Nearly a tenth of global climate finance could be under threat as U.S. president Donald Trump’s aid cuts risk wiping out huge swathes of spending overseas, according to Carbon Brief analysis. Last year, the U.S. announced that it had increased its climate aid for developing countries roughly seven-fold over the course of Joe Biden’s presidency, reaching $11bn per year.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In a fervent appeal to the global community, Prime Minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea has called on US President Donald Trump to “rethink” his decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and current global climate initiatives.
Marape’s plea came during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting held in Davos, Switzerland, on 23 January 2025.
Expressing deep concern for the impacts of climate change on Papua New Guinea and other vulnerable Pacific Island nations, Marape highlighted the dire consequences these nations face due to rising sea levels and increasingly severe weather patterns.
“The effects of climate change are not just theoretical for us; they have real, devastating impacts on our fragile economies and our way of life,” he said.
The Prime Minister emphasised that while it was within President Trump’s prerogative to prioritise American interests, withdrawing the United States — the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide– from the Paris Agreement without implementing measures to curtail coal power production was “totally irresponsible”, Marape said.
“As a leader of a major forest and ocean nation in the Pacific region, I urge President Trump to reconsider his decision.”
He went on to point out the contradiction in the US stance.
US not closing coal plants
“The United States is not shutting down any of its coal power plants yet has chosen to withdraw from critical climate efforts. This is fundamentally irresponsible.
“The science regarding our warming planet is clear — it does not lie,” he said.
Marape further articulated that as the “Leader of the Free World,” Trump had a moral obligation to engage with global climate issues.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape’s plea to President Trump. Video: PNGTV
“It is morally wrong for President Trump to disregard the pressing challenges of climate change.
He must articulate how he intends to address this critical issue,” he added, stressing that effective global leaders had a responsibility not only to their own nations but also to the planet as a whole.
In a bid to advocate for small island nations that are bearing the brunt of climate impacts, PM Marape announced plans to bring this issue to the upcoming Pacific Islands Forum (PIF).
He hopes to unify the voices of PIF member countries in a collective statement regarding the US withdrawal from climate negotiations.
US revived Pacific relations
“The United States has recently revitalised its relations with the Pacific. It is discouraging to see it retreating from climate discussions that significantly affect our region’s efforts to mitigate climate change,” he said.
Prime Minister Marape reminded the international community that while larger nations might have the capacity to withstand extreme weather events such as typhoons, wildfires, and tornadoes, smaller nations like Papua New Guinea could not endure such impacts.
“For us, every storm and rising tide represents a potential crisis. Big nations can afford to navigate these challenges, but for us, the stakes are incredibly high,” he said.
Marape’s appeal underscores the urgent need for collaborative and sustained global action to combat climate change, particularly for nations like Papua New Guinea, which are disproportionately affected by environmental change.
Republished with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
By Harry Pearl of BenarNews
Vanuatu’s top lawyer has called out the United States for “bad behavior” after newly inaugurated President Donald Trump withdrew the world’s biggest historic emitter of greenhouse gasses from the Paris Agreement for a second time.
The Pacific nation’s Attorney-General Arnold Loughman, who led Vanuatu’s landmark International Court of Justice climate case at The Hague last month, said the withdrawal represented an “undeniable setback” for international action on global warming.
“The Paris Agreement remains key to the world’s efforts to combat climate change and respond to its effects, and the participation of major economies like the US is crucial,” he told BenarNews in a statement.
The withdrawal could also set a “troubling precedent” regarding the accountability of rich nations that are disproportionately responsible for global warming, said Loughman.
“At the same time, the US’ bad behavior could inspire resolve on behalf of developed countries to act more responsibly to try and safeguard the international rule of law,” he said.
“Ultimately, the whole world stands to lose if the international legal framework is allowed to erode.”
Trump’s announcement on Monday came less than two weeks after scientists confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first in which average temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Agreed to ‘pursue efforts’
Under the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015, leaders agreed to “pursue efforts” to limit warming under the 1.5°C threshold or, failing that, keep rises “well below” 2°C by the end of the century.
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said on Wednesday in a brief comment that Trump’s action would “force us to rethink our position” but the US president must do “what is in the best interest of the United States of America”.
Other Pacific leaders and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) regional intergovernmental body have not responded to BenarNews requests for comment.
The forum — comprising 18 Pacific states and territories — in its 2018 Boe Declaration said: “Climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific and [we reaffirm] our commitment to progress the implementation of the Paris Agreement.”
Trump’s executive order sparked dismay and criticism in the Pacific, where the impacts of a warming planet are already being felt in the form of more intense storms and rising seas.
Jacynta Fa’amau, regional Pacific campaigner with environmental group 350 Pacific, said the withdrawal would be a diplomatic setback for the US.
“The climate crisis has for a long time now been our greatest security threat, especially to the Pacific,” she told BenarNews.
A clear signal
“This withdrawal from the agreement is a clear signal about how much the US values the survival of Pacific nations and all communities on the front lines.”
New Zealand’s former Minister for Pacific Peoples, Aupito William Sio, said that if the US withdrew from its traditional leadership roles in multilateral organisations China would fill the gap.
“Some people may not like how China plays its role,” wrote the former Labour MP on Facebook. “But when the great USA withdraws from these global organisations . . . it just means China can now go about providing global leadership.”
Analysts and former White House advisers told BenarNews last year that climate change could be a potential “flashpoint” between Pacific nations and a second Trump administration at a time of heightened geopolitical competition with China.
Trump’s announcement was not unexpected. During his first term he withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, only for former President Joe Biden to promptly rejoin in 2021.
The latest withdrawal puts the US, the world’s largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases, alongside only Iran, Libya and Yemen outside the climate pact.
In his executive order, Trump said the US would immediately begin withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and from any other commitments made under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
US also ending climate finance
The US would also end its international climate finance programme to developing countries — a blow to small Pacific island states that already struggle to obtain funding for resilience and mitigation.
A fact sheet published by the Biden administration on November 17, which has now been removed from the White House website, said that US international climate finance reached more than US$11 billion in 2024.
Loughman said the cessation of climate finance payments was particularly concerning for the Pacific region.
“These funds are essential for building resilience and supporting adaptation strategies,” he said. “Losing this support could severely hinder ongoing and future projects aimed at protecting our vulnerable ecosystems and communities.”
George Carter, deputy head of the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University and member of the COP29 Scientific Council, said at the centre of the Biden administration’s re-engagement with the South Pacific was a regional programme on climate adaptation.
“While the majority of climate finance that flows through the Pacific comes from Australia, Japan, European Union, New Zealand — then the United States — the climate networks and knowledge production from the US to the Pacific are substantial,” he said.
Climate actions plans
Pacific island states, like all other signatories to the Paris Agreement, will this year be submitting Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, outlining their climate action plans for the next five years.
“All climate actions, policies and activities are conditional on international climate finance,” Carter said.
Pacific island nations are being disproportionately affected by climate change despite contributing just 0.02 percent of global emissions, according to a UN report released last year.
Low-lying islands are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and extreme weather events like cyclones, floods and marine heatwaves, which are projected to occur more frequently this century as a result of higher average global temperatures.
On January 10, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) confirmed that last year for the first time the global mean temperature tipped over 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average.
WMO experts emphasised that a single year of more than 1.5°C does not mean that the world has failed to meet long-term temperature goals, which are measured over decades, but added that “leaders must act — now” to avert negative impacts.
Harry Pearl is a BenarNews journalist. This article was first published by BenarNews and is republished at Asia Pacific Report with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Australia’s government is being condemned by climate action groups for discouraging the International Court of Justice (ICJ) from ruling in favour of a court action brought by Vanuatu to determine legal consequences for states that fail to meet fossil reduction commitments.
In its submission before the ICJ at The Hague yesterday, Australia argued that climate action obligations under any legal framework should not extend beyond the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement.
It has prompted a backlash, with Greenpeace accusing Australia’s government of undermining the court case.
“I’m very disappointed,” said Vepaiamele Trief, a Ni-Van Save the Children Next Generation Youth Ambassador, who is present at The Hague.
“To go to the ICJ and completely go against what we are striving for, is very sad to see.
“As a close neighbour of the Pacific Islands, Australia has a duty to support us.”
RNZ Pacific reports Vanuatu’s special envoy to climate change says their case to the ICJ is based on the argument that those harming the climate are breaking international law.
Special Envoy Ralph Regenvanu told RNZ Morning Report they are not just talking about countries breaking climate law.
Republished from ABC Pacific Beat with permission.
Climate @CIJ_ICJ hearings day 1 recap:
called for climate justice, self-determination & accountability
talks of climate leadership but argues against binding human rights
exposed polluters hiding behind the #ParisAgreement to dodge accountability.https://t.co/PB86XFpwzA pic.twitter.com/KI1hOKAM0G
— Center for International Environmental Law (@ciel_tweets) December 3, 2024
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The United Nations climate change summit COP29 has “once again ignored” the Pacific Islands, a group of regional climate advocacy organisations say.
The Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN) said today that “the richest nations turned their backs on their legal and moral obligations” as the UN meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, fell short of expectations.
“This COP was framed as the ‘finance COP’, a critical moment to address the glaring gaps in climate finance and advance other key agenda items,” the group said.
“However, not only did COP29 fail to deliver adequate finance, but progress also stalled on crucial issues like fossil fuel phase-out, Loss and Damage, and the Just Transition Work Plan.
“The outcomes represent a catastrophic failure to meet the scale of the crisis, leaving vulnerable nations to face escalating risks with little support.”
The UN meeting concluded with a new climate finance goal, with rich nations pledging a US$300 billion annual target by 2035 to the global fight against climate change.
The figure was well short of what developing nations were asking for — more than US$1 trillion in assistance.
‘Failure of leadership’
Campaigners and non-governmental organisations called it a “betrayal” and “a shameful failure of leadership”, forcing climate vulnerable nations, such as the Pacific Islands, “to accept a token financial pledge to prevent the collapse of negotiations”.
PICAN said the pledged finance relied “heavily on loans rather than grants, pushing developing nations further into debt”.
“Worse, this figure represents little more than the long-promised $100 billion target adjusted for inflation. It does not address the growing costs of adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage faced by vulnerable nations.
“In fact, it explicitly ignores any substantive decision to include loss and damage just acknowledging it.”
Vanuatu Climate Action Network coordinator Trevor Williams said developed nations systematically dismantled the principles of equity enshrined in the Paris Agreement at COP29.
“Their unwillingness to contribute sufficient finance, phase out fossil fuels, or strengthen their NDCs demonstrates a deliberate attempt to evade responsibility. COP29 has taught us that if optionality exists, developed countries will exploit it to stall progress.”
Kiribati Climate Action Network’s Robert Karoro said the Baku COP was a failure on every front.
‘No meaningful phase out of fossil fuels’
“Finance fell far short, Loss and Damage was weakened, and there was no meaningful commitment to phasing out fossil fuels,” he said.
“Our communities cannot wait for empty promises to materialise-we need action that addresses the root causes of the crisis and supports our survival.”
Tuvalu Climate Action Network’s executive director Richard Gokrun said the “outcome is personal”.
“Every fraction of a degree in warming translates into lost lives, cultures and homelands. Yet, the calls of the Pacific and other vulnerable nations were silenced in Baku,” he said.
“From the weakened Loss and Damage fund to the rollback on Just Transition principles, this COP has failed to deliver justice on any front.”
PICAN’s regional director Rufino Varea described the outcome of the meeting as “a death sentence for millions”.
