Author Archives: IslaMitchell

Explained in 90 Seconds: Breaking the Carbon Budget

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To avoid catastrophic climate change impacts, 37 percent of fossil fuels held by publicly listed companies should stay buried. As we reported this week, some of the world’s richest nations are lagging behind on their climate protection pledges. Most often, these commitments follow the formula: “We aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions X percent below year Y levels by year Z.” It seems like a straightforward proposition, but have you ever wondered where those numbers come from? The answer is a scientific concept known as the carbon budget, and like a teenager with her first credit card, we’re well on our way to blowing right through it. In the video above, Kelly Levin, a climate policy expert at the World Resources Institute, explains what our carbon budget is, how much we’ve already “spent,” and why it matters. Back in 2009, delegates to the UN climate summit in Copenhagen agreed that in order to avoid the worst potential impacts of climate change, global temperature rise should be limited to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. For their report this fall, scientists on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change looked at how emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have warmed the planet since the Industrial Revolution, and extrapolated how much more we could emit before breaking the Copenhagen limit, the same way you might draft a budget to keep your checking account balance above zero. The IPCC set our total carbon budget since the Industrial Revolution at about 1 trillion metric tons of carbon. Today, we’ve already spent over half of that (largely thanks to just 90 companies, as Climate Desk partner the Guardian reported yesterday). If projections for future emissions hold true, Levin says, we’ll eat through the rest of the budget by 2044. That means that if we want to stick to the 2-degree C limit, we’d have to immediately cease all emissions, everywhere on Earth, on the first day of 2045. Turn off every fossil-fuel-fired power plant, charge every car only on renewable electricity, etc. Given the cruddy international track record of reaching even basic climate agreements—yesterday, 132 countries walked out of UN climate talks in Warsaw—that kind of turn-on-a-dime shift seems unlikely to happen. Instead, Levin argues, if we take measures to cut emissions starting now, we can stretch the budget much longer and give ourselves that much more time to clean up the energy system. Which brings us back to those 90 companies, and many more who count unburned fossil fuels (still-buried coal, oil, and gas) among their bottom-line assets. No matter how long we drag it out, consuming all the world’s fossil fuels would burn straight through the budget, and then some. Burning the total volume of fossil fuels now held in reserve by publicly listed companies would emit the equivalent of 762 metric billion tons of carbon, according to a recent analysis by the Carbon Tracker Initiative. But we’ve only got about 485 billion left in the budget. In other words, if world leaders come together to actually enforce the Copenhagen warming limit, roughly 37 percent of the fossil fuels held by those companies will need to stay in the ground. This is where the carbon budget becomes a carbon bubble: Companies valued on the basis of their fossil fuel holdings could find the rug pulled from under them if those holdings become impossible to sell. Recently, Al Gore and investment banker David Blood (who have collaborated on a consulting firm to help companies divest from fossil fuels) estimated the value of these “stranded assets” at some $7 trillion. So the question now is: Are we really going to smash our carbon piggy bank? Watch Kelly Levin explain, above.

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Explained in 90 Seconds: Breaking the Carbon Budget

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Explained in 90 Seconds: Breaking the Carbon Budget

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Climate Talks: Wealthy Countries Urged to Foot Bill for Weather-Related Disasters

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Developing countries threaten to walk out of UN talks in Warsaw over failure to reach agreement on financial recompense. UNHCR Photo Download/Flickr The proposal by developing countries that their wealthier counterparts be held financially responsible for the damage incurred by extreme climate events such as typhoon Haiyan and droughts in Africa has become the most explosive issue at the UN’s climate change conference in Warsaw. With neither side prepared to give way on the principle, confrontation looms at the close of the talks on Friday. Earlier this year, governments agreed to resolve the issue of possible financial recompense. But with only two days of high-level negotiations remaining, positions have hardened, even though the issue has not been discussed. Some of the least developed countries have threatened to quit the talks over the situation. “This is a red line for us,” said Munjural Khan, a spokesman for the Least Developed Countries (LDC), a coalition of 49 nations that, though the most vulnerable to climate change, claim to have contributed the least to the problem. “We have been thinking of ways to harden our position, to the point of walking out of the negotiations.” To keep reading, click here.

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Climate Talks: Wealthy Countries Urged to Foot Bill for Weather-Related Disasters

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Climate Talks: Wealthy Countries Urged to Foot Bill for Weather-Related Disasters

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Friday Cat Blogging – 25 October 2013

Mother Jones

As we count down toward the end of the year, we’re also counting down toward the end of the quilts. Today’s is one of Marian’s earliest, a double Irish chain that’s machine pieced and tied, rather than traditionally quilted. (But it still counts as a quilt.) When I tossed it over the sofa, Domino fell in love instantly, returning to it over and over throughout the day. I’m not sure why. This quilt currently does duty as a protective covering in the back of Marian’s car, so maybe it’s absorbed some interesting smells. Or something. It’s a mystery.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 25 October 2013

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CHART: Welfare Reform Is Leaving More In Deep Poverty

Mother Jones

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The economy is picking up in some parts of the country, but that hasn’t translated into any new serious efforts to help those suffering the most hardship. In fact, for those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, life may be getting even harder. A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) looks at cash benefits provided under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, commonly known as “welfare.” It finds that the value of monthly cash benefits that make up the fragile safety net for the poorest families with children has continued to decline steadily since the program was “reformed” in 1996.

Back then, benefits weren’t exactly generous, but they did manage to keep a whole lot of kids out of really deep poverty. Today, those benefits are almost nonexistent. The lucky few who are able to get cash assistance aren’t getting enough to pay rent or keep the lights on in most states, and the value of the benefits has declined precipitously since 1996—even more so since the recession started. According to CBPP, there is not a state in the country whose welfare benefits are enough to lift a poor single mother with two kids above 50 percent of the poverty line, or about $9700 a year. In many southern states, TANF doesn’t provide enough money to get a poor family much above 10 percent of the poverty line. What’s especially troubling about these figures is that, as CBPP reports, TANF benefits are often the only form of cash assistance poor families receive. They may be getting food stamps, which definitely help their situations, but you can’t buy diapers or pay the rent with food stamps.

People like President Bill Clinton and then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich claimed they’d be doing welfare recipients a favor in the 1990s when they reformed the welfare program to impose work requirements and make it more difficult for people to get benefits. The idea was that welfare recipients were just lazy and that their government checks were keeping them from working, making them dependent on the government. When the reform legislation passed, with Clinton’s signature, some people in the administration quit in protest, arguing that cutting off cash assistance for poor families would push millions of children into poverty. That didn’t happen, at least not right away. But funding for the TANF block grant hasn’t increased since 1996, meaning that in real terms, what the country spends to help poor families in the program has fallen 30 percent overall since welfare was “reformed,” and benefit levels have fallen even more in some states that cut benefits after the financial crisis started in 2007. Not surprisingly, since 1996, the number of families with children living in extreme poverty—that is, on $2 a day or less—has gone up nearly 130 percent.

The US Census Bureau reports that the number of Americans suffering significant hardships, such as having utilities cut off, getting evicted, or suffering food shortages, has escalated sharply during the recession. Between 2005 and 2011, nearly 7 million additional people were unable to make a mortgage or rent payment, suggesting that as the nation’s last-ditch safety net for people in really dire straits, TANF, is not working. Given that science is now showing just how damaging the stress of poverty is to children and their health and intellectual development, maybe it’s finally time for welfare reform to be reformed in a way that gives poor kids a fair shot at a decent future.

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CHART: Welfare Reform Is Leaving More In Deep Poverty

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