To understand why governments continually fail to take decisive action against climate change you’ve got to have a strong grasp on game theory and the tragedy of the commons.
It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. According to new research published in Nature, humanity will witness marked sea level rises and frequent killer heatwaves before governments take decisive action against climate change. And to predict the future, mathematicians have turned to game theory.
The paper, published by a team of mathematicians, uses game theory to explain why it is so hard to protect the environment, updating it so they could model the effects of climate change, overuse of precious resources and pollution of pristine environments.
The bad news is that the model suggests that, when it comes to climate change, things might have to get demonstrably worse before they can get better. The good news, on the other hand, is that game theory could help policymakers to craft new and better incentives to help nations cooperate in international agreements.
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The new mathematical model suggests the global environment has to deteriorate in a dramatic way – hurricanes becoming more intense, more droughts and heatwaves – before our eyes before governments will be spurred on to make things better. “When human activity leads to drastic environmental deterioration, through global warming, cooperation becomes the winning strategy,” Nowak says.
However, this new mathematical model also enables policymakers to explore future possibilities raised by climate models and explore next steps on a more rational basis. “This opens up many new possibilities,” says Nowak. Because key impacts of climate change occur over a long timescale, one option is not to rely on environmental decline to spur policymakers into action. Instead we need to devise incentives that work over much shorter timescales, say a year or so. “We even show which feedback is needed,” Nowak says.
“You could give people, cities or countries financial incentives to work together on a problem and, if they succeed, they get these incentives and can move to bigger and more complex problems, along with even larger rewards.” The financial incentives hinge on the actions of the players, whether they are people or countries. “Cooperation leads to more valuable games, defection to less valuable ones, and can be designed to occur quickly enough to make a difference,” Nowak says. “This new approach is a game changer.”
Read more at Climate Change Will Get a Whole Lot Worse Before It Gets Better, According to Game Theory
President Emmanuel Macron, who has cast himself as the guardian of the Paris agreement on climate change since Washington announced it would pull out, is championing the initiative, which will bring together the heads of six sovereign funds to thrash out a pro-environment investment framework.
The guidelines, which funds will ask the companies they invest in to meet, are expected to influence other big asset managers, French presidential advisers said.
“Beyond the colossal amounts these funds manage, it’s the snowball effect we’re betting on,” one adviser at Macron’s office said. “By getting them to make this joint pledge, there will be a ricochet effect spreading across global finance.”
With five of the funds coming from oil-rich nations - Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Norway - and the sixth from New Zealand, the Elysee dismissed suggestions the funds could just be opportunistically jumping on the climate bandwagon.
“They could have told us: that’s none of your business,” the adviser said. “So a big part of our work has been to create trust and show there is political leadership to get them moving, showcase them. It’s not greenwashing.”
Lawrence Yanovitch, an American national who is coordinating the initiative, said the funds understood it was in their financial interest to take account of the risks of climate change in their investments and that most of their countries were already seeking to transition toward low-carbon economies.
Read more at Macron Gathers World's Top Sovereign Funds to Send Climate Signal
The UN’s flagship climate finance initiative had a public setback this week. What went wrong, what are the political implications and what happens next?
The Green Climate Fund has muddled through many a tense board meeting, but talks on how to refill the pot defied resolution this week.
Things were looking “toxic and dysfunctional” to US representative Geoffrey Okamoto on day two and collapsed without agreement on key decisions come Wednesday. Oh, and top official Howard Bamsey resigned.
It is a major blow to climate cooperation in a critical year. Here are eight takeaways from the wreckage.
Read more at UN Green Fund Implodes
The City of Paris and Groupe Renault announced their intention to share their expertise and skills to develop electric mobility for Parisians, Île-de-France residents and visitors.
The partnership will result in short-, medium- and long-term actions in favor of the development of connected and autonomous electric vehicles.
