‘Moment of truth’ for oil industry: Deepen the climate crisis or help fix it
Olesya Dmitracova, CNN – November 23, 2023
Janos Kummer/Getty Images
Oil and gas producers must confront a “pivotal” choice: continue to accelerate the climate crisis or become part of the solution, the International Energy Agency said in a report Thursday.
The industry currently accounts for only 1% of global investment in clean energy, and continues to pump out disastrous quantities of planet-heating gases, including methane, which is roughly 80 times more potent than CO2 in the near term. If the world is to stand any chance of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, drastic action is needed on both fronts, and fast, the IEA said.
The warning comes ahead of COP28, a United Nations climate summit starting next week, and as a recent UN analysis shows that the planet is set to heat up by nearly 3 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. Scientists predict that warming of that scale could push the world over a number of catastrophic and potentially irreversible tipping points, such as the collapse of the polar ice sheets.
“The oil and gas industry is facing a moment of truth at COP28 in Dubai,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement. “With the world suffering the impacts of a worsening climate crisis, continuing with business as usual is neither socially nor environmentally responsible.”
Introducing the report, entitled “The Oil and Gas Industry in Net Zero Transitions,” Birol told journalists Thursday there are two measures the industry must take to play its part in limiting global warming to the internationally agreed level of 1.5 degrees.
The first is reducing planet-heating pollution from its own operations, such as extracting oil and gas from the ground, processing the fuels and delivering them to consumers. These three activities generate nearly 15% of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions.
“These emissions, including methane emissions, we know that they can be fixed rather easily, quickly and in many cases in a cost-effective manner,” Birol said.
This pollution needs to be cut by more than 60% by 2030 from today’s level, the IEA report says.
Clean investments
The second measure the agency recommends is a dramatic ramp-up in investments in renewable energy by oil and gas companies, which have been “a marginal force” in the clean energy transition, the report said.
The industry invested around $20 billion in clean energy projects last year — only around 2.5% of its total capital spending, the IEA found. That share would need to shoot up to 50% by 2030 to help keep global warming to the less dangerous level of 1.5 degrees.
Such an increase would mean a radical change in how oil and gas firms spend their cash. Between 2018 and 2022, the industry generated around $17 trillion in revenue: 40% was spent developing and operating oil and gas assets, 10% went to investors and just a fraction was invested in clean energy, according to the IEA report.
Oil and gas companies have been investing in carbon capture technologies to remove carbon pollution from the air and to capture what’s produced by power plants and industrial facilities. The captured carbon can then be stored or reused. But carbon capture is “not the answer,” Birol told reporters.
The techniques can play an important role in certain sectors such as the production of cement, iron and steel among others, he said.
“But to say that the carbon capture and storage technology would allow the oil and gas industry to continue with the current oil and gas production trends and at the same time bring the emissions down… is, in our view, a pure fantasy.”
Limiting the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees would require capturing “an entirely inconceivable” 32 billion metric tons (35 billion short tons) of carbon by 2050, the IEA said. The amount of electricity needed to power this process would exceed current global annual electricity demand.
Commenting on the IEA report, Kaisa Kosonen, policy coordinator at Greenpeace International, said: “Industry self-regulation leads to collective disaster, so the real moment of truth will come at this year’s climate summit when governments have the chance to agree to make fossil fuels history, in a fair and fast manner.”
A concentration of greenhouse gases, rising sea levels, and warming, acidifying oceans – these represent a clear threat to children’s health, and even their right to life. The UN World Meteorological Organisation warned recently of alarming, continuing trends in these four key indicators of climate change, which will severely impact children in decades to come.
The Committee on the Rights of the Child is composed of 18 experts, it monitors compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child in each of the 196 states that signed it. It does this by collecting reports from UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund), governments, and nonprofit organisations, which it then uses to make recommendations for improvement.
