Darkness Descends

 

 The Christian season of Advent countenances expectation, hope, joy and purity in the lighting of candles, culminating in a moment of reverence on Christmas Day. The hopes and expectations of the future during this century are continuing to be focused on the climate crisis of our time. It becomes more and more fraught as the COP climate summits pass without concrete actions and benchmarks.

The Wilson Center is a think tank that provides input and public education on policy positions. In its Environmental Change and Security Program, it lays out some high-level issues and possible engagement strategies on climate change as it is dealt with at the global level. The video interview with Ruth Greenspan Bell makes a very clear position that the US has damaged its influence and negotiating strategies with the four year intransigence of the Trump administration. Not only that, but as a result we have now lost the Arctic. As in "finis".

Her article in The Daily Climate makes the argument that the COP process via the UN hasn't produced any substantive agreements or strategies for reducing the carbon emissions that are destroying planetary systems.

"Carbon emissions might have been worse without this annual attention [COP meetings], but it’s hard to escape that the current pathway is essentially business as usual.

What is the return on value of almost 30 years of meetings? We’ve seen record-breaking increases in global average atmospheric carbon dioxide and little progress toward concrete support for poor countries that suffer the most from the climate’s radical changes, though they contributed the least to the destruction.

It might be time to strip away the parts of this annual ritual that have value and jettison the rest."

Emily Atkin is a blogger on Substack who is an environmental reporter and writer, best known for founding the weekly climate newsletter HEATED. It is dedicated to original accountability reporting and analysis on the climate crisis. Her article, "How fossil fuel influence choked climate talks" is very clear about how the climate talks have broken down because of interference by the fossil fuel companies. She has provided further background in the links below her article, it's very dismal. Her summation of COP27 is:

"We are fast-approaching the deadline for limiting warming to safe levels. Yet we are still living in a political and media environment where the vast majority of people don’t mention fossil fuels when they talk about climate change.

That’s not a coincidence; it’s by design. The fossil fuel industry is fighting tooth and nail to deny the truth of their responsibility. As long as they’re allowed at global climate talks, that’s what they’ll continue to do."

The biggest fear is that the fossil fuel corporations will completely derail any global consensus about how to stop the carbon emissions that are so destructive to our ecosystem. This isn't some kind of normal negotiation which allows for "compromise". It is complete and utter destruction of the biosphere; there can be no compromise on the goals and methods. 

Dawning of the Light

Ahead of COP27 in Egypt, it has dawned on everyone in the climate modeling refinement and measured data from all over the world that there isn't any more room in the carbon allowance space to stay within the parameters agreed to by the UNFCCC to keep the warming of the planet below 1.5C. This problem is particularly wicked because emissions have not even peaked yet, according to the stats provided by the EIA. World energy use via fossil fuels simply keeps increasing.

"UN finds ‘no credible pathway to 1.5C in place’ in the current climate crisis. Current pledges for action by 2030, if delivered in full, would mean a rise in global heating of about 2.5C and catastrophic extreme weather around the world. A rise of 1C to date has caused climate disasters in locations from Pakistan to Puerto Rico."

It remains to be seen if COP27 in Egypt in November brings any action to bear on carbon reduction processes or practices. It doesn't seem like things are going to change much. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has said she will skip next month's COP27 talks in Egypt, criticising the global summit as a forum for addressing climate change.

Horror Show

 

 

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has announced a new flagship UN report on climate change, indicating that harmful carbon emissions from 2010-2019 have never been higher in human history. This is proof that the world is on a “fast track” to disaster, António Guterres has warned, with scientists arguing that it’s ‘now or never’ to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.

His latest statement opens with:

"We are on a pathway to global warming of more than double the 1.5-degree limit agreed in Paris.
Some government and business leaders are saying one thing – but doing another.
Simply put, they are lying.
And the results will be catastrophic.
This is a climate emergency." 

In an op-ed article penned for the Washington Post, Mr. Guterres described the latest IPCC report as "a litany of broken climate promises", which revealed a "yawning gap between climate pledges, and reality." This is a major wakeup call for the governments of the world, which need to begin immediate actions on carbon emissions because many current carbon sources are not accounted for. The collective pledges so far would mean a 14 percent increase in emissions.

This plea to the world sets the stage for more urgency of action on carbon emissions, and a political imperative to look at the issue of how all countries of the globe must make drastic reductions in fossil fuel use. There are also questions as to whether the analysis of carbon emissions is accurate, because many of the revised scenarios are projecting more emissions when the models are analyzed, using more data and accounting for a more complete synthesis of elements not previously considered. We are beginning to see that we have actually surpassed the carbon budgets already, and it will bring about massive destructive events in the ecosystem in the coming years. The veil has been lifted, and we must now deal with those realities. "First and foremost, we must triple the speed of the shift to renewable energy. That means moving investments and subsidies from fossil fuels to renewables, now." 

Update 8/5/22: António Guterres is backing windfall taxes on “immoral” oil

Science/Technology

 

The largest database on earth, Google, has now trained its sights on our planet, using its developed Google Earth platform to integrate information across time and place to show how we have RADICALLY changed this planet in a few centuries, and not for the better. The Google maps are now integrated with satellite databases to render the changes in our planet over a timescape of 35 years or so. Its very simple to jump to the navigation dashboard and view the resulting videos.

