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paris climate agreement
Trump’s Climate Policies Could Cause Mass Death of Global Poor, Analysis Warns
"These are people with lives," said a spokesperson for the US Climate Action Network. "They are people like us, even if they happen to live in a different part of the world."
Nov 19, 2025
As he skips out on this year’s annual climate summit in Brazil to the chagrin of world leaders, a new analysis shows that President Donald Trump’s climate agenda will cause a massive increase in excess deaths in the poor nations least equipped to deal with—and least responsible for—rising temperatures.
The analysis, published Wednesday by The Guardian and ProPublica, found that the emissions released over the next decade due to Trump's acceleration of fossil fuel usage, combined with his killing of renewable energy, will result in an estimated 1.3 million more preventable heat-related deaths worldwide over the next 80 years.
Most of them will occur in poor, hot countries in Africa and South Asia, which the report notes "emitted relatively little of the pollution that causes climate change," but "are least prepared to cope with the increasing heat." On the contrary, the US, which has just 4% of the world's population, has emitted around 20% of the world's greenhouse gases.
The estimate of excess deaths is based on a widely recognized peer-reviewed metric known as the "mortality cost of carbon," which finds that every 4,434 metric tons of greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere translates to about one additional excess death. Notably, that metric only includes direct temperature-related deaths from conditions like heat stroke, while not taking into account indirect deaths from drought, famine, disease, wildfires, and other disasters that climate change is worsening.
An analysis from Carbon Brief, based on modeling from Princeton University, found that an additional 7 billion metric tonnes of carbon—roughly the equivalent of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter—will be released through 2030 as a result of Trump’s policy actions. These have included the shredding of pollution regulations; the near-total elimination of investment in wind, solar, and electric vehicles; and the dramatic expansion of oil and coal extraction.
As the rest of the world makes great strides toward a renewable future, the global Climate Action Tracker says Trump is carrying out “the most aggressive, comprehensive, and consequential climate policy rollback” it has ever analyzed.
"We are quickly emerging as the planet’s rogue nation, determined to deny climate and slow the energy transition as best we can," wrote environmental journalist Bill McKibben last month in Common Dreams.
The new analysis follows research published last month by the University College of London, which found that the climate crisis has already led to a huge spike in excess deaths. An average of more than half a million preventable heat-related deaths occurred globally each year between 2012 and 2021, a 23% increase since the 1990s.
While still an unfathomable loss of life, the 1.3 million projected to die as a result of Trump's climate policies are a drop in the bucket on top of the 83 million excess deaths that the mortality metric predicts if emissions continue at the same rate.
“The sheer numbers are horrifying,” Ife Kilimanjaro, executive director of the non-profit US Climate Action Network, told The Guardian and ProPublica. "But for us, they’re more than numbers. These are people with lives, with families, with hopes and dreams. They are people like us, even if they happen to live in a different part of the world."
The report comes amid the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, which the US was one of only four nations in the world to skip, drawing condemnation from numerous world leaders.
One of them was Maina Vakafua Talia, the climate envoy from Tuvalu, the small Pacific island nation that is expected to be one of the first countries to become uninhabitable due to sea level rise and fiercer storms, and has already begun planning for mass evacuations over the next two decades. Trump's pullout from the Paris Climate Accords, he said, demonstrated a “shameful disregard for the rest of the world."
But while the brunt of the climate emergency will be felt by the Global South, Americans will not be spared. Annual deaths from heat in the US have already increased by 50% since the year 2000, according to a recent Yale University study. A Texas A&M University study from 2023 projected that if global temperatures exceed 3°C above preindustrial levels, an additional 200,000 Americans could die annually due to changes that cause both hot and cold temperatures to become more extreme.
In an interview at COP30 with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Dutch climate envoy Prince Jaime de Bourbon de Parme likened Trump's denial of the climate emergency to ignoring an illness.
"If I’m sick, and I take my temperature, and I’ve got facts and figures that I’m sick, I can ignore it or not," he said. "So, it’s up to him to listen to the doctor or not. But it’s wise to listen to the facts. The science tells the story. I’m not telling it. It’s not my opinion. It’s just listening to the experts that tell us that climate is a fact."
The Guardian and ProPublica analysis came a day after the Brazilian COP30 Presidency released a draft text that campaigners warned did not go far enough in demanding a roadmap to transitioning away from fossil fuels. More than 80 countries at the conference on Tuesday joined a call for leaders to include tangible metrics and plans for the transition in the summit's final agreement.
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'Against Humanity': Leaders Denounce Fossil Fuel-Loving Trump as He Skips Out on Global Climate Summit
“Every fraction of a degree means more hunger, displacement, and loss—especially for those least responsible,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres on Thursday. “This is moral failure—and deadly negligence.”
Nov 07, 2025
As world leaders gathered in Brazil for this year's global summit on the accelerating climate crisis this week, many took note of the absence of US President Donald Trump.
This year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) summit comes on the tenth anniversary of the Paris Climate agreement, in which nations committed to adopting policies intended to keep global temperature increases below the threshold of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, considered a tipping point at which many of the worst ravages of climate change will become irreversible.
Ten years later, progress has fallen far short of the mark, with leaders scrambling to keep the deal’s goals intact—an aim that is likely untenable without the cooperation of the US, the globe’s largest historical emitter of carbon.
America’s president has not only once again pulled the US out of the Paris agreement, but also sought to turn climate denial into public policy and spent his term in office thus far grinding American investment in renewable energy to a halt—actions viewed as extraordinary abdications of responsibility at a time when the globe is ever more rapidly approaching the point of no return for warming.
Fresh on climate advocates' minds are Trump’s comments at the UN General Assembly in September, when he described climate change as the world’s “greatest con job.”
On Thursday, the World Meteorological Organization found that greenhouse gas emissions had reached a record high. Meanwhile, 2025 is on track to be the third hottest year on record, behind only 2024 and 2023.
“Every fraction of a degree means more hunger, displacement, and loss—especially for those least responsible," said UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday. "This is moral failure—and deadly negligence."
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has emerged as one of the world's leading climate defenders from the heart of the Amazon rainforest, began the conference by delivering an indirect but unmistakable shot at Trump. He denounced the "extremist forces that fabricate fake news and are condemning future generations to life on a planet altered forever by global warming."
Other Latin American leaders were more direct. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, whom Trump recently hit with sanctions and threatened with military action, denounced the US president as "against humanity," as evidenced by "his absence" at the conference.
"The president of the United States at the latest United Nations General Assembly said the climate crisis does not exist," added Chilean President Gabriel Boric. "That is a lie."
In Trump's stead, over 100 other state and local figures from US politics have traveled to Brazil to take part in the conference: Among them are California Gov. Gavin Newsom, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers.
Another attendee is Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, chair of the Climate Mayors network, who recently applauded Tuesday night’s elections in the US. More than 40 candidates associated with the network came out victorious, as well as the self-described ecosocialist New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
“Our climate mayors did very well on the ballot,” Gallego said to applause at a local leaders forum for COP30. “We want to send this message from the US.”
But despite the US delegation, even with officials from the Trump administration absent, climate campaigners fear the White House may still seek to sabotage the conference from afar. Last month, the administration did just that when it used the threat of tariffs to strong-arm countries into killing what would have been a global-first carbon fee on shipping.
Even without Trump present, COP30 is crawling with fossil fuel lobbyists seeking to stymie progress. A report released Friday from the climate advocacy group Kick Big Polluters Out found that over 5,350 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended UN climate negotiations over the past four years. The corporations they represent are responsible for more than 60% of global emissions.
