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The Ugly Truth Lurking Behind the Climate Talks

by Myrna Posted on December 11, 2015

As a climate deal nears, power players want accountability (just not for themselves). US Secretary of State John Kerry and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon meet on the sidelines of the Paris climate negotiations. Mandel Ngan/Pool/AP LE BOURGET, France—When I meet new people here, the first question I usually get is a variation on, “Are these your first climate talks?” What they want to know is if I’m an expert like them—if I know the jargon, the unwritten rules, the backstories of who’s been fighting who since Kyoto ’97. The answer is, yes, these are my first talks. And that’s made for some humbling learning curves (look, “ADP” and “informal informal” aren’t exactly self-defining terms). But the good part is that I got to come here with the outsider’s perspective of someone who’s spent more time covering disaster, social upheaval, and response, particularly in Haiti, the country ranked as the third-most affected by climate change so far. In other words, I’ve seen a few things—things that leave me with a question right at the center of what is likely to be the major battle in the final stage of these talks. I think everyone gets the importance of money and power at these negotiations by now. The operating assumption is that rich countries who’ve benefited most from carbon emissions will pay something to alleviate the effects of global warming on the poor, while helping the new major polluters, such as India, get off carbon before they burn us past the point of no return. Read the rest at The New Republic. Link: The Ugly Truth Lurking Behind the Climate Talks ; ; ;

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The Ugly Truth Lurking Behind the Climate Talks

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The Island of Nauru Could Live or Die at the Hands of COP21

by Myrna Posted on December 11, 2015

Over the years, this tiny Pacific island has been devastated by war, phosphate mining, and now climate change. Years of strip-mining have left three-quarters of Nauru’s land useless. Sosrodjojo/JiwaFoto/ZUMA You’ve probably never heard of Nauru. But you might want to learn its name. It may not be around much longer. Nauru is a speck in the South Pacific. It’s the tiniest island nation and the third smallest nation in the world. At roughly 8 square miles and with just over 10,000 residents, Nauru isn’t exactly a political heavyweight on the world stage. But Nauru is sinking, drying out, and generally in peril due to the ever-accelerating effects of climate change. And it may spark a debate at the Paris climate talks currently underway about what to do with populations on the verge of becoming climate refugees with literally nowhere to go. Nauru is not your typical drowning-island scenario. What used to be a Pacific island oasis is now, by many accounts, a physical example of how quickly paradise can be destroyed. In the early 1900s, a German company began strip-mining the interior of the island for phosphate, the main component of agricultural fertilizer. Then came Japan, which occupied the country during World War II, and continued the phosphate mining. The U.S. bombed Japan’s airstrip on Nauru in 1943, preventing food supplies from entering the island. Less than a year later, Japan deported 1,200 Nauruans to work as forced laborers on a nearby island—only 737 of them survived the ordeal to be repatriated after the war just three years later. After the war, Australia took control of the country, and phosphate mining resumed as an Australian enterprise, before mining rights were transferred to Nauru when the nation became independent in 1968. Read the rest at Newsweek. More: The Island of Nauru Could Live or Die at the Hands of COP21 ; ; ;

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The Island of Nauru Could Live or Die at the Hands of COP21

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The Paris Climate Agreement Could Be More Ambitious Than Anyone Expected

