By Dr. M.Bali
From COMPREHENSIVE PROGRESSIVE AGENDA & WISH LIST REPORT
Source: progressivewishlist.wordpress.com
7. Climate Change Challenges
A Massive Climate Summit Is About to Happen in Paris. Here’s What You Need to Know.
U.S. Greenhouse Gas Pollution Include:
1. Carbon Dioxide (CO2), 82%
2. Methane (CH4), 9%
3. Nitrous Oxide (N2O), 6%
4. Flouronidated Gases, 3%
Source: EPA
Major CO2 global emitters
China 27%
US 15%
EU 10%
India 7%
Russia 6%
Japan 4%
Other 30%
Source: EPA
Greenhouse gasses in Earth’s environment have surpassed 400 parts per million around a great part of the planet—crossing a typical threshold that researchers say will have foreboding ramifications for environmental change. As indicated by a World Meteorological Organization report in Nov 9, 2015, the concentrations of all of three closely watched heat-trapping gasses— carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—showed strong growth this year, and are up 36 percent since 1990.“We are moving into uncharted territory at a frightening speed,” said WMO Secretary General Michel Jarraud of the discoveries.
Independently, a World Bank report released in Nov 8, 2015, cautioned that if nations neglect to maintain measures to decrease the rise of an Earth-wide temperature rise, an extra 100 million individuals could be driven into poverty by 2030. The report contends that addressing to climate change will be key to ending worldwide destitution as needy individuals are hit the hardest by crop failures, extreme climate, spikes in food costs, and waterborne diseases.
“Poor people and poor countries are exposed and vulnerable to all types of climate-related shocks—natural disasters that destroy assets and livelihoods; waterborne diseases and pests that become more prevalent during heat waves, floods, or droughts; crop failure from reduced rainfall; and spikes in food prices that follow extreme weather events,” it reads. “Climate-related shocks also affect those who are not poor but remain vulnerable and can drag them into poverty—for example, when a flood destroys a micro-enterprise, a drought decimates a herd, or contaminated water makes a child sick.”
No Breathable Air Unless Carbon Is Cut
As representatives from 195 countries meet in Paris to pound out a worldwide agreement to cut greenhouse gas discharges, another study finds that the inability to cut carbon could leave the world without breathable air. Marine plants, for example, phytoplankton are estimated to deliver more than a large portion of the Earth's atmospheric oxygen, as indicated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the study, Sergei Petrovskii, an applied mathematics professor at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, calculated how unmitigated climate change influence phytoplankton and along these lines the oceans's capacity to create breathable air. He ran PC models that took a look at what might happen to phytoplankton's capacity to photosynthesize at different temperatures. In the event that the world's seas warmed by 6 degrees Celsius — a practical probability if worldwide emissions proceed unabated—the little plants would stop oxygen creation, as indicated by the study, which was distributed in December 2015 in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology.
They warn: “Our results indicate that the depletion of atmospheric oxygen on a global scale (which, if it happens, obviously can kill most of the life on Earth) is another possible catastrophic consequence of global warming, a global ecological disaster that has been overlooked.”
In the run-up to United Nations Climate Change Conference that opens in Paris on November 30, yearly worldwide release of Carbon dioxide (CO2) will be around 32 billion metric tons. At the rate we’re going, the world’s air is set to rise 4 degrees Celsius before the century’s over, twofold what researchers say is a “acceptable” level of warming. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives preservationist benchmarks concerning what is required to balance out the normal worldwide temperature at its present level of around 60.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) over the pre-modern normal of 56.7 degrees. As indicated by the IPCC, worldwide CO2 outflows need to fall by around 40 percent underneath current levels inside of 20 years, to around 20 billion tons, and 80 percent by 2050, to seven billion tons.
Indicating what will be the most drastic measure to be taken in avoiding catastrophic environmental change, a recent study in the journal Nature found that 92 percent of US fossil fuels reserves must stay in the ground to keep worldwide temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, the threshold climate experts say would bring catastrophic floods, droughts, rising sea levels, heat waves, wildfires, ocean acidification and biodiversity loss and other extreme weather events. So, what to do now?
Implement low-carbon energy base that promotes conservation, conversion into renewal energy sources and fusion technology, providing a fair transition from fossil fuels and a “global treaty” to block the export of fossil fuels. How to do these?