From Google: 

"As far as we know, Timelapse in Google Earth is the largest video on the planet, of our planet. And creating it required out-of-this-world collaboration. This work was possible because of the U.S. government and European Union’s commitments to open and accessible data. Not to mention their herculean efforts to launch rockets, rovers, satellites and astronauts into space in the spirit of knowledge and exploration. Timelapse in Google Earth simply wouldn’t have been possible without NASA and the United States Geological Survey’s Landsat program, the world’s first (and longest-running) civilian Earth observation program, and the European Union’s Copernicus program with its Sentinel satellites."

 From Tom's Guide:

"Try it for yourself, and you may not like what you see. Watching the Timelapse unfold is a pretty shocking experience, especially in areas such as the Amazon rainforest, where untold devastation is happening as land is deforested and repurposed for farming. Seeing just much the ice is melting in places like Antarctica and Alaska is similarly depressing.

Naturally, Google will be updating Timelapse every year from now on, and it promises to keep it updated for at least another decade. That way, we’ll be able to continue to see how our planet is changing, and what human beings are doing to continually mess the whole place up."

This new time-based planetary exploration takes the standard NASA time lapse to a new dimension, which shows the changes in nature as well as the expansion of urban sprawl. Previously, this time-lapse video crammed 20 years of Earth into just a few minutes. Google helped scientists learn a lot more about global warming and how the earth is changing.

Fortunately, with the new Biden administration preparing to address the climate issues with tremendous reserves of science analysis and highly structured data, there's a ray of hope that capitalist "business as usual" is no longer the prevailing norm. There's now hope for a livable future, with a focus on competent solutions to the horrific global problems that threaten the planet's existence.

Follow the Money

Grantham Institute: Policies to finance energy efficiency in Europe

The Grantham Institute, part of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), has taken leadership on climate investments since 2008, in a bid to change the economic system that is responsible for the degradation of the planet's ecology and living systems that give life to everything that exists on this earth. LSE's centre for policy-relevant research & training in climate change & the environment is chaired by Lord Nicholas Stern.

Since 2013, the man who made billions by predicting every recent financial crisis has spoken out on climate change. Jeremy Grantham, the environmental philanthropist who is part of the leadership of this group, emphasizes "We're trying to buy time for the world to wake up".  "Capitalism is killing the planet and needs to change. Capitalism and mainstream economics simply cannot deal with these problems. Mainstream economics largely ignore [them]," Grantham says."We deforest the land, we degrade our soils, we pollute and overuse our water and we treat air like an open sewer, and we do it all off the balance sheet," he adds.

They are developing investment tools to assist investors in directing their funds towards ecologically sustainable sectors. Their Transition Pathway Initiative provides an interactive tool that enables the assessment of companies’ carbon management quality and carbon performance, within a selected sector. They also have a research database on Climate legislation for countries, regions and territories. Their most recent public lecture of April 2018, notes that very few investors realise how rapidly the environment is being wounded, not just by climate change but also by overuse and by chemical waste:

"We may have created a world that is simply hostile to most living creatures including us. Contrastingly, very few realise how favourably and dramatically fast the relevant science is progressing and the cost of necessary technologies declining.  These opposite forces will determine whether we can even retain a world with as stable a global society as we have today, a modest definition of success.  The results will certainly transform the entire world of energy, resources and food in a few decades with unprecedented financial consequences." says Grantham.

Other investment managers have also developed policies around climate change and global emissions, primarily in Europe and based in London. They are seeing the path forward in carbon reduction and energy efficiency as the only constructive way for financial investment to be viable. Not only that, some of these companies are targeting the lack of corporate response to these critical issues. Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM), for example, names corporate climate leaders and laggards, and specifically targets climate change laggards with shaming and disinvestment. Of course, that may be like trying to shame Trump.

Louise Dudley, Portfolio Manager for Hermes Global Equities speaks out on a climate for change: matching awareness with action:

"In 2015, Bank of England Governor and Chairman of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) Mark Carney labelled climate change “the tragedy of horizon”. That is, the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors, imposing a cost on future generations that the current one has no direct incentive to fix. In his capacity as FSB Chairman, he also established the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) to give investors information to identify companies most at risk and best prepared for climate change.

It is therefore important for investors to understand climate-related financial risk. It can broadly be divided into two major categories – carbon risk, which is related to the transition to a low-carbon economy, and climate impact risk, which is related to the physical impacts of climate change."

In another example, the aim of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC)'s Climate Solutions program is to help investors identify, and to the extent possible, quantify the strategic implications of policy measures and physical risks to long-term investments with a view to inform communication with other stakeholders.

It's time to leave behind the old postwar metrics of economic measure and adjust to the realities of those destructive things left off the balance sheet of global investments. The GDP chimera is a measure that has led to massive global destruction and economic inequality in every country. There is no time left now for failure to act.

Update 7/3/18: Climate financing by the world’s six largest Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) rose 28 per cent on the previous year.

Update 10/22/18: Materialism - a system that eats us from the inside out.

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.