Because of its potential to cause social breakdown among communities and families, UNICEF has warned that climate change constitutes a form of structural violence against all children. They make reference to the effects of natural disasters, environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity, which in turn have terrible consequences for agriculture, access to clean water and nutrition. Ultimately, these impacts constitute a violation of the right to health.
In fact, their damning August 2021 report stated that dramatic figures have been reached: 815 million children exposed to lead pollution, 820 million to heat waves, 920 million to water shortages and 1 billion to high levels of air pollution.
For its part, the World Health Organisation had already sounded the alarm in 2017 that 1.7 million children die annually as a result of preventable environmental impacts. This makes it the leading cause of early childhood mortality, accounting for more than a quarter of deaths in children under the age of five.
Provide all children with access to a clean and healthy environment.
Listen to children and take their opinions seriously. Respect their role as key players in environmental action.
Make the actions of governments and companies clear and transparent.
Encourage international cooperation.
Expand and improve awareness and environmental education.
Create spaces for participation, to share ideas and find solutions.
This document insists on shared responsibility. It makes strong emphasis on the need to create universal standards so that governments can uphold children’s rights that which are being are violated by the climate emergency, the collapse of biodiversity and widespread water, air and soil pollution. When all is said and done, children have rights just like all other humans. They are drivers of social participation and have a very active, positive part to play in the environmental transformation.
It is imperative that states introduce laws and guidelines with enough funding and transparency to restore and protect these rights against abuse by external forces, including by private companies. They must also ensure the recovery and conservation of biodiversity.
Children have a right to a clean environment, and states have an obligation to guarantee this right. Not only for those already in the world, but also for the future inhabitants of the planet, who deserve a world where their rights are truly upheld.
How Democrats’ climate plan is impacting fossil fuels
Saul Elbein – November 22, 2023
iStock
The Democrats’ signature climate plan is helping to unleash a flood of fossil fuels onto world markets — even as American consumers increasingly turn away from those products, according to a new report.
According to advocacy group Oil Change International, oil and gas consumption within the U.S. will fall by 16 percent by 2035 amid implementation of the clean energy stimulus Inflation Reduction Act.
But a report from the group released this week also predicted that the bill’s support for oil and gas would produce a corresponding rise in gas production — even as the U.S. economy goes electric — with the difference to be exported and burned overseas.
That’s something some of the bill’s policy architects are proud of. “Because of the Inflation Reduction Act, we are producing fossil fuels at record levels,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) wrote in September in The Wall Street Journal.
When Democrats passed the IRA, “the focus was on ‘let’s fund the good things,’” said Lorne Stockman of advocacy group Oil Change International, which used data from the Rhodium Group to assemble Monday’s report on the fossil fuel boost enabled by the IRA.
But the Biden administration, Stockman argued, failed to commit to what its own scientists were saying: that to ensure a safe climate, “the fossil fuel industry must go into decline.” The advocacy group’s report comes on the heels of U.N. findings that steep additional emissions cuts were needed by 2030 to avoid barreling past the levels of planetary heating seen as safe.
This was a serious overshoot, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Monday. Guterres compared the gap to a “canyon littered with broken promises, broken lives, and broken records.” Guterres emphasized that this “betrayal of the vulnerable” was also a “massive missed opportunity. Renewables have never been cheaper or more accessible.”
To be sure, the Rhodium model that projected IRA impacts — which Oil Change International used in preparing their report — suggests that the U.S. is moving “in the right direction,” and the administration is on track to reduce emissions levels by the end of the decade.
That tracks the broader global trajectory, with Monday’s U.N. report finding the world slowly bending the curve toward decreased emissions — increasing an estimated 3 percent by 2030 instead of the 16 percent estimated when the Paris climate accords were adopted.
But the UN emphasized that emissions need to fall by 42 percent to keep the global climate system stable. And the U.S. currently isn’t keeping up with its own plans to make sure that national emissions in 2030 are half what they were in 2005 — the year the fracking boom kicked off a vast expansion in domestic oil and gas production, according to the original Rhodium report.
