Climate 411

How Biden’s climate summit can accelerate global ambition

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Tomorrow is Earth Day, and it is a pivotal one for global climate action. On Thursday and Friday, President Joe Biden will host a virtual Leaders Summit on Climate, fulfilling a pledge he made on the campaign trail.

The ultimate measure of the Summit’s success will only become clear later this year, at the COP26 conference scheduled for November in Glasgow. The Biden administration has been in office fewer than 100 days, and diplomacy takes time; some of the administration’s efforts will undoubtedly only bear fruit in the coming months. Nonetheless, the Summit is a critical first milestone for a president who has pledged to make climate change a top priority. Here’s what to expect from the Summit – and what we are looking for. Read More »

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What the next 5 years hold for the Paris Agreement

Eiffel Tower at sunset. (Source: Pixy)

Last Saturday, December 12, was the fifth anniversary of the Paris climate agreement, and countries around the world gave it a proper (virtual) fête, filled with announcements on how countries planned to step up their action to curb climate change. Although some of the announcements represented modest steps forward, the overall effect of the event was to capture the growing climate momentum of recent months rather than break new ground.

The event also got many observers thinking back to that other Saturday in Paris, five years ago, when the agreement was approved – and, inevitably, weighing what the future will bring for the accord.

As we head into 2021 and draw closer to the annual international climate negotiations in Glasgow next November (known as COP26), three issues will increasingly dominate the discussion: the need for greater ambition in setting the next round of targets; a shift from negotiations to implementation, not only at national level but also among key global sectors like aviation and shipping; and the enduring importance of the rules for monitoring and reporting emissions, known as the “enhanced transparency framework.” Read More »

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COP 25: The mess in Madrid – and how international carbon markets can still drive ambition despite it

Midnight COP 25 plenary on Dec. 14 in Madrid. UNclimatechange via Flickr.

At just before 2:00 pm Sunday afternoon in Madrid, at a sprawling conference center on the outskirts of the city, a new record was set — and not an enviable one. That’s when the gavel finally fell on COP 25 — the 25th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — making it the longest COP in history, as it extended nearly 44 hours past its scheduled end.

Even with all that extra time, however, negotiators from 197 Parties were unable to reach agreement on virtually anything of real consequence, including one of the issues that topped the conference agenda: guidance for promoting the integrity of international carbon markets, in particular by ensuring consistent and robust accounting of emissions reductions transferred among countries.

While that failure is widely recognized, the outcome also offers three key implications for how markets can move forward.

  • First, negotiators came surprisingly close to a good deal. That provides a foundation for negotiators to build on next year – although it’s not at all clear that having failed two years in a row, the third time will be the charm.
  • Second, countries that are serious about markets don’t need to wait for the UN to provide guidance: they can and should move ahead to set their own rules.
  • Third, the failure to reach agreement puts the Kyoto Protocol’s offset program (known as the Clean Development Mechanism) on shaky legal ground – something that decision makers at the UN’s aviation agency, ICAO, should heed.

How markets can help drive ambition

Markets may seem like a surprising headline topic for an international climate negotiation. But they are a central, if underappreciated, tool to make faster, deeper cuts in climate pollution — which is desperately needed, given the growing gap between the world’s current emissions trajectory and where we must go to meet the Paris Agreement’s objective of limiting warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius.

The Paris Agreement expressly recognizes, in its Article 6, that carbon markets provide a critical tool to enhance ambition. Market-based international cooperation enables countries to do more together than they could on their own. Economic analysis by EDF shows that carbon markets could achieve nearly double the emissions reductions relative to current Paris Agreement commitments, at no extra cost. The current nationally determined commitments (NDCs) are nowhere near ambitious enough to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement, and we need all the tools in the box to avoid climate catastrophe.

