08/11/2017

Here’s How Far The World Is From Meeting Its Climate Goals

New York Times - Brad Plumer | Nadja Popovich

Two years after countries signed a landmark climate agreement in Paris, the world remains far off course from preventing drastic global warming in the decades ahead. On Monday, the latest round of post-Paris international climate talks begin in Bonn, Germany, to discuss how to step up efforts.

Under the Paris deal, each country put forward a proposal to curtail its greenhouse-gas emissions between now and 2030. But no major industrialized country is currently on track to fulfill its pledge, according to new data from the Climate Action Tracker. Not the European Union. Not Canada. Not Japan. And not the United States, which under President Trump is still planning to leave the Paris agreement by 2020.
Worse, even if governments do take further steps to meet their individual pledges, the world will still be on pace to warm well in excess of 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the threshold that world leaders vowed to avoid in Paris because they deemed it unacceptably risky.
“One year after the Paris Agreement entered into force, we still find ourselves in a situation where we are not doing nearly enough to save hundreds of millions of people from a miserable future,” said Erik Solheim, head of the United Nations Environment Program.


Even before the election of Mr. Trump, the goal set by former President Barack Obama of slashing United States emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 would have been difficult to hit. While emissions from the United States power sector are falling rapidly — as hundreds of coal plants retire in favor of cleaner natural gas, wind and solar — other sectors, like transportation and heavy industry, have proven harder to clean up.
Mr. Trump, for his part, has disavowed his predecessor’s pledge and is dismantling Obama-era regulations designed to push down emissions further, such as the Clean Power Plan. And while states like New York and California are still pursuing their own policies on renewable energy and electric vehicles, they may not prove sufficient to close the gap.
For now, analysts think the United States will fall well short of its Paris pledge. That, in turn, could make it harder for future administrations to pursue the deeper emissions cuts by mid-century needed to help keep the world below 2 degrees of global warming.
Climate Action Tracker provides a rough estimate of the cuts each country would need to make to avoid 2ºC of warming, with wealthier nations expected to do more. How to divide up the burden remains a major debate within climate talks.


The E.U. may fall slightly short of its promise to cut emissions 40 percent by 2030, compared with 1990 levels. While European officials have created a continent-wide cap-and-trade system to curb emissions from electricity and heavy industry, that regulation leaves out sectors like transportation and agriculture.
Progress among individual European countries has been mixed: Over the past two years, Britain has been rapidly phasing out coal power, aided by a national carbon tax and cheap natural gas. But Germany is expected to miss its near-term emissions goals, as recent rapid growth in renewables has been partly offset by the closure of nuclear power plants.


Outside experts say that China crafted a Paris pledge that was relatively easy to meet: overall emissions would peak around 2030 and the country would get 20 percent of its energy from non-fossil sources.
Several recent studies suggest that China’s emissions could now peak years ahead of schedule as the country’s once-insatiable demand for energy has slowed (though other analysts have questioned the accuracy of China’s emissions reporting). The central government has already canceled plans for a hundred coal plants and is investing heavily in cleaner sources like solar, wind, and nuclear. The country also plans to sell millions of electric vehicles in the years ahead.
Yet keeping the world below 2 degrees of warming would likely require China’s coal emissions not just to flatten, but to fall sharply by 2030.


Because India is still relatively poor, with 240 million of its citizens lacking access to electricity, the nation has long argued that wealthier countries should take the lead on cutting emissions.
As such, India’s pledge was less restrictive than pledges from Europe or the United States. The country vowed to install more clean energy and improve its carbon intensity — the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of gross domestic product — while still allowing total emissions to rise between now and 2030. India’s per capita emissions would likely remain below those of China or the United States.
Some recent studies have suggested that India can achieve those modest goals, as the falling cost of renewables and shifting market conditions have allowed the country to scale back its plans for new coal plants after 2022. A recent report from the U.N. Environment Program argued that India had “ample room” to strengthen its emission pledges — as would likely be necessary to help keep the world below 2 degrees of warming. But the Indian government has asked for aid from wealthier countries to do so.

What happens next in climate talks?
Negotiators will meet in Bonn this month to discuss guidelines for making national pledges and policies more transparent, so that outsiders can gauge individual countries’ progress (or lack thereof) more precisely.
In 2018, climate negotiators plan to embark on a major effort to assess the world’s progress on climate change to date and measure it against the 2 degree goal. Countries can then revise their individual climate pledges accordingly — and will do so every five years thereafter.
Right now, many of the Paris pledges remain fairly opaque, and most nations have been vague on what specific policies they will take to meet them. There is no official mechanism for quantifying progress. As a result, groups like Climate Action Tracker have had to make rough estimates as to whether nations are on pace to meet their pledges — and how much further each country would need to go for the world to stay below 2 degrees of global warming.
Increasing the transparency of pledges would make it easier for countries to pressure each other do more, which is how the Paris Agreement was designed, said David Victor, a professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego.
“Countries could come back and say, ‘Here’s what has worked, what didn’t, what our progress is and what other countries can learn,’” Dr. Victor said. “We know from other areas of international cooperation that that dynamic actually works pretty well.”