by SharylBlevins Posted on December 10, 2015

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The US and other countries want to set a lower limit for global warming. But will that promise actually mean anything? A climate activist at the Paris conference calls for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. US negotiators appear to agree. Michel Euler/AP The international climate summit in Paris may be getting too ambitious for its own good. There are a lot of numbers flying around at Le Bourget, the modified airport in the northern Paris suburbs where diplomats from around the world are racing toward an unprecedented international agreement to limit climate change. Many of the most important are dollar figures: the need for wealthy countries to raise $100 billion annually to help vulnerable countries deal with climate impacts; promises by the US to double spending on clean energy research and climate adaptation grants for developing countries. But right at the top of the draft agreement is another number that, in the big picture, could be the most important. That’s the overall limit on global temperature increase that the accord is designed to achieve. At the last major climate summit, in 2009 in Copenhagen, world leaders agreed to cap global warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, based largely on findings from scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that anything above that level would be totally catastrophic for billions of people around the world, from small island nations to coastal cities such as New York. All the other moving pieces in the agreement, which officials here hope to conclude by late Friday or Saturday, are more or less aimed at achieving that target. It’s the number that is really driving the sense of urgency here, since earlier this year the world crossed the halfway point toward it. In other words, time is running out to keep climate change in check. As the negotiations push into their final hours, something unexpected is unfolding: That target might get actually get even more ambitious. There’s a very good chance, analysts and diplomats say, that the final agreement will call for a limit of 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F)—a crucial half-degree less global warming. Here’s the relevant section of the text; negotiators need to pick one of these options: The US delegation is supporting Option 2, according to an official in the office of Christiana Figueres, the head of the UN agency overseeing the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official is not authorized to speak to the press about the negotiations. That aligns with the announcement, made yesterday by Secretary of State John Kerry, that the US will join the European Union and dozens of developing countries in the so-called “High Ambition Coalition,” a negotiating bloc that has emerged to push for the strongest outcome on several key points, including the temperature limit. Negotiators in that bloc have realized, the official said, that “if they move the long-term goal further out, it will move politics in the short term closer to where they need to be.” If the 1.5 degrees C target makes it into the final agreement, that would be a massive win for climate activists and delegates from many of the most vulnerable nations, especially the small island nations. Since the 2 degrees C goal was set in Copenhagen, the leaders of low-lying countries like the Marshall Islands and the Maldives have increasingly protested that even that level of warming would essentially guarantee the destruction of their islands. The fact that the US is now backing a more ambitious target is a sign that President Barack Obama is hearing that message, said Mohamed Adow, a Kenyan climate activist with Christian Aid. “Paris is meant to indicate the direction of travel, and the US giving in on this point demonstrates their solidarity,” he said. “You’re talking about a level of warming that we can actually adapt to.” But here’s where things get problematic. There’s a huge difference between including the 1.5 degrees C limit in the agreement, and ensuring that it could actually be met. That’s because other key pieces of the agreement, that could actually make that level of ambition possible, are still far from clear. The biggest obstacle could be the hotly debated “ratchet mechanism,” which would require countries to boost their targets for greenhouse gas reductions over time, and which the US delegation appears to be resisting. The current draft of the text includes language directing countries to provide an update of their progress every five years or so, which would be compiled into a global “stock-take,” a kind of collated update, sometime after 2020. But the enforcement stops there; there’s nothing in the agreement to penalize countries that lag behind or to compel them to boost their ambitions. Yesterday, Kerry offered a confusing take on that problem when he said that in the agreement, “there’s no punishment, no penalty, but there has to be oversight.” Everyone here seems to agree that Paris is only a starting place: Without an incremental ramping-up of climate goals, 2 degrees C—not to mention 1.5—will remain out of reach. The current set of global greenhouse gas reduction targets only limit global warming to roughly 2.7 degrees C (4.9 degrees F). That’s a big gap. “It’s not looking good,” Adow said. “If the US means business, are true to their support, they need to agree to an annual review starting in 2018.” Instead, it seems that the US could be trading a concession on the 1.5 degrees C target for steadfast resistance to increasing its funding for climate adaptation in developing countries. The US is also standing in the way of a “loss and damage” component, which would require heavily polluting countries to compensate countries that have been wracked by climate impacts. Without extra money on the table to invest in clean energy, developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere won’t be able to contribute to the 1.5 degrees C target, said Victor Menotti, executive director of the International Forum on Globalization, a San Francisco-based activist group. “The US is pretty clear they want 1.5,” he said. “The question is what’s going to accompany it, and at what price. They’ll be able to claim climate leadership, but without any means of implementation.” The upshot is that the whole Paris accord risks losing credibility if it comes up with a really ambitious target and no way to reach it. All of these pieces are essential, because even with the best possible outcome in Paris, 1.5 degrees C is going to be really hard to meet, said Guido Schmidt-Traub, executive director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. In a recent report, Schmidt-Traub found that meeting the 2 degrees C limit means ceasing all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2070. And because most coal- and natural gas-fired power plants have multi-decade lifespans, that means we need to start planning to cease building them as soon as possible. “The bottom line is that 2C requires all countries to decarbonize their economy at a very rapid rate, but in our analysis there is some wiggle room,” he said. “If you go to 1.5C, it becomes very hard to have any wiggle room left. This is a very fundamental point that is not being discussed at all in the negotiations.”

