Yearly Archives: 2015

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15 December 2015, Carbon Pulse, After Paris, UN’s new “light touch” role on markets to help spawn carbon clubs. It may take years for enough governments to ratify the new Paris Agreement for it to come into force, or to agree on the rules underpinning the new emissions trading mechanism enshrined by it, but any parties wanting to link up their carbon markets under the pact need not wait. The agreement approved by 195 governments in the French capital on Saturday carried provisions effectively setting up two tracks for the use of market-based mechanisms in meeting nations’ emissions reduction pledges, now officially known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Article 6.4 of the agreement takes a centralised approach, establishing a market-based mechanism akin to the Kyoto Protocol’s CDM or JI, which is to be developed by countries between now and 2020. It will create a new type of carbon unit that, similar to those generated under Kyoto, can be used by governments that have ratified the agreement. Articles 6.2 and 6.3, on the other hand, allow for decentralised ‘cooperative approaches’ that let countries and other jurisdictions with markets bilaterally and multilaterally link them together, in what many now refer to as ‘carbon clubs’. These clubs will now be able to trade units, recognised under the Paris Agreement as being “Internationally Transferrable Mitigation Outcomes”, or ITMOs, that are backed by robust accounting measures and not counted more than once towards a country’s target. These cooperative approaches, says Jeff Swartz, director of international policy at IETA, “set up the framework for a much deeper world of cooperation” on carbon markets. “It says ‘here’s a framework, some basic rules of the road’. It’s different from Kyoto’s top-down approach in that it lets countries drive,” added Nat Keohane, vice president for global climate at US-based Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Both spoke to reporters on Tuesday in a conference call hosted by the two organisations. Read More here

 

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15 December 2015, Carbon Brief, The world has spoken. It wants to limit future temperatures rises to 1.5C above historic levels. To achieve this everything must change. The twelfth of December 2015 may well be remembered as the day the human race came together and saved the world. Old differences between rich and poor, west and east were laid aside. Unbeknownst to anyone, six months ago and in secret, the sinking Marshall islanders started to raise an army of more than 100 ambitious nations that rose above the flotsam and jetsam of self-interest and created a stronger climate agreement than anyone thought possible. The Paris agreement aims to hold the increase in the global average temperatures to “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels” and to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C”. It also requires parties to produce audited emission-reduction commitments ratcheting up every five years, and delivers a “floor” of $100 billion per year of financing up to 2025. So unexpected was this that we climate scientists were caught napping. Before Paris, we all thought 2C was a near-impossible target and spent our energies researching future worlds where temperatures soared. In fact, there is still much to discover about the specific advantages of limiting warming to 1.5C, and the plausible social and economic pathways that might keep us under this limit. Some have derided the 1.5C target as a pipe dream, given that current national pledges to reduce carbon dioxide emissions – known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) – could bring us closer to 3C. However, the limited research that does exist suggests that it is possible to overshoot 1.5C and return below it by 2100. And the figure below illustrates how a five-year ratchet mechanism of increasingly ambitious INDCs could deliver a temperature close to 1.5C by 2100. Read More here

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14 December 2015, The Guardian, In the final meeting of the Paris talks on climate change on Saturday night, the debating chamber was full and the atmosphere tense. Ministers from 196 countries sat behind their country nameplates, aides flocking them, with observers packed into the overflowing hall. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, talked animatedly with his officials, while China’s foreign minister Xie Zhenhua wore a troubled look. They had been waiting in this hall for nearly two hours. The French hosts had trooped in to take their seats on the stage, ready to applaud on schedule at 5.30pm – but it was now after 7pm, and the platform was deserted. After two weeks of fraught negotiations, was something going badly wrong? Then at 7.16pm, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, returned abruptly to the stage, flanked by high-ranking UN officials. The last-minute compromises had been resolved, he said. And suddenly they were all on their feet. Fabius brought down the green-topped gavel, a symbol of UN talks, and announced that a Paris agreement had been signed. The delegates were clapping, cheering and whistling wildly, embracing and weeping. Even the normally reserved economist Lord Stern was whooping. Read More here

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14 December 2015, Renew Economy, Hidden gem in Paris deal condemns coal to early demise. When France foreign minister Laurent Fabius brought the gavel down on Saturday night and declared the Paris Agreement on climate change action was sealed, the reaction was almost immediate. Within the conference hall it was greeted with cheers, hugging and great emotion. Outside, the agreement to cap temperature rises “well below 2°C” and as low as 1.5°C signalled a remarkable achievement that had one major implication: the end of the fossil fuel era is nigh. ….But if that is what the fossil fuel industry and the Coalition government are really thinking, then the evidence suggests that they are kidding themselves. One little gem, alerted to me by the Potsdam Institute’s Malter Meinshausen (on the dance floor of the COP after party of all places) puts the agreement in a new perspective. It is this paragraph, article 17, in the decisions text of the deal: “Clause 17. Notes with concern that the estimated aggregate greenhouse gas emission levels in 2025 and 2030 resulting from the intended nationally determined contributions do not fall within least-cost 2 ̊C scenarios but rather lead to a projected level of 55 gigatonnes in 2030, and also notes that much greater emission reduction efforts will be required than those associated with the intended nationally determined contributions in order to hold the increase in the global average temperature to below 2 ̊C above pre-industrial levels by reducing emissions to 40 gigatonnes or to 1.5 ̊C above pre-industrial levels by reducing to a level to be identified in the special report referred to in paragraph 21 below”; OK, now for a quick translation. The world currently emits around 50 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year. Even if all the pledges put together by 186 nations before and during the Paris climate talks were enacted, these emissions would grow to around 55 gigatonnes of GHG emissions a year by 2030. But to meet the 2°C target, the world will need to reduce those emissions to 40 gigatonnes a year. And to reach that level, they are likely going to have to reverse direction before 2020. What’s more, if the world does move to that aspirational goal of capping temperatures to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, then it is going to have to move a lot faster, and a lot more dramatically than that. That trajectory will be outlined by a new IPCC report due in 2018. Read More here