“These companies have defended their fossil interests by watering down climate action for years," said Fiona Hauke of the German environmental group Urgewald. "As we head towards COP30, we demand transparency and accountability: Keep polluters out of climate talks and make them pay for a just energy transition.”
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As Trump and Cabinet Thrash Climate, Coalition Demands Dems Hold the Line Against Big Oil Immunity
"What's at stake here isn't just who pays for climate disasters—it's whether our democracy allows powerful industries to simply rewrite the rules when justice catches up to them," said the communications director at Make Polluters Pay.
Mar 13, 2025
Over 190 groups are urging Democrats in Congress resist any attempts by Big Oil to evade potential legal liability amid the growing number of legal and legislative efforts aimed at holding major polluters accountable for their role in the climate crisis.
In a Thursday letter addressed to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the groups urge Democratic lawmakers "to proactively and affirmatively reject any proposal that would shield fossil fuel companies" from those efforts.
A quarter of U.S. residents live in a state or locality that is "taking ExxonMobil and other major fossil fuel companies to court to hold them accountable for this deception and make them pay for the damage their climate lies have caused," according to the letter. Maine, for example, became the eighth U.S. state to sue major oil and gas companies for deceiving the public about their products' role in the climate crisis.
The letter signatories include a long list of green groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity and Extinction Rebellion US, as well as the American Association of Justice and other nonprofits.
The Supreme Court on Monday denied a request by a coalition of Republican state attorneys general aimed at preventing oil and gas companies from facing these types of lawsuits. Trump has also vowed to block climate litigation aimed at Big Oil.
In their letter, the groups also point to a number of efforts, some successful, to pass what are known as "superfund laws," which force privately owned polluters to help cover the costs of protecting public infrastructure from climate-fueled threats. Oil and gas companies have lobbied against the passage of these laws.
"What's at stake here isn't just who pays for climate disasters—it's whether our democracy allows powerful industries to simply rewrite the rules when justice catches up to them," said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of Make Polluters Pay—one of the letter's signatories—in a Thursday statement.
"Lawmakers must decisively reject any attempt by the fossil fuel industry to evade accountability and ensure both justice today and the right of future generations to hold polluters responsible for decades of deception," DiPaola continued.
The letter references episodes when "fossil fuel companies and their allies" tried to "secure a blanket waiver of liability for their industry."
In 2017, a carbon tax plan spearheaded by a group of Republican statesmen and economists proposed stopping potential lawsuits against oil companies and other corporations that release greenhouse gases, and in 2020, the fossil fuel industry tried to quietly include a liability waiver for itself in a government Covid-19 relief package, according to the outlet Drilled.
The letter also highlights that 60 Democratic House members urged leadership to categorically oppose efforts to "immunize polluters" in response to the latter effort.
"We have reason to believe that the fossil fuel industry and its allies will use the chaos and overreach of the new Trump administration to attempt yet again to pass some form of liability waiver and shield themselves from facing consequences for their decades of pollution and deception," the letter states. "That effort—no matter what form it takes—must not be allowed to succeed."
The demand from these groups comes amid broader attacks on climate and environmental protections from the Trump administration
On Wednesday, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a series of actions to roll back environmental regulation impacting issues ranging from rules on pollution from power plants to regulations for vehicles.
On his first day in office, Trump signed executive orders withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement and initiated plans to open up Alaskan wilderness to drilling and mining.
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New Biden Emissions Targets Seen as No Match for Looming Trump Attacks on Climate
With Donald Trump beginning his term next month, "it'll be up to states and other national leaders to defy Trump and move us quickly away from planet-heating fossil fuels."
Dec 19, 2024
With U.S. President-elect Donald Trump set to take office in just over a month, green groups on Thursday greeted President Joe Biden's new climate goal with a blunt assessment of the likelihood of significantly slashing plant-heating fossil fuel emissions in the coming years.
Under Trump, said several advocates, meeting the goal set by Biden will take far-reaching action by state and local governments—as the incoming Republican president, who has dismissed the climate crisis as a "scam" and a "hoax," is expected to ramp up emissions with his plans to repeal key federal regulations.
Biden's announcement on Thursday pertained to the country's nationally determined contribution (NDC), which is required by the 2015 Paris climate agreement—a pact Trump has said the U.S. will exit after he takes office, as it did during his first term. The government's new climate target, Biden said, is a 61-66% emissions reduction from 2005 levels by 2035.
The administration anticipates methane reductions of at least 35% from 2005 levels in 2035—a key component of achieving the NDC, as methane is more than 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
The target is a significant step up from the one set in 2021, when Biden pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030.
But Oil Change International said the goal set on Thursday underscores the Biden administration's overall approach to emissions reductions: a "failed strategy of counting on clean energy to displace fossil fuels without simultaneous efforts to stop fossil fuels," as U.S. campaign manager Collin Rees said.
In a video address, Biden said his efforts to invest billions of dollars into renewable energy technology and to regulate fossil fuel emissions from some power plants and other sources have amounted to "the boldest climate agenda in American history."
But by approving fossil fuel infrastructure like ConocoPhillips' Willow project, Biden has angered groups that have demanded the U.S. act on climate experts' warnings that continued oil and gas extraction has no place on a pathway to limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
"Under Biden, even as clean energy surged, America became the world's planet wrecker-in-chief, planning the largest oil and gas expansion of any country over the next decade," said Rees. "As history's largest polluter and second-biggest current emitter, the U.S. has a unique responsibility to lead on climate action. This NDC fails to deliver the bold commitments needed to halt America's booming oil and gas expansion and support vulnerable Global South nations bearing the brunt of a crisis they didn't cause."
Oil Change International applauded the president's acknowledgment that fossil fuels must be phased out—but emphasized that the NDC "doesn't commit to doing it."
The Rhodium Group estimated in a study this week that Biden's current climate policies could achieve a 38-56% emissions reduction below 2005 levels by 2035.
Last year, emissions were reduced about 17% from 2005 levels, but no significant reduction is expected this year because rising electricity demand has offset renewable energy progress, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
But if Trump rolls back a majority of Biden's policies, like methane regulations unveiled earlier this year and subsidies and tax incentives for clean energy included in the Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. may only be able to reduce its emissions by 24-40% by 2030.
"As history's largest polluter and second-biggest current emitter, the U.S. has a unique responsibility to lead on climate action."
The new percentage reduction goal in the new NDC was "good to see," said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
"But it'll be up to states and other national leaders to defy Trump and move us quickly away from planet-heating fossil fuels," said Su. "While Biden's pledge rightly reiterates the need to get off dirty energy, the real work lies in rooting out the corrupting political influence of oil, gas, and utilities. As climate deniers and corporate grifters sleaze into the White House, leaders at every level who actually care about the planet will have to fight twice as hard to hold polluters accountable for the economic and environmental havoc they're wreaking around the globe."
The U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of 24 governors whose states represent 57% of the U.S. economy and 54% of the population, pledged on Thursday to work together to achieve the NDC announced by Biden.
The alliance—whose governors represent states including California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota—said it has already "reduced its collective net greenhouse gas emissions by 19% between 2005 and 2022, while increasing collective GDP by 30%, and is on track to meet its near-term climate goal by reducing collective greenhouse gas emissions 26% below 2005 levels by 2025."
"The coalition's states and territories are collectively employing more workers in the clean energy sector, achieving lower levels of dangerous air pollutants, and preparing more effectively for climate impacts than the rest of the country," said the alliance.
U.S. Climate Alliance co-chair Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, said the NDC "will serve as our North Star, guiding us in the years to come and keeping America on track toward a cleaner, safer future."
Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that though Biden's new NDC falls short "of what the science requires," it will also provide "an important benchmark to propel further climate action by cities, states, Tribal nations, and businesses in the years ahead."
