Links tagged “paris”

The Bad: If next president is climate activist:

"Don’t wait on Congress. Don’t wait to see if one type of policy solution works best; just do them all." - Brett Hartl, chief political strategist, Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund.

If climate activist president wins in 2020: "Rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement is easy but is only the start. Among numerous other options in circulation: Declare a climate emergency and reallocate resources. Block pipeline construction and restrict pipeline use. Halt drilling on federal lands and use of fracking technology across the nation. Ban all fossil fuel imports and exports. Place a carbon adjustment fee on imported goods produced through carbon-intensive processes. And on. Presto-chango through unilateral executive power that ignores the legislative branch."

The Good: The "Trump administration has largely eviscerated all of the major Obama climate policy efforts via executive orders, regulatory revisions, and administrative stalling, designed to make it as difficult as possible for any successor to shift gears again.”

Grist Mag: "According to a recent update of a study originally published in Nature Climate Change, fossil fuel pollution has bounced back rapidly as lockdowns have started to lift around the world. In early April, when billions of people were sheltering in place, global daily carbon dioxide emissions were 17 percent lower than they were in 2019; now, it’s almost as if the lockdowns never happened." ...

"Fear of the coronavirus is also pushing people to get in their cars, instead of taking public transit. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released guidelines encouraging people to drive to work solo, instead of taking the bus or the subway...Last Monday, 800,000 people rode the New York City subway, the highest number since March — but that’s still only 15 percent of normal." ...

"The researchers still expect emissions for the whole of 2020 to be down 4 to 7 percent compared with last year, depending on the pace of reopening. But that’s not even close to enough to slow down climate change. Keeping global warming below dangerous levels would require a 7.5 percent drop in emissions every year."

Moment of Clarity: “People want to move on with their lives,” Jackson said. “We can’t reduce emissions just by locking people at home.”

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Flashback: ‘Fantastic’ for the climate: Activists See Coronavirus Lockdowns As Dress Rehearsal for ‘Climate Emergency’ – Special Report

"In our new paper in Climate Policy, we analyse two self-proclaimed climate ‘progressive’ nations, the UK and Sweden, and demonstrate just how far removed current policy frameworks are from meeting the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement."

Laments no central planning ambition that extends to 2100! "Neither have a clearly defined carbon budget to the end of the century."

“The only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy," Yvo de Boer, former UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) executive secretary said in 2013. 

Yvo de Boer's words sound prophetic when compared to the comments of climate campaigners in 2020 excited about the impact of the COVID lockdowns.

Climate activist Eric Holthaus said on April 22, 2020, about the impact of lockdowns on global CO2 emissions: “This is roughly the same pace that the IPCC says we need to sustain every year until 2030 to be on pace to limit global warming to 1.5C and hit the Paris climate goals. This is what ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ looks like.”

The new figures from the Mauna Loa Observatory show humans are irrelevant. Despite the Ultra-Revolutionary-Carbon-Reduction-Program far beyond anything the UN has every dreamed of,  Global CO2 hit 417ppm. This is a record high since humans discovered test tubes but the 300 millionth time since life on Earth evolved. It shows how all plans for carbon reduction known to mankind are futile.

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Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer: "It would be difficult to see a downturn in the anthropogenic source of CO2 unless it was very large (say, over 50%) and prolonged (say over a year or longer)."