Into the Furnace

 

The screenshot above comes from a video in April of 2019. It's a screen capture of a massive fire in Los Angeles, California near the Getty Center. This video record is documenting the opening of the International Rebellion in London with Jem Bendell leading the protest. "Europe has been experiencing unprecedented heat waves, particularly in the summer of 2018. It has resulted in a drop in food production of 20% and is now getting worse. The video shows a diagram of how these energy emissions are interacting to produce the global heating that we're experiencing. The future of our climate is not now under our control." This rebellion did not produce any policy changes in the UK government, but it became a precursor to the events following, as heat waves began to propagate across the planet in the following years.

Greta Thunberg and Al Gore, two of the world's leading voices in the fight against climate change, publicly reacted to the record-setting heat wave and wildfires gripping Europe in July of this year (2022). "With temperature records being smashed in parts of the United Kingdom and France, Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist, warned that the worst is yet to come. As of Tuesday, at least 1,346 people had died in Spain and Portugal due to the current heat wave, and experts say that figure is expected to rise over the coming days as extreme heat continues to broil places like the U.K., where air conditioning is not common."

Alarm is rising as the fastest growing US cities risk becoming unlivable from the climate crisis. Cities that sprawl in the south-western US have in recent years experienced population booms, with people moving in droves for cheap yet expansive properties, warm winters and plentiful jobs. Large corporations are shifting their bases to states with low taxes and cheaper cost of living.This has been upended with the reality of the climate emergency, with parts of the southwest suffering the worst drought in more than 1,000 years, with record wildfires and extreme heat that is triggering some medical conditions, as well as deaths from heat exposure.

George Monbiot writes that this heatwave has eviscerated the idea that small changes can tackle extreme weather. "We have seen nothing yet. The dangerous heat England is suffering at the moment is already becoming normal in southern Europe, and would be counted among the cooler days during hot periods in parts of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, where heat is becoming a regular threat to life. It cannot now be long, unless immediate and comprehensive measures are taken, before these days of rage become the norm even in our once-temperate climatic zone."

 "The world is burning once again". In another article by Monbiot, he emphasizes that mainstream climate advocates have adapted an approach of incrementalism in climate change which has been wiped out by corporate resistance and the focus on profit above all else. "I feel clearer about what effective political action looks like than I have ever done. But a major question remains. Given that we have left it so late, can we reach the social tipping point before we hit the environmental tipping point?"

It's late in the day, but it's imperative for us and our kids to force our governments and the corporations to take serious measures to stop carbon emissions and ditch the fossil fuel energy immediately. Our survival, and that of the biosphere, depends on our immediate and effective actions.

Update 8/13/22: The World Needs ‘Rapid Climate Cooling’ as 2℃ Overshoot Now Likely

New Sheriff in Town

 

The new Biden administration has awakened the Federal beast, which is stirring with new life on the carbon issue. Biden’s pledge on Earth Day 2021 is in line with what environmental groups and hundreds of executives at major companies have pushed for. The president announced the target at the closely watched global leaders’ climate summit on April 22, during which he hopes to urge global cooperation to address the climate crisis.

“This is the decisive decade,” Biden said at the summit on Thursday morning. “This is the decade that we must make decisions to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis.”

“This is a moral imperative. An economic imperative. A moment of peril, but also a moment of extraordinary possibilities,” the president said.

At the state level, California is setting policies in concert with many organizations that are moving ahead with their goals and solutions to the carbon emission emergency that has been declared. The architects and contractors are already developing their methods for reducing not only emissions, but are also the decarbonization strategies that drastically reduce the impact of construction in cities and towns. This is being done in concert with the American Institute of Architects California (AIACA) and Architecture 2030 leadership by Ed Mazria FAIA.

Rocky Mountain Institute, headed up by Amory Lovins, is working with industry to transform the global energy system to secure a clean, prosperous, zero-carbon future for all. They are developing zero-carbon roadmaps for harder-to-abate sectors; accelerate development and deployment of breakthrough technologies; cultivate zero-carbon industries and ecosystems. These are some of the goals of their China program.

The response to the climate change issue has several major policy supporters that share similar climate goals. Recognizing that buildings account for nearly half of global CO2 emissions, the Carbon Leadership Forum, a non-profit organization at the University of Washington, is dedicated to accelerating the transformation of the building sector to radically reduce the embodied carbon in building materials and construction through collective action. This group's document was published in March 2021. To learn more about different policy initiatives related to embodied carbon or track updates on the policy initiatives in this document, visit the Carbon Leadership Forum’s Policy Toolkit.

The goals of the UNFCCC policies of 1.5C established in Paris are facing some serious pushback by the fossil fuel industry. It's not just a disinformation campaign, but steering governments to implement actions that will keep the oil flowing. For example, a human rights lawyer is facing prison for holding an oil giant to account talks about his Kafkaesque case.

"One of the critical facts is it’s not an accident. It’s a deliberately designed pollution event where Texaco decided to do it this way, essentially to play God with the people of Ecuador in order to save $2 or $3 a barrel of oil produced. The net result today, 50 years after this started, is you have the world’s worst oil disaster. You have thousands of people dead or dying from exposure. You have virtually no medical care. You have indigenous groups decimated, on the way to extinction because the forest is now poisoned by these deliberate acts of destruction. It can no longer sustain the culture, so it’s a disaster from every angle."

And at the same time, cities face new roadblocks in their quest to decarbonize buildings with policies that cripple efforts by local governments to establish sustainable policies.

The International Code Council (ICC) — an organization that manages building codes for much of the U.S. — this month removed the rights of local governments to vote on future energy efficiency building regulations, a move that could have major implications for cities as they seek to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within building sectors, according to industry experts.

So we're looking to Biden's leadership to help untangle these issues and policies that are colliding in the US as well as the global community acting under the United Nations oversight.

Update 10/8/21: Take three steps to begin designing zero carbon buildings today

Update 10/9/21:  CarbonPositive: COP26 

Approaching the Endgame

 

The World Meteorological Organization maps out the heat of climate change in June. An exceptional and dangerous heatwave is baking the Northwestern USA and Western Canada in areas which are more synonymous with the cold. Temperatures have reached more than 45.0°C on consecutive days, with extremely warm nights in between. The destructive impacts of climate change have been anticipated by climate scientists for decades. The accelerating damages from overheating the biosphere have been shown to be even worse than we've expected, and it's happening faster and faster. The ClimateReanalyzer map above shows the massive heat that's currently sitting in a dome over western Canada and the United States. 

