Government Inaction Puts World On Track For 'Catastrophic' Climate Change, U.N. Warns

Newsweek - David Brennan

Firefighters battle flames near Yosemite National Park, California, U.S., on August 6, 2018. This year's extreme weather events are believed to be linked to global climate change. Courtesy USFS/Yosemite National Park/Handout via REUTERS 

A senior United Nations (U.N.) official has warned that government inaction has put the world on track to a catastrophic climate change situation, in which the global community fails to keep temperature rises below the vital 2 degree Celsius (3.6 degree Fahrenheit) cap.
The warning comes ahead of climate-change discussions in Bangkok, Thailand, this week. Patricia Espinosa, who is head of the Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said nations have been too slow to reach to the threats posed by global warming.
In an interview with Reuters on Sunday, Espinosa said this year’s extreme weather is just a taste of what is to come, and that she hopes the heat waves, floods and forest fires seen across the globe “will create a bigger sense of urgency.”



In 2015, the Paris climate deal agreed to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The pact also said signatories would continue “pursuing efforts” for the more challenging target of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Espinosa explained, “1.5 is the goal that is needed for many islands and many countries that are particularly vulnerable to avoid catastrophic effects. In many cases it means the survival of those countries. With the pledges we have on the table now we are not on track to achieve those goals.”
The 2015 agreement, while a landmark achievement, was somewhat vague on the details of how such a cap would be achieved. Signatories will meet again in December in Poland to agree rules for how to achieve its the goal of ended the fossil fuel era this century.
Espinosa said she hopes the week-long talks in Bangkok will produce a draft text for negotiation on the deal’s rulebook. “This is a process that has been ongoing for some time. One of the reasons why this is so complex is because we are talking about... many different areas,” she explained. “One of those areas that countries need to take action on is to reduce their emissions.”
Both private and government financing is required, Espinosa said. While a pledge from rich nations to commit $100 billion each year is important, more will be needed. “There is a clear view that the $100 billion is only one part of the broad transformation of our societies that we are talking about,” she told Reuters.
The Paris agreement, signed by 195 countries and ratified by 180, faced opposition from the U.S. since President Donald Trump took office. In June 2017, Trump withdrew from the deal, claiming it would undermine the country’s economy and puts the U.S. at a “permanent disadvantage.”
Espinosa suggested such behavior demonstrates how some nations are not taking the threats of climate change seriously enough. But ignoring the problem does nothing to help. The vast majority of scientists and institutions agree that man-made global warming exists, and is getting worse.
This year, extreme weather events have been reported across the globe, and average temperatures have been significantly higher than previous years. “It really does make the evidence clear that climate change is having an impact on the daily lives of people,” Espinosa said.

Links

• Did climate change kill off our Neanderthal cousins?
• NASA Will Launch a Laser into Space to Measure the Ice Caps
• India’s Drought Is Killing Crops—And Pushing People to Suicide
• Highest Ever Water Temperature Recorded Off San Diego
• Largest King Penguin Population Has Declined by Nearly 90 Percent
• Climate Change Is Not A Key Cause Of Human Conflict Around The World: Study | Opinion
• Arnold Schwarzenegger Joins Increasing List Of Those Suing Big Oil For Climate Change

The Swedish 15-Year-Old Who's Cutting Class To Fight The Climate Crisis

The Guardian - David Crouch

Following Sweden’s hottest summer ever, Greta Thunberg decided to go on school strike at the parliament to get politicians to act

Greta Thunberg leads a school strike and sits outside of the Swedish Parliament, in an effort to force politicians to act on climate change. Photograph: Michael Campanella for the Guardian 

Why bother to learn anything in school if politicians won’t pay attention to the facts?
This simple realisation prompted Greta Thunberg, 15, to protest in the most effective way she knew. She is on strike, refusing to go to school until Sweden’s general election on 9 September to draw attention to the climate crisis.
Her protest has captured the imagination of a country that has been struck by heatwaves and wildfires in its hottest summer since records began 262 years ago.
Every day for two weeks, Thunberg has been sitting quietly on the cobblestones outside parliament in central Stockholm, handing out leaflets that declare: “I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future.”
Thunberg herself is a diminutive girl with pigtails and a fleeting smile – not the stereotypical leader of a climate revolution.

“I am doing this because nobody else is doing anything. It is my moral responsibility to do what I can,” she says. “I want the politicians to prioritise the climate question, focus on the climate and treat it like a crisis.”
When people tell her she should be at school, she points to the textbooks in her satchel.
“I have my books here,” she says in flawless English. “But also I am thinking: what am I missing? What am I going to learn in school? Facts don’t matter any more, politicians aren’t listening to the scientists, so why should I learn?”
Thunberg’s protest might come as a surprise to anyone seduced by Sweden’s reputation as a climate pioneer and champion of the environment. This year the country enacted “the most ambitious climate law in the world”, aiming to become carbon neutral by 2045 and comfortably beating the 2015 Paris climate targets along the way.
“This is too little too late, it needs to come much faster,” Thunberg says. “Sweden is not a green paradise, it has one of the biggest carbon footprints.”
Her parents want her to give up her protest and go back to school. “My teachers are divided,” Thunberg says. “As people they think what I am doing is good, but as teachers they say I should stop.”
One teacher to have downed tools to join her protest is Benjamin Wagner, 26. He expects to lose three weeks’ wages – and his job – as a result of his strike.
“Our inability to stop climate change is like the efforts to stop world war one – we knew for years it was coming, they arranged all sorts of conferences, but still they didn’t prevent it,” Wagner says.

