17/06/2017

How World Cities Moving Forward On Climate Change Leave The US President Behind

The Conversation - 

A partial map of all the cities which pledge to fight climate change, with or without Donald Trump. Global Convenant of Mayors/Google Earth
When US President Donald Trump announced that his country would be pulling out of the Paris agreement, the immediate reaction across the globe was one of despair, anger and helplessness.
The Paris agreement is widely seen as the last opportunity for the world to unite and limit the increase in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius. How can this international agreement remain relevant when the world's second-largest polluter chooses to remain outside its ambit and is not willing to be held responsible?
This wasn't the first time that the United States has reneged on a climate deal. George W. Bush's government had refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol (1997), which proved to be the death knell for the agreement and international cooperation at large. An entire decade was wasted with countries sparring over who was really responsible for the mess we found ourselves in, until Paris.
But 20 years is a long time, and between Kyoto and Paris, we find ourselves living in a completely different geopolitical and economic global framework.
The good news is that this time around, there might be reasons to not despair. Within the climate diplomacy framework, cities led by powerful mayors are effectively asserting themselves like nation-states and showing themselves willing to act collectively.

City coalition for climate
Speaking at the press conference about the US withdrawal from the Paris agreement, President Trump declared that he was "elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris. Within minutes of his speech, the mayor of Pittsburgh issued a statement reaffirming the city's commitment to the Paris agreement.
He issued an executive order committing his city to the accord by continuing efforts to end the use of landfills, reduce energy consumption by half and develop a fossil fuel-free fleet of city vehicles.

Mayor Bill Peduto was not alone. All in all, 175 mayors (and counting) of the biggest cities across the country, cutting across party lines and representing 51 million Americans, reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris agreement.
On social media, #wearestillin quickly became viral while US mayors pledged their commitment to climate change on an eponymous website listing all supportive cities.
Since Trump's decision to pull out, US states have jumped in. On June 6, Hawaii enacted legislation in support of its Paris commitments. The same day, California independently signed an accord with Germany, with the aim of empowering local communities to combat climate change.
It's not just US cities that support the Paris Agreement. Carlos Jasso/Reuters
Mayors from around the world reacted, pledging their support for the Paris agreement, often adorning their cities' monuments with green lights.

Powerful, independent cities
This isn't the first time that cities have found themselves at the centre stage of international politics. In fact, historically, most global cities have preceded their respective nation-states by over 5,000 years. But by the late 19th century, when the concept of the Westphalian sovereign nation-state developed in modern international relations, and countries became the main actors on the diplomatic stage, the political clout of cities diminished.
Over the last decade, this has changed significantly. For starters, some cities have grown so big that by virtue of their economic might, they're now able to assert themselves independently. New York's GDP (US$1.45 trillion) is larger than that of Spain (US$1.1 trillion) or South Korea (US$1.38 trillion).
São Paulo state in Brazil is wealthier than Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia combined, and Guangdong in China is richer than Russia or Mexico.
Most big cities in the world have also been able to organise themselves under a common international forum, which only further enhances their bargaining power. Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI), United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) or the Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40) are a few such examples.
These hybrid and often complex networks have been particularly successful in fostering innovative modes of cooperation between the private sector and cities.
The private insurance industry is working with several cities across the world to identify and quantify risks as well as design mitigation strategies and post-disaster financing instruments. It's a win-win situation for both parties as the insurance industry helps develop cities' climate resilience and, in return, gains access to new markets.