In a March follow-up, Rhodium found that meeting the Biden climate goal was still possible — if Congress, the presidency and cities and states all worked together. But with the House controlled by the GOP, which has repeatedly passed bills seeking to defund the IRA, such unified action is currently unlikely. (Republicans also control a majority of state legislatures.) And as the U.N. found on Monday, these numbers are just the beginning of the much deeper and more extensive economic transformation that will be needed.
Stockman, with Oil Change International, told The Hill that the problem is political — not technological: giant batteries are already outcompeting gas plants, as Reuters reported this week. But in the arena of policy and regulation, battery companies “are struggling to compete against an incumbent [gas] industry that is peddling a myth,” Stockman said.
Thousands of gas ranges recalled due to carbon monoxide poisoning risk
George Stockburger – November 21, 2023
(WHTM) – Thousands of ZLINE gas ranges are being recalled due to a risk of carbon monoxide poisoning.
The recall, which was first announced in January 2023, was expanded to include approximately 30,000 units where the oven can “emit dangerous levels of carbon monoxide (CO) while in use, posing a serious risk of injury or death from carbon monoxide poisoning,” according to the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission.
ZLINE Expands Consumer Options in Recall of Gas Ranges; Serious Risk of Injury or Death from Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
ZLINE Expands Consumer Options in Recall of Gas Ranges; Serious Risk of Injury or Death from Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
ZLINE Expands Consumer Options in Recall of Gas Ranges; Serious Risk of Injury or Death from Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
This recall involves the oven compartment of ZLINE gas ranges with model numbers RG30, RGS-30, RGB-30, RG36, RGS-36, RGB-36, RG48, RGS-48 and RGB-48. For units sold after 2020, the model number is printed on a label under the right side of the range top.
The ranges were sold in several door colors including black matte, blue gloss, blue matte, DuraSnow, red gloss, red matte, and white matte. They also came with multiple finishes including stainless steel, black stainless steel and DuraSnow, a cloudy steel finish.
Best Buy, Lowe’s, The Home Depot, The Range Hood Stores, and online retailers sold the ranges nationwide.
ZLINE is offering a replacement range or a refund after originally offering a repair in January. Consumers can call ZLINE toll-free at 833-226-1400 from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. ET Monday through Friday. They can also email at rgrecall@zlinekitchen.com or go online to the ZLINE recall website.
There have been 44 reports of carbon monoxide emission, including three reports involving users needing medical attention.
Sobering climate change report says we’re falling way short of Paris Climate Agreement promises
Mike Augustyniak – November 20, 2023
Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
MINNEAPOLIS — The United Nations has provided a new and stark update on our progress toward mitigating climate change. Simply put, the report says global warming is set to blow well past the goals that countries agreed to in 2015.
The Paris Climate Accord was signed that year with the goal of preventing catastrophic warming. Nearly 200 countries made a legally-binding promise to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Each molecule of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere — like carbon dioxide and methane — is like a feather in a down comforter. The more molecules, the more warming. Human activity, like the burning of fossil fuels, has led to the highest level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in at least 800,000 years, and a rate of warming that NASA calls “unprecedented” in human history.
At our current rate of progress, the U.N. predicts that the earth’s average temperature will rise to nearly double the goal by 2030. Even if every country slashed their emissions by 42% overnight, the U.N. says there’s still no guarantee we’d limit warming enough to prevent the worst of natural disasters.
The reality is that not only did we not cut, but emissions from burning coal, oil and gas rose 1.2% last year.
And yet, we have proven that change is possible. In 2015, based on policies in place at the time, greenhouse gas emissions were projected to increase by 16% by 2030. Today, that projected increase is only 3%.
So what’s next? We have no choice but to try harder. This year, the earth got a taste of what’s to come, with extreme weather events including our drought and wildfire smoke. Preparing our homes and infrastructure for more extreme weather and more-frequent extreme weather events is critical.