Runaway Phase

Facing another very hot summer in Southern California, it's become a rite of spring to dread the inescapable heat waves that now roll in from the hot Arizona desert. What happened to spring and to fall? We now hit a wall of heat in May and don't see relief until nearly the end of October. People's winter wear now consists of a sweater, not a coat. Our landscape and forests are brown and bleached from the lack of water; millions of trees in the Sierras are dying. If we look at our scientific surveys and satellite studies, we see that polar sea ice is now at record lows in the summer.

We are seeing temperatures in the summer that are breaking all previous records. By a lot. If the Earth’s temperature increases by 2 degrees Celsius, the benchmark agreed upon in the landmark Paris climate agreement, the entire Greenland ice sheet could experience the same accelerated melting that the island’s coastal glaciers and ice caps are facing. At this point, Greenland's coastal ice caps have melted past the point of no return. We are losing our planetary ecological home that is supposed to support 7.5 billion of us.

This process is not immediately apparent, but the NASA studies show conclusively that Greenland is melting significantly. There is no question that the scientific consensus is that Earth's climate is warming, and this warming is accelerating. This accelerating meltdown is a critical red flag to our global civilizations, but like the endless wars in the Middle East, it's a profit center for those who mindlessly control fossil fuels and weaponry for money. The military budget for the USA, far exceeding those of all other countries combined, is the match held to the fuse.

This warming process from fossil fuels leads to an unstoppable, runaway climate change that is fueled by the carbon and methane emissons from the ice and permafrost melt at the poles, which is already observable by science teams and satellites, and puts the destruction of our ecosphere and our planet on an irreversible path. The pace at which species disappear is picking up as temperatures rise, and this is devastating in the tropics which are disproportionately impacted. We cannot stop this once it sets in, the processes ignite themselves with monstrous emissions from the melting poles.

So this is how the Anthropocene ends. In a blaze of greed and ignorance.

Update 6/27/17: Tipping points are real: Gradual changes in CO2 levels can induce abrupt climate changes

Update 6/28/17: Climate Change and Devastating Heat Waves

Update 6/29/17: Current emissions could already warm world to dangerous levels: study

Update 6/30/17: The looming catastrophe of feedback emissions

Update 7/1/17:  Seven facts about the Arctic methane timebomb

Update 7/2/17:  Top Scientists Warn of Catastrophic Sea Level Rise

Update 7/3/17: Experts warn: three years to save humanity from climate change

Update 7/4/17:  New study confirms the oceans are warming rapidly

Update 7/5/17: Warming hits 'tipping point' (from 2005)

Update 7/6/17: Hopes of mild climate change dashed by new research

Update 7/7/17:  Rising temperatures are curbing ocean's capacity to store carbon

Update 7/8/17: NOAA Study Confirms Global Warming Speed-Up Is Imminent

Update 7/9/17: High temperatures and extreme weather continue

Update 7/10/17: Earth faces "biological annihilation" in sixth mass extinction, scientists warn

Update 7/18/17: Carbon dioxide must be removed from the atmosphere to avoid extreme climate change

Update 7/20/17: Today's Extreme Heat May Become Norm Within a Decade

Update 7/24/17: It’s fair to say we have passed the point of no return on global warming 

Update 8/24/17: Greenland has warmed 9 degrees F in the last 60 years.

Update 10/10/17: Richard Muller - I Was wrong on Climate Change (Jan 2015)

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

Rest of the World Moves On

Climate action in the US and the Rest of the World (ROW) continues apace, despite the machinations of the new and disorganized Trump administration. The global climate pact in Paris was the result of extraordinary turnarounds by the world’s two greatest greenhouse gas polluters, China and the U.S., which had long resisted climate action. A myriad set of strategies has been set in motion to put the world on the path to net zero emissions.

Six months after the successful Paris Climate Agreement of December 2015, two of the world’s primary city-led climate change and energy initiatives, the EU Covenant of Mayors and the Compact of Mayors, announced the formation of a new, first-of-its-kind global initiative  of cities and local governments leading in the fight against climate change. This single initiative will create the largest global coalition of cities committed to climate leadership, building on the commitments of more than 7,100 cities from 119 countries and six continents, representing more than 600 million inhabitants, over 8% of the world’s population. Then in November of last year, officials from Los Angeles (Mayor Garcetti), New York, Tokyo, Beijing and 82 other major cities — including more than 40 mayors —  met in Mexico City to share ideas about how to reverse course on climate change. The cities belong to C40, a network launched in 2005 to combat climate change. In an analysis released Wednesday, the group said that actions taken over the next four years will determine whether cities do their part  in meeting the goals of the Paris agreement on climate change signed by nearly 200 countries.

Back in December of 2015, the Compact of Mayors and the Covenant of Mayors partnership was founded on the shared goal of supporting cities around the world to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change. The core principles of the partnership will be to recognize local governments as key contributors to a global climate solution, work with city networks as critical partners to support participating cities, capture city climate action plans from registration to implementation, and emphasize importance of reducing GHG emissions and fostering local climate resilience. In partnership, the Covenant of Mayors and the Compact of Mayors will work with cities around the world to ensure robust solution agendas, focusing on sectors like transportation and buildings where cities have the greatest control. The partnership will enable the Compact and the Covenant to streamline reporting systems that are working to help cities measure their work.