A forest fire burns near Sarna in central Sweden on July 26, 2018. Photograph: Maja Suslin/TT News Agency/AFP/Getty Images

“Greta is a troublemaker, she is not listening to adults. But we are heading full speed for a catastrophe, and in this situation the only reasonable thing is to be unreasonable.”
There are signs that more Swedes are listening. The Green party, a partner in the centre-left coalition government, was languishing in the polls before the country was hit by more than 60 forest fires, which raged for weeks through a rural tinderbox created by the unprecedented drought. Now the party’s support is up by half to about 6%.
“I am very impressed by Greta’s courage and determination,” says Janine Alm Ericson, a Green member of parliament.
“But I am also sad that she feels she has to be there – the political parties in Sweden have not done enough. Thanks to the hot summer it has become easier for people to imagine what climate change can mean for us and others in Europe if we continue to ignore what is happening.”
Outside parliament, Stella d’Ailly, 45, an art director, has come to join Thunberg’s protest.
“I feel like I am dying inside if I don’t protest,” she says. “Sweden may be well organised to recycle our trash, for example, but we do nothing to cut the amount of plastic bottles and packaging in the first place. We need drastic change.”
Thunberg’s own awakening to the climate crisis a few years ago caused upheaval in her family. Her mother, the well known opera singer Malena Ernman, has given up her international career because of the climate effects of aviation.
“Greta forced us to change our lives,” says her father Svante. “I didn’t have a clue about the climate. We started looking into it, reading all the books – she has read them too.”

Greta Thunberg and friends outside the Swedish parliament. Photograph: Michael Campanella for the Guardian

Her teachers were telling her to turn off the lights and save paper, then flying off to New York for a holiday. For Greta, this was just not good enough: “Everyone believes that we can solve the crisis without effort, without sacrifice,” she wrote in an article widely circulated on social media and translated into English.
While on strike, she has done a lot of homework and read three books, her father says.
“She is supposed to be in school, we cannot support her action. But we respect that she wants to make a stand. She can either sit at home and be really unhappy, or protest and be happy.”
Greta has Asperger’s syndrome, which in the past has affected her health, he says. She sees her condition not as a disability but as a gift which has helped open her eyes to the climate crisis.
“The best thing about my protest has been to see how more and more people have been coming and getting involved,” Greta says.
“I don’t care if I get into trouble at school. I believe that one person can make a difference.”

Links

• Greta Thunberg: “Sweden is not a Role Model”
• To lead on climate, countries must commit to zero emissions
• The Swedish town on the frontline of the Arctic wildfires
• Wildfires rage in Arctic Circle as Sweden calls for help
• Sweden's reindeer at risk of starvation after summer drought

We Cannot Fight Climate Change With Capitalism, Says Report

Huffington Post - Laura Paddison

The world's economies are totally unprepared for rapid climate change, rising social inequality and the end of cheap energy.

Flames roll over a hill toward homes near Lakeport, California, on Aug. 2. The effects of rapid climate change are being felt across the world. Fred Greaves/Reuters

As access to cheap, plentiful energy dries up and the effects of climate change take hold, we are entering a new era of profound challenge ― and free market capitalism cannot dig us out. This is the conclusion of a report produced for the United Nations by Bios, an independent research institute based in Finland.
Signs of a world in turmoil are not hard to find. People are increasingly feeling the effects of rapid climate change. Cities boil in more than 120-degree heat, California burns and the Arctic thaws. Meanwhile, biodiversity loss is reaching terrifying levels, with animals going extinct at about 1,000 times the natural rate. In addition, as societies, we’re facing increased inequality, unemployment and soaring personal debt levels.