City diplomacy
Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is a strong proponent of this form of city diplomacy. He had once cheekily remarked:
We're the level of government closest to the majority of the world's people. We're directly responsible for their well-being and their futures. So while nations talk, but too often drag their heels, cities act.
True to his word, within a few hours of President Trump's press conference, Bloomberg had managed to organise a coalition through the Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40), which he chairs.
On June 2 2017, addressing a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace, Bloomberg assured the international community that the US will meet its Paris commitment, and through a partnership among cities, states, and businesses, will seek to remain part of the Paris agreement.
He went a step further and pledged US$15 million, the amount that the Bonn-based secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) stands to lose as a result of Washington's decision to pull out of the deal.
Accepting Bloomberg's proposal, Christina Figueres of the UNFCCC has even promised to evolve a method for cities to be able to independently declare their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), a responsibility earlier reserved only for countries in the Paris agreement.
IMAGE
City leaders have also been active members of the 2016-founded Global covenant of mayors for climate and energy, an international alliance of mayors grouping 7,450 cities across the world dedicated to fighting climate change.
President Trump's decision to pull out of the deal seems to have inspired action not just in American cities but also in the developing world.

The cost of climate change
Last week, India announced that it does not plan to build any new coal plants after 2022. It has also committed to generating 57% of its power through renewable sources by 2027, far exceeding its earlier target and three years before schedule.
Aided by a favourable market and falling technology costs, countries such as India and China are keen to assume global leadership.
Indian mayors are also particularly conscious of the financial cost of climate change. The 2015 floods that hit the southern state of Tamil Nadu and particularly the city of Chennai, caused a US$3 billion loss to the Indian economy. Chennai is now seeking to learn resilience strategies from other Indian cities that have faced similar disasters and adapted successfully.
An aerial view shows a flooded residential colony in Chennai on December 6 2015. Anindito Mukherj/Reuters
One of them is Surat, in Gujarat, on the west coast of India. The industrial, fast-growing town has been severely affected by climate change. In the last decade, Surat has experienced over 23 floods as well as an outbreak of plague in 1994.
But the town has made great strides towards resilience. From building early warning response systems, mapping communities vulnerable to flooding, setting up a system of evacuation shelters, securing the electricity grid, preventing vector-borne diseases and groundwater management programs, Surat has been able to drastically reduce the effects of climate change-induced disasters.
Globally, since 2000, climate change disasters are estimated to have cost a whopping US$2.5 trillion. The case for clean energy, resilience and sustainability is increasingly an economic one rather than purely environmental.

Climate is cities' responsibility
Cities have an added incentive and responsibility to act before it's too late. Almost all of the world's cities are dealing with one or more of the harmful effects of climate change. After all, 90% of the world's urban areas are in proximity to coastal land, which puts most cities at risk of flooding due to rising sea levels. Cities also consume ⅔ of the world's energy and are responsible for over 70% of global CO² emissions.
It is critical that cities have plans in place to deal with climate change and its effects, develop resilient infrastructure and have contingency plans for disaster recovery.
Former US president Barack Obama had committed to reducing US greenhouse gas emissions 26% to 28% by 2025, from their 2005 levels.
If the enthusiasm of the mayors over the last few weeks is anything to go by, President Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris agreement only seems to have reinvigorated efforts, strengthened resolve and motivated local leadership to redouble efforts to tackle climate change. Some US mayors are even confident of bettering Obama's commitment.
If cities, states, businesses, and civil society are able to work together and tap into networks of other cities while maintaining the right kind of momentum, Trump pulling the US out of the Paris deal might just turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

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New Research May Resolve A Climate ‘Conundrum’ Across The History Of Human Civilization

