These are the news stories I found:
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Greta Thunberg and the Teens Go for Broke in New UN Climate Emergency Petition
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Q&A: how fast do we need to cut carbon emissions?
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Roadmap Details Just Transition Based on Sustainable Wind Energy for Nebraska
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C-suites need to prioritize sustainability, climate change plans
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Cop26: what do scientists think about the progress in Glasgow?
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'This Must Not Happen': If Unhalted, Permian Basin Fracking Will Unleash 40 Billion Tons of CO2 by 2050
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In an age of “blah, blah, blah”, what should climate activism look like?
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China’s top Cop26 delegate says it is taking ‘real action’ on climate targets
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How to reduce our carbon footprint
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Trust Is Hard to Find at the U.N. Climate Summit in Glasgow
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During the two weeks of COP26, women will miss out on 2.5 million working days while fetching water
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Climate talks draft agreement expresses 'alarm and concern'
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Coastal threats can be tackled with more focus on adapting
This Is An Open Thread
Greta Thunberg and the Teens Go for Broke in New UN Climate Emergency Petition
The teens continue to exploit every avenue they have to force the world to come to grips with their future. The latest push came on Wednesday when Greta Thunberg and 13 other kids dropped a petition on United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ doorstep. Their demand: The UN must declare a climate emergency.
The petition is the group’s second attempt to get the UN to throw its weight around. The teens asked for climate change to be declared a children’s rights crisis in 2019, only to be rebuffed last month. The new petition, dropped in the midst of international climate talks in Glasgow known as COP26, opens a new avenue for redress.
“We respectfully call on you and Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) to declare a systemwide climate emergency at the United Nations,” the petition reads.
Q&A: how fast do we need to cut carbon emissions?
How hard will it be to transition away from fossil fuels?
Speed matters – the longer we leave it, the harder it gets. Scientists now know that achieving any climate outcome, such as the Paris agreement goal of limiting global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, is dependent on cumulative emissions over time.
In other words, there is a finite carbon budget, and we have already used most of it. The longer we continue with high emissions, the more drastic cuts will need to become in future years in order to stay within the overall budget. On the graph below, the total carbon budget is the area under the emissions line.
Roadmap Details Just Transition Based on Sustainable Wind Energy for Nebraska
The people of Nebraska "deserve a livable future with less water and air pollution, more sustainable jobs, and democratic control over their energy sources."
So declares a report released Tuesday by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) that urges the landlocked U.S. state to take full advantage of its vast wind energy potential and ditch its climate-wrecking reliance on coal.
Entitled Rain and Sunshine and Wind How an Energy Transition Could Power Nebraska, the new publication details how the state is ripe for a just energy transition and offers a roadmap for how to get there.
C-suites need to prioritize sustainability, climate change plans
The international response to climate change could lead to regulations prompting the C-suite to reconsider sustainability plans.
That's a likely outcome of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), underway in Glasgow, Scotland, policy experts said. The rules will likely stress the use of renewable and green energy and environmentally sound sourcing of materials. Businesses may have to change how they operate and document those changes for governments. The impact will be felt internationally throughout the supply chain.
"We can expect more promises from governments, more regulations in place, more push, more investments, more backing for investments by governments after that conference," said Abhijit Sunil, a Forrester analyst.
Cop26: what do scientists think about the progress in Glasgow?
The Science Weekly podcast is in Glasgow, where we are bringing listeners daily episodes from Cop26. Each morning you will hear from one of the Guardian’s award-winning environment team. Today, Guardian global environment editor, Jonathan Watts, talks to Katharine Hayhoe and Peter Stott about their work as climate scientists and how they feel Cop26 is progressing
15 minute audio ^^^
'This Must Not Happen': If Unhalted, Permian Basin Fracking Will Unleash 40 Billion Tons of CO2 by 2050
As activists at the COP26 summit continue to denounce the "massive" gap between wealthy governments' lofty rhetoric and their woefully inadequate plans for addressing the climate emergency, a new analysis of projected extraction in the Permian Basin in the U.S. Southwest exposes the extent to which oil and gas executives' refusal to keep fossil fuels in the ground puts humanity's future in jeopardy.
"While climate science tells us that we must consume 40% less oil in 2030, Permian producers plan to grow production more than 50%."
Released Tuesday by Oil Change International, Earthworks, and the Center for International Environmental Law, the second chapter of The Permian Basin Climate Bomb warns that if the drilling and fracking boom that has turned the Permian Basin into "the world's single most prolific oil and gas field" over the past decade is allowed to persist unabated for the next three decades, it will generate nearly 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide by mid-century.
In an age of “blah, blah, blah”, what should climate activism look like?
On Friday 5 November in George Square, Glasgow, the statue of James Watt, the engineer who helped birth the Industrial Revolution, gazed down thoughtfully from his plinth. Below were spread thousands of young climate protesters, outraged at the unforeseen consequences his fossil fuel era has left.
Leading the crowd were activists from indigenous territories and the Global South, adorned with feathers, beads and colourful traditional clothes. Inflatable dinosaurs and polar bears followed behind, together with marchers holding a sea of placards: “The wrong Amazon is burning” and “system change not climate change”, they read. One grey-haired woman carried a “recycled teenager” sign.
And while their global protest strategy is vibrant, the message that climate protests have unleashed on the world is brutally serious. “This is no longer a climate conference,” the Fridays For Future founder Greta Thunberg warned from the protest stage about the ongoing Cop26 summit. “This is now a Global North greenwash festival; a two-week long celebration of business as usual and ‘blah, blah, blah’.”