The New York Stock Exchange in New York City. Traditional ways of economic thinking aren't sufficient to deal with the coming challenges we face, according to a new report. Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Faced with these interconnected crises, says the report, our economies are woefully underprepared: “It can be safely said that no widely applicable economic models have been developed specifically for the upcoming era.”
The paper, commissioned by the U.N. to feed into its 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report, looks specifically at the next 20 to 30 years as a key transition period during which the world must radically cut emissions and consumption to have a hope of stopping climate change.
Traditional ways of economic thinking have been based on the assumption we will continue to have access to cheap and plentiful sources of energy and materials, says the report, but the “era of cheap energy is coming to an end.”
The thrust of the authors’ argument is that, for the first time, economies are moving to sources of energy that are much less efficient ― meaning more and more effort is needed to get smaller amounts of energy. There are plenty of fossil fuels that can still be pulled from the ground but doing so would shoot through climate commitments and accelerate global warming. In addition, we have used up the planet’s capacity to handle the waste generated through all our material and energy use.
In other words, we are at an ecological crunch point and we don’t have the economic tools to deal with it.
“Trusting that the free market capitalist dynamics will get us there, that of course is not going to happen,” report co-author Paavo Järvensivu, an academic who specializes in economics and culture at Bios, says in a phone call with HuffPost. Economies that rely on the power of markets, notes the report, don’t even recognize the problem as they’re too focused on short-term profits to take account of longer-term issues like climate change and environmental destruction.
But Järvensivu is also keen not to fuel an argument about whether capitalism is dead.
“I think it’s harmful to think of capitalism as this one big lump, or capitalism as this kind of ‘either, or’ question: that we either have capitalism or something totally different,” Järvensivu says.
“The social and material need for this transformation [away from cheap energy and mass consumption] is so acute and societies have to go through a very dramatic shift over 20 to 30 years to get their emissions dramatically lower,” he adds, “so we are past this discussion of should we have capitalism or should we have something else.”

People commuting by bike in Copenhagen, Denmark. Some cities are already well set up for cleaner transportation options such as cycling. william87 via Getty Images

Instead, he says, we need to find new ways of thinking about the economy to meet these challenges. It’s asking the question, he says, “Do we aim for more consumption or do we aim for liveable environments in the future?”
Around 80 percent of global energy comes from fossil fuels ― oil, coal and gas, which powered industrialization but have a heavy toll through their climate change impact. While we need to wean ourselves off these, renewables are not efficient enough yet compared to conventional energy and the infrastructure is not in place for it, the report says. “Meeting current or growing levels of energy need in the next few decades with low-carbon solutions will be extremely difficult, if not impossible,” it notes.
What’s needed, says the report, is to combine developing clean energy sources with lowering energy use. And it has some suggestions about how to achieve this without compromising people’s opportunity for a decent life.
The report calls for an overhaul of transportation away from a focus on car ownership. In cities, this would mean changes in city planning to focus on biking and walking, combined with an electric public transit system. This “could be beneficial for people in a larger sense,” says Järvensivu, as it “means less transport, less owning private cars, but not necessarily a less good quality life.”

President Donald Trump at a political rally in Charleston, West Virginia, on Aug. 21. His administration announced a plan to weaken environmental regulations on coal plants. MANDEL NGAN via Getty Images

International freight transportation and aviation would need to be slashed, says the report, as they “cannot continue to grow at current rates” because of the need to cut emissions as well as the lack of low carbon alternatives.
Food systems also need to be rethought. Both rich and poor countries should focus on self-sufficiency, advises the report, to produce a diverse selection of food for their own populations. As for diets, it advocates that dairy and meat, which have a big climate impact, be replaced by largely plant-based diets.
Housing is the third area slated for transformation. Construction using steel and concrete is hugely carbon intensive. The report authors suggest moving to wooden structures, which could provide carbon storage.
All these changes require concerted political action. “There must be a comprehensive vision and closely coordinated plans. Otherwise a rapid system level transformation towards global sustainability goals is inconceivable,” says the report.
Which is all well and good, but doesn’t exactly jibe with what’s been happening on the political scene. President Donald Trump is hellbent on cutting environmental regulation and has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement. Even the countries that remain in the agreement are failing on their commitments to curb climate change.
There has been interest in introducing a carbon price, which means charging polluters for the carbon they emit ― a key pledge Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made in his campaign. But the report argues this measure is nowhere near good enough: “As a policy tool, carbon pricing lacks the crucial element of coordinating a diverse set of economic actors toward a common goal.”
Järvensivu believes the push for action will come from the fact that people are starting to genuinely worry about their future security and looking for collective action. “These kind of things might actually start to matter quite a bit more than caring about a new iPhone or a yearly trip to Thailand,” he says. “We are actually looking for a sense of security and not in a way that we would just aim for more consuming power in terms of money and so on.”
He cites Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as an example of someone seeking transformational economic change, along with professor Stephanie Kelton, whose work argues sovereign governments cannot run out of money, thus debunking the argument that economies cannot afford to make the transformations needed to address climate change.
Järvensivu insists the report isn’t advocating for an economy that would be unrecognizable from what we have now, at least not in the short term. Rather, he says, it seeks to identify the material and energy crises approaching us and the kinds of economic tools and policies we need to meet them.
“After 20 to 30 years, we don’t know what this [economy] would look like, if we actually managed to achieve radically lower emissions and still secure possibilities for a good life ... are we then even concerned whether this was capitalism or not, or are we looking for other things,” he says. “Probably we are.”

Links

• Global Sustainable Development Report 2019
• Scientists calculated a 'point of no return' for dealing with climate change — and time is running out
• Fossil fuel energy consumption (% of total)
• Cement industry urged to reduce 'invisible' global emissions