He said the Pacific Islands have been clear that climate finance must be grants-based and responsive to the needs of frontline communities.
“Instead, developed countries are handing us debt while dismantling the principles of equity and justice that the Paris Agreement was built on. This is a betrayal, plain and simple.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
By Kate Green , RNZ News reporter
A new carbon credit trading deal reached in the final hours of COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, has been criticised as a free pass for countries to slack off on efforts to reduce emissions at home.
The deal, sealed at the annual UN climate talks nearly a decade after it was first put forward, will allow countries to buy carbon credits from others to bring down their own balance sheet.
New Zealand had set its targets under the Paris Agreement on the assumption that it would be able to meet some of it through international cooperation — “so getting this up and running is really important”, Compass Climate head Christina Hood said.
“It’s a tool, it’s neither good nor bad, but there’s going to have to be a lot of scrutiny on whether the government is taking a high-ambition, high-integrity path, or just trying to do the minimum possible.”
The plan had taken nine years to go through because countries determined to do it right had been holding out for a process with the right checks and balances in place, she said.
As it stood, countries would have to report yearly to the UN on their trading activities, but it was up to society and other countries to scrutinise behaviour.
Cindy Baxter, a COP veteran who has been at all but seven of the conferences, said it was in-line with the way Aotearoa New Zealand wanted to go about reducing its emissions.
‘We’re not alone, but . . .’
“We’re not alone, Switzerland is similar and Japan as well, but certainly New Zealand is aiming to meet by far the largest proportion of our climate target, [out of] anywhere in the OECD, through carbon trading.”
The new scheme fell under Article six of the Paris Agreement, and a statement from COP29 said it was expected to reduce the cost of implementing countries’ national climate plans by up to US$250 billion (NZ$428.5b) per year.
COP29 president Mukhtar Babayev said “climate change is a transnational challenge and Article six will enable transnational solutions. Because the atmosphere does not care where emissions savings are made.”
But Baxter said there was not enough transparency in the scheme, and plenty of loopholes. One of the issues was ensuring projects resulting in carbon credits continued to reduce emissions after the credits were traded.
“For example, if you’re trying to save some mangroves in Fiji, you give Fiji a whole bunch of money and say this is going to offset this amount of carbon, but what if those mangroves are destroyed by a drought, or a great big cyclone?”
Countries should be cutting emissions at home, she said.
“And that is something New Zealand is not very good at doing, has a really bad reputation for doing. We’ve either planted trees, or now we’re trying to throw money at offset.”
Greenpeace spokesperson Amanda Larsson said she, too, was concerned it would take the onus off big polluters to make reductions at home, calling it a “get out of jail free card”.
‘Lot of junk credits’
“Ultimately, we really need to see significant cuts in climate pollution,” she said. “And there’s no such thing as high-integrity voluntary carbon markets, and a history of a lot of junk credits being sold.”
Countries with the means to make meaningful change at home should not be relying on other countries stepping up, she said
The Green Party foreign affairs spokesperson Teanau Tuiono said there was strong potential in the proposal, but it was “imperative to ensure the framework is robust, and protects the rights of indigenous peoples at the same time as incentivising carbon sequestration”.
It should be a wake-up call to change New Zealand’s over-reliance on risky pine plantations and instead support permanent native afforestation, he said.
“This proposal emphasises how solving the climate crisis requires global collaboration on the most difficult issues. That requires building trust and confidence, by meeting commitments countries make to each other.
“Backing out of these by, for instance, restarting oil and gas exploration directly against the wishes of our Pacific relatives, is not the way do to that.”
Conference overall ‘disappointing and frustrating’
Baxter said it had been “very difficult being forced to have another COP in a petro-state”, where the host state did not have much to gain by making big progress.
“What that means is that there is not that impetus to bang heads together and get really strong agreement,” she said.
But the blame could not be placed entirely on the leadership.
“The COP process is set up to work if governments bring their A-games, and they don’t,” she said.
“People should be bringing their really strong new climate targets [and] very few are doing that.”
Another deal was clinched in overtime of the two-week conference, promising US$300 billion (NZ$514 billion) each year by 2035 for developing nations to tackle climate emissions.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
For decades, making progress on global climate action has felt like trying to tunnel through a mountain with only a spoon and some elbow grease. When people suggest alternative tools that are perhaps better equipped for tunnel-digging, or maybe even float the idea of climbing over the mountain, they’re dismissed and demeaned as too idealistic. Other people will stare straight at the mountain and…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
By Sera Sefeti of Benar News
Pacific delegates fear the implications of a Trump presidency and breach of the 1.5 degree Celsius warming target will overshadow negotiations on climate finance at the UN’s annual COP talks that have started in Azerbaijan this week.
At the COP29 summit — dubbed the “finance COP” — Pacific nations will seek not just more monetary commitment from high-emitting nations but also for the funds to be paid and distributed to those countries facing the worst climate impacts.
With the US as one of the world’s largest emitters, it is feared Trump’s past withdrawal from the Paris Agreement could foreshadow diminished American involvement in climate commitments.
“We have our work cut-out for us. We are wary that we have the Trump administration coming through and may not be favourable to some of the climate funding that America has proposed,” Samoan academic and COP veteran Salā George Carter told BenarNews.
“We will continue to look for other ways to work with the US, if not with the government then maybe with businesses.”
This year, for the first time, a COP President’s Scientific Council has been formed to be actively involved in the negotiations. Carter is the sole Pacific representative.
Past COP funding promises of US$100 billion annually from developed countries to support vulnerable nations “has never been achieved in any of the years,” he said.
Disproportionate Pacific burden
Pacific nations contribute minimally to global emissions but often bear a disproportionate burden of climate change impacts.
Pacific Island Climate Action Network regional director Rufino Varea argues wealthier nations have a responsibility to support adaptation efforts in these vulnerable regions.
“The Pacific advocates for increased climate finance from wealthier nations, utilizing innovative mechanisms like fossil fuel levies to support adaptation, loss and damage, and a just transition for vulnerable communities,” Varea told BenarNews.
COP29 is being held in the capital of Azerbaijan, the port city of Baku on the oil and gas rich Caspian Sea, once an important waypoint on the ancient Silk Road connecting China to Europe.
The country bordering Russia, Iran, Georgia and Armenia is now one of the world’s most fossil fuel export dependent economies.
About 40,000 delegates will attend COP29 from all the U.N. member states including political leaders, diplomats, scientists, officials, civil society organizations, journalists, activists, Indigenous groups and many more.
All nations are party to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and most signed up to the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and the 1.5 degree target.
Priorities for Pacific
Pacific Islands Forum Secretary General Baron Waqa in a statement yesterday said “the priorities of the Pacific Islands countries, include keeping the 1.5 degree goal alive.”
“The outcomes of COP 29 must deliver on what is non-negotiable – our survival,” he said.
Ahead of COP29, the 39 members of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) — representing the Pacific, Caribbean, African, Indian, and South China Sea — met in Baku to discuss negotiation priorities to achieve the 1.5 degree target and make meaningful progress on climate finance.
Pacific negotiators have historically found COP outcomes disappointing, yet they continue to advocate for greater accountability from major polluters.
“There have been people who have come to COP and refuse to attend anymore,” Carter said. “They believe it is a waste of time coming here because of very little delivery at the end of each COP.”
Papua New Guinea is not attending in Baku in an official capacity this year, citing lack of progress, but some key PNG diplomats are present to support the Pacific’s goals.
Climate data last week from the Europe Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service predicted 2024 will be the hottest year on record, and likely the first year to exceed the 1.5 degree threshold set in Paris.
Science becoming marginalised
Delegates worry science is becoming marginalised in climate negotiations, with some “arguing that we have reached 1.5, why do we continue to push for 1.5?,” Carter said.
“Although we have reached 1.5 degrees, we should not remove it. In fact, we should keep it as a long-time goal,” he said.
Carter argues for the importance of incorporating both scientific evidence and “our lived experience of climate change” in policy discussions.
The fight for the Paris target and loss and damage funding has been central to Pacific advocacy at previous COPs, despite persistent resistance from some countries.
The 1.5-degree target is “a lifeline of survival for communities and people in our region and in most island nations,” Varea said.
He stressed the need for “a progressive climate finance goal based on the needs and priorities of developing countries, small island developing states (SIDS), and least developed countries (LDC) to enable all countries to retain the 1.5 ambition and implement measures for resilience and loss and damage (finance).”
“As Pacific civil society, we obviously want the most ambitious outcomes to protect people and the planet.”
Pacific negotiators include prominent leaders, such as President Hilde Heine of the Marshall Islands, Vanuatu’s Special Envoy Ralph Regenvanu, Tuvalu’s Climate Change Minister Maina Talia and negotiators Anne Rasmussen from Samoa and Fiji’s Ambassador Amena Yauvoli.
Republished from BenarNews with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The outcome of global climate summits has barely changed since the United Nations held the first Conference of the Parties (COP) in Berlin in 1995. Reaching an international consensus on climate action that might avert the worst effects of global warming and put the planet on a sustainable track has always been an elusive goal due to the power of the fossil fuel industry and political short…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Former Vice President and climate advocate Al Gore is warning that the UN climate summit COP28 is now “on the verge of complete failure” after leaders of the summit published a draft agreement that omitted a call for phasing out fossil fuels — without which it is impossible to meaningfully mitigate the climate crisis. In a scathing statement on social media on Monday, Gore warned that the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
By Kelvin Anthony,
Pacific island countries’ “relentless” efforts at the UN’s specialist agency on shipping, International Maritime Organisation (IMO), has resulted in the adoption of a new emissions reductions strategy to ensure the Paris Agreement goal remains within reach.
The IMO’s 80th Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC80) was under pressure to deliver an outcome to reduce the global maritime transportation industry’s carbon footprint and to steer the sector towards a viable climate path that is 1.5 degrees-aligned.
It was a political compromise after two weeks of intense politicking that got member states through to settle on the 2023 IMO Greenhouse Gas Strategy on Friday, just as hopes were fading of any meaningful outcome from the negotiations at the IMO’s climate talks in London.
The Pacific collective from the Marshall Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Tonga and Solomon Islands, who have been at the IMO since 2015 joined by Vanuatu, Nauru, Samoa and Nauru — referred to as the 6PAC Plus — overcame strong resistance to ensure international shipping continues to steam towards full decarbonisation by 2050.
Vanuatu’s Climate Change Minister Ralph Regevanu, who attended the IMO meeting for the first time, said: “This outcome is far from perfect, but countries across the world came together and got it done — and it gives us a shot at 1.5 degrees.”
Pacific nations were advocating for global shipping to reach zero emissions by 2050 consistent with the science-based targets.
They had proposed absolute emissions cuts from the sector of at least 37 percent by 2030 and 96 percent by 2040 for the industry, to ensure the IMO is not out of step on climate change.
Countries came up short
But countries came up short, instead agreeing that to “reach net-zero GHG emissions from international shipping” a reduction of at least 20 percent by 2030, striving for 30 percent, and at least 70 percent by 2040, striving for 80 percent compared to 2008, “by or around 2050”, was sufficient to set them on the right trajectory.
While there were concerns that targets were not ambitious, they were accepted as better than what nations had decided on in an earlier revised draft text on Thursday, when they agreed for only 20 percent by 2030, with the upper limit of 25 percent, and at least 70 percent by 2040, striving for 75.