"The strengthened U.S. NDC announced today by the Biden administration underscores that working together to collectively address climate change is in the best interest of the United States and the world," said Cleetus. "Cutting fossil fuel pollution sharply and building a thriving economy powered by clean energy is good for national prosperity and people's health and pocketbooks. It's encouraging to see the NDC also call for measures to address the full breadth and scope of heat-trapping emissions, including potent methane, across the economy."
But Cleetus emphasized that "much work remains to be done by world leaders and policymakers, especially if President-elect Trump—who seems hellbent on dismantling widely popular clean energy policies and boosting fossil fuel company profits—once again exits the Paris climate agreement."
"Today marks one of many important milestones on the path toward keeping the goals of the Paris Agreement within reach for the betterment of current and future generations," she said.
Rees called on Biden to take other specific steps to cement his climate legacy and reduce U.S. emissions, including rejecting pending liquefied natural gas exports, shutting down the Dakota Access Pipeline, and ending financing for international fossil fuel projects.
"With Trump looming, Biden is squandering his last chance to lock in ambitious commitments to stop the massive growth of oil and gas production—commitments that could guide future federal action and inspire immediate state and local initiatives," said Rees. "The clock is ticking—for the Biden administration and our planet."
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Big Oil Needs to Be Held Accountable for Its Climate Deception
Ultimately, the future of accountability for the fossil fuel industry is up to us.
May 02, 2024
Oil companies knew since the 1950s that their product was causing catastrophic climate damage. The industry never supported the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, despite their many public statements to the contrary. Companies like BP and Shell understood the dangers of methane emissions from ‘natural’ gas, but marketed it as a clean energy solution anyways. Over the last decade, the industry has spent over $700 million on university research to promote a lasting role for fossil fuels in our energy future. ExxonMobil’s security chief is “tracking” climate activists’ whereabouts, while the American Petroleum Institute monitors their social media feeds.
Those are just some of the revelations from a 65-page report released by the Senate Budget committee ahead of a hearing on Wednesday into Big Oil disinformation. The report is the culmination of a three-year investigation into the industry’s “denial, disinformation, and doublespeak,” an inquiry which the industry tried to stymie at nearly every turn, withholding information, resisting subpoenas, and then swamping the committee with over 100,000 pages of meaningless documents.
Despite the industry’s efforts, the report is a damning portrayal of Big Oil’s decades-long crusade to simultaneously block meaningful climate action while extracting more government support for false solutions like ‘natural’ gas (aka methane) and carbon capture and sequestration. Over the course of thousands of emails, top executives, lobbyists, and PR advisors debate how to lobby against important regulations, greenwash the industry’s reputation, shape university research agendas, and mislead the public about the threat of fossil fuels.
The fossil fuel industry isn’t going to give it up willingly. Which means that the next phase of the effort to hold Big Oil accountable is going to have to pursue the industry with sharper teeth.
And that’s all from the content they were willing to share, which begs the question: what did they decide to redact? If these are the documents the industry felt best represent their harmless day-to-day operations, what sorts of bombshells are they covering up? The committee’s report reads like the flickering of a flashlight in a dark basement, giving us a snapshot of the subterranean world of Big Oil deception, while raising the question, what else hides in these dark corners?
Whatever it is, the fossil fuel industry isn’t going to give it up willingly. Which means that the next phase of the effort to hold Big Oil accountable is going to have to pursue the industry with sharper teeth.
At the federal level, that means getting the Department of Justice to launch an investigation into Big Oil disinformation. Twenty members of Congress have already sent a letter to DOJ urging such an investigation and after this week’s hearing and report, pressure will only grow. What’s needed now is for President Biden and the White House to throw their weight behind the idea. Congress can also pay their part by pursuing a more aggressive “make polluters pay” agenda, taking up bills like a windfall profits tax, which would go after Big Oil profiteering, and the Polluter Pays Climate Fund, which would make the industry pay their fair share to deal with climate damages.
At the city and state level, we need to see more lawsuits to prosecute the industry for climate damages and disinformation. Over 30 cities and states have already filed suit, but with thousands of communities already paying the costs of extreme weather, sea level rise and other climate impacts, we could see hundreds of new cases in the years to come. Lawsuits aren’t the only tool at our disposal: five states are now pursuing “climate superfund” bills that would make Big Oil pay for climate impacts by contributing to a fund based on their share of historic emissions. Vermont could pass its version as early as this summer.
Ultimately, the future of Big Oil accountability is up to us. The fossil fuel industry has spent billions on its efforts to lull us to sleep with fairy tales about ‘algae fuels’ or ‘natural’ gas. This week’s hearing was another wake up call to the reality of their deception and lies. Let’s not let it go to waste.
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COP28 Stocktake Draft Reveals Vital Battle Over 'Unabated' Fossil Fuels
The draft offers "the fossil fuel industry a lifeline with dangerous distractions, like carbon capture and storage, and other abatement technologies," said one campaigner.
Dec 05, 2023
With a week left until the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference wraps up with a long-awaited "Global Stocktake" that will measure countries' progress towards the objectives of the Paris climate agreement, a draft of the document released Tuesday revealed a strong push to include a major loophole for the biggest fossil fuel producers—in the form of language that would allow so-called "abated" emissions.
More than 100 countries reportedly support a clause in the Global Stocktake that would call for "accelerating efforts toward phasing out unabated fossil fuels"—emissions that are not "captured" through technological fixes like carbon capture and storage (CCS) before they reach the atmosphere. That option in the text also calls on countries to "rapidly" reduce unabated fossil fuels "so as to achieve net zero CO2 in energy systems by or around mid-century."
The Biden administration, among other wealthy governments, has backed an expansion of CCS, offering $1.2 billion in grants for two projects this year. Analysts warn the technology would actually increase energy consumption by 20%, ultimately increasing the carbon emissions that CCS proponents claim are "abated" by the technology, as well as worsening environmental injustice by ramping up smog, benzene, and formaldehyde emissions in fenceline communities.
Other options in the draft text include a call for "an orderly and just phaseout of fossil fuels," which more than 25 countries support, according to BusinessGreen, and no mention at all of a phaseout.
Another paragraph in the draft included an agreement that countries will rapidly phase out "unabated coal power this decade" and ban the building of new coal power plants, and a second option would omit any mention of phasing out coal.
Romain Ioualalen, global policy manager for Oil Change International, acknowledged that just "three years ago, it would have been unimaginable to see governments consider an inclusion of fossil fuel phaseout in any [Conference of the Parties] agreement," which organizers and governments in the Global South have aggressively campaigned for in recent years.
The ultimate goal for the Global Stocktake, however, said Ioualalen, is "an agreement to immediately decline fossil fuel production and use... as well as a full, fast, fair, and funded fossil fuel phaseout."
The draft released on Wednesday goes in the opposite direction, he said, giving "the fossil fuel industry a lifeline with dangerous distractions, like carbon capture and storage, and other abatement technologies."
"We urge parties to hold a strong line against these failed technologies and refuse any language that allows fossil fuel companies to justify continued oil and gas extraction," said Ioualalen.
Pivoting to technologies like carbon capture and storage instead of focusing on sharply dialing down all carbon emissions, he added, would "blow us well past 1.5°C [in planetary heating], and lead to catastrophic climate consequences."
As author and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben wrote in a column earlier this week, countries that are embracing technologies like CCS are playing into the hands of fossil fuel giants.
"It's abundantly clear that coal, oil, and gas are breaking the climate system; it's also abundantly clear that the people who own coal, oil, and gas reserves don't care," wrote McKibben. "In an effort to keep burning them, so they can continue to collect the returns, they propose building vast engineering projects alongside fossil-fuel generating plants, to capture the carbon dioxide from the exhaust stream. That is, they want to 'abate' the damage of their product."