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The Paris Climate Agreement Could Be More Ambitious Than Anyone Expected

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Explained in 90 Seconds: Why 1.5 Degrees Matters

by BrittneyMyrick6 Posted on December 10, 2015

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Negotiators are pursuing a far more ambitious limit on global warming. But can that really be achieved? Update—December 10, 2015, 4:50 pm ET: Delegates in Paris appear to have agreed on Thursday to “pursue efforts” to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)—a target that US negotiators had been pushing for. That’s substantially less warming than the 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) limit that was agreed to in Copenhagen in 2009. Here’s the latest text from Thursday evening’s draft agreement: However, the document also “notes with concern” that the actual actions that countries have so far agreed to take to reduce their emissions fall well short of both the 1.5 degrees C target and the 2 degrees C limit. Original story: The international climate summit in Paris may be getting too ambitious for its own good. There are a lot of numbers flying around at Le Bourget, the modified airport in the northern Paris suburbs where diplomats from around the world are racing toward an unprecedented international agreement to limit climate change. Many of the most important are dollar figures: the need for wealthy countries to raise $100 billion annually to help vulnerable countries deal with climate impacts; promises by the US to double spending on clean energy research and climate adaptation grants for developing countries. But right at the top of the draft agreement is another number that, in the big picture, could be the most important. That’s the overall limit on global temperature increase that the accord is designed to achieve. At the last major climate summit, in 2009 in Copenhagen, world leaders agreed to cap global warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, based largely on findings from scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that anything above that level would be totally catastrophic for billions of people around the world, from small island nations to coastal cities such as New York. All the other moving pieces in the agreement, which officials here hope to conclude by late Friday or Saturday, are more or less aimed at achieving that target. It’s the number that is really driving the sense of urgency here, since earlier this year the world crossed the halfway point toward it. In other words, time is running out to keep climate change in check. As the negotiations push into their final hours, something unexpected is unfolding: That target might get actually get even more ambitious. There’s a very good chance, analysts and diplomats say, that the final agreement will call for a limit of 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F)—a crucial half-degree less global warming. Here’s the relevant section of the text; negotiators need to pick one of these options: The US delegation is supporting Option 2, according to an official in the office of Christiana Figueres, the head of the UN agency overseeing the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official is not authorized to speak to the press about the negotiations. That aligns with the announcement, made yesterday by Secretary of State John Kerry, that the US will join the European Union and dozens of developing countries in the so-called “High Ambition Coalition,” a negotiating bloc that has emerged to push for the strongest outcome on several key points, including the temperature limit. Negotiators in that bloc have realized, the official said, that “if they move the long-term goal further out, it will move politics in the short term closer to where they need to be.” If the 1.5 degrees C target makes it into the final agreement, that would be a massive win for climate activists and delegates from many of the most vulnerable nations, especially the small island nations. Since the 2 degrees C goal was set in Copenhagen, the leaders of low-lying countries like the Marshall Islands and the Maldives have increasingly protested that even that level of warming would essentially guarantee the destruction of their islands. The fact that the US is now backing a more ambitious target is a sign that President Barack Obama is hearing that message, said Mohamed Adow, a Kenyan climate activist with Christian Aid. “Paris is meant to indicate the direction of travel, and the US giving in on this point demonstrates their solidarity,” he said. “You’re talking about a level of warming that we can actually adapt to.” But here’s where things get problematic. There’s a huge difference between including the 1.5 degrees C limit in the agreement, and ensuring that it could actually be met. That’s because other key pieces of the agreement, that could actually make that level of ambition possible, are still far from clear. The biggest obstacle could be the hotly debated “ratchet mechanism,” which would require countries to boost their targets for greenhouse gas reductions over time, and which the US delegation appears to be resisting. The current draft of the text includes language directing countries to provide an update of their progress every five years or so, which would be compiled into a global “stock-take,” a kind of collated update, sometime after 2020. But the enforcement stops there; there’s nothing in the agreement to penalize countries that lag behind or to compel them to boost their ambitions. Yesterday, Kerry offered a confusing take on that problem when he said that in the agreement, “there’s no punishment, no penalty, but there has to be oversight.” Everyone here seems to agree that Paris is only a starting place: Without an incremental ramping-up of climate goals, 2 degrees C—not to mention 1.5—will remain out of reach. The current set of global greenhouse gas reduction targets only limit global warming to roughly 2.7 degrees C (4.9 degrees F). That’s a big gap. “It’s not looking good,” Adow said. “If the US means business, are true to their support, they need to agree to an annual review starting in 2018.” Instead, it seems that the US could be trading a concession on the 1.5 degrees C target for steadfast resistance to increasing its funding for climate adaptation in developing countries. The US is also standing in the way of a “loss and damage” component, which would require heavily polluting countries to compensate countries that have been wracked by climate impacts. Without extra money on the table to invest in clean energy, developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere won’t be able to contribute to the 1.5 degrees C target, said Victor Menotti, executive director of the International Forum on Globalization, a San Francisco-based activist group. “The US is pretty clear they want 1.5,” he said. “The question is what’s going to accompany it, and at what price. They’ll be able to claim climate leadership, but without any means of implementation.” The upshot is that the whole Paris accord risks losing credibility if it comes up with a really ambitious target and no way to reach it. All of these pieces are essential, because even with the best possible outcome in Paris, 1.5 degrees C is going to be really hard to meet, said Guido Schmidt-Traub, executive director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. In a recent report, Schmidt-Traub found that meeting the 2 degrees C limit means ceasing all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2070. And because most coal- and natural gas-fired power plants have multi-decade lifespans, that means we need to start planning to cease building them as soon as possible. “The bottom line is that 2C requires all countries to decarbonize their economy at a very rapid rate, but in our analysis there is some wiggle room,” he said. “If you go to 1.5C, it becomes very hard to have any wiggle room left. This is a very fundamental point that is not being discussed at all in the negotiations.” Master image: A climate activist at the Paris conference calls for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Michel Euler/AP

