Climate negotiators in Paris are drawing close to resolving one of the sticking points for a breakthrough emissions pact by favoring a five-year review period on promised greenhouse gas cuts, a top official said on Wednesday.
Regular reviews are seen as a crucial part of any agreement since countries' current pledges to cut emissions - submitted by 185 nations to the United Nations - will fail to prevent temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, seen as a dangerous level.
Countries have disagreed as to how often audits of those plans should take place. While many major emitters including China, the United States and the European Union supported a five-year period, a term included in an outline U.N. text last month, others such as India have been reluctant to commit.
"It seems now there is a growing consensus that (reviews) will be every five years," U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres told a news conference on the third day of talks. There was still little progress on thornier issues, though, such as funding for developing nations and a long-term goal for phasing out fossil fuels.
That prompted French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to urge delegates to quicken efforts to whittle down a lengthy draft.
On the reviews, there was still uncertainty about when they would start and any conditions to ensure they result in increased action. "These are issues for negotiations," said Ajay Mathur, director general of the bureau of energy efficiency and a leading member of the Indian delegation.
Read more at First Small Sign of Climate Accord on Five-Year Review of Carbon Cuts
More than 500 institutions representing about $3.4 trillion in assets have agreed to sell their investments in fossil fuel companies, divestment leaders announced on Wednesday, a nearly 24 percent increase since the movement last announced its commitment list in September.
European insurer Allianz, the city of Oslo, Norway, and the London School of Economics are among the latest institutions, communities and individuals to pledge to divest at least partially from coal, oil and natural gas companies, members of the green group 350.org and nonprofit Divest-Invest said at a press conference in Paris.
The campaign began in earnest in 2014 with 181 institutions and more than 650 individuals representing at least $50 billion in assets, and has gathered participants steadily since.
Read more at More than $3.4 Trillion in Assets Vow to Divest from Fossil Fuels
"Finance ministers are facing strong demand for public investments in education, security or transport -- pricing CO2 turns out to be a suitable means of raising the revenues that are needed," says Max Franks from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), lead-author of the study. "Finance ministers can put money into infrastructure that substantially and lastingly improves public welfare. This is something you can count in dollars. And along the way they save the climate, since pricing CO2 yields a strong incentive to reduce emissions. You could call it a double sustainability dividend."
In our globalized world, taxing a firm's capital assets is difficult
In contrast, it is difficult for governments to raise additional taxes on a firm's capital assets or on labor. "In our globalized world, it has become relatively easy for capital - and in fact for whole companies - to relocate to another, low-tax country," says co-author Ottmar Edenhofer, chief-economist of PIK. Payroll taxes, being the alternative, reduce consumption and can raise social issues. "We have been surprised how robust our results are," adds Edenhofer. "No matter whether other countries are taxing emissions or if the fossil fuel market is dominated by a near-monopoly OPEC or by perfect competition, virtually all of the scenarios we computed show that CO2 pricing has a positive economic effect - even without considering the additional benefits of avoided climate change damages."
Read more at Why Finance Ministers Favor Carbon Taxes, Even If They Do Not Take Climate Change into Account
The need to slow down destruction of the world’s remaining forests to prevent the planet dangerously overheating has long been acknowledged, but has proved impossible to achieve.
Now a group of scientists has reviewed the state of the forests where the destruction is greatest, in the tropics, and has concluded that the rate of deforestation could be halved in five years – drastically cutting the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.
Their paper in Global Change Biology says Brazil has proved that the rate of deforestation can be cut dramatically, while at the same time allowing an increase in agricultural output. This is significant because Brazil has been cutting down forests faster than any other country in the world.
The scientists say that if Brazil − which has large areas of lawless territory − can slow the destruction, then anyone can.
However, they are not suggesting it will be easy. Short-term financial gains, which do not take into account environmental costs or the long-term interests of the country involved, still dominate, so destruction could increase again.
In fact their fears proved only too real. The latest figures show that deforestation in the Amazon has begun to increase again, by 16% so far in 2015, reflecting cuts in funding for the regulatory authorities.
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By 2012 Brazil had cut its emissions from deforestation by 80%. Despite this, it still had the highest forest destruction in the world, but that could be cut further if the political will was there.
Second to Brazil is Indonesia, which managed to reduce emissions between 2012 and 2013, but these have since risen again because of disastrous fires. The government is currently clamping down on peatland development to try to reduce this problem.
