2 November 2016, Renew Economy, Australia failing climate targets as Paris deal comes into force. A new assessment of the Coalition government’s climate change policies says Australia will fall well short of its “inadequate” Paris climate targets, and will likely increase emissions by nearly as much as it has promised to cut them. The assessment from Climate Action Tracker says that Australia’s target falls well short of the effort needed to limit warming to below 2°C, let alone the stronger aspirational target of 1.5°C that was included in the Paris Agreement. “If most other countries followed the Australia approach, global warming would exceed 3°C to 4°C,” the report says. The Climate Action Tracker report is not the first to highlight Australia’s pathetically inadequate climate policies, nor will it be the last. A slew of reports is expected in coming days and weeks as the Paris Agreement comes into force from Friday and new climate talks begin in Marrakesh in Morocco on Monday. Australia is likely to be questioned intensely by many countries, including its major trading partners, over its climate policies, particularly the effectiveness of its Direct Action policy, which prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has embraced despite ridiculing it before replacing Tony Abbott as leader just over a year ago. Fairfax Media reported last month that China, the US and other countries have put more than 30 questions to the Turnbull government, asking for detail about how Australia will meet its 2030 emissions target and raising concerns about a lack of transparency over how the government calculates and reports emissions. The Australian government has admitted it has not even modelled the impact of its own policies and whether they would reach their target, and it is unclear whether a promised 2017 review will lead to new policies or simply be a “situation report” on the current trajectory. Read More here
Category Archives: Global Action Inaction
1 November 2016, Bloomberg, Geoengineering to Alter Climate Moves Closer to Reality. A United Nations body is investigating controversial methods to avert runaway climate change by giving humans the go-ahead to re-engineer the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. So-called geoengineering is seen as necessary to achieve the COP21 Paris agreement clinched in December, when 197 countries pledged to keep global temperatures rises below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to researchers who produced a report for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. “Within the Paris agreement there’s an implicit assumption that there will need to be greenhouse gases removed,” said Phil Williamson, a scientist at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia, who worked on the report. “Climate geoengineering is what countries have agreed to do, although they haven’t really realized that they’ve agreed to do it.” Large-scale geoengineering may include pouring nutrients into oceans to save coral habitats or spraying tiny particles into the Earth’s atmosphere to reflect sun rays back into space. Geoengineering proposals have been shunned because of their unpredictable consequences on global ecosystems. Read more here
27 October 2016, Climate Home, Whiffs of sulphur: UN shipping talks face climate dilemma. Historic pact to cut sulphur emissions from shipping sector hailed by green groups, but slow progress suggests a climate deal is a long way off. Whisper it, but the shipping industry is showing signs of tackling its environmental footprint. This week at International Maritime Organisation (IMO) talks in London around 170 countries agreed to tighten limits on toxic sulphur emissions from ships. The decision means the sulphur content of maritime fuels has to be cut from a current maximum of 3.5% to 0.5% in 2020, and could prevent 200,000 premature deaths, say experts. It’s a significant step and one that the likes of WWF, Friends of the Earth and Brussels-based NGO Transport and Environment have been pushing for in the past few years. “This is a landmark decision and we are very pleased that the world has bitten the bullet and is now tackling poisonous sulphuric fuel,” said Bill Hemmings, T&E shipping director. Still, the battle to get this deal has been immense, and raises questions over the capability of the IMO to deliver a similar agreement on climate change, its next major task. The sulphur fight has lasted a decade. Only now, with the European Union pushing hard for tougher global regulations and China implementing its own standards has a pact seemed likely. Read More here
26 October 2016, Bloomberg, Magical Thinking Won’t Stop Climate Change. World leaders have started to generate some real optimism with their efforts to address global climate change. What’s troubling, though, is how far we remain from getting carbon emissions under control — and how much wishful thinking is still required to believe we can do so. The Paris agreement on climate change has garnered the national signatories needed to go into force on Nov. 4. Some economists see it as a promising framework for cooperation among many different countries, especially if those not pulling their weight suffer penalties such as trade sanctions. There’s even talk of aiming for the more ambitious goal of keeping global temperatures within 1.5 degrees Celsius or less of their pre-industrial level, as opposed to the currently agreed 2 degrees. Meanwhile, another major international deal has been reached to phase out greenhouse gases used in refrigeration systems, and solar energy technology continues its rapid advance. For all the progress, though, the gap between what needs to happen and what is happening remains large. Worse, it’s growing. Consider, for example, how far the planet remains from any of the carbon emission trajectories in which — according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — global warming would remain below 2 degrees. Even in the most lenient scenarios, we would have to be cutting net emissions already. Yet under the pledges countries have made in the Paris framework, emissions will keep increasing sharply through at least 2030, as this chart from a recent commentary in the journal Science illustrates….. The gap is probably even bigger than the chart suggests. As climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters argue, an element of magical thinking has crept into the IPCC projections. Specifically, they rely heavily on the assumption that new technologies will allow humans to start sucking carbon out of the atmosphere on a grand scale, resulting in large net negative emissions sometime in the second half of this century. This might happen, but we don’t know how to do it yet. The assumptions about negative emissions amount to a bizarre step in what ought to be a cautious and conservative analysis. The IPCC scenarios essentially ignore the vast uncertainty surrounding a technology that does not yet exist, and about our ability to ramp it up to the required scale. To eliminate that much atmospheric carbon, as geophysicist Andrew Skuce estimates, we would need an industry roughly three times as big as the entire current fossil fuel industry — and we would need to create it fast, building something like one new large plant to capture and store carbon every day for the next 70 years. Does that sound likely? Read More here