These are some of the stories I found:
- COP26: 'One of the whitest' climate conferences in years, say environmentalists
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Over 100 Nations at COP26 Pledge to Cut Global Methane Emissions by 30 Percent in Less Than a Decade
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‘No one knew they existed’: wild heirs of lost British honeybee found at Blenheim
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Energy Vault Partners with DG Fuels to Provide 1.6 GWh of Energy Storage for SAF Project
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Indigenous Women in Peru Seek to Turn the Tables on Big Oil, Asserting ‘Rights of Nature’ to Fight Epic Spills
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Thunberg v Carney: tensions flare over net zero and carbon offsets at Cop26
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Inside and outside climate talks, youths urge faster action
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Global climate change may impact crops within 10 years
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Markey-Merkley Bill Would Stop Big Banks From 'Throwing Money at Dirty Fossil Fuel Projects'
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By 2050, 200 Million Climate Refugees May Have Fled Their Homes. But International Laws Offer Them Little Protection
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Rock samples in Quebec offer clues into the cause of Earth's first mass extinction event
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More Than 100,000 Take to Streets on Global Day of Action for Climate Justice
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Decrying 'Greenwashing' at COP26, Youth Climate Leaders Join Tens of Thousands at Glasgow March
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Report: G20 Governments Have Bankrolled at Least $188 Billion in Fossil Fuels Since 2018
This Is An Open Thread
COP26: 'One of the whitest' climate conferences in years, say environmentalists
A catalog of mistakes means that representatives from the Global South have found it difficult to show up to a conference in the United Kingdom where world leaders are deciding how to slow the planet's further heating.
The number of people registered to attend COP26 has doubled from the last UN climate conference in 2019 to almost 40,000 people, according to documents published by the organizers Tuesday, but delegates and observers from poorer countries say their colleagues have struggled to make it to the summit.
Travel restrictions to slow the spread of the coronavirus, last-minute changes in quarantine rules, and the high costs of flights and hotels have forced many delegates to attend the conference via video call. Because of restrictions on space in the rooms in Glasgow, environmental groups representing vulnerable people across the world say they have been shut out of meetings.
Over 100 Nations at COP26 Pledge to Cut Global Methane Emissions by 30 Percent in Less Than a Decade
In a rare moment of good news coming from this week’s Conference of the Parties climate summit in Glasgow, more than 100 nations have pledged to cut global methane emissions by 30 percent or more between now and 2030 in an effort to quickly and significantly curb global warming.
The announcement marking the official launch of the U.S.-European Union led Global Methane Pledge came as the Biden administration took a key step on Tuesday toward meeting the reduction goal with a draft of stringent new methane regulations for the oil and gas industry released by the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington.
“This is huge,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said of the global initiative. “If we fulfill this pledge over the next 10 years the impact is [the same as] switching … all the cars of the world, all the trucks of the world, all the planes of the world [and] all the ships of the world to zero emission technologies; [the] entire transportation sector.”
‘No one knew they existed’: wild heirs of lost British honeybee found at Blenheim
Thousands of rare forest honeybees that appear to be the last wild descendants of Britain’s native honeybee population have been discovered in the ancient woodlands of Blenheim Palace.
The newly discovered subspecies, or ecotype, of honeybee is smaller, furrier and darker than the honeybees found in managed beehives, and is believed to be related to the indigenous wild honeybees that foraged the English countryside for centuries. Until now, it was presumed all these bees had been completely wiped out by disease and competition from imported species.
While feral honeybee colonies – usually created by swarms of non-native bees that have left a nearby managed hive – are occasionally found in the UK, there was no evidence that self-sustaining colonies of native, tree-nesting honeybees still existed in England, and no record of the wild subspecies living in Blenheim.
Energy Vault Partners with DG Fuels to Provide 1.6 GWh of Energy Storage for SAF Project
Under the terms of the agreement, Energy Vault agreed to provide 1.6 gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy storage to support DG Fuels across multiple projects, with the first project slated for 500 megawatt hours (MWh) in Louisiana. This initial project will be followed by additional projects in British Columbia and Ohio. DG Fuels has developed a carbon conversion fuel production process that is targeting a 93% carbon conversion efficiency, which reduces the amount of feedstock required to produce SAF and lowers cost of production.
DG Fuels will deploy Energy Vault’s gravity storage systems to provide green electricity in conjunction with photovoltaic solar to firm and shape the renewable energy to match the demand load of the green hydrogen production. The renewable power will be used to power HydrogenPro water electrolysis for both hydrogen and oxygen feedstock production.
Energy Vault’s advanced gravity energy storage solutions are based on the proven physics and mechanical engineering fundamentals of pumped hydroelectric energy storage, but replace water with custom-made composite blocks, or “mobile masses”, which do not lose storage capacity over time. The composite blocks can be made from low-cost and locally sourced materials, including the excavated soil at the construction site, but can also utilize waste materials such as mine tailings, coal combustion residuals (coal ash), and fiberglass from decommissioned wind turbine blades.