On December 1, 2016, the former UN climate chief, Christina Figueres, was announced as the vice chair of the new Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy. It is expected she will play a key role in running the coalition of more than 7000 mayors.“Cities are where the future is created,” Figueres tweeted after the announcement and said she is looking forward to her role in the new coalition. Figueres will work closely with former New York City mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg and EU Commission vice-president Maroš Šefcovic, the co-chairs of the covenant. The Covenant of Mayors information website is here.

Deadline 2020 is the first significant routemap for achieving the Paris Agreement, outlining the pace, scale and prioritization of action needed by C40 member cities over the next 5 years and beyond. This report has been delivered through a collaborative partnership between C40 and Arup, the global consultancy firm. Ove Arup (ARUP) is an independent firm of designers, planners, engineers, consultants and technical specialists offering a broad range of professional services and is one of the premier engineering firms for the top major architectural design and planning projects across the planet.

ARUP issued a science-based global carbon reduction effort with the 'Deadline 2020' report. An analysis of the contribution C40 cities can make to delivering the Paris Agreement objective
of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.

"This ARUP report has been delivered through a collaborative partnership between C40 and Arup, the global consultancy firm. Arup has worked with C40 since 2009 to develop strategic analysis and research that is central to progressing our understanding of how cities contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation. This is why in June 2015, Arup announced a major partnership with C40, committing $1 million of professional support over three years to help cities take meaningful action against climate change. This partnership is founded on Arup’s independent and evidence-based approach, alongside C40’s longstanding belief in “measurement for management”. The partnership supports a strong analytical research agenda while helping city actors to identify opportunities, collaborate and develop practical solutions to accelerate and expand action on climate change."

Update 1/25/17: For Trump's crew, however, the past is forever prologue. If fossil fuel was good in the 18th century, it must be good in the 21st. The battle plan has shifted.

Update 3/5/17: Trump Can’t Stop This: Global Renewable Energy Booms

Update 6/28/17: Highlight the 2020 climate turning point at G-20

Update 7/9/17: G-20 USA in isolation and failed leadership

Eye of the Needle

This is one of the original main entry doors for the San Gabriel Mission in southern California. Like most ancient fortresses, hilltowns, churches and synagogues that were places of refuge in early human history, it was crafted with a small-scale entry door just big enough for one person to slip through at night when the big doors were shut for safety. The smaller door, known as a page’s passage, was set into one of the wings of the main door, to provide easy access, as the main portals remained closed for security reasons.The simplest doors were decorated with rows of metal bosses, strips, and knockers. The bosses, placed in double rows on the upper and lower sections of the door, helped to prevent the wooden panels from cracking.

In the middle east, for example, it was designed for security reasons so that enemies could not simply ride into the city on their camels and attack. The gate was so small that a man would have to unload his camel of all that it was carrying and then carefully lead his camel through this small gate. It was a slow and quite difficult task. It means releasing all of the baggage and squeezing through the opening, generally on the camel's knees. Thus it's the parable for letting go of everything except the essential self, which in the biblical parable the rich man was not able to do.

We are facing a similar paradigm with our changing climate: how do we make it through the impossibly small aperture of the necessary drastic reduction in carbon emissions in time to preserve our future on this planet? Do we discover, like King Midas, that all that's vital to our existence cannot be frozen in gold and that there's no going back with the help of a mysterious, powerful stranger? And ironically, tragically, "money" has no meaning in the real world of living dynamics and natural processes.

We are in a vise of our own making. Per Paul Gilding, the global economy is in deep and serious trouble. Growth in the current model is grinding to a halt. Inequality and the lack of progress of the Western middle class has laid the foundation for political extremism, xenophobia and isolationism. It has thus brought us phenomena like Trump, Brexit and other political movements that further threaten the global economy. Policies to address this sluggish growth have led to both increased financial system risks and an enormous debt load — one there is no realistic way to pay back, just because growth is so sluggish. The resulting instability forms the shaky foundation on which the impacts of uncontrolled climate change will land — creating an economic and social crisis that will likely tip the system over the edge.

According to Bill McKibben, even if every nation in the world complies with the Paris Agreement, the world will heat up by as much as 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100 — not the 1.5 to 2 degrees promised in the pact’s preamble.  Clinton’s advisers originally promised there would be a “climate war room” in her White House, but then corrected the record: It would actually be a “climate map room,” which has the effect of a hollow promise. Which means "business as usual" and an utter failure to come to grips with the real and self-inflicted issues threatening our planet. He has written about why he feels that climate emergency mobilization is the only rational way forward at this point. His organization is working with a "Victory Plan" by Ezra Silk with the Climate Mobilization group that is assembling an approach to a global mobilization on many fronts. There's a discussion forum on this plan online, which calls for reworking the government and economy even more thoroughly than during World War II, in order to cut America’s net greenhouse emissions down to zero by 2025 while also reversing degradation of ecosystems and halting the mass extinction of species. In keeping with examining our options at this point, a new study released by Oil Change International, in partnership with 14 organizations from around the world, scientifically grounds the growing movement to keep carbon in the ground by revealing the need to stop all new fossil fuel infrastructure and industry expansion

But the way to survive this coming ordeal is not just the mechanics of rapid restructuring and regeneration of our desiccated ecological systems, but also a common purpose shared by human civilizations. This consensus and coordination is necessary to ensure that all efforts are willingly taken to make these immense changes in an effective way. The consensus is achieved with a global agreement at the UN level, one that establishes a framework that is essentially fair and achievable, and relies upon simple benchmarks such as emissions. Since these actions will upend the entire economy, it makes no sense to build a framework in dollars or money, but purely upon the necessary carbon reductions that our global cities and countries must undertake. This can be measured and monitored no matter what kind of economy emerges from the coming restructuring that we will have to do in spite of the chaos we will have to face.