“These higher targets are the result of relentless, unceasing lobbying by ambitious Pacific islands, against the odds,” Marshall Islands special presidential envoy for the decarbonisation of maritime shipping, Albon Ishoda said.
”If we are to have any hope of saving our beautiful Blue Planet, and building a truly ecological civilisation, the climate vulnerable needs our voices to be heard and we are confident that they have been heard today.”
Tuvalu’s Minister for Transport, Energy and Tourism, Nielu Mesake, said he was “very disappointed” to have “a strategy that falls short of what we need”.
“But we are also realistic and understand that to reach any chance of setting this critical sector in the right direction we needed to compromise,” Mesake said.
He said Tuvalu was confident in the shipping industry’s ability to change.
“We have seen it before. We are confident that our industry will now prioritise each effort and each capital into decarbonizing [and] see shipping stepping up to the plate and fulfil its responsibility to reduce emissions.”
Ishoda said the IMO’s focus now was to deliver on the targets.
“We look forward to swift agreement on a just and equitable economic measure to price shipping emissions and bend the emissions curve fast enough to keep 1.5 alive.”
More work ahead
IMO chief Kitck Lim said the adoption of the strategy was a “monumental development” but it was only “a starting point for the work that needs to intensify even more over the years and decades ahead of us.”
“However, with the Revised Strategy that you have now agreed on, we have a clear direction, a common vision, and ambitious targets to guide us to deliver what the world expects from us,” Lim said.
And Pacific nations are under no illusion of the task ahead for international shipping truly to truly meet the 1.5 degrees limit.
Fiji’s Minister for Transport Ro Filipe Tuisawau said: “We know that we have much more work to do now to adopt a universal GHG levy and global fuel standards urgently.
“These are tools which will actually reduce emissions. We also look forward to the utilisation of viable alternative fuels,” Tuisawau said.
Kiribati Minister for Information, Communication and Transport Tekeeua Tarati said the process of arriving at the final outcome “has been an extremely challenging and distressing negotiation for all parties involved.”
“We had hoped for a revised strategy that was completely aligned to 1.5 degrees, not a strategy that merely keeps it within reach,” Tarati said.
“We need to work on the measures that are essential to achieve the emissions reductions we so desperately need.”
Carbon levy on the table
The calls for a GHG levy for pollution from ships also made it through as an option under the basket of candidate mid-term GHG reduction measures, work on which will be ongoing in future IMO forums.
While the word “levy” is not mentioned, the strategy states an economic measure should be developed “on the basis of maritime GHG emissions pricing mechanism”.
“A GHG levy, starting at $100/tonne, is the only way to keep it there. Ultimately it’s not the targets but the incentives we put in place to meet them. So we in the Pacific are going to keep up a strong fight for a levy that gets us to zero emissions by 2050.”
Ishoda said a universal GHG levy “is the most effective, the most efficient, and the most equitable economic measure to accelerate the decarbonisation of international shipping.”
But he acknowledged more needed to be done.
“There is much work to do to ensure that 1.5 remains not just within reach, but it’s achieved in reality.”
‘Wish and prayer agreement’
But shipping and climate campaigners say the plan is not good enough.
According to the Clean Shipping Coalition, the target agreed to in the final strategy was weak and “is far short of what is needed to be sure of keeping global heating below 1.5 degrees.”
“There is no excuse for this wish and a prayer agreement,” the group’s president, John Maggs, said.
Maggs said the member states had known halving emissions by the end of the decade “was both possible and affordable”.
“The most vulnerable put up an admirable fight for high ambition and significantly improved the agreement but we are still a long way from the IMO treating the climate crisis with the urgency that it deserves and that the public demands.”
University College London’s shipping expert Dr Tristan Smith said outcome of IMO’s climate talks “owes so much to the leadership of a small number of climate vulnerable countries – to their determination and perseverance in convincing much larger economies to act more ambitiously”.
“That this still does not do enough to ensure the survival of the vulnerable countries, in spite of what they have given to help secure the sustainability of global trade, is why more is needed, and all the more reason to give them the credit for what they have done and to heed their calls for a GHG levy,” Dr Smith added.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Human-caused global warming is set to surpass 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Celsius) by the year 2037, overshooting an international goal beyond which severe climate disruptions may become the norm, according to a new analysis from 50 climate scientists. “This is unprecedented in anything we have seen historically,” said Piers Forster, a professor at the University of Leeds and an author on the paper.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A Swedish court on Tuesday ruled that hundreds of youth climate activists including Greta Thunberg can collectively sue Sweden for the government’s “insufficient climate policy.”
More than 600 people under age 26, including 20-year-old Thunberg, signed the 87-page document that is the basis for the lawsuit, which was filed in Stockholm in November and coincided with a march through the city.
“Sweden has never treated the climate crisis like a crisis,” Anton Foley of the youth-led group Aurora, which prepared and filed the class-action suit, said at the time. “Sweden is failing in its responsibility and breaking the law.”
The Nacka District Court determined Tuesday that the case can proceed and gave the Swedish government three months to respond.
“The district court has today issued a summons in a high-profile class-action lawsuit,” the court said. “In the case, demands have been made for the district court to determine that the state has an obligation to take certain specified measures to limit climate change.”
“Limiting global warming to 1.5°C requires drastic emission reductions starting now.”
“At present, the district court cannot give a forecast as to when the case may be finalized or when it may be necessary to hold hearings in the case,” the court continued, adding that the case could go to trial or be settled in writing.
As Aurora’s webpage for the case explains, the young activists believe the climate emergency “is a problem we all have to solve together, but the responsibility is not evenly distributed between the countries of the world” and “Sweden, as a rich country with historically high emissions, has a particularly big responsibility to take the lead.”
Referencing the 2015 Paris agreement’s more ambitious goal for global heating by the end of this century, the activists argue that their country’s climate action “is insufficient to be in line with Sweden’s fair share of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C” and therefore “constitutes a violation of human rights.”
“Limiting global warming to 1.5°C requires drastic emission reductions starting now,” the youth warn, noting calculations that suggest Sweden doing its fair share would involve moves to cut emissions by 6.5-9.4 million tons annually from 2019-30.
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The climate crisis also negatively impacts mental health, “partly as a consequence of the extreme weather and environmental changes that are happening and will happen, but also due to anxiety and stress during youth,” the site stresses. “Everyone who is involved in the class action is young and therefore runs a high risk of suffering these consequences during their lifetime.”
The Swedish court’s decision came a day after the release of a highly anticipated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called “a survival guide for humanity” which shows the 1.5°C goal for this century is still achievable but requires “a quantum leap in climate action.”
Thunberg, founder of the global Fridays for Future movement, tweeted Monday in response to the report, “The fact that people in power still somehow live in denial, and actively move in the wrong direction, will eventually be seen for and understood as the unprecedented betrayal it is.”
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“Today, after yesterday’s IPCC report, everything is back to normal—as always,” Thunberg added Tuesday. “We continue to ignore the climate crisis as if nothing happened. Our societies are still in denial, and those in power go on with their never ending quests to maximize profits. We cannot afford this.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The global food system’s greenhouse gas emissions will add nearly 1C to Earth’s surface temperatures by 2100 on current trends, scientists warned on 6 March. This would obliterate the Paris Agreement climate goals.
But a major overhaul of the sector – from production to distribution to consumption – could reduce those emissions. A transformation of the sector could cut emissions by more than half even as the global human population increases, the scientists reported in Nature Climate Change.
The Earth’s surface has warmed 1.2C since the late 1800s. The 2015 Paris Agreement set a core goal of trying to limit warming to 1.5C. They also seek to cap it at “well under” 2C.
Science has shown the 1.5C limit to be a much safer threshold to avoid more devastating climate impacts, including coastal flooding, heatwaves and drought, and possibly irreversible climate tipping points. These are thresholds that could trigger large-scale changes in the Earth system, such as the collapse of certain vast ice sheets.
As Carbon Brief has reported, research indicates that, at warming above 1.5C, there is a “significant likelihood” of the world crossing multiple tipping points.
According to some estimates, the global food system accounts for about 15% of current warming levels. Nonetheless, only a third of national emissions reductions plans under the Paris pact include any measure to cut carbon pollution from agriculture or animal-based farming. The study’s lead author Catherine Ivanovich, a doctoral student at Columbia University in New York, told Agence France-Presse:
Mitigating emissions from the food sector is essential to working toward a secure climate future
To make their own estimates of how much the food system adds to global warming – now and in the future – Ivanovich and her colleagues looked separately at the three main greenhouse gases. These gases vary in potency and staying power in the atmosphere.
Once emitted, carbon dioxide can remain in the atmosphere for centuries. Methane only lingers for about a decade but, on that timescale, is almost 100 times more efficient in retaining the Sun’s heat.
CO2 from machinery and transport are significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Nitrous oxide from excess use of chemical fertilisers is similarly harmful. But the researchers calculated that around 80% of:
future warming from food consumption will be from meat, rice and dairy products.
These are “high-methane food groups”, they highlighted.
Without a sharp change in production and diet, the study concluded, global food consumption will boost Earth’s average surface temperature 0.7C and 0.9C by century’s end. The authors emphasised that:
This additional warming alone is enough to surpass the 1.5C global warming target and approach the 2C threshold
The study based its estimates on the continuation of “current dietary patterns and agricultural production practices”. As the study highlighted, this means that if consumption levels of animal-based foods increase, as projected, the situation could be much worse.
Methane, the study showed, is clearly the key to curbing food-related carbon pollution. Ivanovich said:
The majority of future warming from the food sector comes from the emissions of methane
“Because it is a short-lived pollutant, immediate reductions in its emissions can result in climate benefits in the near future.”
The study found that improving production methods for meat, dairy, and rice, and slashing food waste would help to cut these emissions. The same can be said of using renewables rather than fossil fuels for power.
Meanwhile, people adopting a diet optimal for human health could curb the emissions by 0.2C. This is around 20% of the anticipated warming, according to the analysis. The researchers used Harvard medical school’s recommendations as the measure of a healthy diet. It advises only a single serving of red meat weekly and “limited consumption” of other animal-based foods, namely fish, birds, and eggs. This means a substantial drop in consumption of animal-based foods is necessary in richer countries. Conversely, some poorer countries could increase consumption.
To date, however, trend lines for many of these measures are stagnant. In the case of meat consumption, they’re moving in the wrong direction.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
Featured image via Vaarok / Wikimedia, cropped to 770×403, licensed under CC BY 2.5
This post was originally published on Canary.
Taking aim at Wall Street banks financing the oil, gas, and coal extraction fueling the climate crisis, a coalition of institutional investors on Tuesday announced the filing of climate-related shareholder resolutions in an effort to force “more climate-friendly policies that better align with” the firms’ public commitments to combating the planetary emergency.
In the resolutions, members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) and Harrington Investments asked six banks—Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo—to enact policies phasing out fossil fuel finance, disclose plans for aligning their financing with their stated near-term emissions reduction goals, and to set absolute end-of-decade emissions reduction targets for their energy sector financing.
Shareholders also filed climate resolutions at four companies—Chubb, Travelers, The Hartford, and Berkshire Hathaway—that insure fossil fuel projects.
“Each of the major banks has publicly committed to aligning its financing with the goals of the Paris agreement to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, a target widely considered imperative to avoid catastrophic climate impacts and financial losses,” ICCR said in a statement. “Scientific consensus shows that new fossil fuel expansion is incompatible with achieving net-zero by 2050, yet these banks continue to invest billions of dollars each year in new fossil fuel development—a fact corroborated by a new Reclaim Finance report released last week.”