Scientists have warned that eight years after the Paris climate agreement was finalized with a goal of limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C—or as far below 2°C as possible—the world is currently on track to warm by 3°C this century.
Global carbon emissions have continued to rise in recent years as countries including the U.S. and the U.K. have approved major fossil fuel projects despite warnings from energy and climate experts that oil, gas, and coal extraction have no place on a pathway to 1.5°C.
The final Global Stocktake, said Shirley Matheson, the World Wildlife Fund's global nationally-determined contribution enhancement coordinator, must force governments to "face up to the consequences of their collective inaction, and commit to strengthen climate ambition and action in line with limiting global warming to 1.5°C."
Matheson called the current draft "bloated" and expressed hope that countries in attendance at the conference (COP28) will adopt a Global Stocktake with the best options included in the draft.
"Good language on phasing out fossil fuels is included as an option, and new text options have been added that call for stronger ambition in the national climate plans, and a new collective goal for 60% emissions cuts by 2035," she said. "These signals are essential to create the conditions for more ambitious commitments and more international cooperation to achieve them."
"Time is running out for negotiators to agree on a draft text with clear political options for ministers later in the week," she added. "Countries must work together to achieve science-aligned guidance and ways forward for a dramatic course correction of climate action. This will give us the best chance of securing a livable planet."
As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, a record number of fossil fuel industry lobbyists are also attending COP28, leaving campaigners concerned that the final agreements out of the summit will include significant loopholes for the industry.
“Global leaders have to deliver a full package," said Ioualalen. "We will not accept weak outcomes only on coal or renewables, and without addressing the primary driver of the climate crisis, fossil fuels."
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Will the Paris Climate Agreement Deliver?
Anything above 1.5 degrees Celsius is a death sentence for us and for the planet.
Apr 28, 2016
A historic event took place on Earth Day 2016. It was a decisive moment for the planet. On Friday, April 22nd around 60 heads of state gathered at the United Nations in New York for the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement. 175 governments took the first step of signing onto the deal and according to the White House at least 34 countries, representing 49% of greenhouse gas emissions have formally ratified the Paris Agreement. It was 'the largest ever single-day turn-out for a signing ceremony,' indicating 'strong international commitment to deliver on the promises.
I was at COP21 in Paris when negotiators finally agreed the Paris Agreement, the first legally binding global climate deal: the culmination of 21 years of international negotiation and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process: a massive global political mobilization in response to the looming threat of catastrophic climate change. It scales up ambition from the previous international instrument, the Kyoto Protocol, by placing mitigation and adaptation obligations on all Parties. The Agreement includes elements of previous international agreements and follows on from the Kyoto Protocol and the shameful failure of the Copenhagen Accord. The Paris Agreement is an unprecedented evolution in both international law and climate change law. We all hope that it will be enough to save the planet.
The program for the opening ceremony included messages from civil society, a UN messenger for Peace, participation of schoolchildren and a performance by the Julliard Quintet. The ceremony itself was preceded by a high level debate on climate change and sustainability. These are perceived as hopeful signs that the Paris Agreement will be inclusive and fulfill the needs of all, including the most vulnerable. "At the ceremony Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, an indigenous women's leader from Chad, called on countries to follow through on their promises. Temperatures in her country were already a blistering 48C (118F), she said, and climate change threatened to obliterate billions spent on development aid over recent decades."
I welcome the commitments of the Paris Agreement, which "aims... to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty... to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5degC above preindustrial levels." The agreement commits to "adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience," to "Making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate resilient development," all "implemented to reflect equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities." These pledges are a great step forward in the race against catastrophic climate change.
I am very concerned, however, about the Agreement's provision to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 degC above pre-industrial levels." This is a dangerous equivocation. By now we all know that a 2degC target is woefully inadequate.
THE 1.5 DEGREE CELSIUS TARGET
Some critics have been skeptical about the Paris Agreement, and expressed doubts that governments have either the intention or the ability to live up to their promises -- I share their doubts. NASA climate scientist Professor James Hansen, one of the world's foremost authorities on climate change, said of the agreement, "It's a fraud really, a fake... It's just bullshit for them to say: 'We'll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.' It's just worthless words. There is no action, just promises.'"George Monbiot writes of the Paris Agreement, "By comparison to what it could have been, it's a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it's a disaster."
Scientists at MIT say that under the current Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) the global average temperature will soar by as much as 3.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100. This is far above the 1.5 degree Celsius target, which, as President Hollande memorably stated at the opening of COP21 in Paris, is the 'absolute ceiling' for global temperature rise if we are to prevent climate catastrophe. Anything above 1.5 degrees C is a death sentence for us and for the planet.
A new report released in the Earth Systems Dynamics Journal in April 2016 maps the different consequences between a 1.5 and a 2 degree Celsius warmer world. Unsurprisingly, the 2 degree scenario is apocalyptic: extreme weather events, water scarcity, reduced crop yields, coral reef degradation and sea-level rise. We are already well on our way to creating this future. 2014 saw record-breaking temperatures and 2015 was the hottest year on record. 2016 has already surpassed previous temperature highs: in February, the global temperature was 1.34C above the average from 1951-1980, according to Nasa data.
We have now arrived at the tipping point. There is no more time for procrastination, or half-measures. The time is now, and there is no Plan B.
POLITICAL WILL
Enforcing the Paris Agreement will need world leaders' commitment for many years to come. The agreement is vulnerable, because it is subject to the vagaries of political will, and to changes in administration. President Obama has, to date, been more committed to combating climate change than any other U.S. President in recent history, and he is a key supporter of the agreement.
What happens, it has been asked, when Obama's administration comes to its end? What if the unthinkable happens and Donald Trump takes the White House? Would Trump feel bound by the Paris Agreement and continue the US's current trajectory towards decarbonization and lowering emissions? Not bloody likely. Hopefully the US will escape the fate of a Trump administration. The only hope is that Hillary Clinton, if she becomes the next President of the U.S., will demonstrate the same, or greater commitment as President Obama has done to the Paris Agreement.
THE RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION
In order for the Paris Agreement to keep the warming of the world below the 1.5 degree Celsius target governments must commit to reducing CO2 emissions "in accordance with best available science." They must commit to halt the burning of fossil fuels, which have already formed a toxic "blanket" around the earth - they must "leave it in the ground." On April 22nd, at the signing ceremony, more than 170 countries vowed to put an end to the age of fossil fuels. These are fine words; but they will remain only words if countries don't commit to eradicating fossil fuels from our energy systems. They must embark upon a renewable energy revolution now.
The transition to renewable energy is urgent and necessary; and it is already bringing great economic benefit across the world. The International Energy Agency has forecast that renewables will produce more power than coal within 15 years. In July 2015, on a windy day, Denmark's wind farms produced between 116 and 140 percent of the national electricity requirements. Mexican energy firm TAU has saved so much through use of renewable energy, that they provide their customers with as much free electricity as they wish between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. "A network of land-based 2.5 MW wind turbines... operating at as little as 20% of their rated capacity, could supply more than 40 times current worldwide consumption of electricity, more than 5 times total global use of energy in all forms," according to Harvard University. If solar's current rate of growth continues, its output could match world power demand in just 18 years time. Big banks like UBS and Citigroup are investing heavily in solar, a market Deutsche Bank estimates will be worth a staggering $5 trillion in 2035. 'The sun has become mainstream, and... promises to democratise energy generation,' writes Leonie Greene in the Telegraph.