(A) Implement the climate protection bill by Sen. Barbara Boxer and Sen. Bernie Sanders that includes a carbon tax on the nearly 3000 of the largest fossil fuel polluters, covering about 85 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, even a little $10-per-ton national carbon tax would cut greenhouse gas outflows by around 28 percent of 2005 levels, save a huge number of lives and kick off the renewable energy industry by finally putting it on an equivalent playing field with Big Oil, Big Gas and Big Coal, as per a study by Think Progress. Putting a cost on carbon would flip the script. Compelling the fossil fuel industry to pay for even a little rate of the harm it does to our planet would, thus, give it a motivating force to keep carbon in the ground. Outflows would go down and everybody would be in an ideal situation.
In his bill, Sanders cautioned that the main researchers who study environmental changes now let us know that their projections in the past weren’t right. That, actually, the emergency confronting our planet is significantly more genuine than they had already believed.They now let us know that on the off chance that we proceed with our cheerful way, where 12 out of the most recent 15 years were the hottest on record, and make no definitive move in changing our vitality framework and cutting green-house gasses, this planet could be 8 degrees Fahrenheit or more hotter than is right now the case.
It’s no coincidence that putting a cost on carbon—unquestionably the most extreme environmental change open—is now supported by 33 nations and a large portion of overall heavyweights, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, two of the world’s preeminent political pioneers on ecological change (Angela Merkel of Germany and Jerry Brown of California, a state that positions as the eighth-greatest economy on the planet), four of its biggest banks (Citi, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase), and a considerable lot of major oil companies.
Organized by the 2015 World Economic Forum, CEOs of 78 major companies, with combined yearly turnover of $2.1 trillion, said in a public statement to world leaders that an ambitious arrangement in Paris would make both financial growth and jobs and urged governments to incorporate the pricing of carbon emissions as a major aspect of policies to limit global warming, as world leaders get ready for a summit on environmental change in Paris.
“We believe that effective climate policies have to include explicit or implicit prices on carbon achieved via market mechanisms or coherent legislative measures according to national preferences,” they wrote. Such pricing would “trigger low-carbon investment and transform current emission patterns at a significant scale,” they added, noting they were taking voluntary actions to reduce their environmental and carbon footprints.
(B) Implement the modest Obama’s Clean Power Plan that pushed for 32 percent diminishes in carbon dioxide surges from power plants by 2030, with the base year of 2005, and requiring a 28 percent of a power production to be generated from renewable sources. Since 2011, already, the nine-state cap-and-trade system that covers Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states has cut carbon emissions by 15 percent and saved consumers $460 million off their electric bills.
In comparison, California’s ambitious Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) right now requires utilities to supply 33 percent of their power generation from renewable sources, for example, sun, wind, and geothermal force, by 2020. The new bill, The Clean Energy and Reduction Act, that goes more further than that would expand that objective to 50 percent by 2030. It would likewise require a 50 percent expansion in energy efficiency in structures by that year. The state means to lessen the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 — a major stride to the larger 2050 objective of decreasing carbon dioxide by 80 percent under 1990 levels.
A study by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that the U.S. can produce 80 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2050, utilizing accessible technology. However, that exists as fantasy as long as renewable energy keeps on being financially disadvantaged in favor of fossil fuel: In 2013, as per the International Institute for Sustainable Development, taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuels totaled $548 billion, contrasted with just $121 billion for renewables.
(C) End tax breaks and subsidies for big oil, gas and coal companies.
Representative Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced the End Polluter Welfare Act to stop taxpayer-funded $135 billion giveaways to oil, gas and coal companies.
Every year, the United States government gives out $20.5 billion to bolster the mining of oil, coal, and gas, with $17.2 billion of that coming at the federal level and $3.3 billion coming at the state level. Internationally, the world’s 20 top economies spend more than $400 billion dollars every year – through a blend of direct spending, tax reductions, speculations by majority-owned companies, and public finance from government-possessed banks and monetary establishments – propping up fossil fuel generation, a practice that seriously undermines the world’s mitigation of environmental change, as indicated a new report by the environmental advocacy group Oil Change International. Every year, governments funnel billions of dollars in support to the fossil fuel industry. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is using those public dollars to dig up fossil fuels that we must not burn if we want a safe-climate future.
D) Eliminate and inevitably boycott Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) gasses.
