(Axios) Drought, rising sea levels and melting ice caps are transforming the geopolitical map at the same time China's rise and revanchist Russia are testing the limits of American power.
Driving the news: These dynamics, outlined in the first-ever National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)* on climate change, released last month, played out this past week at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. President Biden rebuked China's Xi Jinping for failing to show up or present new commitments.
Why it matters: U.S. intelligence assessments show climate change is threatening military assets and opening new fronts in the great-power competition defining the 21st century.
Biden has sought to place the "existential threat" of climate change squarely at the center of his national security policy, while at the same time casting China as the "biggest geopolitical challenge" facing the U.S.
Those two priorities are inextricably linked: China is the world's largest source of carbon emissions, and its cooperation is critical to preventing some of the worst effects of global warming.
(Grist) The U.S. government has a new goal to make it much cheaper to suck carbon dioxide out of the air. On Friday, at the United Nations’ climate conference, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced her agency’s new “Earthshot Initiative” to bring the cost of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it securely below $100 per metric ton.
The Earthshots program is the Department of Energy’s attempt to help scale up some of the nascent technologies that could be required to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to make them cheaper. Today, we know how to generate clean electricity from the sun, wind, water, and the latent heat beneath the Earth’s surface. But we don’t yet have economical ways to fly airplanes, power large ships, make key materials like steel or cement, or grow food without sending planet-warming emissions into the atmosphere.
The Carbon Negative Shot is the third program in the Earthshots series. The Department of Energy announced a Hydrogen Shot, a program to make clean hydrogen fuel 80 percent cheaper than it is today, in June. The agency also introduced a Long Duration Storage Shot, with an aim to reduce the cost of storing at least 10 hours’ worth of energy for the electric grid, in July. (Grid batteries will be needed to supply power at times when renewable energy isn’t available.)
“Bringing those technologies to the market will not happen if we leave everything to energy markets,” said Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, at the press conference on Friday. “We need governments to push the button of innovation here.”
Carbon dioxide removal doesn’t directly cut emissions from any particular industry, like agriculture or aviation. But if other solutions don’t emerge to clean up flying or fertilizers, carbon removal can be deployed to counteract continued emissions and stabilize the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. That’s why United Airlines, for example, has invested in a direct air capture plant under development in Texas. In addition to balancing out any remaining emissions that can’t be eliminated, scientists say carbon removal is the only way the world could eventually reverse global warming, by sucking more carbon out of the atmosphere than we’re putting in.
(Counterpunch) The U.S. East Coast has been hit with hurricanelike flooding in recent weeks, with South Carolina and Georgia getting the latest round. High tides are part of the problem, but there’s another risk that has been slowly creeping up: sea level rise.
Since 1880, average global sea levels have risen by more than 8 inches (23 centimeters), and the rate has been accelerating with climate change.
Depending on how well countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years, scientists estimate that global sea levels could rise by an additional 2 feet by the end of this century. The higher seas means when storms and high tides arrive, they add to an already higher water level. In some areas – including Charleston, South Carolina, where a storm and high tide on Nov. 5, 2021, sent water levels about 8 feet above normal– sinking land is making the impact even worse.
I’m a geoscientist who studies sea level rise and the effects of climate change. Here’s a quick explanation of two main ways climate change is affecting oceans levels and their threat to the world’s coasts.
Ocean thermal expansion
Climate change, fueled by fossil fuel use and other human activities, is causing average global surface temperatures to rise. This is leading the ocean to absorb more heat than it did before the industrial era began. That, in turn, is causing ocean thermal expansion.
In addition to further discussion of thermal expansion, the article also discusses how the melting of land ice also affects ocean levels.
(Climate Home News) China and the US have announced a deal to strengthen their cooperation on climate action and accelerate emissions cuts this decade, in a boost to the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow, UK.
The world’s two biggest emitters released a surprise joint statement on Wednesday evening setting out their intention to “seize on this critical moment to engage in expanded individual and combined efforts to accelerate the transition to a global net zero economy”.
An unformatted draft was hastily shared through climate communications networks on a Google Doc before the official version was published by the US state department and Chinese environment ministry websites.
Under the deal, both sides promised to act in this “decisive decade” to reduce emissions and keep the goals of the Paris Agreement to limit temperature rise “well below 2C” and pursue efforts for 1.5C “within reach”.
They recognised that “there remains a significant gap” between current national carbon-cutting pledges and policies and what is needed to achieve the Paris goals.
Mind you, as I typed my brief introduction above, I could hear a certain activist voice in my head condemning it all as "blah, blah, blah."
Still, on complex matters, words come before actions. Planning must proceed implementation. That is just in the nature of things. Not that I see myself as much of an apologist. As far as I am concerned, the ruling elites who are coming around on all of this are about forty years behind schedule. So their actions are hardly all that praiseworthy.
Morrison Government rejects key COP26 objectives hours after agreeing to them in Glasgow
Monday, November 15, 2021
The Glasgow climate summit has issued a final communique which calls on countries to phase down coal and to increase their formal 2030 targets by next year.
