To be sure, the nations of the world have had a lot added to their plates the past couple of years—having to deal on the fly with the pandemic, the Ukraine war, and the economic and sociological fallout from both. And now recession is definitely in the air. So it’s understandable that climate has been again shoved a bit aside to deal with these other crises. But also sad and infuriating because—how often must it be said before it clicks?—time to act is short. Scientists told us three years ago that we need to be on a trajectory to be a zero greenhouse gas emissions civilization by 2030. Not zero emissions by then, but on a path that can get us there by mid-century. If we’re not on the right path by then, a word to replace cataclysmic may have to be invented.
And guess what? We’re not on that path. On Sept. 23, in accord with agreement at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow last November, the world’s 200 nations were supposed to have brought their enhanced, strengthened pledges of emissions cuts for 2030. In other words, to bring their proposed national action in line with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement of 2015. The current pledges aren’t good enough to achieve that. And even if they were, only a handful of very small nations are on target to meet them. Here’s Joe Lo at Climate Home News:
As that date passed, just 23 of the nearly 200 countries which signed the Glasgow agreement had submitted updated 2030 climate plans. Of these, most offered more policy detail rather than strengthening headline targets.
Top three emitters the USA, EU and China worked on implementing pledges made last year but did not increase their ambition. India formalised promises made by prime minister Narendra Modi at Cop26 into an official four-page document.
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare told a webinar last week: “The bottom line is there has been really little progress since Cop26. Politics and geopolitics is dominated by the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine which then sent energy markets into turmoil but still, we feel countries should be moving ahead.”
He added: “There’s a massive emissions gap remaining and the IPCC assessment has been very clear that we do need to get down and close that gap if we have much of a chance of limiting warming to 1.5C.”
From the standpoint of the United States, the political circumstances are far better than they would have been without the massive climate investment in the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s unprecedentedly large yet not nearly large enough, just 5% of the Defense budget over the 10 years of the act. Obviously, that’s not taking the situation as seriously as it deserves. Tons more needs to happen. But after decades of fossil-fueled foot-dragging in the matter, you take what you can get from the haggling and dealing. In this case, the good outweighs the bad in the IRA. And as we’ve seen in the permitting victory, some of the bad can be deep-sixed.
Several states are stepping it up, too. California just enacted 40 climate-related bills. Again, more could and should be done, but what’s just been done is a phenomenal accomplishment in one session of a legislature that, let me be diplomatic here, has not always in the past been climate friendly even among many Democrats. It’s a testament to changing times and wiser leadership. Welcome policy progress.
But as with the Paris Agreement pledges, the proof is in committed implementation. It’s too soon to judge new legislation, of course. But so far, in most cases around the world, full implementation of the Paris pledges isn’t happening. So it’s not exactly heartening when so many nations miss the deadline to upgrade their already inadequate pledges.
Come November, when COP27 takes place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, there’s going to be a conversation about another pledge, that of the wealthy nations that have emitted most of extra greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere to fund the prevention, adaptation, and amelioration needed by less affluent nations because of the resulting climate change. The pledge was $100 billion a year. Seven years in and it’s not even a fifth of that. No wonder there’s a push from the nations most affected by and least responsible for climate change to get something more than a pledge. And something that the wealthy nations, including the United States, very much do not want to talk about.
But words are just words, even when they’re engraved. Without commitment, they are just one more form of greenwashing. We desperately need a more balanced ratio of words to action.
Faster and better, please.
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
See scientists respond to made by CEOs of ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
GREEN takes
Every four years, BirdLife International publishes its State of the World’s Bird report. It’s the official Red List Authority for birds, a documented compendium of other reports on the global extinction risk of all 11,000+ species for the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List. The 2022 update has now been released, and the picture it paints is particularly alarming because birds are crucial to the well-being and even the very existence of many ecosystems.
Expansion and intensification of mechanized and chemically heavy agriculture, logging, invasive species, natural resource extraction, hunting and trapping, and climate change are putting pressure on 73% of bird species. Around the world, 49% are in decline, with 12% threatened by extinction. Red List assessments are getting worse, with 222 species now counted as critically endangered, and there have been sharp declines in previously common and widespread species. The previous report in 2018 found 40% in decline. While most of the 187 bird species that have been confirmed lost since 1500 lived on islands, there is now an uptick in bird extinctions on larger land masses, especially in the tropics. Only 6% of bird species are increasing.