We may already be in a global heat state that's irreversible because of the feedback emissions from melting permafrost, the burning forests and emerging global droughts due to the heat already absorbed in the ocean and on the land over the last 150 years. It's a runaway climate scenario that has started with a vengeance. The challenge now is for the global communities to come to a resolution to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2030. Of course we're not going to be able to hit this benchmark, and the resulting decimation of our planet will mean that human civilization will not be able to survive.

The details of the Endgame are summarized in this blog which traces the work of the Global Commons Institute and the efforts by Aubrey Meyer to develop a framework for the global climate agreement which includes the necessary emission reductions required to keep the planet from heating up past 1.5C. Over the past 30 years we have not been able to accomplish this agreement primarily due to the intransigence of the US, China and Europe. This is due to the immense interference and obfuscation by the fossil fuel industry, which has leverage in all the major governments of the world.

Update 7/18/21: Is This the Beginning of Runaway Global Warming?

Update 7/19/21: The Amazon is Burning and the Earth is Dying Slowly

Update 7/20/21:  An Open Letter to All Climate Scientists

Update 7/22/21: Global Warming: From Scientific Warning to Corporate Casualty

Update 7/23/21: Forward to the Past

 

A New Day

 

January 6, 2021
Commentary from Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Governor of California

 

January 20, 2021  The color of womanpower!

Energy Flows

Online expanded view of this chart that tracks energy from its source to its consumption. Further discussion and breakdown is here.

It's not hard to drive fossil fuels out of the US economy, quickly. The US has everything it needs to decarbonize by 2035. A World War II mobilization will be necessary for the US to decarbonize its economy fast enough to avert the worst of climate change. To do its part in limiting global temperature rise to between 1.5° and 2° Celsius, the US must reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 at the latest. Despite the titanic effort it would take to decarbonize, the US doesn’t need any new technologies and it doesn’t require any grand national sacrifice. All it needs, in this view, is a serious commitment to building the necessary machines and creating a regulatory and policy environment that supports their rapid deployment. A key component of this strategy is the electrification of the power grid and integration of this energy supply with the existing grid. Solar power and wind power are the prime sources of energy, especially with the continuing improvement of battery storage technologies that are part of a more advanced distributed power model. 

 The time for climate discussion has passed. Architects are taking action. The American Institue of Architects (AIA) has developed a landmark initiative to take on climate action for all. From advocating for public policy, to supporting renewable energy use in buildings, from reducing carbon emissions through building design and informed product selection, to spurring energy efficient renovations and designing for natural hazard risk – America’s architects have a leading role to play in humanity’s collective call to climate action.

The kickoff event for this nationwide push to decarbonize the construction sector was held in Los Angeles last March, and the efforts to educate the profession are underway by the AIA. In the very near future, building codes will be adopted that are based upon the ZERO code template for structures, since the AIA is interfacing with the various code agencies. 

Architecture 2030 has worked with the U.S. House of Representatives and sent them the ZERO Code and talked to them about existing buildings point of sale and emissions reduction mandates. They were given quite a bit of building sector information. Adopting a zero carbon building code today, but no later than 2030, made it into the policy recommendations, and more importantly into the 2021 IECC code as an Appendix, which means it can be used with any year of the IECC code. The availability of the IECC Appendix, and national and international ZERO Code, means that any city or jurisdiction in the world can implement policies to ensure that all new buildings are designed and built to zero carbon standards. The AIA was incredibly influential and helpful with these developments. Anica Landreneau of HOK and Carl Elefante, past president of the AIA, both testified in the House. Anika was on the IECC code committee and strongly supported the adoption of the Zero Code. The AIA is reorienting their organization’s resources to address climate change.

Eye of the Needle

The coronavirus pandemic is reshaping our world. An article by William Rees points out that "clearing skies and cleaner waters should inspire hopeful ingenuity. If we wish to thrive on a finite planet, we have little choice but to see the COVID-19 pandemic as preview and our response as dress rehearsal for the bigger play. Again, the challenge is to engineer a safe, smooth, controlled contraction of the human enterprise. Surely it is within our collective imagination to socially construct a system of globally networked but self-reliant national economies that better serve the needs of a smaller human family. The ultimate goal of economic planning everywhere must now turn to ensuring that humanity can thrive indefinitely and more equitably within the biophysical means of nature."

This is impacting the schedule of the World Climate Foundation summit, as well as the COP26 date. "In 2020, climate action must take on a new format to ensure global momentum is maintained. Short and long-term objectives should aim to overcome the socio-economic disruptions of COVID-19 and kickstart the global economy through resilient and ambitious green agendas, prioritizing net-zero commitments and low carbon investments now and throughout the next ten years.

With the postponement of the COP26 to 2021, World Climate Foundation is equally postponing its annual World Climate Summit to 2021, and now offers an exciting new series of digital, regional World Climate Forums. At these Forums, governments can transform climate ambitions into successful markets for climate business and market players in major regions of the world and instigate collaboration on policy, innovation, and investments."For decades, scientists have been demanding that climate crisis be taken this seriously. But despite numerous international agreements, governments have been slow to take action to reduce carbon emissions."

The coronavirus pandemic may have one silver lining: the potential collapse of big oil. "As Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, recently pointed out,  the drop in oil prices also offers an opportunity for countries around the world to lower or remove subsidies for fossil fuel consumption,  which disproportionally line the pockets of wealthy individuals and  corporations with money that could go to education, health care or clean  energy projects."

