25 November 2015, New Matilda, Halting Climate Change Means More Than Cutting Carbon. With the Paris climate talks just around the corner a focus on carbon dioxide is not enough. Geoff Russell explains. With yet another in the seemingly infinite sequence of climate summit conferences looming it’s time to take stock of what’s been happening over the past 25 years. But I’ll be taking stock properly, which means not being CO2 centric. Focusing exclusively on CO2 is rather like focusing on protein when thinking about nutrition: it’s simply silly. It’s been seven years since Barry Brook and I wrote an article about the misleading nature of the so-called “carbon dioxide equivalence” factor used to aggregate methane emissions in Greenhouse Inventories. This isn’t a priority claim; many understood the problem before us. Among the first was Kirk Smith of the University of California, Berkeley. Smith is an expert in air quality, among other things, and was the first to measure and understand the impact of indoor cooking smoke on health in India. Globally, it kills people, mainly women and children, by the hundreds of thousands every year. He’s also been tackling the problem in a practical way by spinning off students and companies designing and building cleaner cookers. Smith’s latest work, with main author Manish Desai, calculates a metric called the International Natural Debt (IND) which is a better than average measure who is responsible for our climate woes. Their study uses national emission inventories and greenhouse gas equations to calculate precisely the impact of emissions on radiative forcing (that’s just jargon for warming). In effect, while they don’t include all the components of a full climate model, they do at least account for the full impact of methane on warming. Their estimate, based on the best inventory data is that anthropogenic methane, on its own, contributes about half of our net warming influence on the climate. In technical language methane is about ~850 mW/m2 of the net ~1600 mW/m2 of anthropogenic radiative forcing. That makes methane a big deal. Even more importantly, reductions in methane have an almost immediate cooling impact. Read More here
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November 2015, Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience – A concept paper by Post Carbon Institute, Communities across the United States are talking more and more about resilience. They’re spurred by recent natural disasters like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, weather extremes like the harsh Northeast winter of 2014-15, and long-term drought in the West. Many people think of a community’s resilience as its ability to “bounce back” from disruption, and efforts to build resilience often focus on the impacts of climate change. Climate change is indeed an urgent and existential threat, with untold potential to destroy and disrupt countless lives. But it is not the only crisis we face, nor is preparing for disruption the only way to build resilience.[1] Truly robust community resilience should do more. It should engage and benefit all community members, and consider all the challenges the community faces—from rising sea levels to a lack of living wage jobs. And it should be grounded in resilience science, which tells us how complex systems—like human communities—can adapt and persist through changing circumstances. Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience describes how communities can approach the full scope of the 21st century’s challenges equitably and sustainably. The report draws on some of the most compelling recent thinking about resilience from academia, sustainability advocacy, and grassroots activism, as well as Post Carbon Institute’s prior work.[2] It is intended as an accessible resource for local leaders and activists in the United States, and as a contribution to the larger public conversation about resilience in human communities. It provides a conceptual starting point for community resilience that we will build on in future products focused on practical actions and tools. Read Full Report here
24 November 2015, Renew Energy, Carbon budgets: Knowing when to hold and when to fold. As global leaders pull up a seat around the negotiating table in Paris in the next fortnight, there is no doubt discussion will quickly turn to the carbon budget and how to spend it. That’s the budget that will determine whether the world stays under two degrees of warming or sails into the unchartered waters of three, four or even a five-degree temperature increase. No one imagines that decision will be made this December at this Conference of the Parties. However to retain any hope of a safe and stable climate, the next decade will see debate around the division of the world’s carbon budget front and centre of discussions between nations, scientists, economists and financial analysts. It’s the gravitational pull of this discussion that will ensure the now heated debate surrounding divestment versus engagement as the most effective form of shareholder activism gets a more forensic examination. Certainly the debate is a now a fairly regular presence in the media, as individual and institutional investors become increasingly wary of the environmental, social and long-term financial risks posed by various holdings within their portfolios. In the last few years the issue’s profile has been raised in response to the fossil fuel divestment movement. Pressure for change is growing from within the community, fuelled in part by a growing awareness of how personal finances are being invested by banks and other institutions. This awareness is largely driven by technological change – investors now have access to more information than at any point in history – if BHP Billiton has a dam wall collapse the world knows within minutes. Read More here
24 November 2015, The Conversation, Feeding ‘Godzilla’: as Indonesia burns, its government moves to increase forest destruction. In the midst of its worst fire crisis in living memory, the Indonesian government is taking a leap backward on forest protection. The recently signed Council of Palm Oil Producing Nations between Indonesia and Malaysia, signed at the weekend in Kuala Lumpur, will attempt to wind back palm oil companies’ pledges to end deforestation. This is despite Indonesia’s efforts to end fires and palm oil cultivation on peatlands. If successful the move will undo recent attempts to end deforestation from palm oil production, and exacerbate the risk of future forest fires. Forests on fire Since August, forest and peatland fires have become so widespread across Indonesia that, in satellite images, the nation has looked like an over-lit Christmas tree. The fires have been so bad that carbon emissions from peatland burning alone (forgetting about the many thousands of additional forest fires) have equalled those produced by the entire United States Schools and airports have been repeatedly closed across large expanses of Southeast Asia. To reduce their risks, residents have been told to stay indoors. Some 500,000 people have so far suffered respiratory distress. Nearby Singapore has threatened legal action against several Indonesian companies whose activities have been linked to the fires, provoking a serious diplomatic spat between the two nations. Read More here