Realpolitic

The politics of dealing with climate change solutions and the implementation of carbon reduction in various industries around the world has been so difficult that our global emissions have continued to climb, putting the entire world in serious danger. The COP meetings via the UNFCCC have so far failed to produce quantifiable results in the negotiations of the parties, largely due to intransigence by the major nations - US, China, the UK and Russia. The real work to implement these policies hasn't been undertaken as policy. Some groups have begun to put out policy frameworks to move climate change implementation into the real world.

The Wilson Center, is an independent think tank based in Washington, DC that examines specific topics and their global impacts for review by policymakers and organizations and the public. Topics they cover are listed on their website, which are extensive and relevant, such as Foreign Policy is Climate Policy - a report from the Wilson Center. Published September 2020, Updated March 2021. A part of their report relates to the emergency of carbon reduction in the immediate future.

"A strong warning of the immediate urgency of implementing climate change policies is a call from UN Chief Antonio Guterrez that the planet is heating more quickly than current models have predicted: "Speaking at the launch of a U.N.-backed report summarizing current efforts to tackle climate change, Guterres said recent extreme weather — from Hurricane Ida in the United States to floods in western Europe and the deadly heatwave in the Pacific Northwest — showed no country is safe from climate-related disasters.

“These changes are just the beginning of worse to come,” he said, appealing to governments to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate accord.“Unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, we will be unable to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit),” said Guterres. “The consequences will be catastrophic.”

A very specific topic development in another report that has just been issued is the massive threat of climate change.Geostrategic Competition and Climate Change: Avoiding the Unmanageable by Robert S. Litwak on September 15, 2021. "Humanity is at an inflection point as it faces the twin threats of climate change and nuclear war. An historical vignette offers perspective. During the 1985 Geneva summit, President Ronald Reagan privately asked Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev if the two superpowers could suspend their Cold War differences and unite if the Earth was invaded by aliens. Today the world faces the functional equivalent in climate change. The most vital issue in international relations is whether the great powers can take concerted action to avert climate catastrophe—or will allow unconstrained geostrategic competition to undermine that urgent necessity."

Taylor & Francis Online has some comprehensive articles on Environmental Politics. This is an organization that is a reputable international publisher which publishes hundreds of journals and thousands of books. They publish and host some of the top-cited journals in different scientific fields. Their research on sources used by the US congress in their history of climate change debates is outlined in a recent article published on August 25, 2021: Weaponizing economics: Big Oil, economic consultants, and climate policy delay.

"For decades, the fossil fuel industry has hired economic consultants to help weaken and delay US and international climate policy. Among them, the economic consultants of Charles River Associates played a key role, helping to undermine carbon pricing, international climate agreements, and other climate policies from the early 1990s onward. The work of these economists was often portrayed to the public as independent, when in fact it was funded by the fossil fuel industry, and their models were incomplete and biased in favor of continued fossil fuel use. Yet their conclusions often passed without challenge and eventually came to represent a significant part of conventional economic wisdom.

Research on the climate change counter-movement has traditionally focused on documenting the promotion of disinformation regarding climate science (Brulle 2014, Franta 2021). While such disinformation has played a crucial role in delaying effective climate policy, the fossil fuel industry and broader climate change counter-movement have also made frequent use of economic arguments to justify inaction. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry has made substantial investments in influential climate economics programs across the US. Further attention is needed on the role of economists and particular economic paradigms, doctrines, and models within climate politics and the perpetuation of fossil fuels."

The political diplomacy which needs to be carried out by the US is tasked to John Kerry, the US  Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. Key workstreams and focus areas for the Special Presidential Envoy’s team include: constructive engagement in the Paris Agreement and related agreements and processes; driving global greenhouse gas emission reductions so as to keep a 1.5 degree Celsius limit on temperature rise within reach; enhancing adaptation and resilience to climate impacts; climate-aligning financial flows; driving overseas clean energy innovation and competitiveness; and better integrating climate and other areas, including the ocean, biodiversity, the Arctic, and international shipping and aviation activities. This is an extensive policy on the climate crisis which has specific urgent measures for getting to zero carbon. So we shall have to measure the outcomes of COP26 in Glasgow by the implementation of the US policies in the real world.