Optimists are encouraged by people such as the director of the Paris-based International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, who last April called the crisis an “historic opportunity today to steer [energy] investments onto a more sustainable path.” With G20 governments already pledging around $5 trillion to stimulate their economies in the wake of the shutdown, Birol called on them to “put clean energy at the heart of stimulus plans to counter the coronavirus crisis.” Birol said he had urged political and global financial leaders to design “sustainable stimulus packages” that focus on investing in clean energy technologies and accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. In its latest short-term projections, the US EIA says that it expects the biggest hit to oil demand in the second quarter of 2020, but that the reduction will only “gradually dissipat[e] over the course of the next 18 months”

The Rocky Mountain Institute is issuing a series of stimulus white papers to respond to the climate crisis, the economic shifts and provide guidance to governments and industry for rapid decarbonization."As the effects of the COVID-19 crisis ripple across the globe, strategic stimulus and recovery investments can get world economies back on track now and help us build back in a way that ensures greater resilience to the disruptions and crises we will inevitably face in the future. The current pandemic shows many parallels to, and interconnections with, a looming climate crisis. A response that addresses both crises at once will advance a low-carbon economy that is more resilient and helps mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, while improving the economy, the environment, and our health and communities."

In response to the impact of the pandemic, the RMI's recommended programs aim to catalyze industries, technologies, and practices shown to improve public health, decrease costs, create enduring job opportunities, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The four programs are:

• Build Back Better Buildings: A building retrofit program to catalyze residential and commercial building improvements at an unprecedented scale.
• Enhance Access and Electrify Mobility: Investment to prioritize pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit over the automobile, while also supporting the growth of the electric vehicle market.
• Debt Forgiveness for a Sustainable Recovery: A financial incentive program to provide companies with debt relief based on verifiable emissions reductions.
• Economic Recovery Facility for Financing Low- and Zero-Carbon Activities: A federal entity dedicated to facilitating the financing of clean energy and infrastructure projects.

A simple debt forgiveness approach can help industries and workers feeling economic pain now and build toward a more sustainable, low-emissions future.

Update 6/26/20: Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance

Update 7/23/20: Tom Steyer - Clean Energy as a job generator

Update 7/30/20:  Some Earth system tipping points may be linked together

Update 8/5/20: What a virus means for climate

Update 8/9/20: Observing recovery through a climate 'magnifying glass'

Update 8/16/20: Exponential growth bias: why most people don't understand the risk of runaway climate change.

Bending the Arc of Justice

From the inspiration of Earth Day in the writings and activism of Rachel Carson in her epic Silent Spring documentation to the present-day confrontational actions between the corporate power of profit versus the Extinction Rebellion - portrayed in the graphic above from FT - we have seen Earth Day evolve extensively from its first recognition in 1970. During that time, we have seen 24 COP's come and go; the first COP was held in Berlin in 1995.

The 25th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 25) to the UNFCCC was to take place from 11-22 November 2019 in Brazil. Upon election as President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro pulled Brazil out of hosting the event. So now the Santiago Climate Change Conference, which will feature the 25th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 25) to the UNFCCC and meetings of the UNFCCC subsidiary bodies, is expected to take place from 2-13 December 2019.

This reflects the global turbulence among countries, governments and corporate powers that are all staking a claim on planet earth, resulting in a human-induced crisis of resources, humanity and the very life systems of our environment. In the last few hundred years we've gone beyond our natural limits and show no signs of stopping carbon emissions in spite of all the agreements and discussions to date. Hence, the increasing tragedy of future environmental collapse, and the resistance personified by children like Greta and the powerful counter movements emerging as the alarms are set off by more and more people seeing an unfolding terrible, dark future.

According to a NYTimes report, more carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference, Nov. 7, 1989, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it. In 1990, humankind emitted more than 20 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. By 2017, the figure had risen to 32.5 billion metric tons, a record. Despite every action taken since the Charney report — the billions of dollars invested in research, the nonbinding treaties, the investments in renewable energy — the only number that counts, the total quantity of global greenhouse gas emitted per year, has continued its inexorable rise.

Like the scientific story, the political story hasn’t changed greatly, except in its particulars. Even some of the nations that pushed hardest for climate policy have failed to honor their own commitments. When it comes to our own nation, which has failed to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the efforts of the fossil-fuel industries to suppress science, confuse public knowledge and bribe politicians.

Because our destructive, profit-focused economic system demands a fiction called GDP that requires physical consumption to increase the ledger sheet balance, the system inherently grows out of control as the markets are expanded. Destroying the environment that provides our life support is a form of insanity that leads to collapse, and that is increasingly recognized now by people all over the world, as well as by governments and the insurance industry. A view delineating this is: Collapse of Industrial Civilization ~ Finding the Truth behind the American Hologram Concerning Humanity’s Future: Interview with Nick Humphrey, Climatologist and Geoscientist. Nick makes the critical point that Nature is in control, not humans. Even our current catastrophes which were sparked by humanity’s activities were ultimately governed by the laws of Nature (physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, etc). We never were separate from it all, but a part of it. We should be telling ourselves to do what we feel is right to respect Nature and its unbreakable laws, accepting our place in the Universe as just one of many species which have a finite existence on this planet.

The enormous effort that it will take for the all the civilizations of the world to stop the self-destruction and change the entire system in time to stave off the worst impacts appear to be unachievable at this point, especially given the rise of demagogues and rampant corruption in many countries, including the US, that block even the efforts by corporations and individuals to change this systemic self-destruction. We have reached our day of reckoning, which was actually five years ago with the issuance of the IPCC's AR5 fifth assessment report, Part 2, ahead of the Paris Climate Summit.

As Chris Hays put it, Martin Luther King's idea that the moral universe inherently bends towards justice is inspiring. ... "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." It means that all of us together will have to bend it with revolutionary fervor, not just foster incremental steps. The time has come, even as the natural world inflicts its wrath upon our efforts to salvage a future for ourselves and our kids.

Update 4/23/19: It’s Not Coming, It’s Here: Bill McKibben on Our New Climate Reality

Update 4/24/19: Club of Rome Climate Emergency Plan (pdf file)

Update 6/29/19: Bonn wrap-up: Shifting the levers of power toward climate justice.

Update 9/24/19: Former Governor Jerry Brown launches California-China Climate Institute.  More on that here.

Peace on Earth

In these desperate, chaotic times of Trump's descent, I'm offering a moment of quiet respite so that we can briefly put down our burdens and regenerate in the intricate peace of Bach's music. This performance is an unusual, contemporary approach to the classic "Ave Maria".

For the moment, the less said about the regressive politics going on around us, as well as the ineffectualness of the global approaches to climate change, the better.