Indonesia was also one of 15 tropical countries which last year signed the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF). That includes the goal of halving natural forest loss by 2020.
Significant increases
In addition to the challenge that Indonesia faces in achieving that reduction, the other 14 countries collectively almost doubled their carbon emissions from tropical deforestation − from 12% of the total in 2001 to 23% in 2013. Of these 14 countries, the biggest contributors were the Democratic Republic of Congo and Peru, and there were also significant increases in Vietnam and Liberia. Only Mexico dropped significantly.
Read more at Forest Destruction Can Be Cut in Half
President Obama sent a hopeful message to the U.N. climate talks Tuesday before he left Paris.
Speaking to the press, Obama said that coming to an agreement in Paris won’t be easy — “getting 200 nations to agree on anything is hard” — but that he was confident in the process. And, Obama said, it wasn’t just Paris he was confident about.
“Climate change is a massive problem. It’s a generational program. It’s a problem that by definition is just about the most difficult thing for a political system to absorb,” he said. “And yet despite all that the main message I’ve got is, I actually think were gonna solve this thing.”
Obama cited the progress the world had already made on climate change as reason for his optimism, including the fact that nearly 200 countries had shown up in Paris with fairly ambitious agreements and the fact that the price of generating solar energy had dropped so dramatically in the last five years.
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Obama addressed these detractors Tuesday, speaking specifically to presidential hopefuls.
“The fact of the matter is there’s a reason why you have the largest gathering of world leaders probably in human history here in Paris. Everybody else is taking climate change really seriously. They think it’s a really big problem,” he said. “I think the president of the United States is going to need to think this is really important.”
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“This one trend, climate change, affects all trends,” he said. “If we let the world keep warming as fast as it is, and sea levels rising as fast as they are, and weather patterns shifting in more unexpected ways, before long were going to have to devote more and more economic resources not to growing opportunities for our people, but to adapting to the various consequences of a changing planet.”
And, Obama said, one way of tackling climate change would be to put a price on carbon.
“I’ve long believed that the most elegant way to drive innovation and to reduce carbon emissions is to put a price on it,” he said.
Read more at Obama to Presidential Hopefuls: You’re Going to Need to Deal with Climate Change
The buzzword of the moment at the Paris climate talks is “ratchet.” Will the nations of the world agree to ratchet up their carbon pollution reduction commitments every five to 10 years — as will be required if we are to avoid catastrophic global warming?
The ratcheting could be thought of like episodes in a long-running movie series.
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The problem with overstating what Paris is accomplishing is that it can create the impression the world doesn’t have much more work to do — since 2.7°C seems so very close to the 2°C “defense line” the world’s top climate experts warn against crossing. The president himself created that impression as he continued:
That’s too high. We wanted to get 2°C or even lower than that. But if we have these periodic reviews built in, what I believe will happen is that by sending that signal to researchers and scientists and investors and entrepreneurs and venture funds, we’ll actually start hitting these targets faster than we expected, and we can be even more ambitious. And so when you look at the cumulative targets that may exist 10 years from now, we may well be within the 2°C increase.
In fact, while I firmly believe the U.S., China, and most other countries will hit targets faster than expected, there is essentially no possibility that “cumulative targets that may exist 10 years from now” could bring us “within the 2°C increase.”
Again, we are going to need to ratchet things down decade after decade (explainer video here). The chances that by 2025 all of the major nations of the world will come to the table with firm, credible pledges that extend through 2100 and bring us “within the 2°C increase” is about the same as the chances that … the Star Wars series was going to end with Episode Five.
Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, has it right in his new Foreign Policy piece. He writes that the Paris pledges, “when you add them up, would warm the planet 3.5 degrees if they were kept.” He puts that in perspective: “That’s historic, that’s remarkable — and that’s also a disaster. A world that warms 3.5 degrees would not be a world with civilizations that resemble ours.”
So the nations of the world will have to ratchet up their targets again and again to keep total warming below 2°C (3.6°F). The good news is that doing so will be super-cheap — according to every major independent economic analysis and all of the world’s leading governments, as I discussed back in January. And that’s without counting some $300 trillion in avoided climate damages — and $18 trillion in health and productivity co-benefits.
But we’re much nearer the beginning of this epic fight than the end. There’s new hope, for sure, but we have many battles yet to come.
Read more at The Paris Climate Talks, Explained Using Star Wars