Read this article:

Explained in 90 Seconds: Why 1.5 Degrees Matters

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The US Will Leave Fossil Fuels in the Ground—Until After the Paris Climate Talks

by Myrna Posted on December 8, 2015

Officials postponed the auction of an oil and gas development lease until next spring. Anton Watman/Shutterstock It’s hard to lead the charge against the global consumption of fossil fuels while making money off the sale of them. Perhaps in recognition of this conundrum, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which manages some 245 million acres of public land, has announced it will postpone an oil and gas lease auction scheduled for December 10 until March 17, 2016. The leases for sale include nine parcels of land in Arkansas and Michigan, totaling 587 acres, eligible for fossil fuel exploration. That means the federal government won’t be selling off land for oil or gas development just as the COP21 climate talks in Paris approach their dramatic conclusion. The planned sale had been drawing heat from climate activists, who are rallying behind the “keep it in the ground” philosophy that to prevent the worst effects of climate change, the world needs to leave most of fossil fuel reserves untapped. President Barack Obama articulated that concept in his rationale for rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline in November: Ultimately, if we’re gonna prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re gonna have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky. That said, the sale will go ahead a few months after the delegates return home from Paris. If Obama rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline for the stated reasons, why go ahead with federal mineral rights leases? One difference is the money from these routine drilling rights sales goes to the government, not to a Canadian energy company. Another possibility is that the goal isn’t really to stop extracting fossil fuels. Read the rest at CityLab. View this article: The US Will Leave Fossil Fuels in the Ground—Until After the Paris Climate Talks ; ; ;

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The US Will Leave Fossil Fuels in the Ground—Until After the Paris Climate Talks

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Here’s Why the Words “Loss and Damage” Are Causing Such a Fuss at the Paris Climate Talks

by Myrna Posted on December 8, 2015

It’s not just mitigation and adaptation anymore. Rich Carey/Shutterstock PARIS, France — There’s a big sticking point in the negotiations over a global climate deal, and it centers around this little phrase: “loss and damage.” The concept has become hugely important to developing countries and climate justice advocates at the COP21 talks — and a big headache for developed countries. The conversation around climate aid — money and assistance that goes from rich countries to poorer ones for climate change–related programs — has traditionally focused on two areas: mitigation, which means cutting or preventing greenhouse gas emissions by doing things like building up renewable energy capacity and halting deforestation; and adaptation, which means preparing for future climate changes, by taking steps such as building better drainage systems to deal with higher seas and more severe storms, and shifting to heartier crops that can withstand higher temperatures and lower rainfalls. But now developing countries are pushing for assistance in a third area: loss and damage. This refers to irreparable losses (loss of lives, species, or land taken over by rising seas) and recoverable damages (damaged buildings, roads, power lines) — basically, to what happens when mitigation and adaptation fall short and climate disaster strikes. At this point, no matter how much we cut emissions or how much we prepare for coming changes, there will still be significant loss and damage from climate change. Already, the devastating effects of rising sea levels, hotter temperatures, and extreme weather events are growing rapidly. Small Pacific island nations are experiencing regular flooding, which submerges roads, batters houses and seawalls, and sends populations fleeing. In nations like Bangladesh, farms are ruined by the infiltration of salt water. Read the rest at Grist. Follow this link: Here’s Why the Words “Loss and Damage” Are Causing Such a Fuss at the Paris Climate Talks ; ; ;

