The ambitious updated California Scoping Plan released last month announces California will reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2045, halving GHG emissions in this decade.
To realize its goals, California will need to quadruple its production of wind and solar power in 13 years and increase building adequate energy storage facilities by 700%.
The state calls for drastic reductions in car travel and significant funding for public transit. Cars and trucks are responsible “for more than 40% of the state’s total emissions, so it’s necessary to not only get more people into electric vehicles, but also get us to drive a lot less. The plan projects that Californians will be driving 25% fewer miles by 2030 — but that’s a big “if.”” laist.com/…
“What we have seen with this updated scoping plan is that, really for the first time, some meaningful shifts toward centering environmental justice,” said climate justice policy advocate Kyle Heiskala from the nonprofit Environmental Health Coalition. “The challenge ahead of us is creating that inter-agency collaboration that pulls in the lived experience of community members who ride transit every day.”
… the plan relies heavily on controversial technologies such as hydrogen, biogas, and engineered carbon capture, which is basically capturing the carbon from smokestacks of power plants before it gets into the atmosphere to further heat up the planet. Opponents worry it’s just another way to extend the life of the fossil fuel industry.
Carbon capture also doesn’t eliminate dangerous air pollutants like benzene, said Olivia Seideman, climate policy coordinator with non-profit Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability in Fresno. There are plans to store much of the carbon captured at power plants in the L.A. area underground in the Central Valley.
Global Warming in the Pipeline
Leading climatologist James Hansen’s latest paper (currently under peer review and due for publication next year) warns that “eventual global warming due to today's GHG forcing alone — after slow feedbacks operate — is about 10 degrees C.”
The essential requirement to "save" young people and future generations is return to Holocene-level global temperature. Three urgently required actions are: 1) a global increasing price on GHG emissions, 2) purposeful intervention to rapidly phase down present massive geoengineering of Earth's climate, and 3) renewed East-West cooperation in a way that accommodates developing world needs.
During the Holocene period, the planet experienced increases in temperature of nearly 4 degrees C at and around the North Pole. There was some warming in Northwestern Europe but Southern Europe experienced cooling temperatures.
EU Green deal
A 27-nation block of the European Union governments and lawmakers Sunday agreed to “reforming the EU’s trading system for greenhouse gas emissions and creating a new hardship fund for those hardest-hit by measures to curb climate change.”
The two sides agreed to push European industries and energy companies to cut their emissions by speeding up the phase-out of free pollution vouchers. Doing so makes each ton of carbon dioxide that’s released into the atmosphere more expensive for polluters.
The EU’s executive Commission said the measure would require European industries to reduce their emissions by 62% by 2030 from 2005 levels, compared to a target of 43% under the previous rules.
To ensure a level playing field, the EU will also introduce a tax on foreign companies that want to import products which don’t meet climate-protection standards European companies have to comply with. The so-called Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism was agreed to last week.
COP15 Close to ending with agreement
Final agreement could bring better protection for vital ecosystems and big reforms to agriculture
A potentially transformational agreement for nature is close to being reached at Cop15 in Montreal, which could bring better protection for Earth’s vital ecosystems such as the Amazon and Congo basin rainforests, big reforms to agriculture and better protection of indigenous territories and rights.
After four years of negotiations and 12 years since the last biodiversity targets were agreed in Japan, the Chinese president of Cop15 put forward its recommendations for a final agreement after two weeks of intense negotiations at the UN biodiversity summit in Canada.
Over the last few days, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and other world leaders called for an ambitious package to tackle scientific warnings about 1m species at risk of extinction ahead of the release of the text.