CO2 emissions reductions that meet the ambition of the Paris Agreement can only be achieved if a transition occurs from fossil fuels to renewables and if the 196 countries that gathered in Paris implement what the Agreement sets out on sequestration and decarbonisation. Article 4.1 of the Agreement states that "In order to achieve the long-term temperature goal ... Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible ... and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century..."
One of the highlights of COP21 was Al Gore's speech "Impacts and Solutions to the Climate Crisis." Before a packed crowd of more than 2,000 people he sounded the death knell for fossil fuels with a sobering and powerful address, in which he championed the viability of renewable energy.
However, not everyone has seen the (solar-powered) light. Oil and gas are currently the cheapest they have been for many years and this is a dangerous incentive for energy corporations. "A critical point is that while the world's governments have signed on the dotted line, the world's companies have not... As long as fossil fuel energy is cheaper than renewables, oil gas and coal will be dispensed by the energy companies and burned by us all in vast quantities." Herbert Girardet writes in his article "COP-out in Paris," in Resurgence and Ecologist magazine, May/ June 2016. China, India and Indonesia are investing as heavily as ever in coal-powered electricity generation. Here in Great Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has enthusiastically adopted fracking, touting it as the solution for energy independence for the UK despite the irrefutable evidence that fracking causes earthquakes, contamination of aquifers, leakage of toxic chemicals into the ground, air pollution, increased road traffic and significantly contributes to climate change. Each well drilled requires millions of litres of water, which places an immense strain on resources.
EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS
In his speech Al Gore mentioned the Weather Disasters report from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), released a week before COP21 got underway, which details how 90% of the natural disasters during the last 20 years have been caused by extreme weather events. The report records 6,457 floods, storms, heat waves, droughts and other weather-related disasters, claiming the lives of 606,000 people, an average of some 30,000 per year, with an additional 4.1 billion people injured, left homeless or in need of emergency assistance. Gore said "This is the acceleration of the climate crisis ... It's like a nature hike through the book of Revelations."
The figures in the report for this year end in August 2015, but -- needless to say -- weather related disasters continue to ravage the world. In the whole of 2015 earthquakes, floods, heat waves and landslides left 22,773 people dead, affected 98.6 million others and caused $66.5bn (PS47bn) of economic damage. In December 2015 a powerful winter cyclone left devastation across the globe, leading to two tornado outbreaks in the United States and disastrous river flooding, driving temperatures in the North Pole up to 50 degrees above average. On 13 January this year a huge, dry electrical storm set more than 70 fires rampaging across the island of Tasmania, destroying most of the island's UNESCO world heritage site, which contained unique, ancient and irreplaceable ecosystems, including many trees that were over a thousand years old. This month devastating floods killed 53 people in Pakistan alone.
FOREST LANDSCAPE RESTORATION AND THE BONN CHALLENGE
In order to preserve the planet and combat climate change, we must preserve the forests - between now and 2020 alone, we stand to lose 1,460,000,000 acres of tropical forest and 273,750 species. We must also restore degraded, and deforested land to purpose. There are 2 billion hectares of degraded and deforested land across the world with potential for restoration. Restoration of degraded and deforested lands is not simply about planting trees. People and communities are at the heart of the restoration effort, which transforms barren or degraded areas of land into healthy, fertile working landscapes. Restored land can be put to a mosaic of uses such as agriculture, protected wildlife reserves, ecological corridors, regenerated forests, managed plantations, agroforestry systems and river or lakeside plantings to protect waterways.
The Bonn Challenge was established by the German Government and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) at a ministerial roundtable in September 2011. It is the largest restoration initiative the world has ever seen. The objective of the Bonn Challenge was originally to restore 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested land across the world by 2020. The New York Declaration on Forests raised the Bonn Challenge ambition in September 2014 by calling for restoration of an additional 200 million hectares by 2030, bringing the total target to 350 million hectares by 2030.
Achieving the 350 million hectare by 2030 goal would result in estimates of 0.6 - 1.7 Gt CO2 sequestered per on year average, reaching 1.6 - 3.4 Gt per year in 2030 and totalling 11.8 - 33.5 Gt over the period 2011-2030. Even restoring 150 million hectares would capture 47 Gigatonnes of CO2, and reduce the emissions gap by 17%. Forest restoration is invaluable in the race to tackle climate change. That is why, in 2012, I became IUCN Ambassador for the Bonn Challenge. Not only is forest landscape restoration a critical tool against climate change, it is an issue of the most basic human rights: the right to food, shelter, clean water and sustainable livelihoods. The Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation (BJHRF) of which I am Founder, President and Chief Executive, is committed to forest conservation and restoration. Almost 20 million hectares have already been pledged by governments, communities and the private sector. Commitments of further 40 million hectares are being finalised.
INDIGENOUS PEOPLE'S RIGHTS
I am concerned by the lack of protection for the rights of indigenous peoples in the Paris Agreement, who have time and again been proven the best custodians of ecosystems, including forests. According to Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, "studies over the last year have shown that indigenous peoples outperform every other owner, public or private entities on forest conservation." According to the Center for World Indigenous Peoples, it was pressure from the United States, the European Union, and Norwegian delegates at COP21 which 'caused reference to the "rights of Indigenous peoples" to be cut from the binding portion of the Paris Agreement, relegating the only mention of Indigenous rights to the purely aspirational preamble.' Megan Davis, UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Chair, said in her statement to the COP, "Sadly, the agreement asks States to merely consider their human rights obligations, rather than comply with them."
The critical role of indigenous people in combating climate change is recognised in the Paris Agreement -- but their rights are not protected. Article 7.5 of the Paris Agreement acknowledges "that adaptation action should follow a country-driven, gender-responsive, participatory and fully transparent approach, taking into consideration vulnerable groups, communities and ecosystems, and should be based on and guided by the best available science and, as appropriate, traditional knowledge, knowledge of indigenous peoples and local knowledge systems."
WOMEN
Article 7.5's language regarding women, "a gender-responsive... approach," is also weak and non-binding. It has long been established that women are disproportionately affected by climate change, especially in poorer countries. They are often most responsible for food production, household water supply and energy for heating and cooking - activities which will be seriously impacted by climate change. Yet women are often underrepresented or excluded from decision-making.
We cannot combat climate change without involving all stakeholders, including women and indigenous people, and their rights should have been at the heart of the Paris Agreement.
FINANCING
The Agreement provides $100 bn in financing to compensate poorer countries' for 'loss and damage,' mitigation and adaptation. But this is a drop in the ocean, to put it mildly. Much more financing is needed to ensure that low lying and developing countries don't pay the price for decades of reckless gas guzzling, coal burning and emissions by the richest countries.
CONCLUSION
To hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 degC above pre-industrial levels" is a mockery. Much as I applaud the historic diplomatic achievements the agreement represents, the treaty contains fatal flaws that threaten us and the planet. This is the most important treaty the world has ever known; world leaders should have come away with an agreement that is bold and ambitious enough to save us from climate catastrophe. As the climate demonstrators at COP21 called out, as they assembled peacefully in the conference halls and Paris streets, as was written large on the signs they carried aloft: it is "1.5 to stay alive."
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The Paris Climate Agreement: Hope or Hype?
Dec 31, 2015
It has become a predictable pattern at the annual UN climate conferences for participants to describe the outcome in widely divergent ways. This was first apparent after the high-profile Copenhagen conference in 2009 when a four-page non-agreement was praised by diplomats but denounced by well-known critics as a "sham," a "farce," and a mere face-saver. UN insiders proclaimed the divisive 2013 Warsaw climate conference a success, even though global South delegates and most civil society observers had staged an angry walk-out a day before its scheduled conclusion.