Update 10/19/16: Economics is a form of brain damage: "Externalities" by David Suzuki (2013)

Update 12/21/16: Another view: for the past thirty-six years, humanity has been moving through the eye of the needle.

Canticle of the Sun

Laudato Si (“Praise be to You, O my Lord!”)
St. Francis of Assisi - Anglican version

Yes, be praised in all your creatures
brother sun and sister moon
in the stars and in the wind,
air and fire and flowing water.

For our sister mother earth,
She who feeds us and sustains us;
For her fruits, her grass, her flowersfor the mountains and the oceans

Praise for those who spread forgiveness,
Those who share your peace with others,
Bearing trials and sickness bravely!
Even sister death won’t harm them.

For our life is but a song,
And the reason for our singing
Is to praise you for the music;
Join the dance of Your creation.

Praise to You, Father Most Holy,
Praise and thanks to You, Lord Jesus,
Praise to You, Most Holy Spirit

The encyclical released by the Vatican today (hosted on GCI's site) appears on the heels of a leaked draft of this position by the Church a few days ago. It's led to speculation that Francis’ remarks on it will not only say climate change is real and caused by humans, but will explain how that happens according to the vast majority of scientists. Which of course is a stunning change of direction for this institution, but it highlights the critical nature of the planetary crisis that we're heading into. The Church also embraces the idea that people of faith and people of science can complement one another.

Upon its release today, the New York Times has signaled it as a call for swift action on climate change from an increasingly popular world religious leader. The encyclical is seen as an unsubtle nudge for action, even as it provides support for leaders faced with tough choices in countries with large numbers of Catholics. It goes on to outline an analysis of key portions of its statements in an interactive online format.

The Vatican has done significant outreach with climate researchers and other governments in order to forge a strongly collaborative position and frame it within the broad parameters of Catholic theology. A very large tent, in other words, which creates a space within which the moral parameters of addressing climate change can be done by people all over the world.

Update 6/19/15: This encyclical will trigger a long over-due “global conversation of, how do we even define prosperity? Is it just accumulating more dollars or do we have to factor in being accountable for our impact on the planet and all people that live on it?”

Update 6/20/15:  Pope Francis attempted to start a global conversation yesterday with his new encyclical on the environment. Unlike most encyclicals, it was addressed not to Catholics, but to "every person living on this planet", and embraces science as part of its policy.

Update 6/30/15: Responses to the encyclical

Aubrey Meyer: Degrowth to avoid extreme damages

David Suzuki: Shift away from growth model

Herman Daly: New Theology of Creation is degrowth 

Update 7/13/15:  In one sense, Laudato si is a critique of 21st century capitalism and as a consequence also of the philosophical underpinnings of the industrial revolution.

After the encyclical, lessons for climate activism?

In thinking we were ensuring our survival, we created the conditions for our own destruction, as is now obvious in the actuality of climate change and of unsustainable production and consumption.

The ethical conundrum, from Don Brown (Oct. 3, 2015):
Ethics and Climate

And so, for 30 years, the opponents of climate change policies have succeeded in framing the climate debate in a way that ignores obvious ethical and moral problems,  Surprisingly both environmental organizations and the US press have failed to bring attention to the obvious moral problems with the arguments made by opponents of US climate change policies

Update 4/13/16:  "We have created a ‘throwaway’ culture which is now spreading.” Pope Francis 2013 Evangelii gaudium

Update 6/4/17: The Renewed Importance of Pope Francis’s Encyclical on Climate Change

The Art of It

The reverberant song of the natural world is rising through the arts and music now; it's becoming overwhelming. A story that stands out among many is that of Zaria Forman, who paints with her fingers in pastels. Her work often has underlying environmental themes. For example, the piece above was part of her Maldives series where she wanted to promote awareness of the Arctic polar melt that’s causing rising seas. This comes via the story of her mother:

My mother, renowned artist Rena Bass Forman, dedicated her life to photographing the most remote regions of the earth and was inspired by Bradford’s journey. The cold and isolated landscape of the Arctic consumed her interest for the past ten years. She created her own series of journey’s entitled Chasing the Light and the Greenlandic expedition is the third in the trilogy. Her work from her Arctic trips have been compared to 19th century photographers John L. Dunmore and George Critcherson who were on Bradford’s expedition.