\u201cBREAKING: @ICCRonline members filed two shareholder proposals for 2023 calling on US banks @jpmorgan @BankofAmerica @Citibank @WellsFargo @GoldmanSachs @MorganStanley to implement more climate-friendly policies & better align with their net zero pledges https://t.co/D000QaI2L6\u201d— ICCR (@ICCR)
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As Stop the Money Pipeline—a coalition of over 200 groups seeking to hold “financial backers of climate chaos accountable”—noted:
A slate of resolutions calling for policies to phase out financing for fossil fuel expansion was filed by the same investors at U.S. banks in 2022. They received between 9% and 13% support, which was a significant milestone for these first-of-their-kind proposals. This year’s fossil fuel financing proposals have been updated to encourage banks to finance clients’ low-carbon transition so long as those plans are credible and verified. The previous resolutions were supported by many major institutional investors, including the New York State and New York City Common Retirement Funds.
New in 2023 are the resolutions on absolute emissions reduction targets for energy sector financing filed by the New York City and New York State comptrollers, and the resolutions calling for disclosure of climate transition plans filed by As You Sow. The day before the resolutions were filed, Denmark’s largest bank, Danske, announced a phaseout of corporate financing for companies engaged in new coal, oil and, gas development.
“Any climate commitment from a bank that is still financing fossil fuel expansion is greenwashing, pure and simple,” Arielle Swernoff, U.S. banks campaign manager at Stop the Money Pipeline, said in a statement. “By supporting these resolutions, shareholders can hold banks accountable to their own climate commitments, effectively manage risk, and protect people and the planet.”
\u201cNEW! Investors have filed climate shareholder resolutions at major US and Canadian banks.\n\nOur response \u2b07\ufe0f\nhttps://t.co/NYbLsbCevF\u201d— Stop the Money Pipeline (@Stop the Money Pipeline)
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Dan Chu, executive director of the Sierra Club Foundation—which led the filing at JPMorgan Chase—lamented that “all major U.S. banks continue to finance billions of dollars for new coal, oil, and gas projects every year. Such financing undermines the banks’ net-zero commitments and exposes investors to material risks.”
“These shareholder resolutions simply ask banks to align their promises with their actions and to adopt policies to phase out the financing of new fossil fuel development,” Chu added.
Referring to a warning from the International Energy Agency, Kate Monahan of Trillium Asset Management—which spearheaded the Bank of America filing—said that “we will not be able to achieve the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C if banks continue to finance new fossil fuel exploration and development.”
“Bank of America has publicly committed to the Paris agreement but continues to finance fossil fuel expansion with no phaseout plan, exposing itself to accusations of greenwashing and reputational damage,” Monahan contended. ” By continuing to fund new fossil fuels, Bank of America and others are taking actions with potentially catastrophic consequences.”
Surpassing the global temperature targets of the Paris climate agreement, even temporarily, could dramatically increase the risk of the world experiencing dangerous “tipping points,” according to research published Friday.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines tipping points as “critical thresholds in a system that, when exceeded,
can lead to a significant change in the state of the system, often with an
understanding that the change is irreversible.”
Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the new study focuses on the potential shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the Amazon rainforest shifting to savannah, and the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.
“Our model analysis reveals that temporary overshoots can increase tipping risks by up to 72%.”
Under the 2015 Paris deal, governments agreed to work toward keeping global temperature rise this century below 2°C, ultimately aiming for limiting it to 1.5°C. However, scientists continue to warn the countries’ pledges and actions to cut planet-heating emissions are far from bold enough to reach those goals, and critics blasted the COP27 summit in Egypt last month as “another terrible failure” given that the conference’s final agreement did not call for rapidly phasing out all fossil fuels.
“To effectively prevent all tipping risks, the global mean temperature increase would need to be limited to no more than 1°C—we are currently already at about 1.2°C,” noted study co-author Jonathan Donges, co-lead of the FutureLab on Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “The latest IPCC report is showing that we’re most likely on a path to temporarily overshoot the 1.5°C temperature threshold.”
The researchers examined various scenarios with peak temperatures from 2°C to 4°C. As lead author and PIK scientist Nico Wunderling explained, they found that “the risk for some tipping events could increase very substantially under certain global warming overshoot scenarios.”
“Even if we would manage to limit global warming to 1.5°C after an overshoot of more than 2°C, this would not be enough as the risk of triggering one or more global tipping points would still be more than 50%,” Wunderling said. “With more warming in the long-term, the risks increase dramatically.”
“We found that the risk for the emergence of at least one tipping event increases with rising peak temperatures—already at a peak temperature of 3°C, more than one-third of all simulations showed a tipping event even when overshoot durations were limited strongly,” he added. “At 4°C peak temperature, this risk extends to more than half of all simulations.”
According to the study, “Our model analysis reveals that temporary overshoots can increase tipping risks by up to 72% compared with non-overshoot scenarios, even when the long-term equilibrium temperature stabilizes within the Paris range.”
Study co-author Ricarda Winkelmann, co-lead of the FutureLab on Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene at PIK, pointed out that “especially the Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheet are at risk of tipping even for small overshoots, underlining that they are among the most vulnerable tipping elements.”
“While it would take a long time for the ice loss to fully unfold, the temperature levels at which such changes are triggered could already be reached soon,” she said. “Our action in the coming years can thus decide the future trajectory of the ice sheets for centuries or even millennia to come.”
\u201c\ud83c\udd95Overshooting #climate targets could significantly increase risk for #tipping cascades, finds new study with PIK scientists Nico Wunderling, @JonathanDonges,@Ricarda_Climate et al.\n\ud83d\udc49https://t.co/K9LiSlRSY7\u201d— Potsdam Institute (@Potsdam Institute) 1671727714
While these scientists found that the Amazon and AMOC have higher critical temperature thresholds, various studies have highlighted the dangers of either system reaching its tipping point.
An analysis of the Amazon released in September by scientists and Indigenous leaders in South America stated that “the tipping point is not a future scenario but rather a stage already present in some areas of the region,” meaning portions of the crucial rainforest may never recover—which could have “profound” consequences on a global scale.
A study on the AMOC from last year, also published in Nature Climate Change, warned that the collapse of the system of currents that carries warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic “would have severe impacts on the global climate system,” from disrupting rains that billions of people need for food and increasing storms to further threatening the Amazon and ice sheets.
Donges stressed that “even though a temporary temperature overshoot would definitely be better than reaching a peak temperature and remaining there, some of the overshoot impacts may lead to irreversible damages in a high climate risk zone and this is why low-temperature overshoots are key here.”
Pointing to estimates that current policies could lead to an average global temperature of up to 3.6°C by 2100, Donges declared that “this is not enough.”
As Winkelmann put it: “Every tenth of a degree counts. We must do what we can to limit global warming as quickly as possible.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
As President Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping arrived on the resort island of Bali, Indonesia, for their November 14th “summit,” relations between their two countries were on a hair-raising downward spiral, with tensions over Taiwan nearing the boiling point. Diplomats hoped, at best, for a modest reduction in tensions, which, to the relief of many, did occur. No policy breakthroughs were expected, however, and none were achieved. In one vital area, though, there was at least a glimmer of hope: the planet’s two largest greenhouse-gas emitters agreed to resume their languishing negotiations on joint efforts to overcome the climate crisis.
These talks have been an on-again, off-again proposition since President Barack Obama initiated them before the Paris climate summit of December 2015, at which delegates were to vote on a landmark measure to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (the maximum amount scientists believe this planet can absorb without catastrophic consequences). The U.S.-Chinese consultations continued after the adoption of the Paris climate accord, but were suspended in 2017 by that climate-change-denying president Donald Trump. They were relaunched by President Biden in 2021, only to be suspended again by an angry Chinese leadership in retaliation for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2 visit to Taiwan, viewed in Beijing as a show of support for pro-independence forces on that island. But thanks to Biden’s intense lobbying in Bali, President Xi agreed to turn the interactive switch back on.
Behind that modest gesture there lies a far more momentous question: What if the two countries moved beyond simply talking and started working together to champion the radical lowering of global carbon emissions? What miracles might then be envisioned? To help find answers to that momentous question means revisiting the recent history of the U.S.-Chinese climate collaboration.
In November 2014, based on extensive diplomatic groundwork, Presidents Obama and Xi met in Beijing and signed a statement pledging joint action to ensure the success of the forthcoming Paris summit. “The United States of America and the People’s Republic of China have a critical role to play in combating global climate change,” they affirmed. “The seriousness of the challenge calls upon the two sides to work constructively together for the common good.”
Obama then ordered Secretary of State John Kerry to collaborate with Chinese officials in persuading other attendees at that summit — officially, the 21st Conference of the Parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP21 — to agree on a firm commitment to honor the 1.5-degree limit. That joint effort, many observers believe, was instrumental in persuading reluctant participants like India and Russia to sign the Paris climate agreement.
“With our historic joint announcement with China last year,” Obama declared at that summit’s concluding session, “we showed it was possible to bridge the old divides… that had stymied global progress for so long. That accomplishment encouraged dozens and dozens of other nations to set their own ambitious climate targets.”
Obama also pointed out that any significant global progress along that path was dependent on continued cooperation between the two countries. “No nation, not even one as powerful as ours, can solve this challenge alone.”
That era of cooperation didn’t last long. Donald Trump, an ardent fan of fossil fuels, made no secret of his aversion to the Paris climate accord. He signaled his intent to exit from the agreement soon after taking office. “It is time to put Youngstown, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; and Pittsburgh, PA, along with many, many other locations within our great country, before Paris, France,” he said ominously in 2017 when announcing his decision.
With the U.S. absent from the scene, progress in implementing the Paris Agreement slowed to a crawl. Many countries that had been pressed by the U.S. and China to agree to ambitious emissions-reduction schedules began to opt out of those commitments in sync with Trump’s America. China, too, the greatest greenhouse gas emitter of this moment and the leading user of that dirtiest of fossil fuels, coal, felt far less pressure to honor its commitment, even on a rapidly heating planet.
No one knows what would have happened had Trump not been elected and those U.S.-China talks not been suspended, but in the absence of such collaboration, there was a steady rise in carbon emissions and temperatures across the planet. According to CO.2.Earth, emissions grew from 35.5 billion metric tons in 2016 to 36.4 billion tons in 2021, a 2.5% increase. Since such emissions are the leading contributor to the greenhouse-gas effect responsible for global warming, it should be no surprise that the past seven years have also proven the hottest on record, with much of the world experiencing record-breaking heatwaves, forest fires, droughts, and crop failures. We can be fairly certain, moreover, that in the absence of renewed U.S.-China climate cooperation, such disasters will become ever more frequent and severe.
Overcoming this fearsome trend was one of Joe Biden’s principal campaign promises and, against strong Republican opposition, he has indeed endeavored to undo at least some of the damage wrought by Trump. It was symbolic indeed that he rejoined the Paris climate accord on his first day in office and ordered his cabinet to accelerate the government’s transition to clean energy. In August, he achieved a significant breakthrough when Congress approved the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which provides $369 billion in loans, grants, and tax credits for green-energy initiatives.
Biden also sought to reinvigorate Washington’s global-warming diplomacy and the stalled talks with China, naming John Kerry as his special envoy for climate action. Kerry, in turn, reestablished ties with his Chinese colleagues from his time as secretary of state. At last year’s COP26 gathering in Glasgow, Scotland, he persuaded them to join the U.S. in approving the “Glasgow Declaration,” a commitment to step up efforts to mitigate climate change.