Source: Climate Action Tracker. Additional development by Adam Pearce.

Notes: Charts show the carbon dioxide equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions. Chart data comes from Climate Action Tracker’s November 2017 update, with the exception of the global Paris projections, which are the most recent available, from November 2016. Climate Action Tracker’s analysis is based on emissions reported to the United Nations by each country. The global data accounts for greenhouse gas emissions and sinks from land-use and forestry, but individual country data does not include land-use and forestry adjustments due to uncertainty in accounting.
Required emissions for Paris and 2°C scenarios are drawn directly from the latest available year of historical data to the final projected year under Paris agreement goals (*2025 for the United States, and 2030 for other countries). The global two-degree scenario reflects a greater than 66 percent chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. For individual countries, the two-degree range is defined by Climate Action Tracker based on a “Fair Share” calculation.
India has made several pledges under the Paris Agreement. The chart above reflects the goal of lowering emissions intensity of G.D.P. by 33 to 35 percent below 2005 levels by 2030

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Climate-Change Lawsuits

The Economist

Global warming is increasingly being fought in the courtroom

IN FEBRUARY a tribunal in Kirkenes, in Norway’s far north, ruled that oil extraction in the Barents Sea was illegal. The courtroom—an auditorium sculpted from 190 tonnes of ice, pictured above—and the verdict were fictitious, staged as part of a festival. But the legal question is real.
On November 14th a district court in Oslo, Norway’s capital, will begin hearing the case that inspired the theatrics. Greenpeace and another pressure group, Nature and Youth, allege that by issuing licences to explore for oil in the Arctic, Norway’s government has breached its constitutional obligation to preserve an environment that is “conducive to health” and to maintain environmental “productivity and diversity”. Their case rests not on local harms, for example to wildlife or water quality, but on the contribution any oil extracted will make to global warming which, under the Paris accord of 2015, Norway and 195 other countries have pledged to keep to “well below” 2°C compared with pre-industrial times.
As policymakers prepare for the annual UN climate pow-wow in Germany, starting on November 6th, activists who think too little is being done to meet that goal are turning to the courts. Cases where the negative effects of carbon emissions are central, not tagged on to more direct environmental damage, such as oil spills or the release of noxious chemicals, are on the rise.
Joana Setzer of the Grantham Institute, a think-tank in London, has found 64 such cases in countries other than America in the past 15 years. Twenty-one were lodged since 2015 (see first chart). In litigious America around 20 are now filed each year, up from a couple in 2002.
The targets are governments, which campaigners argue are doing too little to avert climate change, and big energy firms, which they hold responsible for most greenhouse-gas emissions. A day before the Oslo hearings, for instance, a German tribunal will consider an appeal by Saúl Luciano Lliuya, a Peruvian who sued RWE, a big German electricity producer. He argues that it is partly liable for melting Andean glaciers that have raised the level of water in a lake that threatens to flood Huaraz, his home town.

Making it stick
The legal obstacles are formidable. Like the lower court in Lliuya v RWE, many courts have peremptorily dismissed climate lawsuits as groundless. Climatologists deal in probabilities, so it is hard to establish a causal link between a country’s or company’s emissions and the damage wrought by greenhouse gases. Singling out one among countless emitters is a stretch.
Even so, the occasional case succeeds. Two years ago a court in the Netherlands agreed with Urgenda, an environmental group, that the Dutch government’s target of a 17% cut in carbon emissions by 2020, compared with the level in 1990, fell short of its constitutional “duty of care” towards Dutch society. It ordered a cut of at least 25%. The same year a high court in Pakistan upheld an earlier decision in a case brought by Ashgar Leghari, a farmer, that “the delay and lethargy of the State in implementing [its climate policies] offend the fundamental rights of the citizens”. It directed the government to make a list of priorities and create an independent commission to monitor progress.
The prospect for climate-friendly verdicts is improving, says Sophie Marjanac of ClientEarth, an advocacy group, for two reasons. The first is the growing volume of climate-related commitments for which governments can be held to account. The second is advances in climate science.
Globally, the number of national climate-change laws and policies has swelled from around 60 in 1997 to nearly 1,400 (see second chart). A survey in 2012 found that 177 countries had laws, regulations or court rulings guaranteeing the right to a clean or healthy environment.
In at least 92 that right was constitutional. Greenpeace v Norway was made possible by a change to the country’s basic charter in 2014, which in effect converted preserving a healthy, productive and diverse environment from a suggestion into an obligation. It would have been harder for Mr Leghari to win had the Pakistani government not spelled out 734 “action points”, 232 of which deserved priority.
The Paris accord is playing a role. Like many environmental treaties, it does not bind signatories to fulfil their obligations, merely enjoins them to do so. But plaintiffs can assess governments’ and firms’ actions against the 2°C goal.
Such assessments are aided by a growing understanding of Earth’s climate and humanity’s effects on it. Scientists are increasingly confident that they know roughly what shares of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were emitted by individual countries, and even by the biggest corporate polluters. The Carbon Majors Database, compiled by Richard Heede, a geographer, tallies historical emissions by fossil-fuel firms and other heavy carbon emitters such as cement-makers. He finds that just 90 belched out 63% of all greenhouse gases between 1751 and 2010. Campaigners seek to argue that these deep-pocketed firms, and not their customers, are ultimately responsible for the emissions, just as cigarette-makers were held liable for their products whereas retailers who sold them on to consumers were not.