So it was no surprise when this happened again on December 12th in Paris. Francois Hollande praised the Paris Agreement as "ambitious," "binding," and "universal." Ban Ki-moon said it ushers in a "new era of global cooperation," and UN climate convention executive secretary Christiana Figueres described it as "an agreement of solidarity with the most vulnerable." Barack Obama waxed triumphant and proclaimed the outcome a testament to American leadership in diplomacy and technology.
It is clear that those who are praising the agreement and those who emphasize its shortcomings live in almost entirely different worlds.
Friends of the Earth International, on the other hand, immediately denounced the agreement as a "sham of a deal," adding that the most vulnerable people around the world would "feel the worst impacts of our politicians' failure to take tough enough action." The renowned elder climate scientist James Hansen called it a "fraud," adding, "It's just bullshit for them to say: 'We'll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.' It's just worthless words." British climatologist Kevin Anderson, among the most politically forthright of current scientists, described the agreement as "weaker than Copenhagen" and "not consistent with the latest science." More moderate in their criticisms were key figures such as Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace International, who described the agreement as "one step on a long road ..., but it is progress," and 350.org's Bill McKibben, who emphasized the agreement's underlying challenge to the supremacy of the fossil fuel industry. "This didn't save the planet," McKibben wrote, "but it may have saved the chance of saving the planet," in part by challenging the growing climate justice movement to keep moving forward.
Perhaps Guardian columnist George Monbiot posted the most realistic assessment on the day of the final deal. "By comparison to what it could have been, it's a miracle," he wrote. "By comparison to what it should have been, it's a disaster." It is clear that those who are praising the agreement and those who emphasize its shortcomings live in almost entirely different worlds.
One such world is dominated by the protocols of international diplomacy, the very real threat of obstruction by the Republican-controlled US Congress, and the logistical near-impossibility of getting representatives of 195 countries to agree to anything substantive. Consider China, whose overheated economy may be just beginning to slow down, and India, which is still growing rapidly and claims that continued economic expansion is needed to help its hundreds of millions of impoverished citizens. Saudi Arabia, according to long-time oil industry analyst Antonia Juhasz, was very active behind the scenes, working to suppress even rhetorical limits on continued fossil fuel expansion. The US delegation, led by John Kerry and climate envoy Todd Stern, was lobbying hard for a more "inclusive" agreement - superseding the historic responsibilities of industrialized nations - while struggling to minimize the financial cost to the richest countries. Recall that it was Stern who argued, with unsurpassed arrogance during the lead-up to the 2013 Warsaw conference, "It is unwarranted to assign blame to developed countries for emissions before the point at which people [sic] realized that those emissions caused harm to the climate system."
The world the diplomats inhabit couldn't be farther removed from the places where the impacts of continuing climate chaos are felt the most. In that world, people are working harder year by year to grow food and sustain their lives in the face of an increasingly unstable global climate. They struggle through seasons of devastating floods, droughts and wildfires that become more intense every year. The groundwater in numerous small island nations is increasingly contaminated by saltwater from rising seas and some Arctic communities are literally collapsing into the melting permafrost. The Philippines are now assaulted by unprecedented late-season typhoons year after year, and this year's extreme El Nino current has heightened the impact of protracted droughts from northern Mexico to South Africa and the Middle East. Many of the million or so refugees that have swept into Europe from the Mideast's expanding civil wars first saw their lives upended by those droughts, which killed as much as 85 percent of the livestock in parts of Syria, for example. While global warming brought balmy mid-December weather to the northern tier of North America, it has strengthened deadly tornadoes across the US South, flooded major cities in northern England, and threatens a pattern of perpetual extreme weather throughout the tropics and sub-tropics. In that world, the Paris Agreement's rhetorical promise to "pursue efforts to limit the [global] temperature increase to 1.5 degC above pre-industrial levels" is far too little, far too late.
Inside the Agreement
So what does the Paris Agreement actually offer to those facing an increasingly unstable future and what is it lacking? First, it's important to distinguish the agreement's various parts. The final Paris document comprises a twelve-page "Agreement" and a twenty-page "Adoption" text. The former outlines most of the substantive steps agreed to by the 195 countries represented in Paris and the latter describes just how they will be implemented.
Words like "clarity," "transparency," "integrity," "consistency," and "ambition" appear throughout the text, but there's very little to assure that these aspirations can be realized.
Perhaps most widely cited is the Agreement's one-page preamble, which appears to embrace all the diverse concerns that various countries and civil society representatives brought to Paris. It preserves the original UN climate convention's focus on "common but differentiated responsibilities" for climate action among countries, as well as the "principle of equity" that was nearly lost in Warsaw and Lima. It acknowledges that some people are "particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change," as well as the "specific needs and special situations" of certain countries. The preamble links climate action to poverty eradication, invokes an end to hunger, and affirms the "imperatives of a just transition of the workforce." There is an acknowledgment of the rights of indigenous peoples, migrants, children and others, along with an appeal to "gender equality" and "intergenerational equity." The "integrity of all ecosystems" is "noted," along with the imperative of biodiversity protection, "recognized by some cultures as Mother Earth," and even "the importance for some of the concept of 'climate justice'," albeit safely embedded inside quotation marks. The preamble was carefully crafted to offer something to nearly everyone.
In contrast, the most specific outcomes of the Paris Agreement mainly reflect the process that went into it, i.e. the expectation that countries will continue to present voluntary "Nationally Determined Contributions" toward reducing climate-altering emissions. These quasi-pledges will be renewed periodically (every five years for now), with a loosely stated expectation of increasing ambition over time. As previously reported in this space, the "intended contributions" submitted by some 187 countries prior to Paris represent a path toward 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degF) average warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100, or perhaps 2.8 degrees C. if various countries' commitments are strengthened over time in line with current trends. Given the level of climate destabilization we have experienced at just below 1 degree of warming, this is indeed a recipe for global chaos, though the rhetorical nod to 1.5 degrees suggests that it has become unacceptable to nearly everyone - at least in principle.
Still, the means for limiting average warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees are largely aspirational, and this is reflected in the agreement's language throughout. Words like "clarity," "transparency," "integrity," "consistency," and "ambition" appear throughout the text, but there's very little to assure that these aspirations can be realized. UN staff are to create all manner of global forums, working groups and expert panels to move the discussions forward but, as was clear prior to Paris, the main focus is to instill a kind of moral obligation to drive diplomats and their governments to take further steps. Article 15 of the agreement proposes a "mechanism to facilitate implementation and promote compliance," but this takes the form of an internationally representative "expert-based" committee that is to be "transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive." This compliance "mechanism" is described in three short sentences in the main Agreement and another couple of paragraphs in the Adoption document; as predicted, there's nothing to legally pressure intransigent countries or corporations to do much of anything.
Discussions in the lead-up to Paris did raise some hopes that the world might come to terms with the obligation to end the combustion of fossil fuels by mid-century at the latest. Studies by James Hansen and others suggest that time is of the essence and that the actual pace of reducing carbon emissions could determine whether destabilizing climate chaos will continue to unfold for decades or instead persist for many centuries into the future. It appears that an explicit goal of "decarbonization" was even part of the pre-Paris conversation for a time. Article 4 of the final agreement falls far short of that, however, stating that total emissions should peak "as soon as possible," fall rapidly thereafter, and aim for a "balance" between sources and sinks of greenhouse gases sometime after 2050. Paragraph 17 of the Adoption document admits that current national "contributions" fall considerably short of a 2 degree goal, much less 1.5 degrees and a later paragraph "invites" the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to study the specific impacts of warming above 1.5 degrees. However, the Paris Agreement's emphasis on sources and sinks represents a substantive step back from the goal of decarbonization and echoes the IPCC's 2014 policy report, which promoted highly speculative carbon capture technologies as a means to compensate for continued fossil fuel use. This approach also bolsters largely fraudulent carbon offset markets (see below) and could enable a host of outlandish geoengineering schemes that would only further destabilize the earth's climate systems.