However, in so many ways, Joe Biden and his foreign policy team are still caught up in the Cold War era and his administration has generally taken a far more antagonistic approach to China than Obama. Not surprisingly, then, the progress Kerry achieved with his Chinese counterparts at Glasgow largely evaporated as tensions over Taiwan only grew more heated. Biden was, for instance, the first president in memory to claim — four times — that U.S. military forces would defend that island in a crisis, were it to be attacked by China, essentially tossing aside Washington’s longstanding position of “strategic ambiguity” on the Taiwan question. In response, China’s leaders became ever more strident in claiming that the island belonged to them.
When Nancy Pelosi made that Taiwan visit in early August, the Chinese responded by firing ballistic missiles into the waters around the island and, in a fit of anger, terminated those bilateral climate-change talks. Now, thanks to Biden’s entreaties in Bali, the door seems again open for the two countries to collaborate on limiting global greenhouse gas emissions. At a moment of ever more devastating evidence of planetary heating, from a megadrought in the U.S. to “extreme heat” in China, the question is: What might any meaningful new collaborative effort involve?
In 2015, few of those in power doubted the overarching threat posed by climate change or the need to bring international diplomacy to bear to help overcome it. In Paris, Obama declared that “the growing threat of climate change could define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other.” What should give us hope, he continued, “is the fact that our nations share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about it.”
Since then, all too sadly, other challenges, including the growth of Cold War-style tensions with China, the Covid-19 pandemic, and Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, have come to “define the contours” of this century. In 2022, even as the results of the overheating of the planet become ever more obvious, few world leaders would contend that “it is within our power” to overcome the climate peril. So, the first (and perhaps most valuable) outcome of any renewed U.S.-China climate cooperation might simply be to place climate change at the top of the world’s agenda again and provide evidence that the major powers, working together, can successfully tackle the issue.
Such an effort might, for instance, start with a Washington-Beijing “climate summit,” presided over by presidents Biden and Xi and attended by high-level delegations from around the world. American and Chinese scientists could offer the latest bad news on the likely future trajectory of global warming, while identifying real-world goals to significantly reduce fossil-fuel use. This might, in turn, lead to the formation of multilateral working groups, hosted by U.S. and Chinese agencies and institutions, to meet regularly and implement the most promising strategies for halting the onrushing disaster.
Following the example set by Obama and Xi at COP21 in Paris, Biden and Xi would agree to play a pivotal role in the next Conference of the Parties, COP28, scheduled for December 2023 in the United Arab Emirates. Following the inconclusive outcome of COP27, recently convened at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, strong leadership will be required to ensure something significantly better at COP28. Among the goals those two leaders would need to pursue, the top priority should be the full implementation of the 2015 Paris accord with its commitment to a 1.5-degree maximum temperature increase, followed by a far greater effort by the wealthy nations to assist developing countries suffering from its effects.
There’s no way, however, that China and the U.S. will be able to exert a significant international influence on climate efforts if both countries — the former the leading emitter of greenhouse gasses at this moment and the latter the historic leader — don’t take far greater initiatives to lower their carbon emissions and shift to renewable sources of energy. The Inflation Reduction Act will indeed allow the White House to advance many new initiatives in this direction, while China is moving more swiftly than any other country to install added supplies of wind and solar energy. Nevertheless, both countries continue to rely on fossil fuels for a substantial share of their energy — China, for instance, remains the greatest user of coal, burning more of it than the rest of the world combined — and so both will need to agree on even more aggressive moves to reduce their carbon emissions if they hope to persuade other nations to do the same.
In a better world, next on my list of possible outcomes from a reinvigorated U.S.-Chinese relationship would be joint efforts to help finance the global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Although the cost of deploying renewables, especially wind and solar energy, has fallen dramatically in recent years, it remains substantial even for wealthy countries. For many developing nations, it remains an unaffordable option. This emerged as a major issue at COP27 in Egypt, where representatives from the Global South complained that the wealthy countries largely responsible for the overheating of the planet weren’t doing faintly enough (or, in many cases, anything), despite prior promises, to help them shoulder the costs of the increasingly devastating effects of climate change and the future greening of their countries.
Many of these complaints revolved around the Green Climate Fund, established at COP16 in Cancún. The developed countries agreed to provide $100 billion annually to that fund by 2020 to help developing nations bear the costs of transitioning to renewable energy. Although that amount is now widely viewed as wildly insufficient for such a transition — “all of the evidence suggests that we need trillions, not billions,” observed Baysa Naran, a manager at the research center Climate Policy Initiative — the Fund has never even come close to hitting that $100 billion target, leaving many in the Global South bitter as, with unprecedented flooding and staggering heat waves, climate change strikes home ever more horrifically there.
When the U.S. and China were working on the climate together at COP26 in Glasgow, filling the Green Climate Fund appeared genuinely imaginable. In their Glasgow Declaration of November 2021, John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, affirmed that “both countries recognize the importance of the commitment made by developed countries to the goal of mobilizing jointly $100b per year by 2020 and annually through 2025 to address the needs of developing countries [and] stress the importance of meeting that goal as soon as possible.”
Sadly enough, all too little came of that affirmation in the months that followed, as U.S.-China relations turned ever more antagonistic. Now, in the wake of Biden’s meeting with Xi and the resumption of their talks on climate change, it’s at least possible to imagine intensified bilateral efforts to advance that $100 billion objective — and even go far beyond it (though we can expect fierce resistance from the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives).
As my contribution to such thinking, let me suggest the formation of a Sino-American Fund for Green Energy Transitions — a grant- and loan-making institution jointly underwritten by the two countries with the primary purpose of financing renewable energy projects in the developing world. Decisions on such funding would be made by a board of directors, half from each country, with staff work performed by professionals drawn from around the world. The aim: to supplement the Green Climate Fund with additional hundreds of billions of dollars annually and so speed the global energy transition.
The leaders of the U.S. and China both recognize that global warming poses an extraordinary threat to the survival of their nations and that colossal efforts will be needed in the coming years to minimize the climate peril, while preparing for its most severe effects. “The climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time,” the Biden administration’s October 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS) states. “Without immediate global action to reduce emissions, scientists tell us we will soon exceed 1.5 degrees of warming, locking in further extreme heat and weather, rising sea levels, and catastrophic biodiversity loss.”
Despite that all-too-on-target assessment, the NSS portrays competition from China as an even greater threat to U.S. security — without citing any of the same sort of perilous outcomes — and proposes a massive mobilization of the nation’s economic, technological, and military resources to ensure American dominance of the Asia-Pacific region for decades to come. That strategy will, of course, require trillions of dollars in military expenditures, ensuring insufficient funding to tackle the climate crisis and exposing this country to an ever-increasing risk of war — possibly even a nuclear one — with China.
Given such dangers, perhaps the best outcome of renewed U.S.-China climate cooperation, or green diplomacy, might be increasing trust between the leaders of those two countries, allowing for a reduction in tensions and military expenditures. Indeed, such an approach constitutes the only practical strategy for saving us from the catastrophic consequences of both a U.S.-China conflict and unconstrained climate change.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Group of 20 nations and major multilateral development banks spent nearly twice as much financing international fossil fuel projects as they did on clean energy alternatives during a recent two-year period, a report published Tuesday by a pair of green groups revealed.
Oil Change International and Friends of the Earth U.S., along with dozens of collaborating climate and environmental justice groups, found that from 2019 to 2021, members of the G20 and multilateral development banks (MDBs) including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) “provided at least $55 billion per year in international public finance for oil, gas, and coal,” an amount “almost two times more than their support for clean energy, which averaged only $29 billion per year.”
“This support directly counters G20 countries’ commitment to align financial flows to 1.5°C under the Paris agreement, as well as their 2009 commitment to phase out fossil fuel subsidies,” the publication continues. “This international public finance has an outsized impact on global energy systems, because it can offer government-backed credit ratings, is often provided at below-market rates, comes with large research and technical capacity, and signals broader government priorities.”
“Right now,” the report notes, “G20 countries and MDBs are overwhelmingly using their international public finance to prop up fossil fuel companies and prolong the fossil fuel era.”
Just Released
Read on for why we’re at a crossroads on the path to #StopFundingFossils
https://t.co/NBSXukFU43 pic.twitter.com/2utDfxPrqG
— Oil Change International (@PriceofOil) November 1, 2022
The new report comes just days ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP27, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. Last year, at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, dozens of countries and institutions including the United States pledged to end public financing of fossil fuel projects by 2022 and fully prioritize a shift to clean energy investment.
However, according to the new report, the United States has spent an average of $2.6 billion on fossil fuel investments, compared with just $358 million on renewables, from 2019 to 2021.
“As the world’s largest historical contributor to climate change, the United States has a duty to show true leadership by upholding President [Joe] Biden’s commitment to shift international public finance away from fossil fuels toward clean energy,” Kate DeAngelis, international finance program manager at Friends of the Earth U.S., said in a statement.
“Instead the U.S. Export-Import Bank and U.S. International Development Finance Corporation have bankrolled tens of billions of dollars to overseas fossil fuel projects that harm communities, kill workers and community members, and cause environmental destruction,” she added. “Biden’s failure to publish a comprehensive policy for international energy finance means the U.S. is breaking its promise rather than ending this deleterious financing.”
According to the report, export credit agencies “were the worst public finance actors, providing seven times more support for fossil fuels than clean energy.”
On Monday, The Guardian published a report that used Oil Change International’s Public Finance for Energy Database to detail how the U.S. government is pouring billions of dollars into fossil fuel projects in Africa while making relatively limited investments in renewable energy.
“International public finance is urgently needed to build a globally just energy transition. But it cannot play this critical role if G20 countries and MDBs continue to funnel $55 billion annually into climate-wrecking fossil fuel projects,” Claire O’Manique, one of the new report’s lead authors and Oil Change International’s public finance analyst, said in a statement.
“The climate movement will continue to hold wealthy countries accountable for their role in funding the climate crisis, and demand they move first and fastest to phase out their fossil fuel production, stop funding fossils, and pay their fair share of a globally just energy transition,” she added. “It is well past time that public finance dollars are spent to remedy fossil fuel colonialism by funding real solutions.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The “decade of inaction” that Labor accuses the Greens of instigating is a product of the former’s refusal to take climate action seriously, argues Alex Bainbridge.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
In a tyrannical move that will have lasting consequences for everyone alive and their progeny, conservative coal baron Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) told Democratic leaders on Thursday that he will not support a reconciliation package that contains provisions to mitigate the climate crisis.
This is a major blow to the Democrats — as well as to the planet’s dying species and anyone invested in inhabiting a livable planet — who were hoping to get about $300 billion or more in funding for climate and energy spending aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions with tax incentives for clean energy and electric vehicle expansion. The bill is modeled after last year’s Build Back Better Act, which Manchin also killed after months of stringing Democrats along in negotiations.
This was likely Democrats’ last chance to pass climate action before the midterm elections, in which early analyses predict that Democrats will lose at least one chamber of Congress. Thanks to Republicans working to nearly outright rig elections and the rapidly waning popularity of President Joe Biden, Democrats could also lose the presidency in 2024. Having a Republican in the White House would essentially ensure that the country doesn’t pass major federal climate bills until at least 2029.
Unless individual states introduce major climate bills and Biden uses his executive power to make unilateral moves like declaring a climate emergency and halting all new drilling on federal lands — as climate advocates have called for for years — the U.S. is likely to fall far short of its Paris Agreement pledge to cut emissions by half of 2005 levels by the end of the decade.