I didn’t read the whole article Energy Vault Partners, I thought making sustainable jet fuels is important.
Indigenous Women in Peru Seek to Turn the Tables on Big Oil, Asserting ‘Rights of Nature’ to Fight Epic Spills
In Peru’s northern Amazon rainforest, across a million acres known as Lot 1AB, a parade of foreign oil companies have for over 50 years drilled, spilled crude and dumped billions of gallons of toxic “production water” on the once pristine land.
Throughout that time, the firms have largely evaded responsibility for cleaning up the mess or compensating Indigenous communities harmed by the devastation, leveraging a global patchwork of advantageous laws that emphasize economic growth and what lawyers for those communities call the “commodification” of nature.
Now, a federation of Kukama Indigenous women in Peru, the Huaynakana Kamatahuara kana, are fighting back by shifting the legal paradigm, demanding in a September lawsuit that the Peruvian government grant and recognize the legal rights of nature by ensuring that the Marañón River, downstream from Lot 1AB, is able to exist, to flow, to live free from contamination, to feed and be fed by its tributaries and to be protected, preserved and restored.
Thunberg v Carney: tensions flare over net zero and carbon offsets at Cop26
There is an ideological battle going at Cop26 and it’s about the concept of net zero emissions and the use of carbon offsets.
There was a flashpoint on Wednesday, when UN climate finance envoy Mark Carney announced that more than 450 banks, insurers and assets managers with $130 trillion in assets under management had committed to set science-based targets in line with net zero emissions by 2050.
The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, or Gfanz, “is the gold standard for net zero,” Carney told the summit.
“The enormous resources and relentless focus of GFANZ can unlock the $1 trillion of additional annual investment needed for the net zero transition in emerging markets and developing countries by the middle of this decade,” he said.
The carbon boot-print of the military
In 1997, international climate negotiations led to the agreement of the Kyoto Protocol, which set carbon emission reduction targets for industrialised nations for the first time. However, one of many compromises made to bring this treaty into being was that the emissions of military forces would be excluded from these targets. As US lead negotiator, Stuart Eizenstat, later stated, “We took special pains, working with the Defense Department… to fully protect the unique position of the United States as the world's only super power… We achieved everything they outlined as necessary to protect military operations… At Kyoto, the parties, for example, took a decision to exempt key overseas military activities from any emissions targets, including exemptions for bunker fuels used in international aviation and maritime transport and from emissions resulting from multilateral operations.” [1]
In 2015, negotiations led to Paris Climate Agreement, which limits the carbon emissions of all signatory nations. Under the operating rules of the treaty, military carbon emissions may be excluded – but the decision is left to individual countries. [2]
With military vehicles such as warships, fighter planes, tanks etc being major consumers of fossil fuels – see table 1 – this leaves a significant hole in the control of greenhouse gas emissions. But how large are military emissions in total?
Inside and outside climate talks, youths urge faster action
Young people both inside and outside of the United Nations climate talks are telling world leaders to hurry up and get it done, that concrete measures to avoid catastrophic warming can’t wait.
Ashley Lashley, a 22-year-old from Barbardos who is on her country's climate negotiation team in Glasgow, thought about how to communicate the need for urgency during a session on carbon trading. As she listened to other delegates debate the intricate and intractable topic that has baffled negotiators for more than six years, a phrase popped into her head: '"blah-blah-blah."
That's the expression prominent teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg has started repeating to express her thoughts on the pace of government actions to curb global warming. The Thunberg-inspired Fridays for Future movement held a demonstration outside the conference venue to pressure the negotiators inside, drawing tens of thousands of participants.
Global climate change may impact crops within 10 years
Global climate change may affect the production of maize (corn) and wheat as early as 2030 under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, according to a new NASA study published on November 1, 2021, in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Food. Maize crop yields are projected to decline 24 percent, while wheat could potentially see growth of about 17 percent.
Using advanced climate and agricultural models, scientists found that the change in yields is due to projected increases in temperature, shifts in rainfall patterns and elevated surface carbon dioxide concentrations from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. These changes would make it more difficult to grow maize in the tropics but could expand wheat’s growing range.
Jonas Jägermeyr, a crop modeler and climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City, said.
Markey-Merkley Bill Would Stop Big Banks From 'Throwing Money at Dirty Fossil Fuel Projects'
As the ongoing COP26 climate summit draws attention to the financial institutions that enable fossil fuel companies to keep wrecking the planet, a pair of progressive U.S. senators on Friday introduced a bill that would force big banks to stop pouring money into the destructive industry.