The hotly contested issue of how climate mitigations in the global South will be financed was postponed once again to next year's planned conference in Morocco, with the document "strongly urging" developed countries to fulfill Obama and Hillary Clinton's 2009 Copenhagen promise of $100 billion per year in climate-related financing by 2020. By 2025, countries are to "set a new collective quantified goal from a floor of USD 100 billion per year," but there's a distinct lack of agreement about what actually counts as climate finance. Global South delegates insist that the rich world is obligated to fund non-polluting energy developments in impoverished regions in order to help curtail their continued economic dependence on fossil fuels, but northern diplomats prefer to emphasize "public-private partnerships," seek credit for existing aid and loan programs and have proposed countless other loopholes. The documents are full of calls for new information-sharing platforms, but are virtually silent on how rich countries can ever be held to their implied financial commitments.
Even more disappointing was the language on "loss and damage," i.e. how countries will be compensated for the continuing destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure in the face of accelerating warming. India's Business Standard reported halfway through the Paris conference that the US had proposed to "recognize the importance of averting and minimizing loss and damage from climate change," but only "on a cooperative [sic] basis that does not involve liability and compensation." The final text (Article 8) is a bit more specific in describing those losses and damages, but paragraph 52 of the Adoption text states specifically that "Article 8 ... does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation."
A related financial uncertainty in the lead-up to Paris concerned the future of the carbon markets that were established under the now-mordant Kyoto Protocol to nominally help facilitate international emissions reductions. It is well-established by now that carbon markets like the European Trading System have proved virtually useless for reducing emissions, that "cap-and-trade" legislation failed in the US Congress despite an overload of corporate giveaways and loopholes, and that the international offset markets enshrined under Kyoto's "Clean Development Mechanism" (CDM) have been riddled with fraud and double-accounting. The value of international carbon credits is an all-time low - well below a dollar per ton of carbon emissions. And the Kyoto principle of "additionality" - the idea that credits to offset domestic emissions growth should support overseas projects that would not otherwise have happened - proved to be a farce. By some estimates, a considerable majority of projects funded by "Certified Emissions Reduction" credits under the CDM were already well underway.
An important warning about the future of the CDM arrived midway through Paris from Bolivian climate activist Pablo Solon. Solon was summarily removed as Bolivia's chief climate negotiator after the Copenhagen and Cancun conferences, likely as punishment for his highly effective critiques of the US strategy to replace Kyoto's mandated emissions cuts with the present system of voluntary "contributions." On December 7th, Solon warned that a new "Mechanism to Support Sustainable Development" was hidden deep inside the conference text. That provision indeed appears in Article 6, albeit only to be used by countries "on a voluntary basis." While the same article touts the need for unspecified "non-market approaches" in two places, there is a clear mandate to continue to use what are euphemistically referred to as "internationally transferred mitigation outcomes." In practice this means that the earth's remaining carbon sinks, including forests, will continue to be managed for the enhancement of carbon markets, and invoked to demonstrate paper compliance with emissions-reduction goals while the planet continues to burn.
A final hidden item in the Agreement is the omission of any steps to regulate rising pollution levels from international shipping and aviation. This was one of the key issues cited by climatologist Kevin Anderson when he compared the Paris outcome unfavorably with Copenhagen's. While these emissions now amount to only 4.4 percent of the world's total, according to the Wall Street Journal, they are projected to grow rapidly, even as other emissions sources are beginning to decline.
What's Next?
On the Monday morning immediately following the Paris conference, the New York Times reported on page 1, "If nothing else, analysts and experts say, the accord is a signal to businesses and investors that the era of carbon reduction has arrived." Indeed Peabody Energy (formerly Peabody Coal) reported a nearly 13 percent decline in its share value that week and a prominent solar stock index was up 4.5 percent. The Times predicted more bankruptcies in the coal sector and reminded readers of the public support for a carbon tax announced last spring by four leading European oil companies. Major coal-dependent utilities are diversifying into large solar projects and Ford is working to expand its fleet of electric cars. More than $3 trillion in financial assets have been divested from fossil fuels in just a few years. The recent congressional deal on taxes and spending included an unanticipated five-year extension of tax credits for solar and wind projects, and Bloomberg News predicted that this could spur a doubling of current US capacity.
Clearly, it will require more than statements of ambitious climate goals to corral the overarching capitalist imperative to grow and expand, or even to rein in political pressures to keep diverting public funds to support fossil fuel corporations.
But energy markets are fickle and levels of renewable energy investment have fluctuated widely in recent years. The persistent decline in oil prices has helped shut down some of the most troubling new exploration efforts, such as in Alaska, but it also makes investments in renewables appear less favorable. While the expansion of renewable energy promises a boom in "green jobs" and may help facilitate the "just transition" alluded to in the Paris text, large renewable energy projects can be highly resource- and capital-intensive. For example, to meet the ambitious renewable energy goals proposed by Mark Jacobson and his research group at Stanford University would require some 1.7 billion new energy installations worldwide, from modest rooftop systems to massive solar and wind farms. While Jacobson and his colleagues have demonstrated the feasibility of meeting all current energy needs by mid-century with genuinely renewable energy (no nuclear, no biomass, no new mega-hydro), some questions remain as to both the environmental and economic feasibility of an expansion of renewables on that scale.
Meanwhile, it appears that most new renewable capacity may still be adding to the total energy mix rather than replacing fossil fuels. A 2012 study suggested that just a quarter of non-fossil energy replaces fossil fuels, and only a tenth of non-fossil electricity; all the rest is simply adding more capacity to the system. When it comes to saving energy, corporations are still reluctant to commit significant capital; a study described in the New York Times a few years ago concluded that most companies insist on a two-year payback for investments aimed to increase the energy efficiency of their operations. A pre-Paris discussion paper from San Francisco-based Eco-Equity reported that direct fossil fuel subsidies - roughly $775 billion worldwide in 2012 - equal the combined annual cost of a transition away from fossil fuels in developing countries plus the estimated need to fund adaptation, losses and damages from climate change. Clearly, it will require more than statements of ambitious climate goals to corral the overarching capitalist imperative to grow and expand, or even to rein in political pressures to keep diverting public funds to support fossil fuel corporations.
This, of course, is where the worldwide climate movement comes in. My earlier discussion highlighted the potential convergence of "Blockadia" and "Alternatiba" that public actions in the lead-up to Paris were designed to symbolize. Opposition to new fossil fuel infrastructure has spread throughout the world in recent years, as have an impressive array of practical, grassroots alternatives to business as usual. The 350.org network and its global allies are now planning a worldwide mobilization against the fossil fuel industry for May of 2016. It will be preceded by countless local and regional rallies, marches, and direct actions, culminating in a unified focus on the world's most destructive fossil fuel extraction sites. Perhaps if enough people are in the streets to say no to continued fossil fuel dependence and yes to community-centered alternatives, grassroots pressure can succeed where diplomacy continues to fall short.
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Millennials Must Keep up the Pressure Following the Paris Climate Deal
My generation has a responsibility to find practical solutions to the environmental problems we have inherited and ensure politicians honor their promises
Dec 30, 2015
I was 15, sitting on a London tube headed for the Houses of Parliament with my mum, when she leant forward and warned me that she might be about to get arrested. It was 2009 and we were on our way to a climate change protest she had helped to organise.
Together with a group of friends - all women - she had co-founded an environmental lobbying group to demand that the government take urgent action on climate change in the run-up the Copenhagen UN climate talks.