Hope for the future is a fragile thing, and its cultivation is the arrow pointing to a better world built by all of us.

"Although we are all born with intrinsic hope, it’s easy to forget. Because we usually focus on problems and difficulties, we can fail to appreciate the miracle of life and become blind to its potentials and possibilities. By concentrating on the negative, we don’t see the positive. By emphasizing what we lack and what we want, we ignore what we already have, and don’t consider what could be."

So this is a small opportunity to look over the view of the world ahead of us, and to ask of ourselves if we can sustain a vision of collaboration and abundant life; the emblematic female grace described by this hymn:

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and in the hour of our death.
Amen.

Update 12/24/18: Let’s pretend that She is inviting (insisting?) that we weave ourselves into the mystery of existence and give up the illusion of our separation.

Update 12/25/18: Lola Perrin's Climate Keys

Update 12/25/18:  The Key Point that has been missed however is that the 'Hemiola' also gives rise to φ (Phi) & thus the subtly breathtaking 'dominance' of the 'Feminine Principle' or σοφία (sophia or 'wisdom')

Update 12/25/18: Emerging from the 'Tao', is the 'feminine principle'

Update 12/25/18:  The derivation of Phi in the feminine principle

Update 12/26/18: Scientists shouldn’t bring emotion or family or humanity into their work... It’s unprofessional! It’s irrelevant! And, of course, it’s feminine.

Update 12/27/18: Science & Spirituality in a Changing World: David Bohm

Update 12/28/18:  Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Maya Angelou’s Stunning Humanist Poem That Flew to Space, Inspired by Carl Sagan

California Climate Policies

This video from CalMatters looks at what happens when a state responsible for about 1 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases goes all-in to fight climate change. Leadership involves some missteps, too.


Can a nation, or indeed the world, bring its greenhouse gas emissions down to zero? An analysis of this goal will be issued on October 8, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes its Special Report on the 1.5ºC target.

Governments commissioned this report at the Paris Summit in 2015. The rationale was that until that point, scientific and technical analysis based on the 1.5ºC target was sparse; the agreed political target had always been 2ºC, and so this was where academics had focussed their attention. Since then, scientists, economists and the technical experts who map possible emissions reduction pathways for various industries have been getting to work – and the IPCC report will be the distillation of their work.

California isn't waiting to take action on this. In response to the state's Fourth Climate Change Assessment, Governor Brown was the principal organizer and reluctant star of the Global Climate Action Summit in September 13-15, a high-octane gathering of lawmakers, executives and scientists working to beat back global warming. But even as he sought to rally other politicians to the cause, Governor Brown’s conference underscored the limits of what politicians can do to avert the most catastrophic effects of climate change — even the politician who leads California, the wealthiest state in the country and the world’s fifth-largest economy.

Can California realistically do it? Nearly all of the remaining 44 percent of the state's electricity is currently generated by burning natural gas, and virtually none comes from coal. Going completely zero-carbon would require phasing out the state's natural gas power plants. The new law actually sets multiple targets rather than just one. It commits California to draw half its electricity from renewable sources by 2026, a share that would rise to 60 percent by 2030.

To take the next step, rather than mandating that all power be renewably sourced, state lawmakers established a 100 percent "zero-carbon" goal. They did not define this term, but it is understood as including wind and solar power, big hydropower plants, and other sources of electricity that do not generate carbon dioxide.

The timeline for these significant actions in California originate with the August release of its Fourth Climate Change Assessment document, which outlined the very extreme impacts that arise from carbon emissions even below the most-desired outcome of the agreed-to 1.5ºC temperature increase in the Paris Agreement of December 2015.

Sept. 14, 2018: With the Global Climate Action Summit underway in San Francisco, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) today announced its commitment to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 60 percent or more below 1990 levels.

Sept. 12, 2018: Governor Brown signed a package of climate-related bills. Among them were three bills supporting building decarbonization. AB 3232 directs the California Energy Commission to assess the potential for California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from residential and commercial buildings by 40 percent by 2030; SB 1477 will establish an incentive program for low-carbon space and water heating equipment; and AB 2195 directs the California Air Resources Board to track GHG emissions from natural gas leakage and venting during the production, processing and transporting of natural gas imported into California.

Sept. 12, 2018:  LA Times op-ed from Jerry Brown and Michael Bloomberg. They are two of the six co-chairs of the Global Climate Action Summit. They are also part of the America's Pledge coalition.

Sept. 10 2018: Governor Jerry Brown has signed legislation that requires California to generate 100 percent of its electricity from clean sources by 2045.

Contrary to the conservative mythology that clean energy slows economic growth, the state is already reduced its greenhouse emissions by 13 percent, even as the economy has grown by 26 percent. Clean energy also creates more jobs than fossil fuels and more people already work solar than coal, gas, and oil extraction combined.

Published in the Los Angeles Times on Aug.28, 2018. 

Right-click the image and "save as" to your computer to read at 100 percent size

California is moving into the forefront of environmental action and climate change issues. The legislature just passed a truly transformative bill, SB100. By setting the marker at 100% clean energy by 2045, California stands to cultivate and capture a huge slice of the domestic renewable energy market and again lead in innovation.

Governor Brown also signed an executive order (B-55-18) to make California carbon neutral by 2045. Full carbon neutrality is now on the table for the world’s fifth largest economy.

Sept. 4, 2018: Los Angeles County

 The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, on Tuesday Sept. 4, 2018, joined other counties, states and cities in support of the goals of the Paris Climate Accord.

Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Hilda Solis recommended registering the county with the We Are Still In coalition, saying impacts of human-driven climate change will include less frequent but more intense rainstorms, more frequent and longer droughts, increased wildland fires and urban forest die- offs, more vector-borne disease, rising seas, lower air quality and longer and hotter heat waves.

August 2018: The California Natural Resources Agency just released its fourth Climate Change Assessment, a call to action on rising global temperatures — the state’s first in six years. Takeaways from California’s New Climate Assessment: water is a critical issue.

Update 9/21/18: Southern California just saw its longest streak of bad air in decades

Update 11/20/18: The public should not have to pay to protect or rebuild mansions on sites that will inevitably burn every 20 or 25 years.