As of now, thanks to Manchin, the U.S. is set to meet only about 24 to 35 percent emissions cuts by 2030, researchers found in a report published this week. This would likely also mean that the country won’t meet 100 percent emissions reductions by 2050, which climate experts say is necessary to prevent some of the worst impacts of the climate crisis projected in the decades to come.
Not meeting these goals would be devastating for people worldwide. The U.S. is consistently one of the highest emitters of carbon, along with China, India and Russia. If the U.S. doesn’t act fast to reach net zero carbon emissions or eliminate fossil fuel usage altogether, the country could even end up increasing the amount of carbon dioxide that it emits every year starting in 2030, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The ramifications of that scenario would be utterly disastrous.
Climate advocates condemned Manchin’s announcement, warning of the consequences if Democrats don’t whip the senator in line or otherwise work around him.
“This is nothing short of a death sentence,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, per Common Dreams. “Our democracy is broken when one man who profits from the fossil fuel industry can defy the 81 million Americans who voted for Democrats to stop the climate crisis. It’s clear appealing to corporate obstructionists doesn’t work, and it will cost us a generation of voters.”
Lawmakers also expressed frustration on Thursday night, and called for lawmakers to double down on forcing climate provisions through Congress, one way or another. “Let me be clear — unless Congress takes bold and necessary action on climate change — a livable future is lost,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts). “Young people have acted bravely and relentlessly in defense of not just our planet, but their very lives. Another world is possible. We must have the courage to deliver it.”
“Manchin is forcing a deal that would abandon our obligation to act urgently on climate, strengthen social services, and prevent mass suffering,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri). “We must organize inside and outside of Congress — together — to ensure Manchin does not get away with this outrageous, failed leadership.”
Climate advocates like the Sunrise Movement and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) have laid out a number of actions that Biden can take to tackle the climate crisis.
They say that Biden could tighten limits on pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane, and issue regulations within a wide swath of agencies like the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — action by a “thousand cuts,” as Whitehouse put it. Biden could also direct the EPA to designate greenhouse gasses as pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act, which would enable the government to put a national cap on emissions, the Sunrise Movement says.
Expectations are high that climate action will be on the agenda, now the climate-denialist Coalition has been booted out. But, as Alex Bainbridge argues, Labor’s support for big fossil fuel projects must be challenged by building powerful grassroots action.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Queensland Nationals Senator Matt Canavan’s “net zero is dead” campaign should hardly come as a surprise, argues Binoy Kampmark.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
In the lead-up to recent climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, some were calling COP26 the “Finance COP.” This was, in part, because Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, had been working tirelessly to secure new climate commitments from financial institutions across the globe.
Carney finally had his big moment in Glasgow when he announced that over 450 of the world’s largest financial institutions — including banks, insurers, pension funds and asset managers — had joined the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) and committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2050. “The architecture of the global financial system has been transformed to deliver net zero,” stated Carney as he unveiled the news.
There were, however, two key words missing from the financial sector’s big moment. Not once in the 1,349-word press release proclaiming the financial industry’s new-found dedication to climate action did the words “fossil fuels” appear. To say that this is problematic is an understatement.
One study calculated that 71 percent of all of history’s greenhouse gas emissions come from just 100 fossil fuel companies. Not only that, but fossil fuel corporations have spent 40 years funding climate denial and waging war against even incremental proposals for climate action.
To tackle the climate crisis without confronting fossil fuels is like trying to put out a fire without doing anything to stop the people pouring gasoline on the flames. But that appears to be the approach that the financial sector is taking. Nowhere is this more obvious than on Wall Street.
In the five years after the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, just six U.S. banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs — have loaned a little shy of $1.2 trillion to the fossil fuel industry. To give that some context, consider that $1.2 trillion is more than double the current share market value of ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP combined.
In spite of their deep ties with the fossil fuel industry, every major U.S. bank has signed on to the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero and committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2050. Yet none of them have committed to ending their support of the industries that are most driving the climate crisis. Indeed, they seem intent on doing the opposite. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon recently vowed to continue providing finance to the oil and gas industry; Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has expressed similar sentiments.
A few months before the start of COP26, JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest funder of fossil fuels, became the first major U.S. bank to set 2030 climate targets. Unfortunately, rather than actually reducing the overall greenhouse gas emissions associated with its lending, Chase chose to reuse a convoluted accounting trick often used by Big Oil known as “carbon intensity,” pledging that by 2030, it will achieve a 15 percent reduction in the “carbon intensity” of the oil and gas firms it finances.
Here’s how Chase’s carbon intensity commitments work: Imagine you are the CEO of an oil firm. Your company owns 1,000 oil wells. You receive a $10 billion loan from Chase. You use that loan to buy 400 additional oil wells and 400 windmills. This means you are digging up and burning more oil than ever before; your overall contributions to climate change have gone up significantly. But because you are now also profiting from wind power, the “carbon intensity” of your company has gone down — an accounting trick that allows your oil company to expand oil production and banks like Chase to meet their greenwashed climate targets.
During COP26, Morgan Stanley became the second U.S. bank to release 2030 climate targets, announcing a plan to slash emissions in the energy, auto and manufacturing sectors. Unfortunately, Morgan Stanley’s targets are only a half-step better than Chase’s.
The press release announcing Morgan Stanley’s 2030 targets claims that the company’s targets are based on the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Net Zero by 2050 pathway. However, a key part of the IEA’s recommendations was that “there is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net zero pathway.” Unsurprisingly, a promise from Morgan Stanley, the world’s largest funder of new LNG terminals, to immediately end support for the expansion of the oil and gas industry was not forthcoming.
Given the collective failures of Carney, Chase and Morgan Stanley, it’s understandable that many activists denounced COP26 as nothing more than a “greenwashing festival.” This failure also makes it clear that we need the federal government to regulate financial institutions that are unwilling to do what’s necessary to curtail catastrophic climate change.
There have been some small first steps toward reigning in Wall Street’s ability to wreck our climate. In May 2021, President Biden issued the first-ever Executive Order on Climate-Related Financial Risk, directing federal regulators to analyze and mitigate the risk that climate change poses to the economy.
In response, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), the federal government’s most powerful financial regulator, released a report outlining what the climate crisis should mean for the financial sector. Unfortunately, although FSOC affirmed that U.S. financial regulators do, in fact, have the authority and obligation to address the climate crisis, it failed in several key regards. Most importantly, the report didn’t even mention that U.S. banks are actively driving the climate crisis by financing the continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry.
Of greater hope is the Fossil Free Finance Act. Introduced by Representatives Mondaire Jones, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley last fall, the Fossil Free Finance Act would prohibit the funding of new fossil fuel projects by 2022 and the funding of all fossil fuel projects by 2030. It is legislation that meets the scale and urgency of the climate challenge — which is, of course, exactly what is required.
Yet so far, only 22 Members of Congress have signed on to co-sponsor the Fossil Free Finance Act. If our elected officials are at all serious about addressing the climate crisis, that number must grow dramatically in 2022.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
ANALYSIS: By Robert Hales, Griffith University and Brendan Mackey, Griffith University
After two hard-fought weeks of negotiations, the Glasgow climate change summit is, at last, over. All 197 participating countries adopted the so-called Glasgow Climate Pact, despite an 11th hour intervention by India in which the final agreement was watered down from “phasing out” coal to “phasing down”.
In an emotional final speech, COP26 president Alok Sharma apologised for this last-minute change.
His apology goes to the heart of the goals of COP26 in Glasgow: the hope it would deliver outcomes matching the urgent “code red” action needed to achieve the Paris Agreement target.
At the summit’s outset, UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged countries to “keep the goal of 1.5℃ alive”, to accelerate the decarbonisation of the global economy, and to phase out coal.
So, was COP26 a failure? If we evaluate this using the summits original stated goals, the answer is yes, it fell short. Two big ticket items weren’t realised: renewing targets for 2030 that align with limiting warming to 1.5℃, and an agreement on accelerating the phase-out of coal.
But among the failures, there were important decisions and notable bright spots. So let’s take a look at the summit’s defining issues.
We’ve made serious breakthroughs @COP26.
We’ve kept 1.5 alive and made huge progress on coal, cars, cash and trees.
And while there is still so much that needs to be done to save our planet, we’ll look back at COP26 as the moment humanity finally got real about climate change. pic.twitter.com/Rf91HN4fS3
— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) November 13, 2021
Weak 2030 targets
The goal of the Paris Agreement is to limit global temperature rise to well below 2℃ this century, and to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5℃. Catastrophic impacts will be unleashed beyond this point, such as sea level rise and more intense and frequent natural disasters.
But new projections from Climate Action Tracker show even if all COP26 pledges are met, the planet is on track to warm by 2.1℃ — or 2.4℃ if only 2030 targets are met.
Despite the Australian government’s recent climate announcements, this nation’s 2030 target remains the same as in 2015. If all countries adopted such meagre near-term targets, global temperature rise would be on track for up to 3℃.
Technically, the 1.5℃ limit is still within reach because, under the Glasgow pact, countries are asked to update their 2030 targets in a year’s time. However, as Sharma said, “the pulse of 1.5 is weak”.
And as Australia’s experience shows, domestic politics rather than international pressure is often the force driving climate policy. So there are no guarantees Australia or other nations will deliver greater ambition in 2022.
“Many of our small, low-lying islands may disappear by the end of this century. That means the country will be lost.”
Palau’s Environment Minister Steven Victor tells #Newsnight decisions made tonight at #COP26 are also about “deciding whether we keep a culture alive”
pic.twitter.com/Qnr0X219om
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) November 11, 2021
Phase down, not out
India’s intervention to change the final wording to “phase down” coal rather than “phase out” dampens the urgency to shift away from coal.
India is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the United States. The country relies heavily on coal, and coal-powered generation is expected to grow by 4.6 percent each year to 2024.
India was the most prominent objector to the “phase out” wording, but also had support from China.
And US climate envoy John Kerry argued that carbon capture and storage technology could be developed further, to trap emissions at the source and store them underground.
Carbon capture and storage is a controversial proposition for climate action. It is not proven at scale, and we don’t yet know if captured emissions stored underground will eventually return to the atmosphere. And around the world, relatively few large-scale underground storage locations exist.
It is hard to see this expensive technology ever being cost-competitive with cheap renewable energy.
In a crucial outcome, COP26 also finalised rules for global carbon trading, known as Article 6 under the Paris Agreement. However under the rules, the fossil fuel industry will be allowed to “offset” its carbon emissions and carry on polluting. Combined with the “phasing down” change, this will see fossil fuel emissions continue.
It wasn’t all bad
Despite the shortcomings, COP26 led to a number of important positive outcomes.
The world has taken an unambiguous turn away from fossil fuel as a source of energy. And the 1.5℃ global warming target has taken centre stage, with the recognition that reaching this target will require rapid, deep and sustained emissions reductions of 45 percent by 2030, relative to 2010 levels.
What’s more, the pact emphasises the importance to mitigation of nature and ecosystems, including protecting forests and biodiversity. This comes on top of a side deal struck by Australia and 123 other countries promising to end deforestation by 2030.
The pact also urges countries to fully deliver on an outstanding promise to deliver US$100 billion a year for five years to developing countries vulnerable to climate damage. It also emphasises the importance of transparency in implementing the pledges.
