10 Things You Need to Know About the U.S.-China Climate Deal

10 Things You Need to Know About the U.S.-China Climate Deal

Bill McKibben | Nove

Last night, just weeks after the largest climate mobilization ever, the world’s two biggest polluters—the U.S. and China—announced their most ambitious climate action yet. That is not a coincidence: it’s a sign that our pressure is working, and that we need to apply much more.

The announcement today is an achievement for everyone who’s held a banner, signed a petition and gone to jail—and a call for many more to join us going forward!

Here’s my take on what the just-announced plan from President Obama and Premier Xi is, and isn’t:

1. It is historic. John Kerry was right to use the phrase in his New York Times oped announcing the deal: for the first time a developing nation has agreed to eventually limit its emissions. This is a necessity for advancing international climate negotiations.

2. It isn’t binding in any way. In effect President Obama is writing an IOU to be cashed by future presidents and Congresses (and Xi is doing the same for future Politburos). If they take the actions to meet the targets, then it’s meaningful, but for now it’s a paper promise. And since physics is uninterested in spin, all the hard work lies ahead.

3. It is proof—if any more was needed—that renewable energy is ready to go. The Chinese say they’ll be using clean sources to get 20 percent of their energy by 2030—which is not just possible, it should be easy. Which they know because they’ve revolutionized the production of solar energy, driving down the cost of panels by 90 percent or more in the last decade.

4. It is not remotely enough to keep us out of climate trouble. We’ve increased the temperature less than a degree and that’s been enough to melt enormous quantities of ice, not to mention set the weather on berserk. So this plan to let the increase more than double is folly—though it is good to see that the two sides have at least agreed not to undermine the 2 degrees Celsius warming target, the one tiny achievement of the 2009 Copenhagen conference fiasco.

5. It is a good way to put pressure on other nations. I’ve just come back from India, which has worked hard to avoid any targets of any sort. But the lesson from this pact is, actual world leaders at least need to demonstrate they’re talking about climate; it makes the lead-up to the global negotiations in Paris next year more interesting.

6. It is a reason projects like Keystone XL and fracking make even less sense than ever. If President Obama is serious about meeting these kinds of targets, then we need serious steps; the surest way to undermine this commitment would be to approve new pipelines or authorize other new fossil fuel developments like fracking. If you pledge sobriety and then buy a keg of beer, people are going to wonder.

7. It is another reminder that it is past time to divest from fossil fuels. The burgeoning divestment movement has been arguing not just on moral grounds, but also making the point that the future will inevitably lead to a downsloping curve for the old energies. This is another warning—for anyone who looks more than a few quarters out, the writing is on the wall that the fossil fuel era is on its way out.

8. It’s not, in any way, a stretch goal. These numbers are easy—if you were really being cynical, you could say they’re trying to carefully manage a slow retreat from fossil fuels instead of really putting carbon on the run. The Germans, for instance, will be moving in on 60 percent of their energy from clean sources by the mid-2020s, when we’ll still be cutting carbon emissions by small increments.

9. It is—and this is the real key—a reminder that movements work. President Obama first endorsed the 80 percent by 2050 goal he enshrined in this pact when he was running for president in 2007, a week after 1,400 demonstrations around the nation demanded that goal. This comes seven weeks after by far the largest global climate demonstrations in history, and amidst ongoing unrest in China about the filthy air in its cities.

10. It isn’t, in other words, a reason to slack off one bit in the ongoing fight for a livable climate, a fight we must continue at all cost. If we want this to be a start, and not a finish, we’ve got to build even bigger and more powerful movements that push the successors of these gentlemen to meet what science demands.

Today is an achievement for everyone who’s held a banner, signed a petition and gone to jail—and a call for many more to join us going forward!

The U.N. Just Released Its Final Report on Climate Change—and It’s Terrifying

The U.N. Just Released Its Final Report on Climate Change—and It’s Terrifying

The IPCC says we need to stop burning fossil fuels by 2100.

(Photo: Hans-Peter Merten/Getty Images)

November 02, 2014  

 

By Kristina Bravo

Kristina Bravo is Assistant Editor at TakePart. 

 

Science has spoken: Fossil fuels should be phased out by the end of the century.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Sunday released the final installment of its four-part assessment, published over the past 13 months. The report, which draws on the analysis of 800 scientists, will serve as a guideline for government officials to come up with a global treaty on climate by 2015.

According to the grim conclusion, the planet will face “severe, pervasive and irreversible” damage if we don’t switch to zero- and low-carbon sources of electricity by 2100. Humans and ecosystems could suffer unprecedented losses from more severe and frequent weather events.

What can we do? The report suggests that we grow our use of renewable energy from its current 30 percent share of the power sector to 80 percent by 2050. Combined with technological and structural change, “behavior, lifestyle and culture” could have a considerable impact.

“We have the means to limit climate change,” IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said at the launch of the report in Copenhagen. “All we need is the will to change, which we trust will be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the science of climate change.”