I was too young and perhaps still too politically naive to engage with the conference's history. So when she explained that for its entire 15-year timescale, it had failed to come to any meaningful agreements - and that this was the year we had to try to make sure it finally did, I'm sure I only grunted in an indifferent manner from under my shaggy mop of hair.
But Copenhagen didn't go as anyone had hoped. It wasn't until six years later, aged 21, that I reflected on that experience.
I had moved to New York to study architecture. One of my first classes was on sustainable systems and as I sat listening to the professor give us a basic introduction to climate change, it all came flooding back. It struck me that here I was, five conferences later and still there were no binding agreements. No clear solutions. No plan of action.
Our first assignment was to design a structure that would help protect a city from flooding. It was a sobering moment. I wondered if my classmates and I were fated to become a generation of architects forced to spend their careers trying to remedy the environmental disasters we humans were responsible for creating.
That class became the wake-up call I needed. I ordered books, downloaded documentaries and found myself at a weekend-long training camp with Al Gore. The event was hosted by his organisation Climate Reality with the goal of making participants into Climate Reality leaders.
Over that weekend in Iowa I met attendees as young as 12 who had persuaded their parents or teachers to take them. I learnt about Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, the 15-year-old campaigner from Colorado who was suing his government for environmental damages. He spoke at the UN last year and he works as the youth director of an organisation he founded: Earth Guardians.
I learnt about Boyan Slat, the 21-year-old environmentalist and inventor whose design for a system of cleaning plastic waste from the oceans has raised more than $2m in support for his organisation, the Ocean Clean Up.
I left that weekend with newfound optimism. I saw an ambitious generation who were keen to learn as much as they could about the environmental threats that we face. A generation who were eager to educate others and inspire action on a bigger scale than we've seen before.
Encouraged by everything I had learnt, I partnered with WWF to make a short film for the video blog I run with my brother, JacksGap. As the negotiations began to take place at COP21 in Paris, we wanted to show our audience the effects of climate change firsthand, together with the impact that we as individuals can have when we stand together to demand change.
Before I knew it I was standing on the edge of one of the world's fastest retreating glaciers in Greenland and then at the front of the people's climate march alongside my mum and thousands of others in London. This time however the conference wouldn't end in failure. In fact it would become the first to produce an ambitious legally binding agreement between all 195 countries.
But the deal agreed in Paris is just the beginning. The responsibility falls on my generation to ensure politicians honour their promises and keep global warming to below 1.5C. It's imperative we keep up the pressure by continuing to organise and find practical solutions to the problems we have inherited.
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Going Beyond Paris or Even 'Sustainability': A Meta-Narrative for Sharing the World with Natural Systems
Dec 25, 2015
The Paris Climate Talks were a top-down collaboration in the global political sphere, producing a hopeful treaty to reduce carbon emissions. At this moment of global alliances, what is a bottom-up approach that rejoins humans and natural systems? Our anthropocentric mindset that devalues all other life forms, the Cartesian influence that reduces all life to functional objects or resources in the service of human goals and activities- this is the central delusion that propels us towards ecological destruction. A parallel track to the political one and equally important is reflection and deep questioning to gain a more realistic perspective of the human role in the natural world. A shift away from anthropocentrism requires a re-doing of worldview; and how we view the world speaks volumes about how we view ourselves and the intersections of Self and Other.
"Resilience" and "sustainability" are central terms and meta-narratives for imagining and creating a lighter, less destructive human footprint in the arenas of agriculture, urban planning, and elsewhere. These meta-narratives or frames help re-educate us to thinking of systems, longevity, diversity in systems, adaptability, and to ending the fallacy of endless natural resources. Yet more-than-humans are still viewed as "resources". These terms don't dispel that fallacy. We need another meta-narrative for creating a shared world with other species, in which others are valued and have inherent worth. To go even further, this new narrative can highlight the view of the Self as a collective, in which others are within us. Post-humanism is a movement within academia that imagines the world beyond anthropocentrism, but these ideas seldom make it to broader audiences or discussions.
Different cultural worldviews contribute to mutual thriving across species, or mutual destruction. In India and parts of Africa, sacred groves are protected due to religious significance and remain areas of high biodiversity and old-growth trees. Many indigenous groups view other species as kin, and as having their own cultures. Humans and other species live in a multi-cultural world, and each deserves respect, and especially the species we choose to eat.
What sort of mindset, perspective, worldview equalizes humans and natural systems and emphasizes interconnectedness, such that both can thrive? What mindset recognizes relationships across species, instead of viewing sociality only in the human realm? And what is the appropriate language here? Conservation biologists talk of "coexistence" with elephants, wolves, other large mammals whose lives sit on the brink of extinction due to habitat loss, poaching, unwillingness to share landscapes. Is "coexistence" a term that works for re-imagining, re-building relationships to other species? The words we choose at this moment are essential.
"Coexistence" emphasizes the concept of living in parallel lines, tolerating the presence of the other. This isn't representative of the inherent interconnectedness within systems. Millions of bacteria inhabit us in mutually beneficial arrangements that are more intertwined than "coexisting." Half of the oxygen humans breath comes from marine phytoplankton; this is not a parallel living arrangement. Even species that don't rely on one another for air share commonalities that connect them. Our lives are bound in a mutuality.
A mindset that emphasizes similarities of form or function across humans and non-humans is one possibility. Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro describes an Amerindian worldview in which animals and plants were all once human and still have a human essence but now wear a cloak of a different kind. He applies this worldview within the discipline of anthropology for an inclusive multi-species approach. Another anthropologist, Tim Ingold, in Scotland, writes about "correspondence," which is an intermingling of sentience among species. Anthropologist Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory brings non-humans into analysis of systems as actors, agents. The field of political ecology begins to view non-humans in an equal position to humans as agents. Ecologist Ricardo Rozzi proposes we move beyond Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic, to bio-culturalism, which "couples human habits, habitats and communities of co-inhabitatants", or non-humans on the landscape. Rozzi explains that "ethics" comes from ethos, which originally meant "the adobe of an animal." Our notions of ethics were originally tied to our connections to other species and their habitual ways.
The term "cohabitation" connotes sharing landscapes, sharing home, which is closer to representing interconnectedness. Cohabitation intermixes logos, mythos, and ethics, storying landscapes and seascapes again with meanings, metaphors, narratives of shared histories, shared places. Cohabitation is especially controversial when applied to large carnivores like wolves and leopards. Ecologist Sunetro Ghosal, who studies large cat conservation in India, explores cohabitation. Scientists view leopards as dependent on them to create conservation plans and understand their behavior, which may contribute less to cohabitation, to sharing landscapes than some of the tribal peoples' views in which leopards are sacred members of their community. They know how to prevent attacks and even know individual leopards and their past experiences, which sometimes explain the reason for a violent episode. The leopards are people, of a sort.
Building relationships to other species, to natural systems is central to this inner way forward. Jane Goodall and many others in her field present how important it is to become like the ones they study, to enlist their mimicry and empathy, and become the Other in a sense. The Other is also within us, as German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk explains in an alternate view of subjectivity. Our own subjectivity involves having the Other within us. In other words, we are not bounded selves but are who we are through our relationships, interactions, and holding others within us. These ideas and ways of being need more of a spotlight and more discussion. This is a way forward, re-establishing humans as a positive force on this planet instead of destroying all life forms in our wake.
Let's study places in the world where humans successfully cohabitate with other species. Cohabitation should be studied in academic institutions, supported with grants by large institutions, and should become a narrative we discuss and perhaps engage with. It's more radical than coexistence or sustainability, but why not elevate values in this learning curve. Science tends to avoid values, but you can't learn how to live with others without valuing them.
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