she said.

“When the proponent says I want you to vote this down and you vote for [it] anyway, that’s a sign,” Anderson said. “We thought maybe this topic needs to be a standard and needs to be developed through the standards methods, which would be more deliberative.”

Once the appeals board’s recommendation to change the code process went to the ICC’s long-term code planning committee, Craig Drumheller, an assistant vice president at the National Association of Home Builders and a voting member of the committee, endorsed the idea with his own motion. The motion passed 8 to 6 with two abstentions, putting the proposal before the ICC’s executive board for final approval.

“Going forward, if we’re going to deal with issues like integrating renewables, advancing electrification, and decarbonization, we require a different process,” Clayton Traylor, the vice president of state and regulatory affairs at Leading Builders of America, said during a hearing on the change last month. “If we want to make progressive change over the long haul, we’re going to need a different system.”

‘A real problem’

The next big step was to hold a public hearing in January. City government officials and architects seemed shocked and dismayed at the proposal, and handily outnumbered speakers who wanted to end voting.

The confusion underscored the proposal’s dramatic shift. On its website, the ICC boasted that the governmental voting process “leaves the final determination of code provisions in the hands of public officials who, with no vested financial interest, can legitimately represent the public interest.”

In years past, the National Association of Home Builders had actually lamented the low turnout among governmental voters. In a 2016 blog post, Phillip Hoffman, the group’s construction and codes committee chair, called low turnout “a real problem.” In 2018, Drumheller himself called for more voting and praised his organization’s distribution of voter guides to make voting easier.

Yet the National Association of Home Builders Chair Chuck Fowke struck a markedly different tone at the January hearing.

“The online vote allows for political manipulation of the outcome,” he said. “The end result is neither desirable nor appropriate. Changing to a standards process … represents the views of the broader ICC membership.”

The statement reflected what Ron Jones, founder of the trade publication Green Builder, called the building industry’s effort to “tighten their long-standing stranglehold on the policy decisions” at the ICC.

“Having failed to achieve their goals under a code development process that has long been slanted in their favor already, they have undertaken the current manipulation strategy through a shameless attempt to change the rules in order to once again tilt the playing field to their advantage,” Jones wrote in a December blog post. “All of this is taking place at an alarming pace during the holiday season in hopes of flying under the radar and in time to institute their desired changes prior to the upcoming Inauguration Day.”

But Fowke may also be identifying a difference in priorities. Developers say the point of codes is to ensure safe, affordable homes, and that they oppose measures that add costs for nominal environmental benefits. City officials and environmentalists bent on slashing emissions might look to the way added insulation, even in homes built in warmer climates, adds up on the grand scale and protects against increasingly unpredictable weather events. Developers, by contrast, see how it adds to the price of the home.

For example, insulation that adds $1,000 to the cost of the home but only saves about $42 per year in a state like Georgia or Florida “doesn’t make sense,” Anderson said.

“It’ll take 100 years to pay off,” she said.

Asked whether this month’s freak winter storm in Texas, where building codes’ lax insulation standards exacerbated blackouts as homes failed to hold in heat and used more and more electricity to stay above freezing, Anderson said people “don’t want to spend money to insulate their homes for something that happens once every 100 years.”

“It was an outlier, and typically we design our building codes based on historical events,” she said. “Unless you have data that says Texas is getting colder, this event was an outlier.”

Changing the energy code to a standard would still mean the same governmental officials could vote on other parts of the building code.

“The irony is if they keep their ICC membership,” Fay said of city officials, “they can vote on the plumbing code. They can vote on the swimming pool code. But they can’t vote on the energy code, which is where they have expertise.”

Building opposition

By the time the ICC held a hearing on the change in January, opponents to ending the voting process outnumbered supporters. The proposals to the energy code were largely in line with things cities were already doing, many insisted. Others argued that a unified code will only help the property owners avoid costly retrofits when climate regulations come into force in the years to come, noting that in recent months, San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle all set dates by which gas hookups for new buildings will be banned.

“Please, please reconsider,” Kevin Burns, the mayor of Geneva, Illinois, pleaded during his testimony.

“What’s the point of disenfranchising the voices of thousands of governmental members when this process has been so successful?” Christopher Chwedyk, a representative for the American Institute of Architects, said during the hearing. “This is 100% unacceptable.”

Of the written comments submitted to the ICC since then, 75 percent oppose eliminating voting. Of the 25 percent that supported the change, 54 percent were builders, and 4 percent came from the fossil fuel industry; in particular, the American Gas Association.

The ICC said replacing the energy code with a standard “would not remove governmental members from the development process” and said it would instead “promote equivalence in voices for standard development, with specific provisions to prevent dominance by any interest category.”

“The committee would include governmental representatives,” Neal said in the statement.