Splitting the bill
Mr Heede’s calculations, which most scientists accept, mean that responsibility for past and future warming can be apportioned—at least in principle. Mr Lliuya’s claim of €17,000 ($19,800) against RWE corresponds to 0.5% of the cost of protecting his town against the glacial melt. That 0.5% is the utility’s estimated share of cumulative global greenhouse-gas emissions, chiefly from all the coal it has mined. Likewise San Francisco, Oakland and three other Californian counties have sued dozens of carbon majors, including BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, for damages proportional to their share.
Scientists are also becoming more willing to blame carbon emissions, not just for global warming, but for specific natural disasters such as heatwaves, floods and superstorms. But so far no plaintiff has been awarded damages on the basis of such attribution arguments. After a legal battle that lasted from 2005 to 2012, an American federal court threw out a case brought by residents of Mississippi against 34 big carbon emitters for damages suffered as a result of Hurricane Katrina, which they argued had been made more devastating by climate change. The court decided that the plaintiffs lacked “standing”, in other words that they could not prove that they had suffered an injury, that the injury could be traced back to the defendant, and that the court could redress it (for instance by ordering damages to be paid).
But “attribution research” has made strides in the 14 years since Myles Allen of Oxford University introduced the notion of “climate liability” for calamities. The first Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society devoted to attribution studies, in 2012, contained just six papers. Last year’s edition contained 26, and many more were turned down for lack of space.
Researchers are even beginning to combine individual emitters’ climate impacts with event attribution. In a paper just published in Nature Climate Change, for instance, Friederike Otto of Oxford University and colleagues (including Professor Allen) conclude that carbon emissions from America and the European Union each raised the frequency of a particularly devastating heatwave in Argentina by roughly a third. This increased chance, the scientists argued, could be interpreted as their share of responsibility for a scorcher four years ago. Many courts already accept probabilistic arguments, for example in cases of occupational hazards. In Britain and America judges have ruled that firms “caused” workers to be exposed to toxic substances if the risk of exposure doubled.
Ms Marjanac expects attribution suits on similar grounds as the science develops. In the meantime most plaintiffs are sticking to settled science. In Norway, Greenpeace is relying on the widely accepted findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says that, to meet the Paris goal, oil production should be wound down, not ramped up. The Californian counties have taken care to sue only those carbon majors with operations in the state.
Plaintiffs are also using established legal arguments, albeit in novel ways—alleging, for instance, that rising sea levels caused by companies’ carbon emissions constitute trespass on county land. They are learning from one another. A lawsuit modelled on Urgenda’s is under way in Belgium. On October 23rd an Irish court agreed to hear another. A court in Oregon will hear a similar one in February. A group of Brazilian NGOs hopes to file its own by April. Following successful lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers, courts are putting new stress on the fact that energy firms have long known about the harm caused by carbon emissions but have done nothing about it.
Defendants, for their part, usually argue that, whatever the climate science or the harms caused by greenhouse gases, they are simply not liable. Climate treaties presume that each country is responsible for its own emissions, says Fredrik Sejersted, Norway’s attorney-general, who will argue the case against Greenpeace. “So Norway does not have a legal responsibility for emissions from oil and gas it exports.” No one denies that the Netherlands emits carbon dioxide, says Edward Brans, an environmental lawyer who is representing the Dutch government in its appeal against the Urgenda ruling. The question is: “Are the government’s actions unlawful?”
America’s Supreme Court is highly unlikely to discover “a constitutional right to a stable climate” any time soon, says Michael Burger of Columbia University’s Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law. Its courts hesitate to rule on issues generally regarded as the preserve of the legislature or the executive branch. Federal courts often decline to consider lawsuits regarding negligence, nuisance, trespass and the like stemming from carbon-dioxide emissions, arguing that these are already regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under a federal law, the Clean Air Act of 1963, which prevails over common law in its remit.
For now, plaintiffs approach state courts because federal statutes do not displace common law at the state level. In climate-friendly jurisdictions such as California, a jury could conceivably find in their favour, says Tracy Hester of the University of Houston. But he adds that, if President Donald Trump or Republicans in Congress relieved the EPA of its obligation to regulate greenhouse gases, the way may be opened for lawsuits in federal courts.