These are intense greenhouse gasses used as a part of fridges and ventilation systems and are discharged essentially amid repairing of or toward the end of the life-span of these items. The outcomes are the collection of substances in these applications which shapes a formerly unrecognized extra hazard for environmental change. These substances are utilized as a part of the spot of the ozone-layer-exhausting substances (CFCs en HCFCs) that were once in the past utilized and banned as a part of 1987. HFCs that supplanted CFCs, conversely, don’t influence the ozone layer, however add to the greenhouse impact.
In October 16, 2015, Obama administration has announced new efforts to diminish the use of hydrofluorocarbons as a piece of worldwide treaty to confine their uses. Also, announced in July 2015, EPA limits atmosphere warming chemicals. The Obama administration moved to restrict the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the most powerful greenhouse gasses produced by human action. The Environmental Protection Agency pronounced that sure uses for HFCs are restricted and certain alternatives can be used. The move is a piece of President Obama's second-term push to limit climate change, to a limited extent through regulations restricting greenhouse gasses. The EPA said the private sector is as of now moving far from HFCs. Without the right regulations, the EPA evaluated that HFC use would double by 2020 and triple by 2030.
(E) Keep it in the Ground Act
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders, have introduced in Nov 2015 the bill Keep It In The Ground Act, that would bar new leases on coal, gas, oil, and tar sands extraction on federal lands in the U.S. The bill, would likewise, preclude offshore drilling in the Arctic and the Atlantic Ocean and forbid the renewal of leases that haven’t yet produced fossil fills.
“This bill is about recognizing that the fossil fuel reserves that are on our public lands should be managed in the public interest, and the public interest is for us to help drive a transition from fossil fuels to a clean energy future,” Merkley said. “We don’t have a lot of time to do this, so there’s an urgency to it, and a place that’s readily available for us to act is on the fossil fuels that are on our public lands.”
Fossil fuels from public lands as of now make up a significant portion of the United States’ carbon emissions: according to a Center for American Progress and Wilderness Society report, oil, coal, and gas taken from public lands and waters are responsible for more than 20 percent of the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions. As indicated by one Bureau of Land Management report, 279 million acres of land of government lands in the U.S. contain an expected total of 31 billion barrels of oil and 231 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Numerous authoritative voices, for example, the leaders of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, and the Bank of England, Mark Carney, have cautioned that numerous fossil fuel reserves could be left useless by activity on environmental change. On the off chance that the retreat from fossil fills does not happen in a slow and arranged way financial investors could lose trillions of dollars as the "carbon bubble" bursts.
President Barack Obama verbalized that idea in his justification for dismissing the Keystone XL pipeline in November:
"Ultimately, if we’re gonna prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re gonna have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky."
[F] Expand research and development into climate change mitigation techniques.
These include cutting-edge efforts to cut or prevent the emissions of greenhouse gases-limiting the magnitude of future warming. It might likewise include attempts, for example, (a) carbon capture and storage (CCS). One form of CCS involves chemically capturing the carbon dioxide from a power plant smokestack, and then piping it underground so that the invisible gas is contained in rock formations without leaking, (b) another approach, so-called “Negative-emissions technologies” are processes that could pull carbon dioxide either via sequestration or out of the atmosphere by means of emerging geoengineering strategies, and (c) mitigation likewise reaches out to the protection of carbon “sinks” like the forests or oceans.
New carbon sinks can be created through, for example, forest regeneration or creating new sinks through silviculture or green agriculture are also elements of mitigation, while the existing forests and phytoplanktonc should be protected. The need to slow down destruction of the world’s remaining forests, such as the boreal forests, rain-forests, and the phytoplankton in the oceans, in order to prevent the planet dangerously overheating has long been acknowledged, but has proved impossible to be achieved. Another potential carbon sink includes (d) ocean iron fertilization to promote the growth of CO2-consuming algae.
An interesting example of Negative-emissions technologies was recently reported from Columbia University's Klaus Lackner who described carbon scrubber, a device sufficiently little to fit inside a shipping trailer, and costing less than $200,000, that has the capacity to remove a ton of CO2 a day from the air - at a small amount of the expense compared to similar technologies. Also, an Australian atmosphere researcher Tim Flannery describes a bewildering cluster of carbon-negative tools in his new book Atmosphere of Hope, including cement and plastics that “eat” carbon. “We must begin setting up the ground now [to convey such tools], even as we undertake the gargantuan effort of cutting emissions,” Flannery writes.