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Here’s Why the Words “Loss and Damage” Are Causing Such a Fuss at the Paris Climate Talks

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Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks

by Myrna Posted on December 8, 2015

The GOP is making its presence felt at the conference. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP LE BOURGET, France—Monday began what’s supposed to be the final week of the climate talks, the one where top-level negotiators hammer out an accord to stop the deadly march of global warming. To troll this momentous event, the climate change deniers at the Heartland Institute came all the way from Chicago to stage a “counter-conference” at a central Paris venue called, seriously, the Hotel California. I don’t know much about what happened on that dark desert highway, in part because journalists with the climate advocacy site DeSmogBlog were kicked out before the session began. Heartland’s Jim Lakely told me DeSmogBlog engaged in “overt advocacy.” Kyla Mandel, one of the two bloggers booted, responded that he’s probably referring to them having told other journalists that Heartland has received funding from ExxonMobil. (Lakely didn’t elaborate.) A few reporters briefly noted the “counter-conference” and moved on, which is the attention it deserved. While there are intense arguments about how to address climate change, there is no real debate among scientists about the core facts: Human contributions to the greenhouse effect are making the Earth hotter, which is bad for life. We can already see it happening, and pretty much the only people still clinging to denial live in well-off, English-speaking countries, primarily the United States. Which is probably why the denial event drew such a paltry crowd—organizers say a multiple of 20—compared to the thousands at anti-carbon emissions protests in the city and tens of thousands at the 196-party United Nations conference here. And yet, at the real conference on Monday, it became clear that there are important reasons not to ignore that small, well-funded American faction entirely. For all the worldwide agreement on global warming, this week’s negotiators are hashing out the thorny issues of what should be done, by whom and when. Big fights include who will pay for existing and future damage and how to make sure that countries live up to all the promises they’ve made and will make this week. Read the rest at The New Republic. Read article here: Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks ; ; ;

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Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks

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Can California Help the Paris Climate Talks Succeed?