The Guardian - 

The new study also confirms the planet is warming 20 times faster than Earth's fastest natural climate change
Stalagmites and stalactites in the caves of Diros in Greece. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Earth's last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago. The warmer and more stable climate that followed allowed for the development of agriculture and the rise of human civilization. This important period encompassing the past 12,000 years is referred to as the Holocene geological epoch. It also created a "conundrum" for climate scientists, because global temperatures simulated by climate models didn't match reconstructions from proxy data.
To be specific, the overall temperature change during the Holocene matched pretty well in reconstructions and models, but the pattern didn't. The best proxy reconstruction from a 2013 paper led by Shaun Marcott estimated more warming than models from 12,000 to 7,000 years ago. Then over the past 7,000 years, Marcott's reconstruction estimated about 0.5°C cooling while model simulations showed the planet warming by about the same amount.
A new paper led by Jonathan Baker may help to resolve that discrepancy. The scientists examined stalagmites from a cave in the southern Ural Mountains of Russia. The ratio of oxygen isotopes in the stalagmites can be used to estimate past winter temperatures. The Marcott study had one known shortcoming – the proxy temperature data they used mostly represented the summer season. And as Baker explained, changes in the Earth's orbital cycles have caused cooling in the northern hemisphere summer and winter warming during the Holocene:
Because our orbit is elliptical, we're not always the same distance from the sun. About 10,000 years ago, Earth was closest to the sun during summer and farthest during winter. Today it is the opposite. Based on this variable alone, we would expect winter warming and summer cooling in the northern hemisphere (and vice versa in the southern hemisphere) over the last 10,000 years.
During the period from 15,000 to 7,000 years ago, temperatures were rising because large ice sheets were disappearing. That was especially true in the summer because back then, the Earth was closest to the sun during that season.
So the Marcott temperature reconstruction, which was predominantly based on summer temperature proxies, estimated a lot of warming from 15,000 to 7,000 years ago (more than in model simulations), then a small cooling thereafter, while models simulate a slight warming over the past 7,000 years due to a slow rise in greenhouse gases.
The stalagmite data in the Baker study show that winter temperatures behaved differently and can reconcile the discrepancies between the Marcott reconstruction and model simulations.
This suggests that the climate models are right – Earth's surface temperature warmed rapidly at the end of the last ice age, from about 17,000 to 7,000 years ago, then the rate of warming slowed as the climate stabilized. However, it didn't reverse into a cooling trend, because atmospheric greenhouse gas levels were rising.
Then of course came the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago, and carbon dioxide levels consequently shot up due to humans burning fossil fuels. As a result, temperatures have spiked as well. Over the past 130 years, global surface temperatures have risen about 20 times faster than when the Earth transitioned out of the last ice age. Over the past 40 years, the rate of global warming has been 3 times faster yet.
And that's in comparison to Earth's fastest natural climate change, when it's transitioning from an ice age to a warm period. Over the past 7,000 years, when human civilization was able to develop and thrive, Earth's temperatures and climate were quite stable. The temperature change during the past 7,000 years was about 0.5°C.
Humans have caused that much warming in just the past 25 years. If we follow through with the Paris agreement and manage to limit global warming to 2°C over a 200-year period, in that best-case scenario the Earth would still warm 20 times faster than a natural ice age transition. If we fail to cut carbon pollution, that rate could speed to more than 50 times faster than Earth's fastest natural climate change.
There are several important points we can take from the Baker study.
First, climate models are able to simulate climate changes over the history of human civilization fairly accurately.
Second, when there's a discrepancy between data and models, people have a tendency to distrust the models, but sometimes the problem lies more in the data.
Third, if not for the human influence, the climate would continue the stable conditions of the past 7,000 years, during which time human civilization developed and thrived.
Fourth and most importantly, humans are in the process of destabilizing the climate, and we're already causing global warming at a rate 20 times faster than Earth's fastest natural climate change. That's why climate scientists are so concerned, and why the Paris agreement is so important.

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Coal Is A Dinosaur And So Is The Growth Economy

Post Carbon Institute - Richard Heinberg


In a recent paper, Justin Ritchie, a Ph.D. candidate in resources and the environment at the University of British Columbia, and his co-author, UBC professor Hadi Dowlatabadi, pointed out that global estimates of the amounts of coal that are economically and technologically recoverable have fallen by two-thirds since the 1990s. This observation also formed the substance of my 2009 book, Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis, so it’s nice to see the point taken up by others. However, Ritchie and Dowlatabadi go a step further and think through the implications of the ongoing coal reserves downgrades for climate modeling.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has for years produced computer-generated models of several possible trajectories for future greenhouse gas emissions through the remainder of the century. These “representative concentration pathways,” or RCPs, include an extreme high emissions case, RCP 8.5, that is commonly referred to as “business as usual.” In this scenario, “coal use in particular increases almost 10 fold by 2100” according to IPCC authors.