[G] Expand research and development into hydrogen fuel cells
Fuel cells are a promising innovation for use as a source of heat and power for structures, and as an electrical power source force for electric engines pushing vehicles. Power devices work best on hydrogen, the most plentiful element in the atmosphere. However, hydrocarbons like natural gas, methanol, or even gasoline can be improved to deliver the hydrogen required for fuel cells. These cells are being composed in light of the fact that they will dispose of releases of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate discharges.
Expanded research will address the full scope of mechanical, economical, and institutional obstructions to the broad commercialization of hydrogen and fuel cell units with a definitive objectives of diminishing our reliance on oil, lessening carbon discharges, and empowering perfect, solid force era.
[H] Revitalizing Coal and Oil producing regions.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has disclosed in Nov 2015, the Plan For Revitalizing Coal Communities to revitalize coal and oil country, to recover as the “clean energy economy” develops, saying “We can’t ignore the impact this transition is already having on mining communities, or the threat it poses to the healthcare and retirement security of coalfield workers and their families.”
Clinton’s proposal calls for $30 billion towards infrastructure upgrades, aid for dislocated workers and vulnerable communities, mine property remediation, job skills and education programs, broadband changes, repurposing old mine sites, health and retirement plans, incentives for business formation in Appalachia, the Illinois Basin, and the Western coal regions.
[I] Fossil fuel divestment.
This is the elimination of investment resources including stocks, securities, and speculation reserves from companies included in extracting carbon and fossil fuels, trying to diminish climate change by accelerating the adoption of renewable energy through the stigmatizing of fossil fuel businesses. A number of environmentalist and student groups advocate fossil fuel divestment, which in 2015 was apparently the quickest developing divestment development in history. By November 2015, 500 separate institutions had resolved to divest their portfolios, representing $3.4 trillion in total, from oil, coal and gas companies, according to gofossilfree.org.
A study by the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at University of Oxford found that the vilification of fossil fuel corporations brought on by divestment can “materially increase the uncertainty surrounding the future cash flows of fossil-fuel companies.” That, thus, “can lead to a permanent compression in the trading multiples – e.g., the share price to earnings (P/E) ratio of a target company.” According to climate change website, 350.org, fossil fuel stocks have lost 30 cents on the dollar in the last 2 years.
[J] Combating Climate Denialism
Republicans, being the business party, famously, are to a great extent deniers of environmental changes, hating green energies of any kind. What explains their resistance to climate science? As indicated by new research distributed in Nature Climate Change, there’s no less than one factually demonstrated motivation behind why more than 56 percent of Congressional Republicans deny environmental change: echo chamber, which refers to circumstances where individuals surround themselves with data they want to listen to, and shut out the rest. We’ve known for some time that these present themselves in climate issues; A 2014 report postulated that the reason Americans haven’t completely accepted the scientific consensus on environmental changes is a result of echo chamber like Fox News and right-wing think-thanks, where traditionalist viewers are “exposed only to content consistent with their opinions, while shielded from dissenting views.”
Republicans’ open hostility to coping with climate change has been strident since President Obama took office. In 2009, White House’s first-ever carbon pollution control, the Cap-and-trade bill was voted down by 168 House Republicans, where just eight sponsored it. (Adversaries killed it in the Senate, where it never got a vote.) This has made an odd circumstance that was as of late summed up by New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait: “The entire world is, in essence, tiptoeing gingerly around the unhinged second-largest political party in the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, in hopes of saving the world behind its back.”
The Republican Party could be the single most noteworthy obstruction to worldwide campaign to moderate environmental change. But small cracks are appearing across this conservative wall of denial. For instance, ahead of time of Pope Francis’ visit to the United States, a resolution distributed among House Republicans that recognized the evidence of a changing atmosphere and the risk it poses to human existence. The resolution required no solid solutions, just saying that Congress ought to focus on studying and tending to the issue at some vague point later on. Yet only 11 of 247 House Republicans were willing to sign it— a scanty 4.5 percent of the GOP caucus.
Another ABC News/Washington Post survey distributed on the eve of COP21 summit finds that the quantity of Americans who say environmental change is a "serious issue" has even fallen six points subsequent to the same survey was led in June 2014. In the meantime, the quantity of individuals who say climate change is not under any condition a serious problem (36 percent) has grown 7 points since the previous survey.
As David Brooks — a conservative commentator, explained in Dec 1, on the climate change issue: "[T]he G.O.P. has come to resemble a Soviet dictatorship — a vast majority of Republican politicians can’t publicly say what they know about the truth of climate change because they’re afraid the thought police will knock on their door and drag them off to an AM radio interrogation.".