Energy Minister Angus Taylor has confirmed that the Morrison Government won't be doing either because it wouldn't be in Australia's national interest.
Morrison Government rejects key COP26 objectives hours after agreeing to them in Glasgow
Monday, November 15, 2021
The Glasgow climate summit has issued a final communique which calls on countries to phase down coal and to increase their formal 2030 targets by next year.
Energy Minister Angus Taylor has confirmed that the Morrison Government won't be doing either because it wouldn't be in Australia's national interest.
A lot of our government don't believe in climate change. The government is a coalition between the Liberal party and the National party. As far as I am aware the nationals were having a party debate on if climate change exists and the leader of the nationals think's it doesn't exist.
Edit I should say I basically ignore Australian news now so this could have changed.
(The Guardian) In the pitch dark, Jason Bullard adroitly shoulders his rifle and levels it at the object. “That looks like one!” he mutters. It turns out to be a fuse box. Another candidate, again aimed at with the gun, reveals itself as a rock.
In this town besieged by armadillos, anything with a passing similarity to the armored nemesis is under suspicion.
Bullard, an affable man in a camouflaged shirt, with a sonorous voice and prodigious beard, has rapidly gone from never seeing an armadillo in his bucolic corner of western North Carolina to killing 15 of them last year. In just the last two weeks, he has dispatched eight of the animals.
Homeowners, perturbed at their lawns being torn up by the newly arrived mammals, initially deputized Bullard as a sort of armadillo bounty hunter, handing him $100 for every dead carcass he produced. But armadillos have wreaked such horticultural havoc that dozens of people in and around Sapphire, North Carolina, now have Bullard on a retainer, allowing him to prowl around their properties at night, armed, in the hope of shooting the culprits.
Extract:
An emerging theory for this advance of armadillos is the climate crisis. The animals dislike freezing conditions and global heating is making winters milder, turning northern parts of the US more armadillo-friendly. Around Sapphire, the armadillos happily root around in the dirt with their snouts and claws, feasting on insects at elevations above 4,000ft. “We just don’t have those really cold winters any more and I’m sure that’s helped them,” said Olfenbuttel.
(Other Words) The recent COP26 climate summit in Glasgow was the 26th attempt to get the nations of the world to fix the climate crisis. During the summit, the Washington Post reported that countries have been under-reporting their emissions, so the negotiations are based on “flawed data.”
We’ve known about the climate crisis for decades. But in these ways and more, we’ve seen a painful, frustrating failure to meaningfully coordinate action on global scale. Still, that doesn’t have to mean that real cooperation is doomed to failure.
Much of the world mobilized in a matter of weeks, radically altering everyday life, to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. We could do the same for climate — and sociology can help us figure out how.
Sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard advocates bringing sociologists to the table on climate change, in addition to the natural scientists, economists, and psychologists who usually play the roles of experts.
Climate change is caused by people acting in groups, after all, and sociology is the study of people acting in groups. We can study questions like: Why are people causing climate change, really? Why won’t people do enough about it? And how can we get people to do more about it?
Polluting greenhouse gases being sold online and smuggled to UK
3 hours ago
A BBC investigation has uncovered a black market in highly polluting greenhouse gases being smuggled into the UK from Eastern Europe.
The gases - hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) - are advertised and sold illegally via social media and the BBC found a trader suggesting smuggling them on coaches.
HFCs are widely used in fridges, air conditioning and aerosol sprays.
The EU and UK are limiting their use and want to eventually phase them out in favour of cleaner alternatives.
But older machinery still runs on the most polluting HFCs - which has led to a black market worth millions.
XPRIZE Carbon Removal is aimed at tackling the biggest threat facing humanity - fighting climate change and rebalancing Earth’s carbon cycle. Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this $100M competition is the largest incentive prize in history, an extraordinary milestone.
The climate math is becoming clear that we will need gigaton-scale carbon removal in the coming decades to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates the need at approximately 10 gigatonnes of net CO2 removal per year by the year 2050 in order to keep global temperature rise under 1.5 or 2C. As governments, companies, investors, and entrepreneurs make plans to meet this challenge, it is clear that we will need a range of carbon removal solutions to be proven through demonstration and deployment to complement work that is already underway. If humanity continues on a business-as-usual path, the global average temperature could increase 6˚(C) by the year 2100.
This four-year global competition invites innovators and teams from anywhere on the planet to create and demonstrate solutions that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans, and sequester it durably and sustainably. To win the grand prize, teams must demonstrate a working solution at a scale of at least 1000 tonnes removed per year; model their costs at a scale of 1 million tonnes per year; and show a pathway to achieving a scale of gigatonnes per year in future.
Any carbon negative solution is eligible: nature-based, direct air capture, oceans, mineralization, or anything else that achieves net negative emissions, sequesters CO2 durably, and show a sustainable path to achieving low cost at gigatonne scale.
To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