China’s top Cop26 delegate says it is taking ‘real action’ on climate targets
China has detailed and concrete plans on how to meet its climate commitments, and is pushing those plans forward vigorously, unlike some countries that are “paying lip service” to their climate targets, the head of delegation for China at the Cop26 climate talks has said.
Xie Zhenhua, China’s veteran chief official, said: “President Xi [Jinping] announced recently on many multilateral occasions China’s specific targets and concrete policies, measures and actions. We have a policy framework to ensure that we can achieve our climate target”
He added: “If we only make promises without taking real action then we are just simply paying lip service to make a show rather than taking real action.”
How to reduce our carbon footprint
After the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last month, it's easy to feel demoralized. With everything else in the news, it's also easy to focus on threats that are arguably more imminent, like the delta coronavirus variant. But the threat from the climate crisis is increasingly part of our everyday lives—and it's going to get worse.
As a result of insufficient action over the past several decades, the next 30 years will bring more extreme weather and a temperature rise of at least 1.5° C, no matter what we do. But—and there is a very important but—collective action now will decide whether the future is even worse than the IPCC's already grim forecast.
"The question now isn't whether we're going to avoid this," says Professor Michael E. Mann, a leading climatologist at Pennsylvania State University who has been a proponent of recognizing and combating climate change. "It's how bad are we willing to let it get."
Trust Is Hard to Find at the U.N. Climate Summit in Glasgow
As the second week of the cop26 United Nations global climate talks began in Glasgow on Monday, the Washington Post published a truly remarkable piece of reporting that will surely demoralize the hardworking people gathered in the convention hall trying to hammer out an agreement. A team led by the Post’s veteran climate analyst Chris Mooney went through the emissions data proffered by countries at the summit, and found that they were in many cases wildly wrong. Malaysia, for instance, claimed that its forests are sucking up so much carbon that its net emissions are smaller than tiny Belgium’s—even though most researchers are convinced that clearing peatlands for palm-oil plantations, as Malaysia has been doing, is the very definition of a carbon bomb. The Central African Republic reported that its land absorbs 1.8 billion tons of carbon a year; the Post termed it “an immense and improbable amount that would effectively offset the annual emissions of Russia.” The worst-case scenario: the emissions data could be off by twenty-three per cent over all, or roughly the equivalent of China’s emissions.
That’s the kind of thing that can undercut whatever confidence the U.N. negotiators are trying to build. Barack Obama spoke at the conference on Monday, telling young people (many of whom are complaining that they can’t get inside the hall) that “you’ve grown up watching many of the adults who are in positions to do something about it either act like the problem doesn’t exist or refuse to make the hard decisions necessary to address it.” But, just three years ago, Obama was in Houston, telling a very different crowd, at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, “I know we’re in oil country and we need American energy.” He then said that oil and gas production “went up every year I was President,” adding, “Suddenly, America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas—that was me, people.” Indeed, although the United States cut carbon emissions during Obama’s years in office, it happened mainly because of his aggressive backing of natural-gas fracking—and the increased methane emissions that came with the switch may have left the nation warming the planet just as much as before. (Methane features prominently in the Post’s analysis.)
During the two weeks of COP26, women will miss out on 2.5 million working days while fetching water
In the time it takes world leaders to agree on climate action at COP26, women in developing countries will miss out the equivalent of 2.5 million working days due to a lack of clean water.
For much of humanity, the climate crisis manifests as a water crisis - worsening as bodies of water dry up, become flooded or polluted. WaterAid is calling on world leaders to meet their $100 billion (€86.4 billion) climate pledge sooner than the delayed 2023 date, in order to provide solutions.
Women and girls in poorer countries are typically responsible for collecting water. With a dearth of basic water services in rural areas, they’re having to walk longer hours to provide for their families, leaving them little time to study or work.
Climate talks draft agreement expresses 'alarm and concern'
Negotiators at the United Nations climate talks are considering a draft decision that highlights "alarm and concern" about global warming the planet already is experiencing and continues to call on the world to cut about half of its emissions of heat-trapping gases by 2030.
The early version of the cover decision released Wednesday at the climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, doesn't provide specific agreements on the three major goals that the U.N. set going into the negotiations.
The draft mentions the need to cut emissions by 45% by 2030 from 2010 levels and achieve "net-zero" by mid-century. Doing so requires countries to pump only as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as can be absorbed again through natural or artificial means.
Coastal threats can be tackled with more focus on adapting
A timely new report demonstrates how planners and local government decisionmakers can reduce risk from coastal hazards now, ahead of new legislation, thereby speeding up adaptation to the impacts of climate change.
The report, "Enabling Coastal Adaptation: Using Current Legislative Settings for Managing the Transition to A Dynamic Adaptive Planning Regime in New Zealand" examines how current legislation can be used to transition to adaptive planning practices so we're ready for new legislation. This will reduce risks and help avoid further 'lock-in' of developments in areas at risk from erosion, flooding and sea-level rise.
The report, authored by adaptation expert Dr. Judy Lawrence of Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington with planning experts Sylvia Allan of Allan Planning & Research and Larissa Clarke of GNS Science, was prepared as part of the Enabling Coastal Adaptation project within the Resilience to Nature's Challenges National Science Challenge.
I collected to many tweets as usual, so I’ll just leave those in the body
The writers in Climate Brief work to keep the Daily Kos community informed and engaged with breaking news about the climate crisis around the world while providing inspiring stories of environmental heroes, opportunities for direct engagement, and perspectives on the intersection of climate activism with spirituality, politics, and the arts.