It's called "Chasing the Light". She is currently leading a historically contextual art expedition in the Arctic in honor of her mother who passed away in 2011:

Continuing the story of polar melt, which is the main cause of rising seas, I followed the meltwater from the Arctic to the equator. I spent September 2013 in the Maldives, the lowest and flattest country in the world, collecting material and inspiration to create a body of work celebrating and representing a nation that could be entirely underwater within this century. Two award-winning artists who participated in the Greenland expedition Chasing The Light joined me in this venture: Painter Lisa Lebofsky, and director, filmmaker, and actress Drew Denny.

During our month on the islands, we shared the concept of our project with children on the islands, inviting them to document their homeland as it transforms throughout their lives. The children can use their creativity to continue spreading awareness while inwardly processing the ecological transformations surrounding them.

I hope my drawings will raise awareness and invite viewers to share the urgency of the Maldivians’ predicament in a productive and hopeful way.  I believe art can facilitate a deeper understanding of crises, helping us find meaning and optimism amidst shifting landscapes.

Another artist, Daniel Crawford, came up with a completely different approach. He’s using his cello to communicate the latest climate science through music. Crawford used an approach called data sonification to convert global temperature records into a series of musical notes. The final result, “A Song of Our Warming Planet,” came about following a conversation Crawford had with geography professor Scott St. George during an internship. St. George asked Crawford about the possibility of turning a set of data into music, and this is the result.

In an urgently collaborative effort in the first few months of 2014, over 120 musicians and poets participated in The Climate Message; creating and submitting short video clips that combined moments of astonishing beauty with calls to action on climate change.

Google Doodle asked kids, grades K-12, to draw an invention that would make the world a better place for their 7th annual Doodle 4 Google competition. The winner, Audrey Zhang, invented a transformative water purifier. It takes in dirty and polluted water from rivers, lakes, and even oceans, then massively cleanses the water into clean, safe and sanitary water, when humans and animals drink this water, they will live a healthier life. Tragically, we see here a child frantically trying to save her own world.

These have become the voices of the New Environmentalists who are engaging hearts as well as minds, with the courage to challenge the status quo and go forward with beauty and light in these dark times.

Update:  On June 22: Bearing Witness To The Climate Crisis — Welcome To Our Festival Of Song And Sound!

Day of the Earth

 

A video produced by UNIFY, subtitled "A New World is Being Birthed" focuses on a timestream of key global ethical movements from 1941 to the present. UNIFY.org is a platform created to support organizations and people who are organizing Global Synchronized Movements of good in the world. It is a social networking outreach and organizational platform focuse on overarching global ethical issues.

UNIFY.org was birthed on December 21st, 2012 to serve the self-organizing emergence of intentional events, flash mobs, meditations, ceremonies, and prayers on that day. Millions of people at sacred sites around the world aligned their expressions of consciousness and participated in a historic moment of global unity.UNIFY’s vision is to provide a sacred mirror reflecting back to humanity its inherent state of unity regardless of nation, race, politics, color, creed or gender.

This Earth Day was the time and place for their global synchronized meditation upon Love Water. It's about hope and action in the face of the overwhelming evil of ecocide and environmental degradation by the economic and political forces emanating from fossil fuel development and extraction over the last 200 years. Do we, as inhabitants of the earth, stand by while life is decimated in the name of control and power?

Rabbi Jeffrey Newman is a UK Earth Charter member, and is an advocate of an equitable framework for a global climate agreement. His essay, Hannah Arendt: Radical Evil, Radical Hope in the Berghan Journal, Volume 47, Issue 1, 2014, European Judaism, addresses this issue: "The world is facing a multitude of interconnected issues, leading to avoidable starvation, poverty and death for hundreds of millions. Is Arendt’s concept of the ‘banality of evil’, which she adopted in preference to Kant’s ‘radical evil’, applicable here? Are we bystanders, addicted to ‘growth’? The paper considers the central role of thinking and, with the help of Greek myth and Nietzsche, the relationship between evil and hope. Finally, there is an emerging concept of ‘radical hope’. What is this, could it be of help and how would it connect with Judaism’s teachings of the Messiah?"

A response to this, by Peter Head, Executive Director of The Ecological Sequestration Trust, on January 21st 2014 engages this question of radical hope. Their purpose states:

Our priority is to develop a network of ‘at scale’ demonstration projects that each encompass city-regions of up to 5 million citizens in China, India and an African country and link them to parallel regional activities in two European centres.Through our Advisory Board and network of partners, we aim to bring together leading local and international experts to catalyse and implement evidence-based action in a network of high-ambition, large-scale demonstrator projects in selected city-regions across the world. The Ecological Sequestration Trust (TEST) was formed in 2011 to demonstrate at city-region scale how to create a step change in improving energy, water and food security in the face of the combined challenges of changes of climate, demography and increasing resource-scarcity. To quote Mr. Head:

"Radical Hope is very relevant. Radical because dealing with the severe problems requires serial cutting edge innovation in the integration of previous disconnected decision making processes-it has never been done before.

Resilience is a good general goal and we have to learn more about what it means in detail as we go but the UN SDG process is doing that right now. The current development of UN post 2015 SDG’s will be sufficient to define the resilience goal I think. It brings together world leading thinking from all the sectors. The concept of resilience is important because it means the solutions have to come from within society and not be imposed from outside if they are to succeed. Hope is the theme that comes through my engagement all over the world with many people, with the most common reaction being that the approach has hope and is inspirational."