Energy is the main source of greenhouse gas emissions; it accounts for 86% of global carbon dioxide. The cleanest energy is the energy that’s never produced, so use less energy. Buying local supports your neighbors, and means goods don’t have to travel as far to get to you.
Something as simple as a home energy audit will help reduce waste and save you money. The Inflation Reduction Act has $375 billion in spending on clean energy incentives.
Most importantly, no individual caused climate change, and no individual is going to solve it alone. Transformative change has to happen on city, state, and national levels, so let your voice be heard.
Medical experts are worried about climate change too. Here’s how it can harm your health.
Karen Weintraub and Dinah Voyles Pulver – November 16, 2023
As the world nears the end of what could be the hottest year in recorded history and heads into one predicted to be hotter still, a report underscores the health consequences of the warming climate.
The 8th annual report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, released Tuesday, describes a “grave and mounting threat” if we fail to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, especially given the evidence of worsening world health as the planet warms.
It outlines many ways this warming trend is already impacting the health of Americans. They include heat waves that stress young and old bodies and threaten to overwhelm hospitals; droughts and floods that endanger the food supply; the spread of disease to new areas, the extension and altered timing of allergy seasons; increases in air pollution and the growing scale of lethal fires.
“As we see temperatures continuing to rise and wildfires continuing to get worse, we’re just seeing these really stark increases in impacts to health,” said Naomi Beyeler, the lead author of the U.S. section of the report.
“We have the tools at hand. We have the money at hand. We can do this,” said Dr. Kari Nadeau, chair of the Department of Environmental Health at the T.H. Chan Harvard School of Public Health. Nadeau was not involved in the Lancet report, but praised its analysis and priorities. “It’s really a matter of the political will.”
Nadeau said she doesn’t want to be a purveyor of doom, but climate change and its health impacts are no longer something coming in the future, it’s something that is happening now.
“I hope people realize it’s going to affect them, their children, their grandchildren and their friends,” she said.
There is room for hope, and for improving public health if countries take action, according to Beyeler, of the University of California, San Francisco.
The Lancet report is one of several arriving ahead of COP 28, a meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that begins Nov. 30 in Dubai.
Countries that committed to the Paris Agreement have pledged to try to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2.7 degrees above pre-industrial times.
That goal is still achievable, but only if governments, companies and banks stop “negligent” investments in oil and gas, according to the Lancet report. “Without profound and swift mitigation to tackle the root causes of climate change, the health of humanity is at grave risk,” it says.
“The climate crisis is not just changing the planet – it is changing children,” according to a report from the United Nations Children’s Fund, released on Monday.
A woman is silhouetted against the setting sun as triple-digit heat indexes continued in the Midwest Sunday, Aug. 20, 2023, in Kansas City, Mo.
This year, more than nine in 10 people worldwide encountered high temperatures made much more likely because of human-caused climate change, the Lancet report found. It represents the consensus of more than 100 experts from dozens of research institutions and UN agencies. Topics include 47 indicators of household air pollution, financing of fossil fuels and engagement from international organizations on the health benefits of limiting climate change.
Among its findings:
The heat was most extreme in the tropics, concentrating the impact on developing countries.
Every country experienced some level of climate-driven heat, including the U.S.
Heat-related deaths of people older than 65 years increased by 85% from 1990–2000, above the 38% increase that was expected if temperatures had not changed.
The unprecedented heat this year has sparked widespread alarm among many climate scientists. The global average temperature through October was the highest on record, nearly 2.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the pre-industrial average, the European Union’s Climate Change Service said last week.
If the global average temperature rises by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial times by mid-century, the world could see a 370% increase in heat-related deaths and increasing food insecurity for more than a half-billion people, the report states.