Stuart Butchart, chief scientist at BirdLife International, told The Guardian: “We have to stop these declines and start getting on track for recovery. Our future, as well as the world’s birds, depends on it. If we continue to unravel the fabric of life, we’re going to continue to place our own future at threat. [...] Birds are useful for telling us about the state of the planet. What they say is that nature is in poor condition, lots of species are in decline.”
Climate threats from drought, heatwaves, and flooding are growing and will be even more prominent in the future, scientists say, striking previously unaffected regions. For the first time, the report took note of the negative impacts on bird species of the growing number of wildfires.
In one hopeful note, the report points out that in the past 30 years, between 21 and 32 bird species would have gone extinct without conservation work.
In the fourth edition of Generation180’s report Brighter Future, the clean energy nonprofit’s authors found that the number of U.S. public, independent, and charter K-12 schools getting electricity from on site solar power have doubled since the first report in 2014. By the end of 2021, “solar schools” totaled 8,400 with an enrollment of 6 million of the nation’s 50 million students. In the past seven years, solar capacity at schools has tripled to more than 1,600 megawatts, enough to provide solar-sourced electricity to the entire population of Denver.
Tish Tablan, director of Generation180’s Solar for All Schools, told Joseph Winters at Grist that a good deal of this growth was made possible with third-party financing models like power purchase agreements, or PPAs. Under these arrangements, a developer pays to install, operate, and maintain solar panels, with the schools contracting to buy the their output for a set number of years. The advantage for the developer is that they get the federal tax credits with a stable return on their investment. The schools can thus avoid the upfront costs of the panel and installation costs and make big savings on their utility bills.
One example the Brighter Future report spotlights is the Pittsburg Unified School District about 40 miles east of San Francisco in an area historically known as Black Diamond for the coal once mined nearby. Starting in 2011, PUSD installed solar at 12 district campuses and its administrative support center. With 3.49 megawatts of solar capacity, the district generates 90% of the electricity it consumes.
Besides eliminating pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from power generation from non-renewable sources, the district is avoiding up to $1 million per year in energy costs. PUSD expects it will have battery storage on line at 10 campuses by year’s end and is now designing its first zero-energy school. The district also has four electric school buses, with three more on order and has applied for a grant to install EV chargers to encourage staff and teachers to drive electric cars.
ECO-TWEET
ECOPINION
There’s No Reason Puerto Rico Had to Go Through This Again. By Nitish Pahwa at Mother Jones. In the years since, Puerto Ricans have made clear their desires to use already-delegated emergency funds to expand renewable energy sources like rooftop solar, to do something about the influx of crypto nomads who are sucking up energy with mining rigs and driving up the cost of living, to reverse the privatization of their grid (which has led, ironically, to monthly blackouts), and to scrap the financial oversight board. Yet local and federal government has paid little heed; after Maria, the US delegated billions of dollars to bolster Puerto Rican climate resiliency, but not even one-fifth of that money was actually spent. [...] What the examples in each of these areas show is an exhausting, angering cycle: Disaster strikes under-resourced areas, engaged citizens propose solutions, governments ignore them, and disaster arrives yet again. If the years since Hurricane Maria have shown us anything, it’s that all these climate horrors are not abating—they’re showing up stronger and stronger each time.
Cleaning up our own backyard: Racism, speciesism and the environmental crises. By Fanny Olsthoorn at Mongabay. Environmental crises are predominantly caused by the West and industrialized countries, but we shift the burden, responsibility and sometimes blame on people on the other side of the planet, on people who do not live the comforts we have. We live in a world where I can fly to Thailand and pay off my guilt by compensating my flight, which results in an NGO giving a gas cooker to a woman in India who would normally cook on woodfire. We live in a world where white people can kill foxes, deer and even lions to their liking, but a Black Tanzanian will die in prison for killing a single giraffe. We live in a world where I can ignore the rows of tofu in the supermarket and eat farmed salmon every day, but an Inuit eating a seal will be debated in the EU Parliament.