As a first step, Groupe Renault will gradually roll out a commercial offering of electric mobility for Parisians, Ile-de-France residents and visitors, starting in September 2018:
- an electric VTC (voiture avec chauffeur, car with chauffeur) offering via Marcel from Groupe Renault;
- an offer of self-service car-sharing electric vehicles accessible 24/7 and without stations; and
- an offer of self-service electric vehicles in carsharing loop, for longer journeys, accessible 24/7 from Renault or partner car parks.
This offering will be based on Groupe Renault’s battery-electric range: ZOE, Twizy, Kangoo Z.E, Master Z.E. By the end of 2019, they will represent a fleet of 2,000 electric vehicles.
Read more at City of Paris and Renault to Partner to Develop Electric Mobility for Region
Safer reactors designed in the U.S. and Europe make their power grid debuts in China.
Call it the world's slowest photo finish. After several decades of engineering, construction flaws and delays, and cost overruns — a troubled birth that cost their developers dearly — the most advanced commercial reactor designs from Europe and the United States just delivered their first megawatt-hours of electricity within one day of each other. But their benefits — including safety advances such as the AP1000's passive cooling and the EPR’s airplane crash-proof shell — may offer too little, too late to secure future projects.
Both of the design debuts happened in China late last month. On Thursday, June 29 a 1,400-MW EPR designed in France and Germany synced up to the grid at the Taishan nuclear power plant. The next day the U.S.-designed 1,117-MW AP1000 delivered first power at China's Sanmen plant.
Both projects are coming online years behind schedule, and they are still at least several months away from full commercial operation. But the real problem for the AP1000 and the EPR are the designs’ unfinished Western debuts.
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The troubled EPR and AP1000 projects show that U.S. and European firms have lost competence in nuclear construction and management. ”It’s no coincidence that two of the four AP1000s in the U.S. were abandoned, and that the EPRs that started much earlier than Taishan's in Finland and France are still under construction,” says nuclear energy consultant Mycle Schneider, principal author of the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report. “The Chinese have a very large workforce that they move from one project to another, so their skills are actually getting better, whereas European and North American companies haven't completed reactors in decades,” says Schneider.
This loss of nuclear competence is being cited by nuclear and national security experts in both the U.S. and in Europe's nuclear weapons states as a threat to their military nuclear programs. The White House cited this nuclear nexus in a May memo instructing Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy, to force utilities to buy power from unprofitable nuclear and coal plants. The memo states that the "entire US nuclear enterprise” including nuclear weapons and naval propulsion, "depends on a robust civilian nuclear industry.”
A letter sent to Perry last month by 75 former U.S. military, industrial and academic leaders adds to the nexus argument, citing a statement from the Trump Administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review about the United States’ inability to produce enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. "Re-establishing this capability will be far easier and more economical with a strong, thriving civil nuclear sector,” write the signatories.
Heavy dependence on China, meanwhile, puts the global nuclear industry in a vulnerable position. Total nuclear generation declined last year if one takes out China, notes Schneider. And he says a Chinese nuclear growth gap is coming since it hasn’t started building a new reactor in 18 months.
For more than a decade, the AP1000 has been the presumed successor to China’s mainstay reactors, which employ a 1970s-era French design. Areva’s EPR was a fallback option. The Chinese government may now wait to see how the first reactors actually operate before it approves a new wave of reactor construction.
All the while, nuclear is falling further behind renewable solar and wind power. As Schneider notes, the 3.3 GW of new nuclear capacity connected to the grid worldwide in 2017 (including three in China and a fourth in Pakistan built by Chinese firms) pales in comparison to the 53 GW of solar power installed in China alone.
Read more at A Double First in China for Advanced Nuclear Reactors
Temperature rises as a result of global warming could eventually be double what has been projected by climate models, according to an international team of researchers from 17 countries.
Sea levels could also rise by six meters or more even if the world does meet the 2 degree target of the Paris accord.
The findings, published last week in Nature Geoscience, were based on observations of evidence from three warm periods in the past 3.5m years in which global temperatures were 0.5-2 degrees above the pre-industrial temperatures of the 19th century.
The researchers say they increase the urgency with which countries need to address their emissions.
Read more at Global Temperature Rises Could Be Double Those Predicted by Climate Modeling