In her own written statement, Susan Asmus, a senior vice president at the National Association of Home Builders, said the standards process would “provide for a balanced committee representing a variety of interests, including governmental representatives, that can have more deliberative discussions on issues such as cost-effectiveness and conceptual changes.”

Still, the effort to end voting has raised some eyebrows. The trade publication Energy News Network covered the proposal, as did New York Times opinion columnist Justin Gillis, who warned in January that “a lobby is trying to block codes that save homeowners money and fight climate change.” The Natural Resources Defense Council, the powerful environmental group that President Joe Biden’s climate czar previously led, called it “a thinly veiled attempt to prevent clean energy progress from happening in the future.”

Three Democratic committee leaders in the House of Representatives echoed those concerns in a letter to the ICC raising concerns that the National Association of Home Builders’ influence over the code-making process is undermining its “integrity.”

“Please explain the rationale for this proposal,” Reps. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat; Bobby Rush, a Democrat from Illinois, and Colorado Democrat Diana DeGette, the chairs of powerful energy committees and subcommittee, wrote in the letter.

Earlier this month, the ICC’s Sustainability Membership Council voted 6 to 1 to urge the board to reject the proposal to end voting. It’s unclear how much weight that recommendation will carry.

Cities like Minneapolis aren’t waiting around for the ICC to come in line with its climate targets. Havey, the sustainability director, said the city is working with Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, and lawmakers in its state legislature to pass stricter new building codes statewide. If the ICC doesn’t keep up, it could just become irrelevant.

“We’re trying to go any which way we can ― from the state legislature, to public utilities, to the ICC ― to get net-zero buildings,” Havey said. “Every building that’s not net-zero energy is adding to the problem, and then we have to go back after it’s built to fix it. And that’s the most expensive way to do it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cities voted for green building codes. Now developers want to end voting. on Mar 1, 2021.

This post was originally published on Grist.

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When it comes to the environment, few countries rival Costa Rica in terms of action and ambition.

The tiny Central American nation is aiming for total decarbonization by 2050, not just a “net-zero” target. It has regrown large areas of tropical rainforest after suffering some of the highest rates of deforestation in the world in the 1970s and 1980s. Costa Ricans play a major role in international environmental politics, most notably Christiana Figueres, who helped to corral world leaders into agreeing the Paris Accord.

Now Costa Rica has turned its attention to securing an ambitious international agreement on halting biodiversity loss. In January, more than 50 countries committed to the protection of 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans as part of the High Ambition Coalition (HAC) for Nature and People, spearheaded by Costa Rica, which is a co-chair alongside France and the U.K.

The coalition hopes the target will become the headline aim for an international agreement on halting biodiversity loss for this decade, set to be negotiated in Kunming, China, later this year.

“Our approach is to lead by example. As Mandela said, ‘It always seems impossible until it’s done.’” Costa Rican president Carlos Alvarado Quesada told the Guardian. “Conservation is one of the key factors that scientists point out as relevant for protecting biodiversity and also for addressing the climate crisis. But working alone, it’s not as effective.”

The world has never met a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems. But the 41-year-old leader believes this time might be different.

Quesada swept to power in April 2018, defeating a conservative evangelical pastor who had campaigned against same-sex marriage. It was a rare victory for a center-left candidate in a time of rising global rightwing populism and led Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz to conclude that Costa Rica was a beacon of enlightenment for its commitment to reason, rational discourse, science, and freedom.

But the pandemic and resulting blow to Costa Rica’s ecotourism industry forced Quesada to enter painful negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, raising fears of large cuts in a country that puts human development at its core, alongside environmentalism.

Costa Rica, now an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member, has no standing army, invests heavily in education and boasts a universal healthcare system. The prospect of internationally enforced austerity caused rioting in October last year, and Quesada pulled out of talks. In January, the IMF and the Costa Rican government agreed a $1.75 billion package that avoided some of the more controversial proposals.

Despite the difficult choices, the president said he was encouraged that global action on the environment will result from the pandemic, especially after the election of Joe Biden as U.S. president, with whom he spoke recently.

“It was a very close conversation. We have lots of things in common. We talked about working together in addressing the climate crisis,” Quesada said. “I think the message of appointing Senator [John] Kerry as ambassador in this area is very strong. It’s going to be a key priority.”

Quesada did not speak to Donald Trump during the latter’s presidency. But the Costa Rican president said the climate crisis and the breakdown of nature were already causing significant problems in the region, including the migrant caravans heading to the U.S. border that often dominate the concerns of U.S. Republicans.

“More and more, the real impacts of the climate crisis on our societies is evident. Just in this past year, Central America was hit by two consecutive hurricanes: Hurricane Iota and Hurricane Eta. Particularly in Nicaragua and Honduras, not only in terms of deaths but also in terms of production and the potential in terms of unemployment, the migrations that it could produce mean you cannot only see the storms in isolation as hurricanes,” he said.