At the 2015 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, at a session co-organized by Post Carbon Institute and other organizations, PCI Fellow David Hughes gave a presentation in which he showed that actual recoverable fossil fuel reserves are consistent only with low-emissions RCP scenarios. The new paper from Ritchie and Dowlatabadi reaffirms much of Hughes’s argument (though Hughes looked more broadly at reserves of all fossil fuels, plus uranium).
What does this downgrading of likely carbon emissions mean for climate change modelers, climate activists, policy makers, and concerned citizens? According to Ritchie, the implication is clearly not as simple as “don’t worry, fossil fuel depletion will solve climate change for us.” Instead, “The same finding that shrinks CO2 emissions may also lower the cost of dealing with global warming, making the Paris Agreement that addresses climate change easier to achieve,” as a Bloomberg article on Ritchie’s paper puts it. That’s because costs of climate action are typically measured against the economic growth presumed to occur if the world continues burning coal and other fossil fuels at ever-increasing rates extrapolated from recent decades. If those extrapolations are unrealistic (too high), then keeping emissions within a two-degree Celsius limit will be easier and cheaper.
Ironically, Ritchie’s and Hughes’s questioning of likely future carbon emissions (no official change has filtered through the IPCC apparatus as of yet) occurs just as Donald Trump undertakes telegenic coal advocacy and abandons the Paris climate accord. In view of the reality that America’s best coal has already been dug and burned, the notion that the industry can somehow be revived at our president’s whim would be laughable—except that the sad joke is on the hundreds of thousands of coal country voters who fell for Trump’s fake promises.
Why has the world dragged its feet in adopting more realistic fossil fuel resource estimates? Pushback from the fossil fuel industry is certainly understandable: coal, oil, and gas companies—whether traded on stock markets or government owned—derive market value from their assets, which consist of future production potentials. Lower reserves estimates translate to lower asset valuations. The motives of climate scientists and activists in overestimating burnable carbon reserves are harder to divine; one can only guess that they accept at face value the numbers from the fossil fuel industries, and then pad those numbers further out of caution (more on this in a moment). In any case, more realistic fossil fuel reserves estimates should help us come to terms with reality in several ways—not only with regard to climate modeling, but economic expectations and political prospects as well.
Every few years, the IPCC issues a major new “assessment” crammed with data and models, aimed at informing policy makers. Unfortunately, these assessments are also filled with what Oliver Gedens has called “magical thinking.” For example, the most recent IPCC assessment (its fifth, released in 2014) described a series of computer-generated models of energy and emissions pathways that would keep the world below two degrees C. Eighty percent of these rely on negative emissions technologies, of which the primary one is Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Sequestration (BECCS). The idea with BECCS is to grow enormous amounts of biomass, burn it, then capture the carbon and bury it. In order to capture and bury enough carbon to make enough of a difference, lots of biomass would be needed; by Gedens’s calculations an area larger than the size of India would have to be planted in fast-growing crops destined to be combusted. The carbon dioxide that’s captured would have to be compressed and moved through thousands of miles of pipelines to old, depleted oil and gas wells to be buried forever, requiring an infrastructure comparable to that of the current global oil industry. The costs would be enormous, as would be the risks.
Again, unrealistic assumptions about fossil fuel reserves, and therefore emissions, lead to unrealistic (i.e., implausibly expensive and risky) methods for keeping those emissions down. The only realistic solution to our climate crisis is not to put so much carbon in the atmosphere in the first place. But that path runs counter to expectations about economic growth—which requires energy. And that is almost surely at the root of the IPCC’s assumptions about future fossil fuel consumption (regardless of whether those fossil fuels are actually available to be consumed).
So far humanity has increased the global atmospheric CO2 concentration from 280 parts per million to over 400 ppm—an already dangerous level. David Hughes figures burning our remaining realistic reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas would send us to about 550 ppm. There’s an easy way of not getting to 550 ppm: leave most of those fossil fuel reserves in the ground. But that would sink the economy, unless we very rapidly develop alternative energy sources (nuclear, which is expensive and risky; or solar and wind, which are more realistic alternatives). Is it even possible to make the energy switch so quickly and completely as to avoid major bumps along the road? Building alternative energy infrastructure will itself require energy, and during the crucial early stages of the transition most of that energy will have to come from fossil fuels. There’s no way to bootstrap the energy transition process with energy from, say solar panels and wind turbines, because wind, and especially solar, technologies take years to energetically pay for their own manufacture and installation. So to avert burning even more fossil fuels than we otherwise would (in order to build all those solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, heat pumps, and so on), resulting in a big pulse of carbon emissions, we would have to severely curtail the use of fossil fuels for current purposes—the maintenance of business as usual. That would also imperil economic growth. And we are talking about a remarkably small time window available for the shift, compared with the decades required for past energy transitions. It’s all so complicated that one can get a headache just thinking about it.