by WandaMichaelis2 Posted on December 8, 2015

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Plus: Tom Steyer on Bernie Sanders’ new climate plan and how global warming will impact the 2016 election. California is no stranger to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. It has the second-highest carbon footprint of any US state (after Texas). But as diplomats from nearly every country on Earth hash through the final details of an international climate change agreement in Paris this week, they’re seeing a very different side of the Golden State. Gov. Jerry Brown, his predecessor Arnold Schwarzenegger, billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, and a host of other Californian political and business leaders are here in the French capital this week to tout their state’s success as a carbon-slashing powerhouse. They argue that countries around the world should look to California for guidance on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and nurture the clean energy industry—while creating jobs and growing the economy. “California can be a template of what is successful,” said California State Sen. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles), in a press briefing Monday with Steyer and a dozen clean energy entrepreneurs. “We can export our policies.” Indeed, the state does have a lot to be proud of. It ranks way down at #45 for per-capita carbon emissions. And it was among the first states to set a greenhouse gas reduction target, way back in 2006. That law, signed by Schwarzenegger, called on the state to reduce its emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. In January of this year, Brown re-upped with a new set of climate goals that are the most aggressive in the nation. California broke ground on carbon trading markets. And thanks in part to a policy that requires the state’s power companies to get a third of their electricity from renewable energy by 2020, the state routinely ranks number-one on clean energy investment and has the most solar power of any state. And as de Leon pointed out several times, all those green policies don’t seem to have dragged down the state’s economy: Total GDP is rising while emissions per unit of GDP are dropping. Climate-savvy lawmakers did suffer a setback this fall, when pressure from the oil lobby led the legislature to give up on an attempt to cut gasoline consumption in half by 2030. But that hasn’t stopped Brown and his peers from becoming leading voices here at the beginning of the second week of “COP21,” as the massive climate summit in Paris is known. On Tuesday evening, de Leon led a coalition of US mayors at an event calling for President Barack Obama to bypass Congress and push to get half the country’s power from renewables by 2030. The day before, Brown took the stage at Earth to Paris, an event organized by the UN Foundation at an ornate building in the city center packed with hundreds of scientists, policy wonks, and political leaders who needed a break from the core negotiations. (Secretary of State John Kerry followed shortly after.) “This is an art and a science,” he said, of his state’s climate campaign. “You have to push business further than they want to go, but within their capacity to reach it.” That message was echoed by Tom Steyer, whose political group NextGen Climate plans to spend huge sums of cash to make climate a central theme of the 2016 presidential election. “The opposition to progressive energy policy around the world always come out as: ‘You can have healthy jobs or a healthy environment, but you can’t have both,’” Steyer said. “But in California, we can walk the walk and talk the talk.” He also said the next president, if it’s one of the Democratic candidates who aims to continue Obama’s climate legacy (all the Republicans running are committed to overturning it), will need to rally much more support from the American people in order to overcome an obstinate Congress. You can hear more of Steyer’s remarks in the video above. It remains to be seen whether any of this will make an impression on the real negotiators, huddled in a converted airport in the city’s northern suburbs. Over the next few days, they’ll be poring over hundreds of fine-grain decisions on everything from how often countries will need to revise their climate commitments, to how much wealthy countries like the United States should have to pay to help vulnerable, poorer nations adapt to climate impacts. We’re on the ground in Paris week—stay tuned for updates. Master image: Darren J. Bradley/Shutterstock

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Can California Help the Paris Climate Talks Succeed?

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Are We Reaching Peak CO2?

by JeraldKayser Posted on December 8, 2015

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Maybe! Emission of CO2 from coal burning and cement manufacturing, the two biggest humanmade sources. The trend has slowed recently and actually reversed in 2015.Graph by Jackson, et al., modified (red rectangle added) by Phil Plait Our planet is heating up. The cause is in some ways simple: Humans add a lot of carbon dioxide to the air every year, about 40 billion tons of it. CO2 is a greenhouse gas: It lets sunlight through to heat the ground, but the infrared light the ground emits gets absorbed, and cannot escape to space. That warms us up, slowly but inevitably. By every measure available to us, we see the effects of this increased heat. But there’s hope, at least a hint of it. A new study has some hopeful news about global warming: The global emission of carbon dioxide slowed substantially in 2014, and is projected to drop a little bit in 2015. This comes after over a decade of quite sharp growth in emission. Better yet: This happened while the global economy underwent “robust growth,” and it happened in part due to switching to renewables (solar and wind power) as well as a drop in coal use. Globally, over the past 15 years, we’ve been dumping roughly an extra billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, jumping from 25 billion tons per year to over 37. But the rate has slowed in the past couple of years; in 2014 the growth slowed dramatically, and according to the new research the rate is projected to drop in 2015 by roughly 0.6 percent, from 35.9 billion tons to 35.7. Read the rest at Slate.

Are We Reaching Peak CO2?

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5 Big Developments From the Beginning of the Paris Climate Summit