Nations are also invited to revisit and strengthen the 2030 targets as necessary to align with the Paris Agreement temperature goal by the end of 2022. In support of this, it was agreed to hold a high-level ministerial roundtable meeting each year focused on raising ambition out to 2030.
The US and China climate agreement is also cause for cautious optimism.
Despite the world not being on track for the 1.5℃ goal, momentum is headed in the right direction. And the mere fact that a reduction in coal use was directly addressed in the final text signals change may be possible.
But whether it comes in the small window we have left to stop catastrophic climate change remains to be seen.
Dr Robert Hales, director of the Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, Griffith University and Dr Brendan Mackey, director of the Griffith Climate Change Response Programme, Griffith University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The “problem with COP,” said a UN observer, is that “everyone has a business class mentality.” In the groupthink of political leaders and diplomats gathered at the Glasgow summit, above all those from the Global North, when addressing the climate crisis, a business approach must prevail. Efficiency measures and new technologies take the star role. Regulation should be “soft”: all promises and no sanctions. Virtually all industries should carry on expanding without restraint — and of the 35 stalls at COP26 that parade countries’ green credentials, only two mentioned the need to shut down fossil fuels. “The marketplace,” U.S. climate envoy John Kerry assured journalists in Glasgow, will shut down the fossil fuel industries so there’s no pressing need for politics to intervene.
This mindset is increasingly at odds with the real world. The degree of hope vested in tech solutions is unrealistic. The market isn’t shutting down the fossil fuel sector at anything like the pace required, in Kerry’s USA and elsewhere. Pollution by the wealthy must be addressed head on: The richest 1% will soon be emitting 16% of global emissions. Alongside fossil fuels, some other industries (aviation, cattle, SUVs) simply must shrink. This can be achieved while avoiding the hairshirt, as the Cambridge University engineer Julian Allwood has shown, but it will require robust regulation.
The business class is dominating the COP26 agenda in more direct ways too. Global negotiations require the hosts to ooze credibility, yet this is running low in Glasgow. Details are emerging every day of the influence of climate deniers and the fossil-fuel lobby at the heart of Britain’s government.
A striking example occurred on November 3. The summit’s host, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, had been relishing the limelight. But on that day he quit the stage and flew by private jet to London to dine with Charles Moore, his former boss from his days as a Daily Telegraph columnist. Moore, a notorious climate-change denier, is a close chum of Owen Paterson. Paterson, a Tory parliamentarian and former government minister, has been embroiled in a long-running corruption scandal, which was now dominating the headlines.
That same day, on Johnson’s instructions, Tory MPs voted to overturn the finding by Parliament’s standards committee that Paterson had acted corruptly — and to rip up the Parliament’s entire system for combating sleaze. It was an extraordinary move. Corruption had been proved: Paterson did receive a six-figure annual sum to lobby for private companies in Parliament, he did fail to declare this, and it is against parliamentary rules.
The Paterson story that day concerned his corrupt activities, but we should be aware that, of his other career highlights, hostility to environmentalism is high on the list. He has long been at the center of Britain’s climate-denial fraternity — which includes his own brother-in-law, Matt “King Coal” Ridley. Paterson claims that global heating could be a good thing for Britain; he pooh-poohs those who “get emotional” about such issues.
This was no mere yapping from the fringes. In the mid-2010s Paterson used his position as environment secretary to push for the expansion of fracking, among other environmental delinquencies.
This invites us to ask: Why would Johnson put his political capital in support of this tool of the fossil-fuel industry — not only risking that the Tories be seen once again as the party of sleaze, but also soiling his own green credentials?
The answer has much to do with the morphing of climate denial into climate delay and climate dereliction.
Johnson is the archetype. Prior to his premiership he was a proud climate sceptic, of a Malthusian stripe. He fed his Telegraph readers with scraps of climate mysticism, proposing that a mini ice age could be upon us “by 2035,” and throwing snide remarks at the renewables sector — wind turbines can “barely pull the skin off a rice pudding.”
Most memorable was his Telegraph column entitled “Forget global warming: global over-population is the issue.”
“The biggest single challenge facing the Earth,” Johnson argued, is not climate change but women’s unrestrained fertility. He tips his hat to his father, Stanley, a World Bank and EU technocrat and Malthusian zealot. Although both men are vocal exponents of controlling women’s fertility, Johnson Sr. fathered six children and Johnson Jr. has added at least half a dozen more to the global population. This is no ordinary hypocrisy. For Malthusians, different moral rules do and should apply to rich and poor. That’s what Malthus is all about; it’s what earned him his place on the conservative seat in the pantheon of classical political economy.
Upon entering 10 Downing Street, Johnson experienced a Damascene conversion, or so the story goes. “How Boris Johnson went from climate sceptic to eco-warrior” ran the typical headline. As any eco-warrior knows, the pressing task facing global capitalism is to quit its addiction to fossil fuels. On this count, how would the new eco-campaigning government fare? Would it, in the interests of a habitable planet, wage war on the combustion of oil and gas with the ferocity that its Thatcher-era predecessor had, in the interests of capitalist enrichment, waged war on the striking coal miners?
Not a bit of it. Johnson stuffed his cabinet with climate deniers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, opponents of renewable energy such as Andrea Leadsom, and supporters of the coal industry such as Priti Patel. His education minister, Nadhim Zahawi, trousers nearly £400,000 (roughly $540,000) per year from an oil firm. His health minister Sajid Javid, is a militant supporter of the fracking industry — and “a big fan” of the hyper-capitalism of Ayn Rand. Even Alok Sharma, appointed by Johnson as President of the COP26 summit, is on the fossil-fuel payroll. He pockets five-figure sums from at least two oil companies, and has repeatedly voted in parliament for fossil-fuel expansion.
Johnson’s conversion, then, was not to eco-warrior. Yet it did mark a shift. According to one of his aides, he was partly responding to “elite fashion” and to a changing electoral atmosphere. “Forget global warming!” doesn’t play well with voters. “We’re making things happen!” certainly does.
But the crucial staging post on Johnson’s journey from climate denial to climate delay came when he woke to the potential of green growth. Whereas for his earlier self, climate change posed a threat to the neoliberal “business as usual” that had served his class so well and must therefore be doubted or denied, Johnson 2.0 recognizes that essentially the same economic agenda could, with moderate adjustments, be marketed as a response to the climate crisis. The core green-growth message is that all systems — energy, travel, housing, etc. — can continue as normal and indefinitely even if, in some cases, new materials and technologies are required. The subtext is that fossil-fuel consumption need not be addressed directly; technologies will provide a short-circuit, a “technological fix.”
The surest test of whether a strategy can be classed as “eco-warrior” or “climate delay” is to ask whether it demonstrably reduces emissions in the next few years, or rests on future speculative promises. Three events last month shed light on the British government’s credentials in this regard.
The first saw the campaign group Insulate Britain block ports and motorways to voice the demand that government should fund the insulation of all social housing by 2025, followed by the low-carbon retrofit of all homes by 2030. This plan offers an obvious ‘win win’: a jobs program that would upgrade skills; insulation of the draughty homes of poorer citizens, ending fuel poverty and saving thousands of lives; and the retrofitting of all homes to enable a successful transition from gas heating to electric heat pumps, thereby switching off one of Britain’s biggest fossil-fuel spigots. Any government of an “eco-warrior” disposition, or one that supported a social agenda of leveling up, would embrace it. Johnson’s sought to put the protestors behind bars.
Second, just as COP26 delegates were gathering in Glasgow and applying the finishing touches to their NDCs, the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, announced his budget. It contained virtually no funding for buildings insulation, no significant green measures and some positively brown ones, notably the slashing of tax on domestic aviation — this in a small country crisscrossed by rail and coach networks.
The third was the government’s Net Zero Strategy. Alongside electric vehicles, nuclear energy and offshore wind it emphasizes three technologies: carbon capture and storage (CCS), synthetic aviation fuel (SAF), and hydrogen (which receives 501 mentions in its 368 pages). These, the document claims, will be central to enabling Britain to reach net zero by 2050.
Without doubt, the Net Zero Strategy signals a transformation in energy policy and significant emissions reductions may well result. Equally striking, however, is that the keystone technologies are speculative. Hydrogen, SAF and CCS are proven, but they are currently tiny in scale, and many are failing. At present, Britain boasts no functioning CCS projects, no “green hydrogen” plants, and no SAF plants. Their success as pillars of the net-zero program would require a large-scale jump-start and subsequent roll-out, to include not only the construction of the plants themselves but of storage facilities and distribution networks, plus the adaptation of entire heating and transport systems (in the case of hydrogen) and the exploration of suitable aquifers (in the case of CCS). Typically, that sort of scale-up takes decades.
Green hydrogen and SAF, moreover, require colossal energy inputs that will somehow have to be provided. Britain’s hydrogen strategy, published this August, places its heavy bets on blue hydrogen, with only small projects for its green cousin. Blue hydrogen should be renamed brownish-blue: It’s dubious and leaky, and it gambles on CCS succeeding at scale. The ulterior aim is to grant a new lease of life to the fossil fuel giants.
The complexity and scope of even one of these programs is enormous. Arguably, one could see Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority as an analog, though that would be to overlook the fact that its central technology, the dam, was built upon millennia of engineering trial and error: It faced no novel problems of scaling up. We should certainly refrain from likening them to missions of “targeted specificity,” such as the Manhattan Project or the moonshot. And yet this is precisely the comparison that John Kerry drew earlier this year. “Fifty per cent of the reductions we have to make to get to net-zero by 2050,” he proposed, “are going to come from technologies that we don’t yet have. … But look at what we did to push the creation of vaccines, look at what we did to go to the moon, look at what we did to invent the internet.” (If nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah. The world is burning but the fire brigade will arrive. Half of the equipment they need doesn’t exist and they don’t know how to make it, but hey, they’ll find a way. If you’re troubled and need inspiration, gaze at the moon.)
This mindset is pervasive, a dominant strand within elite responses to the climate emergency in Britain, the U.S. and beyond. Its consequences are troubling. It sustains the technocratic myth that decarbonization must center on the deployment of new technologies, with a downplaying of the potential roles for well-known technologies (such as buildings insulation) and for social-systemic change. It breeds complacency: We needn’t worry about burning oil and coal because the tech guys will catch and store the carbon; fuel for transportation can simply be switched from hydrocarbons to hydrogen; planes can fly on biofuels and batteries, and so on.
The leaders gathered at COP26, with the British government to the fore, remain in the thrall of technology fetishism. It’s a syndrome that in recent memory proved the undoing of what had been a supposedly successful COP gathering. I am referring to COP21 in Paris, which yielded the celebrated Paris Agreement. That concord of 2015 was based heavily on the COP delegates’ magical belief in a particular technology: Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). Since then, BECCS has been discredited and the Paris Agreement on which it was built has crumbled. The hosts of COP26 appear determined to learn nothing from that debacle. The true beacons at COP26 are the civil-society movements that have encircled the negotiations, applying pressure to those within and raising awareness without. As the summiteers disperse, so the task turns to building on that experience and holding lawmakers’ feet to the fire.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
ANALYSIS: By Robert McLachlan, Massey University
As the Glasgow climate summits gets underway, New Zealand’s government has announced a revised pledge, with a headline figure of a 50 percent reduction on gross 2005 emissions by the end of this decade.
This looks good on the surface, but the substance of this new commitment, known as a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), is best assessed in emissions across decades.
New Zealand’s actual emissions in the 2010s were 701 million tonnes (Mt) of carbon dioxide equivalent. The carbon budget for the 2020s is 675Mt. The old pledge for the 2020s was 623Mt.
