7 December 2015, The Conversation. Draft deal emerges midway through Paris climate talks, but leaves plenty to do. A huge piece of street art with the words “Fluctuat nec mergitur” – Paris’ official motto since 1853 – has just appeared on a building near the city’s Canal Saint Martin. It refers to a ship at sea and translates as “tossed but not sunk”. The slogan is cropping up around the city as a sign of resistance to the recent terror attacks. But it is perhaps also a comment on the Paris climate negotiations. The Paris Conference of the Parties (COP) aims to land a deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2020. Progress during this first week has been grindingly slow. Nevertheless, the initial 54-page document has been whittled down to a slightly more focused 48-page text, now handed to the COP president Laurent Fabius. The new draft, released on Saturday, is still dense with contested phrases and bracketed options and landmines of coded language, both substantive and tactical. These will be the focus of this week’s high-level negotiations as ministers arrive for the second half of the summit. Mind the gaps The cluster of issues being considered include collective ambition on climate mitigation and adaptation, the level and nature of climate finance, technology transfer and capacity building, and processes for measuring and reviewing progress. It is hard to predict where the final deal might land, but at this stage negotiators are struggling to bridge two critical gaps – a mitigation gap and a climate finance gap. Deeply entrenched positions over which countries should do what, how much, and when, have dominated these negotiations. Longstanding disputes between developed and developing countries over the equitable sharing of responsibility and effort for mitigation, and who should bear the costs of mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, stand in the way of bridging either gap. The mitigation gap lies between the current level of global fossil fuel use and the much lesser amount required to keep global warming below 1.5℃ or 2℃ – the two goals being considered here in Paris. Read More here
Category Archives: Global Action Inaction
7 December 2015, Renew Economy, Paris, COP21: Australia ignoring energy transition as emissions soar. Australia is being put on the spot at the Paris climate talks about its treatment of surplus credits from the Kyoto Protocol, and the fact that it will more than likely meet its short- and mid-term targets without actually reducing its industrial emissions. Indeed, it seems that the Turnbull government – like those before it since the Kyoto Treaty was first signed in 1997 – is insisting that its focus remain on accounting and ticking boxes, rather than reducing industrial and energy emissions and preparing the country to decarbonise its economy. That rise in industrial emissions is one reason why Australia will not be following the example of five European countries and cancelling their Kyoto surplus. On Friday, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Britain announced that they will cancel 634.6 million excess Kyoto credits that they could have counted towards their Kyoto targets for 202. They decided to do this as part of a bid to remove what has been described as a giant “hot air” loophole that has favoured some countries. “By cancelling surplus units we hope to send a strong positive signal of support for an ambitious global climate agreement here in Paris,” the European nations said in a joint statement. But don’t expect Australia to follow suit. Australia is still intent on using its surplus of 128 million units to meet its modest 2020 targets, which it will do despite it becoming increasingly clear that its industrial emissions, and its power sector emissions in particular, will continue to rise. That doesn’t appear to faze the Turnbull government. When RenewEconomy asked environment minister Greg Hunt on Friday if the government was worried that its approach would not position Australia to decarbonise its economy and compete with other countries committed to doing so, Hunt simply said that the critical thing for Australia was to meet its targets. Its Direct Action program is buying emissions abatement through its emissions reduction fund, and $2.55 billion of taxpayer money – but as quickly as it is doing this, emissions are rising in the electricity sector and elsewhere. A new report from Pitt & Sherry says electricity emissions alone are rising 10 per cent, and estimates by Reputex put the increase in industrial emissions at 6 per cent by 2020. Read More here
6 December 2015, Climate News Network, Scientists post extreme weather warning. COP21: Climate change means that temperate Europe faces the twin threat of life-threatening heatwaves and periods of bitter cold over the next 20 years. New research warns that longer, hotter and more frequent heatwaves than those that killed 55,000 Russians in 2010, or 72,000 in France, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK in 2003, will hit Europe in the next two decades. But, over the same period, Europe could also begin to get colder as a consequence of a drop in solar activity, and a century-long chill could be on the way, according to a study of long-period climate cycles. And if global warming accelerates, and average global ocean temperatures rise by 6°C or more, most of the living, breathing world could in any case begin to suffocate, according to ominous calculations by a mathematician. At some point, the providers of oxygen could begin to perish. All three uncomfortable projections were published as 30,000 delegates, politicians, observers, pressure groups, and journalists gathered in Paris for COP21, the UN summit on climate change, which is meeting to try to forge an agreement that could, ultimately, limit global warming to a planetary average of 2°C or less. Magnitude index Simone Russo, a geophysicist, and colleagues from the European Union Joint Research Centre at Ispra in Italy report in Environmental Research Letters that they developed a heatwave magnitude index to cope with a problem once considered improbable for temperate Europe − extremes of heat. The index is a tool for statistical analysis, and provides a way of matching bygone events with possible future extremes. Deaths in Europe accounted for 90% ofglobal mortality from heat extremes in the last 20 years. And there could be more on the way. Read More here
5 December 2015, Climate News Network, Saudis still hooked on oil habit. COP21: Despite making pledges to cut back on its large-scale fossil fuel emissions, Saudi Arabia’s oil production is continuing to run at record levels. PARIS, 5 December, 2015 − Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter and one of the world’s top per capita emitters of greenhouse gases, has traditionally voiced little concern about climate. So there was some surprise when, in advance of the current UN climate change summit in Paris, the country announced that it was aiming to cut back on its C02emissions. The problem is that the pledge comes with some important caveats that seem to render the whole exercise meaningless. More than 180 countries have so far submitted pledges – referred to in UN jargon as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) − to the summit to cut back on emissions of greenhouse gases. Export revenues Under the Saudi plan, there will be an annual cutback of up to 130 million tonnes of emissions by 2030. But they say that such cutbacks will only be made as long as there is “a robust contribution from oil export revenues to the national economy”. They also warn that should any agreement made at the Paris talks create what is termed an “abnormal burden” on the country’s economy, then the climate-related commitments would be weakened. Read More here