The Guns of August

 

 

This title seems appropriate, given that it's the name of a book that examines the historic factors leading to the start of WWI.

The IPCC report is a dire warning delivered with an urgency not expressed in previous reports. The key to climate politics is guaranteeing fossil fuel workers no loss in salary as sustainable energy replaces carbon-based fuel – and this would cost “a pittance” says Robert Pollin on the Analysis.news with Paul Jay:

"The U.S. military is the global largest emitter of emissions. The point being, that to finance scale-level investments in a new clean energy economy, which is — and I take that as part of the sixth assessment report. I think it’s more emphasized in that one than prior ones. That is the first project. We can talk about all kinds of new fancy things. But unless we’re willing to cut carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and transforming into a clean energy system, then there’s nothing really else that we can do.

So we have to stop burning oil, coal, natural gas, and we use the technologies we have that work fine. That is renewable energy and efficiency."

An analysis published by The Conversation in June of 2019 reveals the scope of the US military impact on climate change:

"Greenhouse gas emission accounting usually focuses on how much energy and fuel civilians use. But recent work, including our own, shows that the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries. If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal."

"It’s no coincidence that US military emissions tend to be overlooked in climate change studies. It’s very difficult to get consistent data from the Pentagon and across US government departments. In fact, the United States insisted on an exemption for reporting military emissions in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This loophole was closed by the Paris Accord."

Another report from about the same time out of Brown University, "Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War", digs into the climate pollution from the U.S. Department of Defence (DOD). This includes the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and other defence agencies. This report is used to compare the emissions from the DOD to the computed emissions projected from the Alberta oilsands.

"This chart also lets you see how the oilsands’ pollution surge has accelerated over time. The oilsands added a half tonne per Canadian in the 15 years up to 2005. Then the industry added twice as much climate pollution per Canadian over the next 12 years.

As a result, the oilsands industry is now a ten times greater climate burden for each Canadian, than the U.S. military is per American."

So the US Military is now eclipsed by Canada's oilsands in Alberta, another massive source of carbon emissions that are not included in the computations for emissions and per capita assignments. This is a very, very serious issue that somehow never gets on the table. Without accurate accounting for all fossil fuel emissions, it's nearly impossible to create an accurate carbon framework back at the UN level. And thus all efforts come to naught.

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

 

Road to Glasgow

 

2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) will begin on Nov 1 and end on Friday Nov 12 in the Scottish Event Campus (SEC) in Glasgow. As of right now in May, the preliminary Sessions of the subsidiary bodies are underway in a virtual platform. This continues the process of meetings and negotiations by the different representatives of countries that are trying to reach a commitment to the 1.5C scenario of the Paris Agreement in 2015. There was no formal framework agreed to in 2015, just an agreement to the cap of carbon emissions that would keep the global ecosystem from exceeding 1.5C by the immediate reduction of green house gas emissions.

The Paris Agreement was an exercise in coming to grips with the enormity of defining the scale of the global emissions reductions and the rapid shift required to get the world to zero carbon.

President Obama was able to formally enter the United States into the agreement under international law through executive authority, since it imposed no new legal obligations on the country. Trump disastrously pulled the US out of the treaty the minute he got into office, on June 1, 2017, and President Biden reinstated US participation on January 20 of this year.

The website for the May-June UNFCCC conference is here. Its purpose is to begin negotiations and hammer out agreements on key aspects of the talks in Glasgow. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is an international environmental treaty against climate change, negotiated and signed by 154 states at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, informally known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June 1992.

Earth Day - US Policy

 VP HARRIS TALKS CLIMATE:  Earth Day 2021 on April 22 was marked by the Biden Administration presentation on streaming platforms as well as broadcast on the Discovery Channel.

This article is part of Covering Climate Now, a global consortium of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story. View the video at this link.

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.