Health consequences of climate change
Health consequences of climate change come directly from warming temperatures, melting ice that can lead to floods and expose new pathogens and droughts that affect the food supply and the likelihood of forest fires. Contagious diseases are likely to spread more, too, experts said, either through vectors like mosquitoes that can survive in new, warming regions or because people searching for new food sources are coming into closer contact with wild animals, passing on diseases like Ebola.
The increased intensity and frequency of wildfires have undermined air quality improvements since the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970, Beyeler said, and have even led to reversals in some areas. “There’s emerging evidence that smoke may be even more harmful to health than non-smoke particulate pollution,” she added.
The scale of the exposures was greater this year than ever before, with tens of millions of Americans breathing in unhealthy air from Canadian wildfires.
This, combined with extreme heat events which especially harm older adults, placed an added burden on the health system, Beyeler noted.
Heat waves occur when temperatures remain elevated for several days in a row, including overnight. They’re particularly dangerous because the overnight warmth doesn’t give people, animals or crops any chance to recover, Karin Gleason, chief of the monitoring section at the National Centers for Environmental Information, told USA TODAY.
“If you don’t cool down several nights in a row there are higher mortality rates,” Gleason said. “Crops and plants and animals need that recovery overnight so they can deal with the intensity of the daytime highs the next day.”
As countries in parts of Europe faced sweltering temperatures this summer, hospitals were “quite stretched,” in treating victims of heat-related illness, said Joyce Kumutai, a research associate and climate scientist at the London-based Grantham Institute.
“We saw something close to COVID-era stretching of hospital facilities,” Kumutai said.
Julia Marturano, of the City of Phoenix Heat Response Program, places a sign out on a sidewalk in July 2023 directing those who needed water and other items to a hydration station as temperatures reached 119-degrees.
What individuals can do
Everyone has a role to play in fighting climate change and safeguarding human health, said Titus Schleyer, a research scientist at the Regenstrief Institute, in Indianapolis, who is leading a summit this week focused on using data to fight the medical consequences of climate change.
“It’s easy to be hopeless, but that’s not going to get us anywhere. That just seals our fate,” he said.
He hopes to use medical informatics to reduce the negative effects of climate change, by providing and analyzing large-scale data about the impacts.
“Data is crucial to understanding where is global warming going and what we can do short-term and medium-term,” said Schleyer, whose conference this week is part of the American Medical Informatics Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans. “We have only one big try and we’ve got to succeed.”
People can consume fewer resources, cut back on airplane travel, recycle, compost and talk to public officials about taking climate action, Schleyer said.
At the community level, switching a single school bus from diesel gasoline to electric power “can improve a child’s asthma who rides that busy every day by about 30%,” Nadeau said. Within a month after the switch, the child will be 30% less likely to have an asthma attack and also less likely to end up in an emergency room.
Trees combat the “heat island effect” of so much concrete in cities. Investing $1 in planting city trees saves about $5 in emergency room costs, she said. “And you don’t have to wait a lifetime to see those economic benefits.”
Beyeler added that people can also help reduce pollution from cars by supporting safe walking and biking in their communities.
The Lancet report, Beyeler said, pushes people to see the connections as it tries to “highlight places where we can make progress on both (climate and health) goals at the same time.”
Although a lot has gone wrong in the last 18 months, with heat waves and forest fires, Beyeler said, a lot has gone right, too. There has been more investment in renewable energy and away from fossil fuels, she said. At the same time, the federal government has renewed its commitment to COP28’s climate goals and to reducing health and climate inequities.
“There is momentum to be built on,” Beyeler said. “At the same time, even with that progress, the scale of implementation and action that’s needed to get us from where we are now to where we need to be is still tremendous.”
Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.com and Dinah Voyles Pulver at dpulver@gannett.com
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
Sir David Attenborough makes bold statement about the future of humanity: ‘This needs to be shared as much as possible’
Erin Feiger – November 15, 2023
The voice of “Planet Earth” has spoken, and it brings a dire warning and a plea.