We Are Not Alone

"I don't think we're going to make it," John Doerr proclaims, in an emotional talk about climate change and investment in 2007. Spurred on by his daughter, who demanded he fix the mess the world is heading for, he has made a commitment to solving the environmental and climate change issues via technology and green investing. He is chair of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, an American venture capital firm headquartered in Silicon Valley that has backed early investors in many significant companies, including Amazon, AOL, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google, Intuit, Macromedia, Netscape, Segway, and Sun Microsystems, with his focus on greentech.

In 2011, he was part of a group that met with President Obama, including Stanford University president John Hennessy, former Genentech CEO Art Levinson, and Steve Westly, founder of the Westly Group. This group backed the environmental policies of the Obama administration and advocated climate change action.

So there is a serious concern by some of the corporate leadership about directly dealing with the climate change issues. In addition, the US military and the Department of Defense have defined climate change as a national security issue and are moving forward with implementing strategies. In 2016, members of the U.S. national security community - The Center for Climate and Security Advisory Board - signed an agreement concluding that the effects of climate change present a strategically-significant risk to U.S. national security and international security, and that the U.S. must advance a comprehensive policy for addressing this risk:

"Climate Security Consensus Project: Our determinations above are based on the impacts of the most likely case.  There is a small chance that the impacts will be less than expected.  There is a greater chance that the impacts will be even worse. It is therefore of critical importance that the United States addresses climate change in a way that is commensurate with this risk profile. In this context, the United States will need to “manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable.” This requires a robust agenda to both prevent and prepare for climate change risks, and avoid potentially unmanageable climate-driven scenarios. Failing to do so will magnify and amplify risks to existing and future U.S. national security objectives."

They cite a quote from Joe Kaeser,  CEO of Siemens:

“A NUMBER of major companies — from PepsiCo to Walmart to U.P.S. — have recognized that corporations have a responsibility to address the causes of climate change before it is too late. We do not have to wait for an international treaty or new regulations to act..”

This group issued a letter to former Secretary of Defense James Mattis on May 8, 2017. The Department of Defense (DoD) and the intelligence community have been aware of this “threatmultiplier,”and taking actions to address it, since the early years of the George W. Bush Administration. By many measures, DoD has been leading in this area, driven naturally by its mission to protect the United States from harm. More recently they issued a press release: A Responsibility to Prepare – Military and National Security Leaders Release New Reports on Climate Change.

The United States Navy operates on the front lines of climate change. It manages tens of billions of dollars of assets on every continent and on every ocean. Those assets—ships, submarines, aircraft, naval bases, and the technology that links everything together—take many years to design and build and then have decades of useful life. This means that the navy needs to understand now what sorts of missions it may be required to perform in 10, 20, or 30 years and what assets and infrastructure it will need to carry out those missions. Put another way, it needs to plan for the world that will exist at that time.

Scientists and researchers have become far more vocal and insistent upon politically forcing governments to make actual progress in drastically reducing carbon emissions. Nathan Lewis - a chemistry professor from Caltech, Pasadena, CA - describes how he's working with Bill Gates to provide solar fuel technology to power transportation systems. In a similar vein, research organizations such as Climate CoLab and the Rocky Mountain Institute are pushing ahead on developing low-carbon energy sources and distribution systems.

They are taking the initiative to act on providing a low-carbon future, and clearly some of the corporate leadership is providing the funding to make this happen even if they're not making a lot of public statements about it right now, particularly in the face of a US administration that is trying to revive the coal industry. To the people deeply concerned and frightened about the climate change that's happening right now, it would appear that all is lost and the situation is hopeless as our planet continues to disintegrate under rapidly increasing global temperatures. But there's an underlying structure of progress that's evident, and it has the embedded potential for rapidly addressing the carbon emissions issues.

We must unleash these energies around climate change immediately, and undertake the enormous effort that will be required to move off of fossil fuels. It's there and we can all do something about this, but we've got to find the will to deal with these at such point that it makes a difference in the time that's left!

Update 10/22/18: Leaders move past Trump to protect world from climate change.

Update 11/1/18: Hansjörg Wyss is a philanthropist and conservationist who is donating $1B for biodiversity

Update 11/9/18: Paul Allen's quest to save the planet

Update 11/ 11/18:  A coalition of investors has written corporations asking for transparency.

Update 11/29/18:  50 CEOs urge world leaders for ambitious climate policy

Update 11/30/18:  Wyoming billionaire pledges to protect 30% of the planet by 2030.

Update 12/10/18:  Tackle climate or face financial crash, say world's biggest investors

Growing Up

From Grist magazine in Nov. 2014: We now know, with a pretty high degree of confidence, that we could tackle climate change if wanted to. All that remains is to decide if we want to.

The good news: There is no substantial technical or economic barrier that would prevent the U.S. from reducing its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, a target that would help put the world on track to limit global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. In fact, there are multiple pathways to that target, each involving a different mix of technologies. Achieving the goal would cost only around 1 percent of GDP a year out through 2050, and if we started now, we could allow infrastructure to turn over at its natural rate, avoiding stranded assets.

The bad news: Pulling it off would require immediate, intelligent, coordinated, vigorously executed policies that sustain themselves over decades.

A summary of strategies for implementation is listed here.

Another easily digested set of strategies are outlined in the Drawdown website that accompanies the companion published textbook. It's a New York Times bestseller.  More detail about the necessary steps are clearly outlined here, a result of Paul Hawken's environmental activism and implementation, released in April 2016.

Unlike most popular books on climate change, it is not a polemic or a collection of anecdotes and exhortations. In fact, with the exception of a few thoughtful essays scattered throughout, it’s basically a reference book: a list of solutions, ranked by potential carbon impact, each with cost estimates and a short description. A set of scenarios show the cumulative potential.

We're seemingly unable to let go of the glittery fossil fuel baubles, and as Grandpa put it: the only person that likes change is a baby with a wet diaper.

But it's not all that difficult. So simple, a child could do it. But we all can't seem to play together in the sandbox, so we march off into oblivion over a few shiny toys.

Update 6/5/18: Climate Change - Why we are heading for extinction and what to do about it.