Progressives Didn’t Kill Manchin’s Permitting Reform Deal—but It Did Deserve to Die. By Kate Aronoff at The New Republic. Now that Manchin’s bill has failed to win enough support, there’s space for a better debate about how to streamline the approval process for new energy projects. [...] While many climate advocates would agree that some reform is necessary if we’re to transition quickly to renewable energy, there’s a big difference between permitting reform as a broad conceptual category and the permitting reform legislation that was actually under consideration. [...] Manchin’s bill was a fossil fuel industry giveaway with some decent goodies for energy transmission grafted onto it. For the most part, the climate and environmental justice groups who rallied against Manchin’s language spent their time pointing out the obvious: that ceding so much ground so quickly to the fossil fuel industry probably wasn’t worth the cost of what good might have been done for interstate transmission lines.
Taking the utility monopoly door down to put more solar up . By John Farrell at Utility Dive. Solar company Sunnova wants to give new homeowners an alternative to electric utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric, cracking open the door to competition with a combination of solar and batteries in a “microgrid.” The proposal would end nearly a century of guaranteed monopoly for California utilities by letting other companies not just sell power but use an alternative delivery system to the utility’s platform. Regulators shouldn’t just let them through this opening, they should take the door off its hinges. [...] Preserving electric utility monopolies is too costly to consumers, entrepreneurs, and to democracy. Every state, not just Texas and California, should allow businesses to group customers together and get them paid to reduce energy demand when grids are stressed. Every state, not just 16 of them, should allow customers to participate in community solar projects if they don’t own a sunny rooftop.
Factory Farming Is More Destructive Than Ever. By Daisy Freund at Treehugger. If everyone in the U.S. ate plant-based food one day each week and ensured that any animal products they eat one other day that week were from animals raised on pasture, it would spare 2.8 billion animals from factory farming annually, which translates into a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, pollution and resource usage from factory farms by more than 25%. [...] The climate is nearly at a point of no return, responsible farmers and ranchers are unable to survive in the consolidated marketplace, and billions of animals are suffering in atrocious conditions every day. It’s time to stop forcing people to choose between two different valid approaches to fixing the food system when merging the two would be more effective and bring more people into this fight.
Isn’t It Time to Challenge the Growth Paradigm? By John Fetter at Foreign Policy in Focus. At the end of July, the International Monetary Fund warned of a “gloomy outlook” for the world economy. It was doing so not because of a spike in poverty, a widening of inequality, or a surge in carbon emissions. Quite the contrary: the IMF was making its pessimistic assessment because it was revising down its forecast for global GDP growth for 2022 from 3.6 percent to 3.2 percent. In other words, the global economy was growing, but not enough, and that for the IMF was cause for concern. [...] Economic expansion remains the yardstick of success at the global and national levels. Robust growth garners positive headlines; anemic growth and contraction generate anxious forecasts. This remains the case despite the widely acknowledged link between economic growth and the climate crisis, a connection reinforced during the COVID pandemic when carbon emissions dropped considerably as a result of the economic shutdowns in many countries.
GREEN QUOTE
Future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts. [...] It is therefore incumbent on experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being to eschew reticence, avoid sugar-coating the overwhelming challenges ahead and “tell it like it is.” Anything else is misleading at best, or negligent and potentially lethal for the human enterprise at worst.—Corey J.A. Bradshaw, et al. in Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future (January 2021).
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
Strategies to maximize clean energy development while being good land stewards. By Anne Fischer at PV Magazine. With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, and solar contracts setting records, development of utility-scale solar farms is expected to accelerate. As a result, large-scale project siting will become a challenge. The Solar and Storage Industries Institute (SI2) took a look at the issue of siting and released a whitepaper on strategies that maximize clean energy development while preserving natural ecosystems and community character. The whitepaper, Large-Scale Solar Siting: Encouraging Ecosystem Enhancement and Conservation While Producing Much Needed Zero-Carbon Electricity, makes recommendations for actions that companies can take to engage with communities and minimize impacts to surrounding lands and communities, in an effort to improve the siting and permitting process.