Sir David Attenborough, British biologist, natural historian, and narrator of the beloved television series “Planet Earth,” among many other things, spoke about the state of the planet.
The video was shared to X, formerly known as Twitter, and is just over a minute long, yet carries a warning spanning millions of years.
“‘Please make no mistake. Climate change is the biggest threat to global security that modern humans have ever faced.’ Sir David Attenborough,” reads the caption above the video.
"Please make no mistake. Climate change is the biggest threat to global security that modern humans have ever faced." Sir David Attenborough.
The Attenborough quote — which is spoken at the end of the video — is then followed by words from the poster: “No time to wait. #ActOnClimate.”
As for the video itself, Attenborough explains that due to increased warming, “Our atmosphere now contains concentrations of carbon dioxide that have not been equaled for millions of years.”
He continues to say that we are close to reaching tipping points that, once passed, will send global temperatures spiraling.
“If we continue on our current path,” he warns, “We will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security. Food production, access to fresh water, habitable ambient temperatures, and ocean food chains, and if the natural world can no longer support the most basic of our needs, then much of the rest of civilization will quickly break down.”
His warning is not unfounded either, as there are more and more examples of ocean food chains at risk, dangerous extreme temperatures, decreasing water access, and loss of essential ecosystems like glaciers.
While the video and the warning came with the usual level of naysaying and denial, many viewers seemed to hear the message loud and clear.
“The feeling of shouting into a void,” lamented one viewer. “He’s absolutely correct, but no one is listening.”
“This needs to be shared as much as possible,” said another. “Humanity has to realize, we are all in trouble…earth is home to all of us.”
One of the cows reportedly suffered as many as 10,000 tick bites.
Asian longhorned ticks (ALTs) have been spreading across the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. since at least 2017, according to the Center for Disease Prevention (CDC), and the pests’ numbers are now on the rise in Ohio—a recent study from the Ohio State University reveals. According to the study’s authors, 9,287 invasive ticks were removed from a farm in eastern Ohio in the summer of 2021 after three cattle were reported dead from tick bites by the landowner.
During the study—lead-authored by Ohio State Assistant Professor of Veterinary Preventive Medicine Risa Pesapane—scientists continued to monitor the invasive tick population after most of the pests were killed off with pesticides. They found that the Asian longhorn ticks returned to the pasture and continued to spread in June 2022, despite the tick control efforts undertaken in 2021.
“You cannot spray your way out of an Asian longhorned tick infestation,” Pesapane said in a Nov. 3 news release. “They are going to spread to pretty much every part of Ohio and they are going to be a long-term management problem. There is no getting rid of them.”
Pesapane said that the cattle killed during the 2021 ALT infestation in eastern Ohio sustained thousands of tick bites. “One of those was a healthy male bull, about 5 years old,” she said in the press release. “Enormous. To have been taken down by exsanguination by ticks, you can imagine that was tens of thousands of ticks on one animal.” The term “exsanguination” refers to the action of draining a person, animal, or organ of the blood needed to sustain life.
On its website, the CDC says that ALTs, native to east Asia, have spread to 19 U.S. states since they were first reported in New Jersey in 2017. The list includes Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.
According to Pesapane, the invasive tick’s rapid spread lies in its ability to reproduce asexually, without mating. “There are no other ticks in North America that do that. So they can just march on, with exponential growth, without any limitation of having to find a mate,” Pesapane said. “Where the habitat is ideal, and anecdotally it seems that un-mowed pastures are an ideal location, there’s little stopping them from generating these huge numbers.”
Read Next: Is Whitetail Deer Blood the Key to Fighting Lyme Disease in Humans?
The CDC is urging anyone who finds an Asian longhorn tick on a person, pet, or on livestock, to remove the pest as quickly as possible. “Save the tick in rubbing alcohol in a jar or a ziplock bag,” the agency advises, “then contact your health department about steps you can take to prevent tick bites and tickborne diseases.
