15 December 2015, The Conversation, How emissions trading at Paris climate talks has set us up for failure. The Paris Agreement has mostly been greeted with enthusiasm, though it contains at least one obvious flaw. Few seem to have noticed that the main tool mooted for keeping us within the 2℃ global warming target is a massive expansion of carbon trading, including offsetting, which allows the market exchange of credits between companies and nations to achieve an overall emissions reduction. That’s despite plenty of evidence that markets haven’t worked well enough, or quickly enough, to actually keep the planet safe. The debate over whether to include carbon markets in the final agreement came right to the wire. Some left-leaning Latin American countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia vehemently opposed any mention, while the EU, Brazil, and New Zealand, among other countries, pushed hard for their inclusion – with support from the World Bank, the IMF and many business groups. Play with words What we have ended up with is some murky semantics. Though terms such as “carbon trading”, “carbon pricing”, “carbon offsetting” and “carbon markets” don’t appear anywhere in the text, the agreement is littered with references to a whole range of new and expanded market-based tools. Article 6 refers to “voluntary cooperation” between countries in the implementation of their emissions targets “to allow for higher ambition in their mitigation and adaptation actions”. If that’s not exactly plain speak, then wait for how carbon trading is referred to as “internationally transferred mitigation outcomes”. The same Article also provides for an entirely new, UN-controlled international market mechanism. All countries will be able to trade carbon with each other, helping each to achieve their national targets for emissions cuts. While trading between companies, countries or blocs of countries is done on a voluntary basis, the new mechanism, dubbed the Sustainable Development Mechanism (SDM), will be set up to succeed the existing Joint Implementation and Clean Development Mechanism, providing for a massive expansion of carbon trading and offsetting while setting some basic standards. Read More here
Tag Archives: UNFCCC
15 December 2015, New Internationalist, COP21 agreed to a climate-changed world. ….. The scaffold on which the entire COP21 hung was the infamous intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs). While the COP itself notes that the figures submitted by countries do not on the aggregate point a way to cooling the planet, it nevertheless stayed the cause of this clearly wrong path. The INDCs, if implemented, will lead to a temperature increase of over 3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, wiping out communities of people and sparking unpredictable repercussions. The Agreement recognizes that INDCs will also be achieved through removal of greenhouse gases – through sinks and offsets, for example. Thus, the path of the INDCs taken by the COP is an irredeemable self-inflicted injury that subverts real efforts to tackle the climate menace. Applauding the COP for being a success because for the first time all nations have indicated commitment to tackle climate change on the basis of the INDCs indicates a total disregard of climate science and equity as epitomized by this pathway. Read more here
15 December 2015, Carbon Pulse, After Paris, UN’s new “light touch” role on markets to help spawn carbon clubs. It may take years for enough governments to ratify the new Paris Agreement for it to come into force, or to agree on the rules underpinning the new emissions trading mechanism enshrined by it, but any parties wanting to link up their carbon markets under the pact need not wait. The agreement approved by 195 governments in the French capital on Saturday carried provisions effectively setting up two tracks for the use of market-based mechanisms in meeting nations’ emissions reduction pledges, now officially known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Article 6.4 of the agreement takes a centralised approach, establishing a market-based mechanism akin to the Kyoto Protocol’s CDM or JI, which is to be developed by countries between now and 2020. It will create a new type of carbon unit that, similar to those generated under Kyoto, can be used by governments that have ratified the agreement. Articles 6.2 and 6.3, on the other hand, allow for decentralised ‘cooperative approaches’ that let countries and other jurisdictions with markets bilaterally and multilaterally link them together, in what many now refer to as ‘carbon clubs’. These clubs will now be able to trade units, recognised under the Paris Agreement as being “Internationally Transferrable Mitigation Outcomes”, or ITMOs, that are backed by robust accounting measures and not counted more than once towards a country’s target. These cooperative approaches, says Jeff Swartz, director of international policy at IETA, “set up the framework for a much deeper world of cooperation” on carbon markets. “It says ‘here’s a framework, some basic rules of the road’. It’s different from Kyoto’s top-down approach in that it lets countries drive,” added Nat Keohane, vice president for global climate at US-based Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Both spoke to reporters on Tuesday in a conference call hosted by the two organisations. Read More here
15 December 2015, Carbon Brief, The world has spoken. It wants to limit future temperatures rises to 1.5C above historic levels. To achieve this everything must change. The twelfth of December 2015 may well be remembered as the day the human race came together and saved the world. Old differences between rich and poor, west and east were laid aside. Unbeknownst to anyone, six months ago and in secret, the sinking Marshall islanders started to raise an army of more than 100 ambitious nations that rose above the flotsam and jetsam of self-interest and created a stronger climate agreement than anyone thought possible. The Paris agreement aims to hold the increase in the global average temperatures to “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels” and to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C”. It also requires parties to produce audited emission-reduction commitments ratcheting up every five years, and delivers a “floor” of $100 billion per year of financing up to 2025. So unexpected was this that we climate scientists were caught napping. Before Paris, we all thought 2C was a near-impossible target and spent our energies researching future worlds where temperatures soared. In fact, there is still much to discover about the specific advantages of limiting warming to 1.5C, and the plausible social and economic pathways that might keep us under this limit. Some have derided the 1.5C target as a pipe dream, given that current national pledges to reduce carbon dioxide emissions – known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) – could bring us closer to 3C. However, the limited research that does exist suggests that it is possible to overshoot 1.5C and return below it by 2100. And the figure below illustrates how a five-year ratchet mechanism of increasingly ambitious INDCs could deliver a temperature close to 1.5C by 2100. Read More here