11 January 2018, ABC News – Science: Forget Paris: Australia needs to stop pretending we’re tackling climate change. As the Bureau of Meteorology confirms another record-breaking year for temperatures in Australia, we should expect a sense of urgency to be creeping into Australia’s climate policy. Instead, we’re seeing the opposite. While 2015-17 were all within the hottest six years on record, our carbon emissions also continued to increase during the same period, including an all-time peak in 2017, when unreliable land-use data was excluded from the analysis. This is despite signing up to the Paris Agreement in 2015, which outlined a plan to reduce our carbon emissions by 26-28 per cent by 2030. Government data pushed out under the cloak of Christmas indicates that we will be about 140 million tonnes — or about 30 per cent — above that target based on current growth Government optimism at odds with UN: Despite last financial year’s continued emissions growth, Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg remains upbeat about Australia’s commitment to the Paris Agreement. “If you look on a yearly basis that is true [that emissions went up]. But if you look on the last quarter, they went down. If you look at the trend, it is improving. And when you talk about the 2030 target, which is our Paris commitment, the numbers that were most recently shown, indicate that they were 30 per cent better than when Labor were last in office,” the Minister told RN Breakfast. But his optimism is at odds with a number of experts, and is contrary to what was reported in the United Nations Emissions Gap Report (see below), 2017. “Government projections indicate that emissions are expected to reach 592 [million tonnes] in 2030, in contrast to the targeted range of 429-440 [million tonnes],” the report states.. Read More here
Category Archives: Global Action Inaction
27 November 2017, Climate Home News. Cleaner coolants fund gets $540m – and US backing. Rich countries will pay $540 million over three years into a fund to support a shift to cleaner coolants, under a deal agreed in Montreal on Saturday. Notably, the US is set to contribute $37m, despite the Trump administration’s hostility to multilateral environmental agreements. It comes as the 1987 Montreal Protocol pivots from its initial focus on the ozone layer to addressing the climate impact of chemicals used in fridges and air conditioners. State department official Judith Garber said the US was starting the process to ratify the Kigali Amendment to the protocol, which sets a phasedown path for HFCs, a group of potent warming gases produced by these appliances. In a speech on Thursday that did not mention climate change, she hailed the Kigali Amendment’s “pragmatic and balanced approach” to reducing HFCs’ “environmental impact”. US chemical companies like Honeywell and Dow support the deal, seeing an opportunity to sell climate-friendly alternatives. The Kigali Amendment will enter into force on 1 January 2019, after Sweden became the twentieth country to ratify it on 17 November. Developing countries like India made clear their backing for an HFC phasedown depended on finance to help their chemical manufacturers switch to substitutes. Gaby Drinkwater of Christian Aid said in a statement: “Developing nations are where the demand growth in air conditioning systems will come from as the planet gets hotter. No one wants to see this demand creating a vicious cycle of rising greenhouse gas emissions.” David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote in a blog that developing countries appeared “optimistic” the funds were adequate. Read More here
21 November 2017, Climate News Network, The devil’s in the COP 23 detail. A key takeaway from this year’s United Nations climate change conference (COP 23) is that, when it comes to putting a practical foundation under the high-minded pronouncements in the Paris Agreement, the COP 23 detail matters more than the headlines. That means the Paris process has entered a potentially perilous moment when the urgency of the climate crisis is mounting by the day, public expectations are (quite rightly) high, the commitment to action extends far beyond national governments – yet negotiators have to focus on nuts-and-bolts issues that are numbingly technical for the large majority of us, but will still determine the success or failure of a crucially important global deal. It means negotiators get to celebrate incremental but hard-fought victories that push the Paris “rulebook” closer to completion, while setting the stage for more obviously significant dialogue at next year’s conference in Katowice, Poland. And it means the discussions that most immediately match up with the world-wide momentum for climate solutions take place at the margins of the main event, in the hundreds of side meetings that coincide with the official proceedings. Read More here
19 November 2017, Carbon Brief, COP23: Key outcomes agreed at the UN climate talks in Bonn. Climate change was again placed at the centre of global diplomacy over the past two weeks as diplomats and ministers gathered in Bonn, Germany, for the latest annual round of United Nations climate talks. COP23, the second “conference of the parties” since the Paris Agreement was struck in 2015, promised to be a somewhat technical affair as countries continued to negotiate the finer details of how the agreement will work from 2020 onwards. However, it was also the first set of negotiations since the US, under the presidency of Donald Trump, announced its intention earlier this year to withdraw from the Paris deal. And it was the first COP to be hosted by a small-island developing state with Fiji taking up the presidency, even though it was being held in Bonn. Carbon Brief covers all the summit’s key outcomes and talking points.Read More here