Courting the public
In Norway an opinion poll in August found for the first time that more people would prefer to leave some oil in the ground in order to limit emissions than to extract it all. This may not influence the Oslo court’s decision. But as citizens’ concerns about climate change grow, so will the prospect of real-life verdicts that resemble Kirkenes’s fictional one.

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The Climate Risks We Face

New York Times - Radley Horton | Katharine Hayhoe | Robert Kopp | Sarah Doherty

David Goldman/Associated Press
Since the dawn of the industrial age, humans have been pumping increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning coal, oil and gas. Researchers at the Mauna Loa Observatory, perched on the side of a volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island, have measured atmospheric levels of this greenhouse gas since 1958. That first year, carbon dioxide averaged 316 parts per million. In May, it reached 410 p.p.m. — an amount never before experienced in the history of our species. This atmospheric carbon dioxide — as well as other heat-trapping gases and other air pollutants emitted by humans — is affecting our planet profoundly.
We helped write the “Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I,” released on Friday by the United States Global Change Research Program. This comprehensive report — the most up-to-date climate science report in the world — is an outstanding example of federal science in action, and is especially noteworthy given the current political climate.
The majority of the report’s 51 authors were drawn from federal agencies, like NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Energy. Much of the foundational data and modeling that underpin the report rely on government investments in observational data and high-performance computing. The report was strengthened by an extensive review process involving the public, the National Academy of Sciences, and all relevant federal agencies, spanning two administrations.
The report concludes that “global climate continues to change rapidly compared to the pace of the natural variations in climate that have occurred throughout Earth’s history.” It finds that “human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.” The bottom line is that this report confirms and strengthens what the vast majority of climate scientists have known for decades: that climate is changing and humans are primarily responsible.
Recent observations and investment in modeling and research have only strengthened the quality and amount of evidence collected. As the report documents, each of the last three years has successively been the warmest on record based on observational data going back to the late 19th century, and 16 of the last 17 years have been among the 17 warmest years on record globally. Global sea level has risen by about 7 to 8 inches since 1900, with nearly half this rise occurring since 1993. A substantial component of this rise, which is accelerating the increased frequency of disruptive “nuisance” flooding in dozens of coastal American cities, is because of human activity. At the same time, the area of ocean covered by Arctic sea ice in September (the typical annual minimum) has decreased by about 50 percent, while its volume has decreased even more dramatically as the remaining ice thins.
The report also highlights growing reasons for concern. For example, ocean acidification, which occurs when atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed by seawater, is taking place at what is thought to be the fastest rate in at least 66 million years. Coupled with reductions in oxygen content in near-coastal American waters, this poses a significant threat to coastal fisheries and ecosystems. Much of the western United States is facing a growing threat of more severe drought and larger wildfires as higher temperatures, reduced snow pack and earlier spring snow melt reduce water availability during the warm season.
To stabilize global temperature, net carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced to zero. The window of time is rapidly closing to reduce emissions and limit warming to no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit or 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the goal set in the Paris climate accord. The further we push the climate system beyond historical conditions, the greater the risks of potentially unforeseen and even catastrophic changes to the climate — so every reduction in emissions helps.
While climate models incorporate many important processes, they cannot include all aspects of the climate system and all of the possible interactions within that system. Vicious cycles between these climate components may push the Earth into states much different from the past: for example, one with a much smaller West Antarctic Ice Sheet and much higher sea level, or one without coral reefs and with greatly reduced marine biodiversity. Surprises can also come from compound extreme events like droughts, floods, heat waves, hurricanes and wildfires that may occur in multiple places at the same time, or sequentially in one place. What is clear is that, even though we cannot quantify all of the possible changes to every element of the climate system, the risks to things we care about — from the health of our children, to the future economic viability of our low-lying coastal cities and infrastructure — are real and growing.
And yet, there is also reason for optimism. The report documents how global carbon emissions may be leveling out, despite continued global economic growth. News reports in just this past year show how the cost of clean energy sources such as wind and solar have decreased dramatically both here and in emerging economies such as China, India and even the Middle East, sending powerful signals to long-term investors and businesses about which way things are trending. And more and more businesses, whether by choice or in response to investor demand, are asking: What risks do we face, if we do not plan for a changing climate?
All humans share this planet. We depend on it for the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the natural resources it provides and the places where we live. For that reason, all Americans need to understand the risks we face, and the impact our choices will have on our future.

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