In the United States, President Obama has pledged to battle climate change and has proposed cutting carbon emissions from power plants by 30 percent by 2013. But the results of the midterm election could hamper similar efforts. The GOP, notorious for challenging climate science, is expected to take control of the Senate.

“If Republicans take back the Senate, I don’t see there being a lot of willingness to allow the administration to cede any authority to the U.N. on climate policies or elsewhere, and I don’t really think that kind of a position will hurt us politically going into 2016,” a Senate GOP aide told the Washington Examiner.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry, in his comment on the IPCC’s report, said that government officials need to act beyond politics.

“We can’t prevent a large-scale disaster if we don’t heed this kind of hard science,” he said in a statement. “The longer we are stuck in a debate over ideology and politics, the more the costs of inaction grow and grow. Those who choose to ignore or dispute the science so clearly laid out in this report do so at great risk for all of us and for our kids and grandkids.”

 

Why Climate Scientists Receive Death Threats

Why Climate Scientists Receive Death Threats

 

 

Tim Radford, Climate New Network | November 10, 2014 9:19 am |

 

 

If you don’t like the message on climate change, it seems that the answer is to shot the messenger.

According to a new book by veteran environmentalist George Marshall, thousands of abusive emails—including demands that he commit suicide or be “shot, quartered and fed to the pigs, along with your family”—were received by climate scientist Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Centre, who drew and published the “hockey stick graph” that charts a steep rise in global average temperatures.





Glenn Beck, a commentator on Fox TV, called on climate scientists to commit suicide. A climate denial blogger called Marc Morano claimed that one group of climate scientists deserved “to be publicly flogged.” And the late Stephen Schneider found his name and that of other Jewish climate scientists on a “death list” maintained by an American neo-Nazi website.

Very Strange

As Marshall points out in his absorbing, all-embracing, immensely readable book, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, something very strange is going on.

Louis Pasteur’s revolutionary microbiology work on disease prevention never resulted in him having to think about how to use a gun. Jonas Salk never needed to fortify his house as result of working on the development of a polio vaccine.
Other scientists are trusted and respected. But the way climate scientists are now treated, Marshall argues, is without parallel in the history of science: “They have been set up to play that role in a climate storyline that, it would seem, cannot refute climate change without demonising the people who warn us about it.”

Forget, if you can, the people who seem to be whipping up these furious responses. Climate change can only be met or mitigated by action—and there are plenty of reasons why a very large number of people nod in agreement about what must be done and then fail to insist that it is done.

Dan Gilbert, a psychologist who won the Royal Society’s science book prize in 2007 with an examination of the puzzles of happiness, says that climate change is something unlikely to strike fear in the human heart anyway. It is impersonal, it is gradual, it is amoral and it isn’t—or doesn’t seem to be—happening now.
Other researchers have pointed out the alarming tendency, shared by all humans, to believe what they want to believe. Furthermore, climate change is not (death threats and public flogging fantasies aside) an immediate or an emotional issue. “A distant, abstract, and disputed threat just doesn’t have the necessary characteristics for seriously mobilising public opinion,” says the Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman.

There are other difficulties. When, for instance, will the awful things start to happen? How do you mobilise public opinion on an argument with uncertain timescales, imprecise outcomes and real puzzles about the costs and benefits of any actions? No one, Marshall says, is ever going to march under a banner of that says “100 months before the Odds Shift into a Greater Likelihood of Feedbacks.”

Marshall founded the Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN), based in Oxford, England. He is a veteran of Greenpeace and the Rainforest Foundation, and there isn’t much doubt about what he thinks and knows to be true.

But the appeal of this book is that he lets others talk. He examines the political doublethink that seems to infect some legislatures in the U.S. He listens to the skeptics, the worriers, the oil giants, the conspiracy theorists, the celebrity environmental campaigners and the other ones who invoke imagery of death, fever and smoking ruin.

And he refers to the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which polled academic experts on global risk, and found an estimate of a “19 percent probability that the human species will go extinct before the end of the century”.

Altruistic Behavior

The title, direction and burden of this book seem to augur almost apocalyptic failure to confront the coming crisis. But, of course, Marshall pulls out an ace near the end.

He concludes that while human brains may be hard-wired to not worry about what may or may not happen in two generations, they also have an immense capacity for pro-social, supportive and altruistic behavior.
“Climate change is entirely within our capacity for change,” he says, “It is challenging, but far from impossible.”

That is good to know. And the book ends with some serious advice about how to make the case for action—and instead of capital punishment, we get generously shouty advice in capital letters. CLIMATE CHANGE IS HAPPENING HERE AND NOW, he reminds us. And he urges campaigners to DROP THE ECO-STUFF, especially the polar bears.

Marshall suggests that we really do try to contain global average warming to 2°C. He quotes John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who told the Australians: “The difference between two and four degrees is human civilization.” And, yes, do think about it.