Update 6/12/18: James Hansen debunks the carbon capture get-out-of-jail-free card

Update 6/13/18: Future Climate - Engineering Solutions, a global alliance of professional engineering associations

Update 6/27/18: Using aerial imagery to measure climate impacts of selective logging

Update 6/29/18:  Back of the Napkin, easy carbon reduction framework

Update 9/21/18:  Zero Carbon Britain toolbox on the other side of the pond.

Update 10/13/18: We are the adults in this room. We have to save ourselves.

Cause and Effect

 The flux of corporeal existence arises from the harmonics of the interactions of everything in the physical world and its energetic structures. The principles of the constructive, anti-entropic processes require that all systems fully account for the energies of mass, motion and light across vast distances that may not actually exist in other dimensions. Living systems operate in this fabric of existence at a scale that reflects the molecular building blocks of DNA strands that emerge as growing organic structures that interact in this system. But a reductionist view is unable to see this.

At its very basic level, "Every action has equal and opposite reaction, acting on two different bodies", which is Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion in his "Principia Mathematica" of 1686. It describes the physical world very well, and until Einstein came along with his theory of special relativity (1905) along with investigating quantum mechanics, these basic concepts prevailed in the Western world.

This kind of understanding in the conscious, energetic realm is reflected in the Buddhist 12 Laws of Karma, including: "Everything in the universe is connected". This is characteristic of all religions, generally assigning this connection to a higher being or form of consciousness that is fundamental to positive outcomes, such as "the mind of the creator". This takes us beyond the simplistic mechanistic views of our post-industrialist civilization and ironically points us towards the findings of quantum mechanics.

There is a new emphasis on this "unified field" approach to the human responsibilities involved with our habitation in our environment. On Care for Our Common Home (Laudato Si') is the fresh appeal from Pope Francis addressed to "every person living on this planet" for an inclusive dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. Pope Francis calls the Church and the world to acknowledge the urgency of our environmental challenges and to join him in embarking on a new path. He emphasizes that the climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all, and not be subject to the destruction driven by capitalism and corporate global commerce. He's in the Peruvian Amazon right now, and has excoriated the “throwaway culture” that wastes lives and despoils the land. “Gold ... can turn into a false god that demands human sacrifices,” the pope said. “False gods, the idols of avarice, money and power, corrupt everything. They corrupt people and institutions, and they ruin the forest.”

From Gary Hall, a former comedy writer and fierce progressive, past Dean of the Washington National Cathedral (Episcopal) - "America's Church" - and now a pastor in Los Angeles: "Our very environment is changing before our eyes. The folly of our human exploitation of nature is finally catching up with us. The climate change we have brought about through our selfish activity turns out to have real consequences for real people and the real world in the here and now."

Among other things, the backlash to environmental destruction is growing, and people of all beliefs across the planet are becoming open to aligning with natural processes and disposing of fossil fuel energy in order to stop burning carbon and quit trashing our planetary ecosystems with plastic refuse.

Understanding the necessity for reducing the human impact on nature is widespread now, and its solution is a congruence with organic growth. Aubrey Meyer has discussed this in depth in his developed principles behind the well-tempered framework of Contraction and Convergence. This is a proposed framework for the implementation by the UNFCCC which is grounded in the organic structure of Phi, a fundamental reality of the natural world. Its adoption would be a crucial step in the means by which humanity curtails its destructive characteristics and resonates in tune with sustainable ecology.

Update 1/21/18: That Was Easy: In Just 60 Years, Neoliberal Capitalism Has Nearly Broken Planet Earth

Update 1/22/18: Fossil fuel energy sources are the problem

Update 1/23/18: The unexpected math behind Van Gogh's "Starry Night"

Update 1/25/18:  And so where did it come from? Carl Sagan, in "Cosmos" Episode 10 clip (1980) and Cosmic Calendar: We have a choice. We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self destruction.

Update 2/9/18: Panpsychism: Could the force be with us?

Update 7/7/18:  Pope Francis calls for people power ahead of climate summit in San Francisco on Sept. 12 - 14

Beyond Politics

The organization Plan B. Earth has now initiated a legal challenge to the UK Government regarding its failure to reduce emissions in line with Paris Agreement. The BBC reports former chief scientist Sir David King (above) is backing legal action against the government over its failure to follow up on proposal for binding zero emission target; the filing is online here. On January 29, 2016 at IEA Headquarters, Paris, a Big IdEAs panel was held to discuss “Towards decarbonising the global economy: the direction of travel after COP21” and Sir David King made a comprehensive presentation to those attending the panel. He is an important player in the actions towards holding corporations accountable for the carbon damage that they have done, and deliberately obstructed global efforts to address the emissions issues for decades.

The Union for Concerned Scientists has also known for decades that fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil have spent millions of dollars to delay action on global warming. This organization is standing up against the disinformation campaign in the US with respect to climate change, and lists the organizations that are propagating public denial and misinformation. Now, groundbreaking research by two UCS scientists calculates the actual portions of sea level rise and global temperature increase attributable to specific fossil fuel companies. The peer-reviewed study, authored by Brenda Ekwurzel, James Boneham, Mike Dalton, Rick Heede, Roberto Mera, Myles Allen and Peter Frumhoff and published in Climatic Change, analyzed and quantified the climate change impacts of carbon dioxide and methane emissions traced to each company for two time-periods: 1880 to 2010 and 1980 to 2010. From storms to droughts to wildfires, the impacts of climate change exact enormous costs to taxpayers. This report is a critical step in making fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil pay their fair share.

The UCS is laying the groundwork for "climate attribution" lawsuits in the US, to make the ExxonMobils of the world own up to what they've done and pay their fair share of the costs of preparing for dealing with the damage brought by climate change. Meanwhile,Trump's Environmental Protection Agency condemned scientists for "politicizing" Hurricanes Harvey and Irma by simply mentioning climate change. Officials at three different agencies (EPA, the Department of Energy, and Department of Agriculture) have banned "the double C—word"—climate change—from reports, grant applications, and studies—and shuttered an official climate change office. The DOE has issued official denials about this as policy. The Department of the Interior also cancelled a study looking at health risks for people living near mountaintop removal coal mines. Thus this administration continues the corporate onslaught against nature and all of humanity.

It's no longer politics as usual as the scientists, ecologists and engineers take a stand against governments that are in thrall to corporate profiteering at the cost of our planet and everything living on it.

