A riverboat pushes a barge loaded with logs that were cut illegally from virgin Amazon rain forest
and seized by federal police and government inspectors as part of Brazil's effort to control deforestation.
As part of a bilaterial meeting, President Barack Obama and President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil announced their agreement Tuesday to each generate 20 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2030. This will not include hydropower, which generates about 6 percent of U.S. electricity compared with 7 percent for wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass sources. Brazil gets nearly 80 percent of its electricity from hydropower and just 0.5 percent from wind. Biomass provides about 4 percent of the nation's electricity. Solar generation is negligible.
Rousseff also announced that Brazil will restore 30 million acres of rain forest as a means of reducing its carbon emissions.
Suzanne Goldenberg and Dan Roberts report:
The White House said the initiatives were part of a new US-Brazil climate partnership, loosely modelled on the historic US-China agreement reached during Obama’s visit to Beijing last November, intended to build momentum for a global deal to fight climate change in Paris at the end of the year.
“Following progress during my trips to China and India, this shows that the world’s major economies can begin to transcend some of the old divides and work together to confront the common challenge that we face,” said Obama at a joint press conference with his Brazilian counterpart. [...]
“This is a big deal,” Brian Deese, the White House climate adviser, told a call with reporters.
It is a big deal. But the numbers show how very far there is to go. Those 30 million acres of rain forest restoration over the next decade and a half compare with 230 million acres that have been deforested since the end of World War II, 148 million since 1970. The Brazilian rain forest currently covers some 1.3 billion acres, which absorbs up to 25 percent of all human carbon dioxide emissions.
Meanwhile, China formally submitted its pledge Tuesday to the United Nations on reducing greenhouse gases. Known in the jargon as the Intended Nationally Determined Contribution, China's pledge is to reach the peak in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, sooner if possible. At $89 billion in 2014, China already is investing more in clean energy projects than any other nation. A recent study by Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicted that China will invest $3.4 trillion in clean energy projects in the next 25 years. That's more than a fourth of the world total of $12.2 trillion Bloomberg estimates all nations will invest in such projects by 2040.