by Simone87Lg Posted on December 3, 2015

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After just a few days, billions of dollars have been committed to clean energy. Yann Caradec/Flickr On Tuesday, more than 100 heads of state departed from Paris, after kicking off two weeks of international negotiations intended to limit climate change. But even though the biggest names have left the building (actually a converted regional airport), the real action is just getting started. If history is any guide, diplomats will be holed up in a room negotiating minute textual details until—or well past—the last possible minute next Friday. Still, the last few days have seen a barrage of developments that aren’t necessarily tied to the core negotiating text. It started on Sunday with a joint commitment from dozens of nations and private corporations to vastly increase their spending on clean energy research and development. Here are a few more key developments, in no particular order: 1. New milestone for fossil fuel divestment: Some of the most prominent activist groups at the summit are focusing their attention on divestment—that is, getting high-profile individuals and institutions to pull their money out of fossil fuel companies. In September, that campaign reached a high-water mark, when a study commissioned by a coalition of environmental groups found that hundreds of institutions and thousands of individuals with assets totaling $2.6 trillion had pledged to divest from fossil fuels. Bear in mind, the actual amount of money being pulled out of fossil fuel companies is substantially smaller than that. But it’s nevertheless a pretty impressive number because of the growing movement it represents. On Wednesday, the same coalition updated that figure: It now tops $3.4 trillion. Again, it’s unclear how much of this is actually being divested. (It’s not always easy for a complex institution such as a university to know how much money, if any, it actually has invested in a given industry). But it’s striking that the total jumped nearly $1 trillion in just a couple of months. The African Development Bank promised to pour $12 billion into increasing access to electricity. 2. Big boost to clean energy in Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa has one of the world’s lowest rates of access to electricity; nearly two-thirds of people there live without power. That makes it hard to grow a business, hard for kids to study, and hard to store fresh food and medical supplies. As we’ve reported before, it also represents a huge opportunity for renewable energy. Small-scale wind and solar projects, while not up to the task of fully supplying the continent’s electricity needs, can often be deployed more rapidly than big fossil-fuel-fired power plants. On Tuesday, the African Development Bank announced that it would pour $12 billion into energy projects over the next five years and seek to attract up to $50 billion in parallel private-sector funding. The project has two goals: to vastly expand basic energy access, and to do so cleanly, by boosting the continent’s renewable energy capacity tenfold. This is just the latest sign that the clean energy industry is likely to be one of the biggest winners from the Paris climate talks. 3. China is playing ball: President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping set the joint climate action ball rolling more than a year ago, when they announced a sweeping plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions and pool resources on clean energy. Since then, China and the United States—the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 carbon polluters, respectively—have stayed close on their climate agendas. That trend appears to be continuing in Paris, a rare point of diplomatic accord in an otherwise testy relationship. China has said it could agree to reevaluating its climate goals every five years, a protocol that the United States, the European Union, and other leading emitters are pushing strongly to include in the final agreement. On Wednesday, Chinese officials back in Beijing also announced deep new targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. India has also rolled out a new $30 million plan to invest in clean energy, although that country remains opposed to the five-year review standard. Russia, meanwhile, doesn’t appear interested in doing much at all. Tensions between the United States, China, India, Russia, Canada, Brazil, and other heavyweights—not to mention small island nations and other highly vulnerable players—are likely to become more apparent as the talks progress into finer minutiae. 4. Who’s going to pay for all this? One of the most contentious issues in Paris is climate finance, a term that refers broadly to cash ponied up by wealthy, high-polluting nations such as the United States to help poorer countries adapt to climate change impacts and reduce their carbon emissions. In 2009, at the last major climate summit, developed countries agreed to raise $100 billion in climate finance per year by 2020. That goal is about halfway met, according to the World Resources Institute. On Tuesday, Obama announced an additional $30 million from the United States for climate adaptation in the most vulnerable countries, on top of a $3 billion promise the United States made to the UN Green Climate Fund last year. But it’s unclear how the Paris agreement will ensure that this fundraising continues. Delegates will have to hash out what sorts of commitments can or should be legally binding, how to count the money, how to spend it, and other important considerations. Jake Schmidt, an international programs director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said many developing countries are pushing to include language in the agreement that would require the total level of finance to be gradually ramped up over time. “I don’t think anyone is envisioning there will be a new [specific] number, but rather asking that $100 billion is a floor to the finance that will be mobilized over time,” he said. The same is true of countries’ various greenhouse gas reduction targets, he said: A big question at the talks is how these commitments can be enforced and strengthened past the next decade or two. “We’re leaving Paris with a sense that it could be 10 or 15 years before we return to these targets,” he said. “If we don’t have another moment to reevaluate these, then we have a problem.” 5. Cities are playing a big role: National governments aren’t the only players in Paris. Cities and states are also offering their own commitments. One of the most prominent voices at the summit so far has been that of California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), who is pushing a group of 60 states and cities around the world to sign on to a sub-national climate agreement. Meanwhile, on Tuesday a group of 21 mayors committed to dedicating 10 percent of their municipal budgets to climate “resilience,” which includes steps like making infrastructure more weatherproof and restricting energy consumption by buildings. They include the mayors of Paris, New Orleans, Oakland, Rio de Janeiro, and other global cities.

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5 Big Developments From the Beginning of the Paris Climate Summit

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