Update 10/3/17:  Global Legal Action Network is assembling a case against 47 European countries for their contributions to climate change

Update 10/4/17: Climate Shocks May Cost U.S. $1 Billion a Day

Update 10/5/17: Economic Case for Climate Action in the US

Update 10/7/17: A district court judge in North Dakota has barred climate change scientist Dr. James Hansen and other experts from testifying in the landmark trial of Michael Foster, one of the 11 climate activists with the group Climate Direct Action who temporarily halted the flow of tar sands bitumen from Canada into the U.S. in a #ShutItDown action last October.

Update 10/12/17: PM of Dominica to the UK general assembly in Sept. 2017: Carribean nations are suffering catastrophic damages because of climate change, which they have not contributed to.

Update 10/25/17:  CIEL explores and develops new legal tools to counterbalance the power of multinational corporations

Update 10/29/17:  Alleging that the state is violating their constitutional rights by putting fossil fuel production above the safety of their lives,16 young Alaskans filed a constitutional climate change lawsuit against the State of Alaska, Governor Bill Walker, Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Larry Hartig, and five state agencies on October 27, 2017.

Update 11/3/17: Global warming is increasingly being fought in the courtroom.

Update 11/15/17: Sir David King: Ministers must tighten UK target or face courts

Update 11/19/17:  Hansen is calling for a wave of lawsuits against governments and fossil fuel companies

Update 12/23/17:  Meet the Lawyer Trying to Make Big Oil Pay for Climate Change

Update 5/12/18:  The environment is finally getting its day in court

Update 10/2/18: Can Climate Litigation Save the World?

Update 10/3/18:  The Fifteen-Year-Old Climate Activist Who is Demanding a New Kind of Politics

Update 10/10/18: Dutch court orders their government to move faster on emissions cuts.

Leverage

The state of California has been in the forefront of climate action and the formation of interstate agreements since 2008. By 2013, it had formalized a pact by the Pacific Coast Collaborative that addressed climate change trade policy.  This unprecedented pact between the governors of California, Oregon, and Washington, and the premier of British Columbia had been signed with the intent of forging a clean energy future. Jerry Brown compared California to a lever and quoted a Greek mathematician: “Archimedes said, if you give me a place to stand ... I can move the earth.” Since California has established its place at the forefront of U.S. environmental policies, California has become ready to play a key role in resisting Washington’s hard right turn. It is also a part of the Western Climate Initiative, established during the Obama administration tenure.

Thus the state has become the chief advocate of resistance in the face of the Trump administration's abdication of leadership in global policy on climate change. For the past two years, California Gov. Jerry Brown has been aggressively recruiting other state and local governments to sign on to their own, sub-national climate pact. In early July of this year, as Trump and other world leaders gathered in Hamburg, Germany, for the G20 summit, Gov. Jerry Brown made waves by telling the world that Trump — who has decided to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate accord — does not speak for most Americans when it comes to dealing with environmental concerns.

At the G20 summit, Brown announced that California would host a global summit on climate change in San Francisco in September of 2018. “All over the world, momentum is building to deal seriously with climate change,” Brown said in a statement. “Despite rejection in Washington, California is all in. We are fully committed to the Under2 Coalition and the Paris Agreement.” The California summit meeting will bring together the leaders of states, cities, businesses and others who made pledges to curb heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Paris accord and the thousands of others who were galvanized by Mr. Trump’s decision. Days after his announcement, the former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg published a letter to the United Nations signed by more than 1,200 mayors, business leaders, university presidents and others declaring “we are still in” the climate deal. The website for the Global Climate Action Summit 2018 is now online.

A week later, Jerry Brown and Michael Bloomberg announced America’s Pledge climate initiative, a national program of state and local participation in climate policy.  This initiative includes an unprecedented number of U.S. states, cities, businesses, and colleges and universities that have reaffirmed their support for the Paris Agreement through collaborations including the “We Are Still In” declaration, the Climate Mayors coalition of cities, the US Climate Alliance group of states, and others. This is now online and contains the declaration that:

“Today we’re sending a clear message to the world that America’s states, cities and businesses are moving forward with our country’s commitments under the Paris Agreement — with or without Washington,” said Governor Jerry Brown, who was recently named Special Advisor for States and Regions ahead of the United Nations’ 23rd Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP23).

All for a Buck

Just when the arc of US environmental policy began to align with the outlines of the Paris Agreement of December 2015, a new administration takes office in January of this year, one grounded in the denial of physics and science, and in thrall to the fossil fuel industry. The entire disruption of the UN agreement reeks of global oil deals, with the corporate influences reaching into the new administration as well as the tactics brought to bear at the UN table.

The potential future science advisor to the President, William Happer, is a contrarian Princeton physicist who views climate change as a positive factor. "While he has a distinguished career as an atomic physicist, previously serving the administration of George HW Bush as a science director, the 77-year-old’s views on climate science are outnumbered by all the credible evidence, all the credible science agencies and are also being laughed at by the Earth’s thermometers and its melting ice sheets and glaciers", as the Guardian has pointed out.

This, along with a cabinet full of fossil fuel-related corporate executives, seeks to create a triumvirate of oil deals with Russia and Exxon Mobil. “Imagine how much havoc Putin, Trump, and a new, oily Secretary of State could wreak on future negotiations by coercing other countries not to keep making new pledges to ratchet down their emissions, which is the cornerstone of Paris’s strategy to avoid catastrophic climate change.” per The Energy Mix. Perhaps all this results from pressure by the Russian oligarchs that the President is indebted to?

This is an old relationship going back to 2012, when Rosneft and ExxonMobil had signed an agreement to jointly develop tight oil production technologies in Western Siberia. This will enable the companies to later discuss undertaking joint projects to explore and develop prospective areas with unconventional oil potential in Russia.