For a Scientist and Mother, Climate Change Is “Generational ‘Robbery.” By Nicola Jones at Yale Environment 360. An interview with Hungarian scientist Diana Ürge-Vorsatz. She is director of the Center for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy at Central European University and vice chair of U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III, which is focused on mitigation. Ürge-Vorsatz is concerned about how the climate change crisis is affecting children. She sees her research on renewable energy and energy demand as part of the essential work of protecting and restoring the future for the next generation.
How Indigenous Knowledge Reconnects Us All to Fire. By Jazmin “Sunny” Murphy at Yes! magazine. Evidence of controlled fire’s benefits and its crucial value to Native populations is documented and preserved in oral tradition. But fear and misunderstanding have caused the United States to take a firm opposition to the practice since the very beginnings of European settlement. [...] In recent years, the University of Minnesota Cloquet Forestry Center has made a significant effort to overcome American taboos and fears of fire, in part by studying the ecocultural history of fire in the Great Lakes region. The Forestry Center is now working to incorporate traditional ecological knowledge into its work without appropriating it. Above all, this means being considerate of Ojibwe lifeways and traditions, avoiding feelings of entitlement to Anishinaabe knowledge of fire, and respecting the boundaries that come with sharing that knowledge.
Extreme Heat Poses an Emerging Threat to Food Crops. By Liza Gross at Inside Climate News. Excessive heat interferes with pollinator interactions with plants that produce about a third of the world’s food crops. Scientists are scrambling to understand the complex ways spiking temperatures are disrupting those relationships. Extreme heat can have multiple knock-on effects that disrupt the intricate interplay between bees and the flowering crops they feed on, researchers at Michigan State University warned in a review of heat’s effects on the pollinators and their host plants published in Insect Science last month. “Extreme heat can indirectly limit plant reproduction by disrupting the pollination services of bees through reduced access to floral nutrition,” the researchers noted. And the bee’s reduced supply of food could exacerbate yield loss from heat-stressed crops.
Federal Government’s $20 Billion Embrace of ‘Climate Smart’ Farming. By Linda Qiu at The New York Times. Currently, climate-smart agriculture remains a niche but growing trend. The latest Census of Agriculture estimated that farmers use no-tillage systems — planting crops directly into the land without digging or turning the soil — on about 100 million acres of cropland. Farmers also planted cover crops, sown to prevent erosion and to increase moisture, on about 15 million acres out of 900 million total of farmland in the United States. Farmers who tapped into existing conservation programs have observed firsthand the ecological and economic benefits of such climate-smart practices. Seth Watkins, who raises cows on about 2,800 acres in southwest Iowa, said that employing practices like rotational grazing and planting clover as a cover crop has attracted Monarch butterflies and songbirds to his farm — and has also helped his bottom line.
At 75, the Father of Environmental Justice Meets the Moment. By Cara Buckley at The New York Times. He’s known as the father of environmental justice, but more than half a century ago he was just Bob Bullard from Elba, a flyspeck town deep in Alabama that didn’t pave roads, install sewers or put up streetlights in areas where Black families like his lived. His grandmother had a sixth grade education. His father was an electrician and plumber who for years couldn’t get licensed because of his race. Now, more than four decades after Robert Bullard took an unplanned career turn into environmentalism and civil rights, the movement he helped found is clocking one of its biggest wins yet. Some $60 billion of the $370 billion in climate spending passed by Congress last month has been earmarked for environmental justice, which calls for equal environmental protections for all, the cause to which Dr. Bullard has devoted his life.
ECO-LINKS
• Global ‘Stilling’: Is Climate Change Slowing Down the Wind? • California becomes first state to eliminate subsidies for gas line extensions amid electrification push • Plant Diversity Booms When Bison Return to the Prairie • U.S. farmers urge Washington to challenge Mexico's looming ban on genetically modified corn • Why Everything Manchin Says About the Mountain Valley Pipleine is Wrong • Wildlife conservation tends to save charismatic species. That may be about to change • Fact Sheet: Why Everything Manchin Says About the Mountain Valley Pipeline Is Wrong • How close is the Amazon tipping point? Forest loss in the east changes the equation • Ships are turning whales into ‘ocean roadkill’. This AI system is trying to stop it • NYC surpasses 4,050 city-owned electric vehicles, meeting its target 3 years ahead of schedule