Even as the world seems to be careening towards self-destruction, it's possible for its people to calmly stand against the unfolding events and consciously choose a different path towards life. The strength and resiliency needed to do this is immense, but humanity has prevailed before in spite of terrible odds.
 

With a Haiku

A wonderful presentation is online here

The reports released by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can be daunting, even for science and policy insiders. The full Physical Science Assessment, the first installment of the Fifth Assessment Report, released in manuscript form earlier this year, is over 2,000 pages long. The series was released between September and November of 2013. It's a difficult and complex series of technical and science documentation, but comprised of absolutely critical assessments on the state of the planet.

I wanted to showcase a presentation created as a haiku by a US Pacific Northwest oceanographer, Gregory Johnson and sponsored by the Sightline Institute for a sustainable Northwest. This embraces the key public policy points in the form of haiku poetry and watercolor visuals.

The more people who can understand the nature of the crisis before us, the better to craft solutions that we can all fully participate in. It's the biggest single thing that has happened to this planet and human civilization that we've ever faced.

Threshold of Change

Upon this Advent season, consensus has begun to illuminate the world dialogue on climate change. On the 19th of November UNFCC, IPCC, IGBP, co-posted a short film reprising the Policy Makers Summary of IPCC AR5 WG1. This group comprises the representative scientific global public policy group on 'climate science and policy', and it's unprecedented for them to co-publish any policy statement.The established absolute limit, from scientific research and study, is for perpetuity the most stringent of the carbon-budgets published in IPCC AR5 WG1 in September 2013.

Their film ends with a comment affirming that global contraction budget limit to future emissions is '250 Billion Tonnes', if the 2 degree limit to global warming is to be held. GCI's file compares this limit to the one previously established by the UK Climate Act. The group recognizes that emissions ‘contraction’ should be complete globally by 2050 if, once ‘feedback effects’ are included, we are to give better than 50:50 odds for keeping within the 2° rise. This is a critical, critical illumination of the scope of the world problem that threatens our existence: a total global emissions cap of 250 Gt C, accomplished by 2050.

The challenge to all of us is very simple, very clear, and the time is now.

The Year of Storms

We're seeing a series of massive, deadly storms in the midwest, and it's just the beginning of summer. Tornadoes, floods and hurricanes occurring over and over; the atmosphere is unleashing tremendous energies. Storms in Europe are creating unprecedented flooding. The Nation Institute, via TomDispatch.com, has posted an article by Rebecca Solnit, which is in dialogue with Bill McKibben's writings on planet Eaarth.

Her article at Tom Dispatch makes timely comments about how human civilization responds in the face of large disasters, now bearing down upon us more and more often because of climate change. The consequences of climate change are a lance aimed straight at the heart of our oil-supported structure in the United States and now across the globe:

Cheap oil requires our insanely expensive military whose annual budget amounts to nearly as much as the rest of the world’s militaries put together, a crazy foreign policy, and in the past decade, a lot of death in the Middle East. It also pushes along the destruction of nearly everything via climate-change, a cost so terrible that the word “unaffordable” doesn’t begin to describe it. “Unimaginable” might, except that the point of all the data and data projections is to imagine it clearly enough so that we react to it.

Bill McKibben, writing in the New York Review of Books on Nov.5, 2009 makes his usual succinct comments on her previous book "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster". They have proven to be prescient.

"Its also time to ask another question, which is what the future will actually feel like once we don't prevent global warming. That is, what will it be like to live not on the relatively stable planet that civilization has known throughout the ten thousand years of the Holocene, but on the amped-up and careening planet we're quickly creating? With her remarkable and singular book, "A Paradise Built in Hell", Rebecca Solnit has thought harder about the answer to that question than anyone else. And she's done it almost entirely with history - she's searched out the analogues to our future in our past, examining the human dynamics of natural disasters from the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 up through Hurricane Katrina...Solnit's argument, at bottom, is that human nature is not necessarily what we imagine it to be, and the even in very extreme cases, people are cooperative."

This challenge that arises to meet us now may perhaps be the very Frankenstein monster that we've created - which will force us into a moral stance on the lifestyle that we've built -  a lifestyle which violates the physics of natural processes on our planet.

Climate Negotiations in Bonn

UNFCCC International negotiations on climate change strategies concluded last week in Bonn. Writing ahead of the conference, the WRI.org reported on the main issues of concern for the structure of a future international climate agreement in 2015.

The final decision by all countries at COP 17 in Durban recognized that current GHG-reduction pledges are not adequate to keep global average temperature below 2 degrees C (the limit science says is necessary to prevent climate change’s most disastrous impacts). In Bonn, experts will put forth new ideas on how to ratchet up ambition in the short-term. Country representatives will also highlight best practices and success stories, in particular, the role that land use could play for enhanced mitigation and adaptation policies.