The way it plays out is this: Exxon Mobil, under Rex Tillerson, brokered a deal with Russia in 2013 for 60 million acres of Russian land to pump oil out of, but all that Russian oil went through pipelines in the Ukraine, who heavily taxed the proceeds, and were applying for admission into NATO at the time. Putin subsequently invaded Ukraine in 2014, secured the routes to export the oil tax-free by sea, and took control of the port where their Black Sea Naval Fleet is based, by taking the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine by force and not giving it back. This was Hitler-tier imperialism that broke every international law in the free world. After Obama sanctioned Russia for the invasion, they could only pump oil from approximately 3 of those 60 million acres. But now Rex Tillerson is our Secretary of State, and as of today, there’s information circulating that Donald Trump will likely unilaterally remove all sanctions against Russia in the coming days or weeks. Putin will make half a trillion (500 Billion) dollars from that much untapped oil. All pumped tax-free through Crimea, stolen from Ukraine, now owned by Russia. Putin may have subverted our government just to become the richest man in the world.

The Republican congress subsequently has a hand in all this, as it moves to rescind the rule requiring Big Oil to reveal foreign government payments.

Since we now have a corporate takeover of our government for profit, it would appear that our chances for survival on our planet are dim. Unless the denizens of this planet can pull the rug out from under this Strangelovian scenario with extremely cheap local renewable energy that doesn't have to be transported or fought over, we're left to deal with this situation without any help from Houston.

But I think we still have a few smart humans left.

Update 2/27/17:  The timeline

Update 2/28/17:  Rachel Maddow explains it all for you - Wilbur Ross at Nexus of Trump Russian Deal

Update 3/2/17: 5 years ago - USA is moving from democracy to plutocracy and corporatocracy

Update 3/3/17: Relationships Between Team Trump and Russia

Update 3/4/17: How a Russian Steel Oligarch and Putin Ally Is Profiting from the Keystone XL Pipeline

Update 3/5/17: Bill McKibben - complete corruption of the fossil fuel industry

Update 3/6/17: Follow the money: the Time Magazine article of Aug 2016

Update 3/11/17: Trump Begins His War For Oil (with Cheney's fingerprints)

Update 3/12/17: In-Depth: Trump's deep Russian financial connections

Update 3/13/17: Democracy Now: A Corporate Coup d’État by Naomi Klein

Update 3/14/17: Leak reveals Rex Tillerson was director of Bahamas-based US-Russian oil firm

Update 3/17/17: Far-right political leaders praise Putin’s aggressive foreign policy

Update 3/23/17: Mercer and a disruptive candidate: Trade of the Century and a Foundation network

COP21 The Budget is Zero

The video above, "A Climate Revolution for All: COP21 – An Inside View" Is the first-hand experience of a Canadian writer/librarian who attended the COP21 summit as a citizen observer (45 min). It's a clear presentation of the overviews of the COP21 process, and a dialogue about the carbon emissions driving climate change.

A conclusion resulting from the global agreement at COP21 has been outlined by the World Bank:

It has become immediately and bleakly obvious to global leadership and citizens that we have lost the opportunity to mitigate let alone prevent drastic climate change. Scientific observation of climate events has overridden even the most pessimistic assumptions made in scenarios contained in the AR5 documents. Carbon feedbacks unaccounted for in these models have rendered them basically irrelevant. So now what?

The World Bank then goes on to outline five ways to reduce climate drivers – very succinct and fundamental shifts that we must undertake immediately. Put a price on carbon, end fossil fuel subsidies, build low-carbon, resilient cities, increase energy efficiency and use of renewable energy, and Implement climate-smart agriculture and nurture forest landscapes. The World Bank has already begun an initiative to end wasteful energy subsidies.

The very, very simplest way for countries across the globe to rapidly reduce fossil fuel use is for the UN to pass a resolution that these global government fossil fuel subsidies are to be completely phased out by 2020. This relieves governments from contractual obligations in these subsidies and frees up money which can go to reforestation, protection of the great forests like the Amazon, and development of carbon sink areas in rural and suburban areas (native plantings and water absorption swales). James Hansen's calculations assume a 100 GtC carbon sink INCREASE that is unfunded in his fee-and-dividend scenario, but is absolutely necessary to achieve the required reduction numbers. We have no time to waste, and the money HAS to go towards restoration of the ecosphere. At a local Sierra Club meeting in Pasadena, California on January 6 of this year, climatologist Bill Patzert stood up in response to a summary of the COP21 resolutions and very simply stated that we must plant far more trees.

This approach is vastly simpler than trying to impose a global carbon tax in the immediate future. Since subsidies are the exact inverse of carbon taxes, it doesn't require a complex regulatory infrastructure, it simply ceases feeding the problem in the very immediate short term. It's a first step to the carbon tax regulatory structure.

There are organizations attempting to formalize this as global policy and implement its necessary criteria. The Global Subsidies Initiative reviews an agreement currently in place. For decades, fossil-fuel subsidies have encouraged wasteful spending and harmful emissions.  In September 2009, the G-20 agreed to phase them out. GSI research uncovers the characteristics of fossil-fuel subsidies and lessons for reform. The GSI has developed a broad range of case studies of fossil-fuel subsidy reform. This includes a review of subsidies and reform attempts across APEC economies and case studies on Brazil, France, Ghana, North Sudan, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Poland and Senegal. Set up in June 2010, Friends of Fossil Fuel Subsidy Reform (the “Friends”) is an informal group of non-G20 countries aiming to build political consensus on the importance of fossil fuel subsidy reform. Current members of the Friends group are Costa Rica, Denmark, Ethiopia, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.

From the Subsidy Watch Blog on COP21:

Fossil fuel subsidies, which are costing governments around US$600 billion every year, and driving the world towards high carbon development, will require greater attention and resources to deliver pre-2020 or early action on the ground. The broader decision from COP21 does include reference to "domestic policies and carbon pricing" in relation to non-party stakeholders (rather than governments) but this falls outside of the Paris Agreement itself. Specific inclusion of the issue of fossil fuel subsidy reform within the agreement was a missed opportunity.

Update 2/10/16: IFC and the World Bank Group:  What’s next for the private sector?

Update 2/14/16: The Door is Closing Fast - Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

Update 3/22/16: World Bank - Negotiations to Action

Update 3/28/16:  The largest impacts go almost unmentioned - On Hansen Et Al 

Update 4/5/16: A Guide to COP21 Purpose and Structure

Update 4/13/16: RCP scenario budgets fail to constrain temperature rise

Update 5/5/16: What Happens Now and the CAIT Paris Agreement Tracker