A study published on November 30, 2015 in the journal Nature Climate Change looks at the institutional and corporate structure of the environmental change counter-development. Report author Justin Farrell revealed a web of 4,556 people with overlapping ties to 164 organizations, who are led by ExxonMobil and the Charles and David Koch family foundations, that advance climate denialism. As indicated by Farrell, those organizations "were most successful in pushing their view" as groups with ties to those donors were "more likely to see their viewpoints make it into media than those without such ties."
Yet, a New York Times/CBS News survey in November 30, 2015, demonstrates that 66% of Americans say the United States ought to join a binding universal treaty to limit the effects of a worldwide climate change, including those persons who identify as conservative. Furthermore, 63 percent of Americans—including a thin majority of Republicans—said they would bolster local policy intended at constraining carbon emissions from power plants. Seventy-five percent of those surveyed said a global warming was at that point having genuine impacts or that it would in the future. Nine in 10 Democrats concurred, in contrast to 58 percent of Republicans. 33% of Republicans said they trusted the climate change's impact on the earth would be irrelevant.
This result was similar to a June 2014 ABC/Washington Post survey reports that 70 percent of Americans believed that the central government ought to require states to limit the measure of carbon dioxide gasses created inside of their borders. A 2015 Stanford University poll also found an overwhelming majority of the American public, including half of Republicans, support government action to curb global warming.
On Dec 1, 2015, the Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives, with some assistance from a few Democratic defectors, voted to block regulations to limit pollution from power plants, the foundation of the administration's push to tackle climate change, sinking efforts to pass climate legislation. “The next president could simply tear it up,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, (whose home state of Kentucky produces dirty coal), proclaimed on the Senate floor, referring to the president's power plant regulations. “Governments currently engaged in this round of climate talks will want to know that there is more than just an Executive Branch in our system of government,” he added, noting that the climate agenda “may not even survive much longer anyway.”
Similarly, Republican lawmakers are threatening to withhold financing to a new “Green Climate Fund,” that the president, along with other wealthy nations, promised the summit to set aside to offer assistance to low-income developing countries with curbing emissions and preparing for the effects of global climate changes. “We pledge that Congress will not allow U.S. taxpayer dollars to go to the Green Climate Fund until the forthcoming international climate agreement is submitted to the Senate for its constitutional advice and consent,” 37 Republican senators wrote in a letter to Obama on December 1.
It’s true that the Paris agreement probably will fall short, on its own, of the international community’s stated goal of halting warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), which is regarded as the benchmark for dangerous, unmanageable climate change. Although many people consider it unrealistic to meeting the 2 degrees goal, these talks, which aptly, if ominously, have been called “our last hope” for climate action, must be met with bold optimism.
Regardless of the possibility that the more than 195 nations' submitted pledges are incorporated into coming into agreement on this 31-page document, called the historic Paris Agreement, agreed upon by 195 countries in Dec 12, 2015. Based on the domestic pledges made by 187 countries, covering some 95 percent of global emissions, worldwide temperatures would now ascend to 2.7 to 3.5 C over the pre-modern level resulting still in catastrophic warming.
During the last day of COP21, Mark Hertsgaard of Nation remarked, that, notwithstanding the well-intentions of the summit attendees as in the Copenhagen 2009, this too will likely fail to reach a workable consensus. "A case in point is unfolding at the landmark United Nations climate summit in Paris, where president Obama and other world leaders seem eager to define a scientific failure as a political success. This triumph of political spin over scientific reality is unfolding for understandable, even well-intentioned reasons, but its effects would be ruinous for human lives and institutions now and for generations to come."
As Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman explained in a piece published recently in the New York Times: "Future historians — if there are any future historians — will almost surely say that the most important thing happening in the world during December 2015 was the climate talks in Paris. True, nothing agreed to in Paris will be enough, by itself, to solve the problem of global warming. But the talks could mark a turning point, the beginning of the kind of international action needed to avert catastrophe... Then again, they might not; we may be doomed. And if we are, you know who will be responsible: the Republican Party."
In conclusion, Naomi Klein, the author of 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, on mostly inevitable consequences of global climate change, declared in a recent interview, that “Climate change isn’t an ‘issue’ to add to the list of things to worry about, next to healthcare and taxes,” Klein writes. “It’s a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinction—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve.”