The Cost of Saving the World

This week, diplomats are gathered in Bonn, Germany to hammer out the latest details of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. While the minutiae of the negotiations are important, the real action isn’t at the UN. The climate pact is bottom up, which means it’s up to each country to meet the goals set forth in Paris.

One of the simplest tools for making progress would be a tax on carbon. Few people like taxes in the abstract, but they help address a real, pressing problem. A carbon tax would bring the price of fossil fuels closer to its true cost to the climate and to public health.

Earlier this year, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said that in order to rein in destructive carbon pollution, countries should implement a tax on carbon of $40 per ton by 2020 that would rise to as much as $100 per ton over the following decade.

Read the NexusMedia story - “The Cost of Saving the World.”

These 76 cities just adopted the Paris climate deal in defiance of Trump

Mayors of 76 cities across the U.S. are defying President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.

In a post to the blogging platform Medium, the Mayors National Climate Action Agenda, also known as Climate Mayors, announced their intent to uphold the United States’ end of the Paris accords within their own jurisdictions, despite Trump’s exiting of the agreement on Thursday evening.

As of this writing, the mayors who have signed onto the letter represent roughly 44 million Americans in 30 states (both red and blue) and Washington DC from all regions of the country ranging from the Deep South to the Pacific Northwest. In the letter, the mayors pledge to use their office to encourage the reduction of greenhouse gases through investments in sustainable energy infrastructure and city planning.

Read the Resistance Report story - “These 76 cities just adopted the Paris climate deal in defiance of Trump.”

Just who are these 300 'scientists' telling Trump to burn the climate?

Physicist William Happer stands inside the elevator
in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York,
U.S., on Friday, Jan. 13, 2017. Happer, who
is under consideration to be Trump’s science
advisor, signed a letter asking him to withdraw
from the UN Convention on Climate Change. 

If you read my articles regularly, you may have noticed multiple times I have stated that the scientific argument is over; there are no longer any reputable scientists that deny the overwhelming human influence in our climate. An open letter published last week by the anti-environmentalists proves my point. 

If you read the headlines, it might have seemed impressive: “300 Scientists Tell Trump to Leave UN Climate Agreement.” Wow, 300 scientists. That’s a lot right? Actually, it’s a pitiful list.

First of all, hardly anyone on the list was a climate scientist; many were not even natural scientists. It is almost as though anyone with a college degree (and there are about 21 million enrolled in higher education programs just in the USA) was qualified to sign that letter.

Okay but what about the signers of the letter? Surely they are experts in the field? Not so much. It was very difficult to find the list of signers online however I was able to acquire it with some help. 

See for yourself - Google “300 scientists letter climate change” in the past week. You will see many stories in the press, but try finding the actual letter or the list of names. The version I obtained was dated February 23, 2017 which helps narrow your searching. In an era of Dr. Google, it is unbelievable that the letter itself was not made more available. 

Read John Abraham’s story on The Guardian - “Just who are these 300 'scientists' telling Trump to burn the climate?”

Keeping warming below 1.5℃ is possible - but we can’t rely on removing carbon from the atmosphere

Kate Dooley.

This week international leaders are meeting in Marrakech to thrash out how to achieve the Paris climate agreement, which came into force on Friday. The Marrakech meeting is the 22nd Congress of Parties (or COP22) to the United Nation’s climate convention. One of the key goals of the agreement is to limit global warming to well below 2℃, and aim to limit warming to 1.5℃.

With global greenhouse gas emissions still rising, this is a daunting task. Numerous models, including recent research, suggest we will not be able to achieve this without removing large amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere later this century (known as “negative emissions”).

But scientists are becoming increasingly sceptical of the concept, as it may create more problems than it solves, or fail to deliver. Instead, we need to ramp up action before 2020, before even the earliest targets of the Paris Agreement.

Read the piece on The Conversation by a PhD candidate from the Australian German Climate and Energy College at the University of Melbourne, Kate Dooley,  “Keeping warming below 1.5 C is possible - but we can’t rely on removing carbon from the atmosphere.”

Energy sector needs reform - Tony Wood

Over the next few decades Australia, like many countries, faces the prospect of an energy transformation that will challenge every aspect of stationary and transport energy: from production, transmission and distribution to consumption and exports.

The ultimate imperative is to move our economy to a low-carbon footing, while ensuring that consumers don’t pay unnecessarily high costs. The COAG Energy Council, the decision-making body of federal and state energy and resources ministers, formally recognised the critical connection between energy and climate policy last July. Later that year the world’s governments brokered the Paris climate agreement, with Australia promising to cut emissions to 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030.

Yet this need for wholesale transformation has emerged at a time when Australia’s policy structures are already struggling to maintain the delivery of affordable and reliable electricity, after the reforms of the 1990s lost momentum in the 2000s.

Read the thoughts of the Program Director, Energy at the Grattan Institute, Tony Wood, on The Conversation  - “Australia’s energy sector is in critical need of reform.”