From Dec. 2-14, an estimated 25,000 participants will meet in Katowice, Poland, for what is being called “Paris 2.0.” Poland's deputy environment minister Michal Kurtyka will preside over the talks there as nations decide how to “count their greenhouse gas emissions, transparently report them to the rest of the world and reveal what they are doing to reduce them”:
The conference will have "quite significant consequences for humanity and for the way in which we take care of our planet," Kurtyka told the Associated Press ahead of the talks.
Experts agree that the Paris goals can only be met by cutting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to net zero by 2050.
But the Paris agreement let countries set their own emissions targets. Some are on track, others aren't. Overall, the world is heading the wrong way.
Alex Kirby at Climate News Network writes—Tripled climate cuts needed to fulfill pledge:
The world is not yet living up to its undertaking to tackle global warming, and it will have to make tripled climate cuts − at least − if it is to do so, a report says.
The emissions gap − the difference between the global emissions of greenhouse gases scientists expect in 2030 and the level they need to be at to honour the world’s promises to cut them − is the largest ever.
The 2018 Emissions Gap Report is published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). While it is still possible to keep global warming below 2°C, its authors say, the world’s current pace of action to cut emissions must triple for that to happen.
In 2015 almost 200 governments adopted the target of keeping global warming to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to try for a lower level, 1.5°C. Their decision is set out in the Paris Agreement.
But the Gap Report spells out in detail a criticism scientists have been making since soon after the Agreement was reached, saying the current pace of countries’ plans for reducing emissions − which they decide for themselves − is not enough to meet the Paris targets.
As well as allowing signatories the freedom to cut emissions as savagely or as modestly as they wish, the Agreement is also condemned by those who believe its targets are themselves so unrealistic that they fail to measure up to the scale and urgency of the climate crisis.
The combination of increasing greenhouse gas emissions and increasingly inadequate action to slow them means that the emissions gap is bigger than it has ever been.
Meeting the 2°C target will require climate action efforts to triple, the Gap Report says. But to meet the 1.5°C limit, which many governments and scientists are urging, needs nations not just to triple their efforts, but to increase them five-fold.
Current action to limit emissions suggests that global warming will reach about 3°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, and will continue to rise after that. If the gap is not closed by 2030, the report’s authors say, it is highly unlikely that the 2°C target can be reached. [...]
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands--whether of individuals or entire peoples--need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.”
~~Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2009—Home Job a Good Gig, If You Can Find One:
I had a boss a decade ago who hated the idea of employees working from home. Hated it. Glared at me every time I suggested we let a few of our team work at home at least a couple of days a week. That team mostly comprised editors and, with an Internet hook-up, they could easily have accomplished their tasks in the basement in their jammies, with the Cheetos close at hand, if they so chose. In some cases, it would have saved them a two-hour round-trip commute. And cut down on their dry-cleaning bills.
It was all about control. He was the kind of boss who didn't believe his staff was working unless he could actually see them working. Didn't matter that their tasks had a required level of output whose quantity could be measured by how often deadlines were met or missed and whose quality was randomly scrutinized by us higher-ups, some of whom also could have worked from home. If Timbuktu had broadband, they could have edited from there. Even though my boss was a good deal younger than I, and should have been more with it, he stuck to this cramped, old-management style right up until the day he left the job. Just as he stuck to the view that people would never give up dead-tree newspapers for on-line coverage.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin on the Pelosi endgame and a mysterious, still outstanding election. Joan McCarter on Trump's most racist judge yet, the next shutdown and ACA enrollment. Bear witness to the birth of the NHPA, the National Hockey Puck Association.
RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube|Patreon|Square Cash (Share code: Send $5, get $5!)