26 October 2015, Renew Economy, Paris climate talks: Now it’s up to Turnbull to save the planet. The last official round of negotiations before the Paris climate change talks have broken up in Bonn, with some progress made but a global climate deal still needing fresh impetus from political leaders to put the world on a course to rapidly decarbonise the global economy. In Bonn, after a week of talks, a 20-page text was expanded to 63 pages, and will need to be cut back. But at least there appears to be agreement on what needs to be resolved. The principal blockages remain around the scale of ambition, and on issues such as finance and the concept of “loss and damage”. The UN has what it says is a “manageable” text and a good “starting point” for negotiations. The text, say observers, has been expanded as each country or bloc inserts their own “bargaining” chip. They say it is now time for the leaders to step in. Which is why the success or failure of the Paris talks will depend on the likes of Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, the newly elected Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, and of course the major players in the world economy – US president Barack Obama, China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Rajendrah Modi, and the European Union. Over the next few weeks a series of meetings will be held to try to resolve some of those issues. A pre-Paris ministerial meeting will take place in the French capital from November 8-10, which will be attended by environment minister Greg Hunt. Read More here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
26 October 2015, Climate Institute, Over the weekend the last round of negotiations on the Paris climate change agreements concluded. The current draft agreement and supporting decisions is available here. Beyond the drama and theatrics of the Bonn meeting, countries left with draft agreements that can form the basis of a credible outcome in Paris. Embedded in the draft are the core elements of an outcome in Paris that reinforce the signal to business that the era of unabated fossil fuel use is at an end. However, progress on the substance of the agreements was mixed and clear political direction from ministers to officials is needed to pick up the pace in the final sprint to Paris. Brinkmanship and negotiation tactics will not deliver in Paris, but political leadership can. This highlights the importance of upcoming political meetings between leaders at the G20, APEC and CHOGM, and the pre-COP ministerial meeting in early November. On the specifics of the current draft, against The Climate Institute’s benchmarks for success in Paris: Read More here
22 October 2015, Ralph Nader, The Downsides of Cheap Abundance. In college, Economics 101 is often described as the social science discipline that deals with the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. MIT Economist Paul Samuelson liked to focus on scarcity, or more specifically, the allocation of scarce resources. “Abundance” was always a pretty word with an idyllic connotation for Professor Samuelson. I often wonder why there weren’t a few classes about the real-life consequences of abundance, along with scarcity and people’s material welfare. The present generation of internet technology is a proper subject of study within an economic framework. It might help us understand what is happening to our society. Let’s start with today’s highly-touted information age. At our finger-tips is the greatest free trove of information in human history. We can get it quickly and efficiently. Are we more informed? Are we hungry for more information? Do we read more books in an era of record production of books? Do we know more about what our congressional and state legislators are about? Are we more knowledgeable about history and its lessons? Read More here
18 October 2015, Climate News Network, Climate changes can kick in below 2°C limit. Sudden shifts in settled climates can occur long before global warming reaches the internationally-agreed safety level, European scientists say. Climate change could arrive with startling speed. New research has identified at least 37 “tipping points” that would serve as evidence that climate change has happened – and happened abruptly in one particular region. And 18 of them could happen even before the world warms by an average of 2°C, the proposed “safe limit” for global warming. Weather is what happens, climate is what people grow to expect from the weather. So climate change, driven by global warming as a consequence of rising carbon dioxide levels, in response to more than a century of fossil fuel combustion, could be – for many people – gradual, imperceptible and difficult to identify immediately. But Sybren Drijfhout, of the University of Southampton in the UK and his collaborators in France, the Netherlands and Germany, are not so sure. They report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they “screened” the massive ensemble of climate models that inform the most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and found evidence of abrupt regional changes in the ocean, the sea ice, the snow cover, the permafrost and in the terrestrial biosphere that could happen as average global temperatures reached a certain level. The models did not all simulate the same outcomes, but most of them did predict one or more abrupt regional shifts. No safe limit. But the future is not an exact science. “Our results show that the different state-of-the-art models agree that abrupt changes are likely, but that predicting when and where they will occur remains very difficult,” said Professor Drijfhout. “Also, our results show that no safe limit exists and that many abrupt shifts already occur for global warming levels much lower than two degrees.” The idea of a “tipping point” for climate change has been around for decades: the hypothesis is that a climate regime endures – perhaps with an increasing frequency of heat waves or windstorms or floods – as the average temperatures rise. However, at some point, there must be a dramatic shift to a new set of norms.Read More here