The main stumbling block that leads policy makers to twist their logic into pretzels is economic growth. Remove the requirement for growth, and it’s barely possible (not easy, but possible) to reconcile carbon reserves, emissions, energy sources, and warming targets—if governments somehow dedicate enough money and policy effort to the job. However, with further economic growth as an absolute requirement, the resulting climate models fester with internal contradictions and with assumptions about speculative technologies that very few people believe can be scaled up sufficiently, and that may have economic, environmental, and political repercussions that no one is prepared to deal with.
We cannot afford to hide the implications of realistic fossil fuels reserves estimates behind magical thinking. Perhaps the most important of those implications is that the world is probably just about at peak energy right now, give or take a decade. If we act immediately and strongly to rein in climate change, then a peak in world energy usage will likely occur more or less immediately. If we don’t act, then we may have another decade before fossil fuel depletion results in peak energy anyway. Our energy mix will shift: in the case of strong climate policy, oil will start to decline first (due to depletion), probably before 2020, and coal as well (due to policy), with natural gas growing until roughly 2020-2050, when it peaks globally from depletion. Without strong climate policy, coal peaks anyway (due to depletion) around 2025 (Chinese coal consumption appears to have peaked in 2013-2014). The amount of energy we get from nuclear power probably won’t change much over this time period. Renewables will contribute a larger share, depending on investment levels and policy supports, but cannot realistically expand far enough, fast enough, to maintain energy growth and therefore economic growth.
So overall, one way or the other, we have just about hit the maximum burn rate our civilization is likely to achieve, and it’s mostly downhill from here. That has implications for robust economic growth (it’s essentially over), and hence for war and peace, inequality, political stability, and further population expansion. Dealing with the end of energy growth, and therefore economic growth, is the biggest political and social challenge of our time—though it’s unlikely to be recognized as such. (Our biggest ecological challenges consist of climate change, species extinctions, and ocean acidification.) The impacts of the end of growth will likely be masked by financial crashes and socio-political stresses that will rivet everyone’s attention while a quiet trend churns away in the background, undoing all our assumptions and expectations about the world we humans have constructed over the past couple of centuries.
If we’re smart, we will recognize that deeper trend and adapt to it in ways that preserve the best of what we have accomplished, and make life as fulfilling as it can be for as many people as possible, even while the amount of energy available to us ratchets downward. We’ll act to rein in population growth and aim for a gradual overall population decline, so that per capita energy use does not have to decline as fast as total use. We’ll act to minimize ecological disruption by protecting habitat and species. We’ll make happiness, not consumption, the centerpiece of economic policy.
If we’re not so smart, we’ll join the dinosaurs.

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