“Scientists say that hurricanes in the region have become more frequent and stronger. This is going to have effects in our societies in terms of economic growth, of jobs, of inequality, of inequality in terms of women, on migration.”

Alongside larger partners, Costa Rica will continue to encourage other governments to take bold action on biodiversity at Kunming through the HAC for Nature and People. But the road ahead is not easy. The negotiations cover conservation and the sustainable use of nature – a topic that will involve difficult choices about agriculture, chemical use, and resource extraction by far more influential powers.

Quesada acknowledges these challenges but says that although such issues also exist in Costa Rica, he will continue to focus on being an example.

“Environmental policies do not necessarily have unanimous consensus. For the past decades, they have been the dominant DNA of Costa Rica but there are also some people saying that perhaps we should be exploiting more. But still, I believe that’s very far away from our DNA.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘It’s in our DNA’: tiny Costa Rica wants the world to take giant step on Feb 25, 2021.

This post was originally published on Grist.

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The U.S. has marked its return to the Paris Agreement by urging countries to do more to confront the climate crisis, with America’s climate envoy, John Kerry, warning that international talks this year are the “last, best hope” of avoiding catastrophic global heating.

On Friday, the U.S. officially returned to the Paris climate accord, 107 days after it left at the behest of former president Donald Trump. Joe Biden moved to reverse this on his first day in office, and Kerry conceded that the U.S. is returning “with a lot of humility, for the agony of the last four years.”

“This is a significant day, a day that never had to happen,” Kerry said to Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, in a conversation filmed on the eve of the re-entry. “It’s so sad that our previous president without any scientific basis or any legitimate economic rationale decided to pull America out. It hurt us and it hurt the world.”

The contrition of the Biden administration is, however, balanced by a desire to resume the mantle of leadership at a time when almost every country is struggling to undertake the swift emissions cuts required to avert disastrous global heating of 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) above the pre-industrial era, as outlined in the Paris deal.

Kerry said that none of the world’s major emitters, including China, India and the E.U., are doing enough and that key U.N. climate talks later this year in Glasgow, Scotland, provide the “last, best hope we have” to get the world on track to avoid runaway climate change.

“The meeting in Glasgow rises in its importance,” said Kerry, a former U.S. secretary of state. “We are at this most critical moment where we have the capacity to define the decade of the 20s which will make or break us to get to net zero carbon in 2050.” Kerry said that countries will have to “define in real terms their roadmap for the next 10 years, the next 30 years. We are talking about a reality we haven’t been able to assemble in these meetings so far.”

Kerry said that coal use needs to be phased out far more quickly, coupled with a rapid escalation of electric vehicles and renewable energy, and that he hoped to “build some new coalitions and approach this in a new way.” The U.S. climate envoy said he had reached out to the pro-fossil fuel leaderships in Brazil and Australia, which have “had some differences with us, we’ve not been able to get on the same page completely.”

“For the last four years there were a lot of times when a lot of us thought the failure of this enterprise may rest on one word: Trump,” Kerry said in an event on Friday to mark the Paris re-entry. “But the international climate regime is still standing.”While emissions worldwide from factories, airplanes and cars dipped sharply last year due to pandemic-related lockdowns, there are already signs of a roaring comeback that risks blowing past the agreed temperature limits and unleash worsening heatwaves, flooding, storms and societal unrest. The narrowing window of time to avoid climate breakdown means there is only brief cheering over the return of the U.S., the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

“It’s good to have the U.S. back in the Paris Agreement, but sadly we have no time to celebrate,” said Laurence Tubiana, France’s climate change ambassador and a key architect of the Paris Agreement. “The climate crisis is deepening and this is the year we need all major polluters to step up and deliver stronger plans to deliver a safe, clean and prosperous future for everyone.”

The U.S. will release a new emissions cut pledge ahead of a 22 April 22nd summit convened by Biden with other major emitting countries and Tubiana said this goal should be “at least” a 50-percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030, from 2005 levels. The US, under Barack Obama, promised a 26-percent cut by 2025 and got about halfway to this target before the Covid-19 outbreak.

A coalition of nearly 200 environmental and humanitarian groups have urged the Biden administration to move well beyond the largely symbolic act of rejoining the Paris Agreement by contributing billions of dollars to help defend poorer countries vulnerable to climate impacts and “lead with actions rather than just words.”

“The climate crisis is a race against time, and the U.S. is just reaching the starting line after years of inaction,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “As the world’s largest historical polluter, the United States must take its fair share of robust climate action on both the domestic and global stage.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline US rejoins Paris accord with warning: This year’s talks are ‘last, best hope’ on Feb 20, 2021.

This post was originally published on Grist.