Links tagged “paris”

'Radicalism has destroyed the slow-moving, consensus-based Paris Agreement.'

'The new radicalism is at war with the establishment moderates. This great gulf between radicals and moderates hit the COP 25 summit in Madrid with a vengeance. These annual summits are normally protracted exercises in compromise among the almost 200 nations represented. Not this time.In Madrid the Action Now! radicals would not even consider compromise. Their extremism then caused the moderates to take hard-line positions as well, so the COP stalled out and failed to act on any significant issue. That what the radicals demand is impossible did not help. The negotiating machinery ground to a noisy halt.'

First, what the summit was supposedly all about, carbon dioxide emissions:

BP Energy Review

These have increased by 26% in the last ten years, and show no sign of peaking. Meanwhile, renewable has barely made a dent in primary energy consumption, with its share increasing to only 4% last year. The increase in fossil fuel usage has fourfold that of renewables.

“Climate change is the biggest business opportunity of all time.”...it’s to show-and-tell their green virtue...

The EU is about to approve a massive Green New Deal. Michael Bloomberg’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TFCD) encourages companies to make voluntary climate-related risk disclosures. Draft EU regulations, meantime, could pave the way for mandatory climate disclosures that would force investment managers to justify their investments against climate and environmental benchmarks. Businesses are transitioning to “net zero,” Polman claims—meaning zero carbon emissions. They’re so far advanced that at this point, it’s only governments holding them back...

Then there’s the psychology of herding, whereby CEOs are fearful of being hung out to dry if they don’t sign the latest statement pledging their company to save the world from climate breakdown."

Pielke Jr.: "The decision by the IPCC to center its fifth assessment report on its most extreme scenario has been incredibly consequential. Thousands of academic studies of the future impacts of climate change followed the lead of the IPCC, and have emphasized the most extreme scenario as “business as usual” which is often interpreted and promoted as where the world is heading. For instance, so far in 2019 two new academic studies have been published every day that present this most extreme scenario as “business as usual” and predict extreme future impacts. Journalist promote these sensationalist findings, which are amplified by activists and politicians and as a consequence climate change becomes viewed as being more and more apocalyptic."

The problem with the extreme “business as usual” scenario of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report is that it is already out of date. For 2020 the scenario wildly overstates emissions, and has been critiqued in the academic literature as a highly unlikely if not impossible future." ...

"The bottom line for today is to understand that a fateful decision by the IPCC to selectively anoint an extreme scenario from among a huge range of possible futures has helped to create the climate apocalypse, a scary but imaginary future."