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Climate Changed: Millions of Americans Already Living Beyond Temperature Goal

(This post was co-authored by Nat Keohane and David Festa

Earth as seen from a NOAA weather satellite. Photo: NASA

The hotter future that climate pollution is creating has already arrived for 1 in 10 Americans. A new analysis from The Washington Post shows that 34 million Americans live in areas that have now seen average temperatures rise farther than the goal set by the Paris climate agreement — 2 degrees centigrade or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Even as the Trump administration attempts to dismantle policies to reduce climate pollution, average temperatures have shot up in parts of North Dakota, Montana, Utah, in the Northeast and Southwest, and elsewhere. These increases – which are not summer spikes, but year-round averages – are part of the trend that is worsening wildfires, making more damaging storms, and creating serious problems for farmers.

The Post‘s Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin, and John Muyskens surveyed more than 100 years of weather data about the continental United States from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and other scientific sources. Their work provides a bold-face headline to the peer-reviewed science that shows the dangerous speed at which our world is warming. It comes on the heels of last week’s United Nations report on land use and climate change, which warned of increasing water scarcity and food shortages from continued warming.

If there is good news in these disturbing reports, it is that the tangible reality of climate change may be spurring action to reduce emissions and begin the long overdue process of building resilience. Despite the Trump administration’s surrender on the issue, many states are newly aggressive. New Jersey, one of the states that the Washington Post reports is getting hottest fastest, just enacted a series of climate pollution reduction policies. Minnesota, California, and Maine – all states with areas of 2-degree increase – have recently put in place ambitious climate action policies. Colorado, another state with hotspots, just enacted landmark legislation that sets some of the strongest targets in the country for reducing climate pollution.

We can’t solve the climate crisis without leadership from the federal government, but there are paths forward to a better outcome. Failing to act because we hear bad news will only make the problem tougher. If we can generate the political will, we can make our future dramatically safer by moving to a 100% clean economy.

Read More »

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Bad news and good news on cutting climate pollution

Climate change is an urgent threat and we must overcome significant hurdles to address it — beginning with the reckless polices of the Trump administration.

Some countries are on track to meet their commitments under the Paris agreement, some are falling behind, and many will not start in earnest until compliance rules are agreed to at the UN climate conference in Poland.

The climate action story so far is a mix of positive and negative trends. As has been well-covered in the media, the US is trying to pull out of the Paris Agreement and global emissions rose in 2018. Those hard facts cannot be dismissed. But there are also larger market and technology trends which, combined with the actions of responsible governments, are creating some positive indications, too. Which side wins out will depend on the action of political leaders, investors, engineers, voters, and activists.

The positive examples below are not simply individual bits of good news, but signs of a world economy in the midst of transition: Read More »

Posted in Clean Air Act, Economics, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, News, Paris Agreement, Setting the Facts Straight / Comments are closed

The path forward for net-zero emissions climate policy

By Nat Keohane and Susanne Brooks

This post originally appeared in The Hill

Climate change is a defining threat of our generation. But the way forward has never been clearer. Electric power generation is being transformed by the rapid deployment of wind, solar and utility-scale storage. Technological innovation is reshaping transportation and industry. New means of capturing and storing carbon are on the horizon.

Even so, the challenge is monumental. To have a reasonable chance of avoiding the worst effects of climate change, the world must achieve “net-zero emissions” — taking as much carbon out of the atmosphere as we put into it — in this century. Here in the United States, we are currently emitting carbon pollution at seven times the rate that we are soaking it up. We must take advantage of every cost-effective opportunity to cut climate pollution now, while investing in the innovations that will put us on course for net-zero emissions as soon as possible.

Economic and technological trends alone won’t do the trick. Waiting to act only deepens the challenge and increases the cost and pace of reductions needed. To unleash the full potential of breakthrough clean energy technologies, we need well-designed policies that accelerate the low-carbon transition rather than hinder it.Encouragingly, action is already underway: cities, states, and businesses are forging ahead to enact policies and undertake initiatives to reduce pollution, building on momentum from the plummeting costs of clean energy technologies. Those efforts are crucial. But the world won’t solve climate change without American leadership at all levels. To cut climate pollution at the scale and pace that science tells us is necessary requires national action.

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