The Climate Change Commission’s advice was for “much less than” 593Mt, and the new NDC is 571Mt. So yes, the new pledge meets the commission’s advice and is a step up on the old, but it does not meet our fair share under the Paris Agreement.
It is also a stretch to call the new NDC consistent with the goal of keeping global temperature rise under 1.5℃.
True 1.5℃ compliance would require halving fossil fuel burning over the next decade, while the current plan is for cuts of a quarter.
Emissions need to halve this decade
Countries’ climate pledges are at the heart of the Paris Agreement. The initial round of pledges in 2016 added up to global warming of 3.5℃, but it was always intended they would be ratcheted up over time.
In the run-up to COP26, a flurry of new announcements brought that figure down to 2.7℃ — better, but still a significant miss on 1.5℃.
As this graph from the UN’s Emissions Gap Report 2021 shows, the world will need to halve emissions this decade to keep on track for 1.5℃.
New Zealand’s first NDC, for net 2030 emissions to be 30 percent below gross 2005 emissions, was widely seen as inadequate. An update, reflecting the ambition of the 2019 Zero Carbon Act to keep warming below 1.5℃, has been awaited eagerly.
But several factors have combined to make a truly ambitious NDC particularly difficult.
First, New Zealand’s old climate strategy was based on tree planting and the purchase of offshore carbon credits. The tree planting came to and end in the early 2010s and is only now resuming, while the Emissions Trading Scheme was closed to international markets in 2015. The Paris Agreement was intended to allow a restart of international carbon trading, but this has not yet been possible.
Second, New Zealand has a terrible record in cutting emissions so far. Burning of fossil fuels actually increased by 9 percent from 2016 to 2019. It’s a challenge to turn around our high-emissions economy.
Third, our new climate strategy, involving carbon budgets and pathways under advice from the Climate Change Commission, is only just kicking in. The government has made an in-principle agreement on carbon budgets out to 2030, and has begun consultation on how to meet them. The full emissions-reduction plan will not be ready until May 2022.
Regarding a revised NDC, the government passed the buck and asked the commission for advice. The commission declined to give specific recommendations, but advised:
We recommend that to make the NDC more likely to be compatible with contributing to global efforts under the Paris Agreement to limit warming to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels, the contribution Aotearoa makes over the NDC period should reflect a reduction to net emissions of much more than 36 percent below 2005 gross levels by 2030, with the likelihood of compatibility increasing as the NDC is strengthened further.
The government then received advice on what would be a fair target for New Zealand. However, any consideration of historic or economic responsibility points to vastly increased cuts, essentially leading to net-zero emissions by 2030.
Announcing the new NDC, Climate Change Minister James Shaw admitted it wasn’t enough, saying:
I think we should be doing a whole lot more. But, the alternative is committing to something that we can’t deliver on.
What proper climate action could look like
Only about a third of New Zealand’s pledged emissions cuts will come from within the country. The rest will have to be purchased as carbon credits from offshore mitigation.
That’s the same amount (100Mt) that Japan, with an economy 25 times larger than New Zealand’s, is planning to include in its NDC. There is no system for doing this yet, or for ensuring these cuts are genuine. And there’s a price tag, possibly running into many billions of dollars.
New Zealand has an impressive climate framework in place. Unfortunately, just as its institutions are beginning to bite, they are starting to falter against the scale of the challenge.
The commission’s advice to the minister was disappointing. It’s being challenged in court by Lawyers For Climate Action New Zealand, whose judicial review in relation to both the NDC and the domestic emissions budgets will be heard in February 2022.
With only two months to go until 2022 and the official start of the carbon budgets, there is no plan how to meet them. The suggestions in the consultation document add up to only half the cuts needed for the first budget period.
Thinking in the transport area is the furthest advanced, with a solid approach to fuel efficiency already approved, and an acknowledgement total driving must decrease, active and public transport must increase, and new roads may not be compatible with climate targets.
But industry needs to step up massively. The proposed 2037 end date for coal burning is far too late, while the milk cooperative Fonterra — poised to announce a record payout to farmers — intends to begin phasing out natural gas for milk drying only after that date.
The potentially most far-reaching suggestion is to set a renewable energy target. A clear path to 100 percent renewable energy would provide a significant counterweight to the endless debates about trees and agricultural emissions, but it is still barely on the radar.
Perhaps one outcome of the new NDC will be that, faced with the prospect of a NZ$5 billion bill for offshore mitigation, we might decide to spend the money on emissions cuts in Aotearoa instead.
Dr Robert McLachlan is professor in applied mathematics at Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
By Peter Kenny in Geneva
The Pacific Islands are in grave danger and at the frontline of global climate change and the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, known as COP26, in Glasgow this week is vitally important for islanders, says Reverend James Bhagwan.
The general secretary of the Suva-based regional Pacific Conference of Churches visited Geneva last week on his way to COP26 in Scotland’s largest city taking place from today until November 12.
“COP26 is important because if this doesn’t work, then we’re in serious danger. It’s already obvious that many of the targets set during the Paris Agreement in 2015 have not been met,” says Reverend Bhagwan with passion and sadness tinging his voice.
“We’re in danger of going well beyond the 1.5C limit of carbon emissions that we need to maintain where we’re at.”
The Pacific Conference has a membership of 33 churches and 10 national councils of churches spread across 19 Pacific Island countries and territories, effectively covering one-third of the world’s surface.
Some progress on countering the effects of climate change have been made in global awareness, says Reverend Bhagwan, a Methodist minister.
The return of the United States to the treaty around it helps.
“And even though there is significant commitment to reduce carbon emissions by countries to as much as 26 percent of those countries that have committed, globally we’re going to see an increase of carbon emissions by 19 plus percent by 2030, which isn’t far away—that’s nine years away,” rues Reverend Bhagwan.
Greenhouse gases warning
On October 25, the World Meteorological Organisation secretary-general Dr Petteri Taalas, releasing a report on greenhouse gases, confirmed Reverend Bhagwan’s worries in a warning:
“We are way off track. At the current rate of increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, we will see a temperature increase by the end of this century far in excess of the Paris Agreement targets of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”
Reverend Bhagwan said his churches’ group covers from the Marshall Islands in the northern Pacific across to Ma’ohi Nui (French Polynesia) in the eastern Pacific, down to Aotearoa New Zealand in the southern Pacific.
The conference also has member churches in West Papua and Australia, and it serves a population of some 15 million people.
For the members of the Pacific region churches, climate change is not an abstract issue.
‘Frontline’ of climate change
“We are on the frontline of climate change; we have rising seas we have ocean acidification which affects our fish and the life of the ocean,” says Reverend Bhagwan.
“We have extreme weather events now regularly, and the category five cyclones which, in the past, would be the exception to the rule for us, now are the baseline for our extreme weather events. During the cyclone season, at least one cyclone will be category five.
“And so, you just pray that either it goes past, or it drops enough when it reaches us, and usually these systems do not affect just one country.”
Reverend Bhagwan notes that the churches in the Pacific region play a much more integral role in society than they do in some of the secular nations.
Because of the covid-19 pandemic, “we’re not getting as many Pacific Islanders attending COP26 as we would like, both in governments and in civil society.
“And so, it’s important that those who can come do so. We, the church, play a very significant role in the Pacific. The Pacific is approximately 90 percent Christian, particularly within the island communities.
“And so, we have significant influence within the region, working with governments. But we also recognise ourselves as part of the civil society space,” said Reverend Bhagwan.
“And so, we have that ability in the Pacific to walk in these spaces, because leaders, government leaders, ministers, workers, civil servants — they’re members of our churches.
“So, we are providing pastoral care and engagement with those in leadership and government leadership, but also that prophetic voice.”
Peter Kenny is a journalist of The Ecumenical.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
ANALYSIS: By Nathan Cooper, University of Waikato
As the UN climate summit in Glasgow kicks off tomorrow, it marks the deadline for countries to make more ambitious pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The meeting is the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and is being heralded as the last best chance to avoid devastating temperature rise that would endanger billions of people and disrupt the planet’s life-support systems.
New Zealand will be represented by the Climate Minister and Green Party co-leader, James Shaw, along with a slimmed-down team of diplomats.
Shaw, who described climate change as the “most significant threat that we face for decades to come”, will take part in negotiations aimed at achieving global net zero, protecting communities and natural habitats and mobilising finance to adequately respond to the climate crisis.
This is the time for New Zealand to commit to delivering on its fair share of what is necessary to avoid runaway global warming.
To understand why COP26 is so important we need to look back to a previous summit, COP21 in 2015, which resulted in the Paris Agreement. Countries agreed to work together to keep global warming well below 2℃ and to aim for no more than 1.5℃.
They also agreed to publish plans to show how much they would reduce emissions and to update these pledges every five years — which is what should be happening at the Glasgow summit. Collectively, current climate pledges (known as Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs) continue to fall a long way short of limiting global warming to 1.5℃.
Many countries have failed to keep pace with what their climate pledges promised. The window to limit temperature rise to 1.5℃ is closing fast.
Time to raise climate ambition
On our current trajectory, global temperature is likely to increase well above the 2℃ upper limit of the Paris Agreement, according to a UN report released last week.
New Zealand has agreed to take ambitious action to meet the 1.5℃ target. But its current pledge (to bring emissions to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030) will not achieve this.
If all countries followed New Zealand’s present commitments, global warming would reach up to 3℃. The government has committed to increase New Zealand’s NDC — after receiving advice from the Climate Change Commission that its current pledge is not consistent with the 1.5℃ goal — but has not yet outlined a figure.
The effects of the growing climate crisis are already present in our corner of the world. Aotearoa is becoming more familiar with weather extremes, flooding and prolonged drought.
Many of our low-lying Pacific island neighbours are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Some are already looking to New Zealand to take stronger regional leadership on climate change.
A perception of New Zealand as a potential safe haven and “Pacific lifeboat” reminds us of the coming challenge of climate refugees, should global warming exceed a safe upper limit.
More work to do
New Zealand’s emissions have continued to rise since the Paris summit but our record on climate action has some positives. The Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act, enacted in 2019, requires greenhouse gas emissions (other than biogenic methane) to reach net zero by 2050.
Only a handful of other countries have enshrined such a goal in law.
The act also established the Climate Change Commission, which has already provided independent advice to the government on emissions budgets and an emissions reduction plan for 2022-2025. But much more needs to be done, and quickly, if we are to meet our international commitments and fulfil our domestic targets.
Climate Change Commission recommendations around the rapid adoption of electric vehicles, reduction in animal stocking rates and changing land use towards forestry and horticulture provide some key places to focus on.
As COP26 begins, New Zealand should announce a more ambitious climate pledge, one stringent enough to meet the 1.5℃ target. Announcing a sufficiently bold NDC at COP26 will provide much-needed leadership and encouragement for other countries to follow suit.
It will also act as a clear signpost for what our domestic emissions policies are aiming for, by when and why. But, no matter what New Zealand’s revised NDC says, much work will remain to ensure we make good on our commitments and give the climate crisis the attention it demands.
Dr Nathan Cooper is associate professor of law, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Last week, a coalition of 24 developing nations that work together on international negotiations issued a statement criticizing rich countries for proselytizing a universal goal of net-zero by 2050. “This new ‘goal’ which is being advanced runs counter to the Paris Agreement and is anti-equity and against climate justice,” the statement from the ministers of the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC) Ministerial said.
The post Why Developing Countries Say Net-Zero Is ‘Against Climate Justice’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