The April Bonn session is scheduled to discuss more specifically the core elements for establishing an international climate action agreement by 2015. We’ll be looking for clarity and answers across five key elements:

“Spectrum of commitments”
Ratchet mechanism
Equity
Architecture of the Agreement
Legal form

This negotiation session did not provide big breakthroughs, but fleshed out possible approaches to the final agreement structure. Fairness and equity are prime concerns. The Daily Kos reported that "the rare focus on a single track of negotiations (as opposed to multiple tracks going on at once) seems to have allowed countries to hold more productive conversations about the issues at hand without getting stymied by how various pieces will fit together." The UNFCCC's May 3 press briefing is here.

Business Green has reported that one concrete development from Bonn was the launch of a new prototype registry, managed by the UNFCCC, which will provide a central database for recording all the "Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions" taken by governments:

The searchable database is intended to make it easier for countries to track each others' progress towards cutting emissions and share policy best practices. "I am proud that the UNFCCC Secretariat has delivered this registry tool for Parties, which is designed specifically to empower developing countries and providers of support to identify greater partnership opportunities for mitigation," said Figueres. "They can then implement greater action together." The database could also prove a useful resource for businesses, providing them with a snapshot of how different countries are promoting climate action and clean technologies through policies and investment.

A Global Call for Climate Action is being undertaken by TckTckTck on their website, and their project with respect to the Bonn conference is the "Adopt a Negotiator" project, which represents the voice of the younger generation left out of the negotiations:

So why do we leave the most important decisions in the world to a few hundred people? Why doesn’t everyone know about it? Why aren’t we all having our say? And what can we do about it? These are the questions we asked ourselves. And we came up with an answer: Adopt a Negotiator. We thought it was time to let our leaders know we are here and we are watching them and we are going to take our future into our own hands.

It's an excellent place to track the issues and the dialog around the Climate Change negotiations. They're linked to another great site, RTCC, which banners the consensus that the world is on track to break the 2 degree Celsius temperature change barrier, which leads us all into irreversible climate change if carbon emissions are not drastically reduced.

Earth Day 2013

In the face of the shenanigans around the climate change issue, it has become critical for action as more voices speak out about our unstable global climate, the dying natural world and the lack of potable water and fresh air as global resources.

Disturbing is the fact that those who are working through the process of negotiation and goal-setting on human emissions limits have abandoned any position that creates backlash that they don't know how to address.  I can see why it's turned into acting like politicians with endless justifications for that, but I think that's fatal in the case of establishing bounds on carbon emissions - which is the whole point of the global exercise! Someone has to forge leadership under the hardest problem the human race has ever inflicted on itself.

It makes me think of the nuclear brinksmanship of the '60's. How can any kid forget the "dive under the desk" drills that were pathetically useless but made people think that somehow they were taking effective action? That was just crowd control. This is starting to look like the same kind of an exercise, but the stakes are far, far higher and it can't go on like this. We are looking at a future of resource shocks and global conflict over diminishing worldwide resources that were initially exacerbated by global trade and cheap oil.

Where is the leadership, the intelligence and the solution-making consensus? Somebody over there at UNFCCC has got to get a grip. There are models out there for the  Precautionary Principle, even entire adopted practices and regulations, it's not that hard and is a very effective "standard of care" that would tamp down a lot of criticism. It's like the Hippocratic Oath, "do no harm" - which is where professional standards of care come from. The UNFCCC doesn't even know it exists, apparently.

What folks are failing to understand is that decisions and policies forged under the Precautionary Principle can always shift as the science and understanding of all the complex factors become more clear, because there's room to maneuver and accommodate more information. This kind of a position is on solid ground. The way they're operating now, it's already too late because they're ignoring scientific reality to accommodate politics.

That's why the US is going its own way, but that doesn't work on a global basis, as has been abundantly made clear; a consensus is required for this to work as a solution to a global problem. Maybe a General Eisenhower or MacArthur will emerge out of all this before too much longer and drag everybody in that direction.

For example, there's a call to action in Orion magazine. California is facing definite climate changes that require dealing with emissions. Gorbachev is now urging global action because of the failure to address climate change:

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says that among his top hopes for 2013 is reaching a new agreement on climate change. Two-decade-old U.N. climate talks have so far failed in their goal of reducing the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions that a vast majority of scientists says are warming the planet.

The Buck Stops Here

Part of President Obama's inaugural address concerned an astonishing position on the climate change issue:

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

With that, a Bicameral Climate Change Task Force has just now been established, co-chaired by Rep. Waxman, the Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Sen. Whitehouse, the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. This article has a link to an important letter that was written by them to President Obama, establishing that the United States must assert its leadership in addressing climate change. This is in response to an overwhelming petition by the public regarding a climate change discussion to the then-candidates during the debates, which was deflected by both parties.

This immensely important issue was thus put out in front as a major domestic crisis, requiring the attention and the resources of the entire country. What has been left unsaid is how this shift in position will play out in the global sphere.

The world is looking towards the USA and China to step up to this issue in an immediate and substantive way, and reaffirm the 2 degree climate change limit that was a global target at Durban in 2011. Both countries are the biggest emissions sources, and they remain outside the agreement framework that is trying to be established. This can't continue because the carbon emissions are already exceeding the limits of the 2 degree impact.

This leadership by the USA is critically necessary even as other countries and many corporations prepare for a warmer and more volatile planet. These carbon emissions must be reduced by all countries very quickly, or there's no future for the world's people and its living systems.

Here is the hope that it will happen.