Climate 411

The scoop on the Scoping Plan: California’s plan falls short in ensuring equitable access to an affordable, clean and safe energy system (Part 2)

By Michael Colvin / Published: June 3, 2022

In May, the California Air Resources Board released the draft 2022 Climate Change Scoping Plan, a roadmap that will guide the state toward meeting its 2030 emissions target and achieving net-zero emissions no later than 2045. This four-part series will unpack several key aspects of the plan and evaluate whether they raise California’s climate ambition to the levels needed to protect communities from the worst climate impacts.

The draft Scoping Plan released by CARB last month attempts to address important climate issues across many sectors in California, including equitable access to an affordable, clean, and safe energy system. As the plan appropriately notes, “a clean, affordable, and reliable electricity grid will serve as a backbone to support deep decarbonization across California’s economy.”

Unfortunately, the recommended actions for the electricity sector are insufficient. CARB needs to increase its ambition in order to fulfill the promise of an affordable, clean and reliable energy system. This includes clearly setting a goal of 0MMT or zero emissions from electricity generation no later than 2045 with direction for planning agencies to establish interim targets and front-loaded actions to measure that progress.

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Posted in California, Greenhouse Gas Emissions / Read 1 Response

Markets, stocktake, and impacts: The three issues to watch at the UN climate talks in Bonn

By Maggie Ferrato / Published: June 3, 2022

This post was co-authored by Julia Ilhardt, High Meadows Fellow at Environmental Defense Fund

Opening Plenary of Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI), 2019 climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany. UNclimatechange via Flickr.

Next week, climate negotiators will begin two weeks of meetings in Bonn, Germany to make progress on a full slate of issues—from carbon markets and finance to adaptation and loss and damage—before November’s global climate talks.

At these mid-year negotiating sessions, negotiators will continue to elaborate rules for international carbon markets, kick off dialogues on the global stocktake, and start work on critical processes to address the impacts of the climate crisis, among other things. They will build on the work completed at COP26 in Glasgow last year, and the results will give us an indication of what the upcoming COP27 negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt will look like.

1. Elaborate rules needed to “operationalize” international carbon markets

At COP26 in Glasgow—after six years of difficult, technical negotiations—countries delivered a strong Paris Agreement rulebook for international cooperation through carbon markets. These rules will give countries the tools they need for environmental integrity and ultimately clear a path to get private capital flowing to developing countries.

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Posted in Carbon Markets, International, Paris Agreement, United Nations / Comments are closed

May brings another record auction for the Western Climate Initiative, as California considers how to ramp up climate action

By Katelyn Roedner Sutter / Published: May 26, 2022

Results of the May Western Climate Initiative auction were released today, and again they demonstrate strong demand for allowances and generate revenue that will deliver meaningful investments for California communities. Earlier this month, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) also outlined the role of its cap-and-trade program in its draft Scoping Plan, which intends to chart the path to California’s 2030 and 2045 climate targets. However, there is major room for improvement: CARB needs to do more to ensure the emissions cap is an effective backstop and can provide certainty of near-term emission reductions.

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Posted in California, Carbon Markets, Greenhouse Gas Emissions / Comments are closed

The scoop on the Scoping Plan: California’s draft plan misses the opportunity for greater climate ambition (Part 1)

By Caroline Jones / Published: May 26, 2022

This post was co-authored by Katelyn Roedner Sutter, Senior Manager for U.S. Climate at EDF.

solar array in California

Photo Credit: Tom Brewster photography for the Bureau of Land Management.

In May, the California Air Resources Board released the draft 2022 Climate Change Scoping Plan, a roadmap that will guide the state toward meeting its 2030 emissions target and achieving net-zero emissions no later than 2045. This four-part series will unpack several key aspects of the plan and evaluate whether they raise California’s climate ambition to the levels needed to protect communities from the worst climate impacts.

California has long been known as a global climate leader, but that title has to be constantly re-earned as the climate crisis accelerates and new leaders raise the bar. The state’s Scoping Plan, which is updated every five years, presents a major opportunity to re-evaluate its strategies to drive down climate pollution based on the latest science, policy and technological developments.

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Posted in California, Carbon Markets, Cities and states / Read 1 Response

Pinterest sets the bar in the fight against climate disinformation

By Lauren Guite / Published: April 26, 2022

This post was co-authored by Michael Khoo of Friends of the Earth

Climate disinformation on digital platforms is a serious threat to the public support needed to solve the climate crisis. It has been so effective at delaying climate action, it was called out for the first time by the UN’s climate report and highlighted by President Obama. But we aren’t doing nearly enough to stop it.

We see a small number of outlets creating the vast majority of climate disinformation, amplified by the platform algorithms that force conspiratorial lies onto mainstream audiences. We have seen major events like the fossil fuel infrastructure failure in Texas’ 2021 winter storm be twisted into false attacks on renewable energy. As Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen showed in her release of 10,000 documents, companies like Facebook know these problems exist, and are doing precious little to stop it.

That’s why we’re excited that this month both Pinterest and Twitter (newly at the helm of Elon Musk) unveiled strong new climate misinformation policies. EDF and FOE, co-chairs of the Climate Disinformation Coalition, worked with both companies over the last year to help develop these policies. Pinterest’s policy has a strong definition of climate disinformation and sets the gold standard in the industry. Twitter’s policy addresses the very real problem of the monetization of climate disinformation through advertising. Both are living proof that all social media companies can and should do much more to stop the spread of climate change disinformation.

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Posted in News, Setting the Facts Straight / Read 1 Response

Unlocking the planet-saving potential of crediting natural climate solutions

By Devyani Singh / Published: April 22, 2022

With contributions from Julia Paltseva, senior analyst, Britta Dosch, analyst, and Christine Gerbode, senior research analyst, all at Environmental Defense Fund. 

Gardens of the Queen archipelago off the coast of Cuba

Earth’s forests, oceans, wetlands and other natural landscapes have the power to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and to store it – making well-managed ecosystems key resources in the fight to halt climate change. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found protecting these resources offers one of the highest mitigation potentials.

Efforts to keep healthy ecosystems intact, restore those that have been cleared or degraded, and improve how these landscapes are managed can have huge benefits to people and the planet, like improving water quality or protecting biodiversity. When these efforts also increase carbon storage or avoid greenhouse gas emissions, they are known as natural climate solutions, or NCS.

Healthy ecosystems around the world are disappearing rapidly, as more of the planet is degraded or converted to other uses. This continued loss could have dire consequences for the entire globe through its effect on climate, while doing particular harm and injustice to the Indigenous and local communities who have historically stewarded many of these crucial environments.

Scaling up global funding and support for NCS activities is an opportunity to limit climate damage while enhancing and protecting the enormous good these ecosystems provide – and benefiting the local people carrying out these important tasks.

One way to do this is to incorporate NCS activities into global carbon markets by crediting emissions. Environmental Defense Fund is now leading a collaborative process to lay out the key considerations and challenges of supporting NCS with the potentially powerful tool of crediting emissions reductions and removals—and of making sure the systems to support this tool are ethical, equitable and effective at the much larger scales of ambition needed to meet the moment.

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Posted in Carbon Markets, Forest protection, Indigenous People, Plants & Animals / Comments are closed