U.S. and China reach a deal on fighting climate change. Here’s what it means.
Ben Adler, Senior Editor – November 15, 2023
U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry shakes hands with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua before a meeting in Beijing, China, July 17. (Valerie Volcovici/Reuters) (REUTERS)
The United States and China may be at odds over everything from the Russia-Ukraine war to the status of Taiwan, but the world’s two largest economies just showed they can still work together on climate change.
The two superpowers jointly announced on Wednesday that they’ve agreed to a deal to rapidly increase the share of energy that comes from renewable sources and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.
Committing to helping the world triple renewable energy capacity by 2030.
Reducing power sector emissions by the end of the decade.
Reducing future emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Halting deforestation by 2030.
The timing
Bifacial photovoltaic solar panels at the Roadrunner solar plant, owned and operated by Enel Green Power, near McCamey, Texas, Nov. 10. (Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg via Getty Images) (Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The deal comes as scientists express growing alarm over the quickly escalating increases in warming and effects witnessed throughout the year, such as more extreme heat waves, wildfires and storms.
October was just the world’s fifth consecutive month of record-high global average temperatures.
The next round of U.N. climate negotiations, called COP28, is set to begin on Nov. 30 in Dubai. More than 60 countries, including the U.S., have recently called for the agreement produced there to include the tripling of renewable energy goals. The G20 also embraced that target in September.
The full moon sets behind a wind farm in the Mojave Desert in California, Jan. 8, 2004. (Toby Melville/Reuters) (REUTERS)
Experts are hailing Wednesday’s announcement as a welcome sign.
“It’s very promising to see the U.S. and China diplomatically engaging on climate change again, after the broader challenges in the relationship sort of brought that to a halt,” Pete Ogden, vice president for climate and environment at the United Nations Foundation, told Yahoo News. “To see that re-energized going into the COP is encouraging and hopefully something they can build on.”
But while the potential impact is huge, other experts note that the actual emissions reductions from this agreement is unclear.
“Since China’s power sector emissions are so large, any decline this decade could avoid a lot of emissions,” Jake Schmidt, senior strategic director for international climate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Yahoo News.
Brazil: Health warnings as country gripped by ‘unbearable’ heatwave
Kathryn Armstrong – BBC News – November 15, 2023
Red alerts have been issued for almost 3,000 towns and cities across Brazil, which have been experiencing an unprecedented heatwave.
Rio de Janeiro recorded 42.5C on Sunday – a record for November – and high humidity on Tuesday meant that it felt like 58.5C, municipal authorities said.
More than a hundred million people have been affected by the heat, which is expected to last until at least Friday.
Officials have attributed it to the El Niño phenomenon and climate change.
The city of São Paulo saw average temperatures of 37.3C on Tuesday afternoon, the National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet) reported.
“I’m exhausted, it’s hard,” Riquelme da Silva, 22, told AFP news agency on the streets there.
“When I get home, it’s cold water, otherwise I can’t even get up because I’m so tired. It’s even hard to sleep.”
Dora, a 60-year-old street vendor, described the heat as “unbearable” for those who worked outside.
The authorities have attributed the heatwave to the El Niño phenomenon and climate change
Inmet has issued red alerts for a large part of the country. These indicate that temperatures may be 5C above average for longer than five days and could pose a serious danger to health.
The heatwave, which comes more than a month before the beginning of summer in the southern hemisphere, has seen Brazil’s energy consumption soar to record levels as people try to keep themselves cool.
Inmet research released last week showed that the average temperature in the country had been above the historical average from July to October.
Extreme weather is becoming more frequent and more intense in many places around the world because of climate change.
ZLINE Expands Consumer Options in Recall of Gas Ranges; Serious Risk of Injury or Death from Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
ZLINE Expands Consumer Options in Recall of Gas Ranges; Serious Risk of Injury or Death from Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