The Fossil Free Finance Act, sponsored by Democratic Sens. Ed Markey (Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (Ore.), would require the Federal Reserve to impose new restrictions on major banks and other systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) to cut off funding for projects that produce planet-heating emissions.
"In order to reduce emissions and combat climate change, we need to stop throwing money at dirty fossil fuel projects," said Markey, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's panel on climate change, clean air, and nuclear safety.
Millions around the world march to demand action on the climate crisis – video report this is a 2:39 video.
By 2050, 200 Million Climate Refugees May Have Fled Their Homes. But International Laws Offer Them Little Protection
In recent years, tens of thousands of people have fled Central American countries like Guatemala and Honduras, leaving not just because of gang violence but also drought and extreme weather conditions that have made it impossible to grow crops.
In Bangladesh, hundreds of thousands of people are displaced every year by larger and more unpredictable monsoon floods, a trend throughout the region, which the World Bank estimates over 8 million people have left in recent years.
In West Africa’s Sahel region, heavy floods and food shortages have combined with violence and instability to drive people to other regions. In the Caribbean, massive hurricanes regularly push residents out of their homes.
Rock samples in Quebec offer clues into the cause of Earth's first mass extinction event
Rock samples from Quebec's Anticosti Island are offering new clues about Earth's first major mass extinction event, suggesting that it may have been caused by a cooling climate.
A team of scientists from the U.S., China, France and the University of Ottawa published a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience exploring the Late Ordovician mass extinction event, which took place around 445 million years ago. It is the oldest among the "big five" mass extinction events and saw around 85 per cent of marine species disappear during that time.
“If you had gone snorkeling in an Ordovician sea you would have seen some familiar groups like clams and snails and sponges, but also many other groups that are now very reduced in diversity or entirely extinct like trilobites, brachiopods and crinoids,” said study co-author Seth Finnegan in a news release.
More Than 100,000 Take to Streets on Global Day of Action for Climate Justice
As diplomats from wealthy countries continue to say "blah, blah, blah" at COP26, over 100,000 people growing increasingly impatient with empty promises and inaction marched through Glasgow on Saturday, with thousands more hitting the streets in cities around the world during roughly 300 simultaneous demonstrations on a Global Day of Action for Climate Justice.
"Many thousands of people took to the streets today on every continent demanding that governments move from climate inaction to climate justice," Asad Rehman, a spokesperson for the COP26 Coalition, said in a statement. "We won't tolerate warm words and long-term targets anymore, we want action now."
"Today, the people who have been locked out of this climate summit had their voices heard," Rehman continued, "and those voices will be ringing in the ears of world leaders as we enter the second week of negotiations."
Decrying 'Greenwashing' at COP26, Youth Climate Leaders Join Tens of Thousands at Glasgow March
Warning world leaders that the climate pledges made at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow are vastly insufficient to limit the heating of the planet to 1.5°C and protect frontline communities, tens of thousands of campaigners marched through the city on Friday as summit attendees marked the conference's "Youth and Public Empowerment Day."
"Many are starting to ask themselves what will it take for the people in power to wake up. But let's be clear: they are already awake. They know exactly what they are doing."
The day is
aimed at engaging with young people as policymakers work to bring about systemic change, but the campaigners who descended on Glasgow for the
167th "Fridays for Future" march—including climate leaders Greta Thunberg of Sweden and Vanessa Nakate of Uganda—demanded that politicians at the conference listen to the calls for action that young people around the world have been making for years.
Report: G20 Governments Have Bankrolled at Least $188 Billion in Fossil Fuels Since 2018
A report released today by Friends of the Earth U.S. and Oil Change International reveals that from 2018 to 2020, G20 countries financed at least USD 63 billion per year ($188 billion in total) for oil, gas, and coal projects by through their development finance institutions, export credit agencies and the multilateral development banks (MDBs) they govern. This preferential, government-backed fossil fuel financing was 2.5 times more than G20 support for renewable energy, which averaged only $26 billion per year. Canada, Japan, Korea, and China provided the most public finance for fossil fuels, together accounting for nearly half of the MDB and G20 fossil fuel finance in our dataset.
Recognizing the urgent need to shift this export and development finance out of fossil fuels and into renewable energy, the UK and European Investment Bank (EIB) have passed policies restricting almost all of their international oil and gas finance. They are expected to release a joint commitment to shift public finance out of all fossil fuels with a group of new country and institution signatories on November 4th at the global climate conference, COP26.
“G20 countries pour billions into fossil fuels while the world burns and the devastating impacts of climate change get worse and worse,” said Kate DeAngelis, international finance program manager at Friends of the Earth U.S. “Even as the world’s scientists have sounded the alarm on the urgency of taking climate action, governments continue to ignore this code red. G20 governments must heed this call and once and for all shift their financing away from fossil fuels toward renewables.”
Come on Joe WTF?