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World’s airlines pledge to cut emissions by 2050
Matthew McDermott, Treehugger
Aviation accounts for only 3% of carbon emissions from the global transport sector, but it’s a number that’s growing. Not to mention that those emissions often have a higher warming potential than ones emitted elsewhere. Radiative forcing anyone? Well, to address these concerns the International Air Transport Association committed Saturday to new emission reductions targets and fuel efficiency improvements:
At the International Civil Aviations Organization High Level Meeting in Montreal, the IATA set the following targets: 1.5% annual fuel efficiency improvements through 2020; 50% reduction in carbon emissions (from 2005 levels…) by 2050; and, stabilizing aviation emissions from 2020, with carbon-neutral growth thereafter.
Government Support for Sustainable Biofuels Requested
To help with this, IATA threw the ball into government’s court. IATA Director General Giovanni Bisignani said, “We can fly the plane efficiently, but governments must deliver improvements in air traffic management,” and added, “Governments must also accelerate the development of the legal and fiscal framework to support the use of sustainable biofuels.”
Here’s the declaration itself: Elements of an ICAO Position for COP15
(12 Oct 2009)
Cars must be electric, says climate tsar
Michael McCarthy, The Independent
Britain’s ambitious policies to cut carbon dioxide in the fight against global warming are still not enough, the official climate change watchdog warns today in its first annual report.
Even though the Government has created a detailed plan for transition to a low-carbon economy, a “step change” is still needed in the pace of reducing carbon emissions, and in fact the rate should be more than doubled, says the Climate Change Committee.
This will have to involve everything from a comprehensive national home insulation strategy to creating a fleet of 1.7 million electric cars with the infrastructure to support them – otherwise, says the committee, on current rates of progress, the “carbon budgets” to which the Government has committed itself are unlikely to be met…
(12 Oct 2009)
(The report can be accessed here.)
Climate Change: Four Degrees of Devastation
Stephen Leahy, IPS
The prospect of a four-degree Celsius rise in global average temperatures in 50 years is alarming – but not alarmist, climate scientists now believe.
Eighteen months ago, no one dared imagine humanity pushing the climate beyond an additional two degrees C of heating, but rising carbon emissions and inability to agree on cuts has meant science must now consider the previously unthinkable.
“Two degrees C is already gone as a target,” said Chris West of the University of Oxford’s UK Climate Impacts Programme.
“Four degrees C is definitely possible…This is the biggest challenge in our history,” West told participants at the “4 Degrees and Beyond, International Climate Science Conference” at the University of Oxford last week.
A four-degree C overall increase means a world where temperatures will be two degrees warmer in some places, 12 degrees and more in others, making them uninhabitable.
…In a four-degree warmer world, adaptation means “put your feet up and die” for many people in the world, Oxford’s Chris West said bluntly. “In accepting the many alarming impacts, we see that it (a four-degree C increase) is not acceptable.”
The climate negotiators heading to Copenhagen in December must accept the fact that the world’s carbon emissions must eventually stop – and stop completely. There is no sustainable per capita carbon emission level because it is the total amount of carbon emitted that counts, explains Myles Allen of the Climate Dynamics group at University of Oxford’s Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department…
(9 Oct 2009)
Sent in by EB contributor billhook, who writes:
The very bluntness of this warning, coming from highly reputable scientists, demands a review of civil society’s climate action priorities.
For all the Nobel prize will put Airforce One about 20 minutes from Copenhagen, unless someone has a viable idea how its passenger can impose the massive US pollution cuts required by 2020, without which there will be no effective UN treaty signed, then it is time to select and pursue in tandem the best of the remaining options – those of so-called “geo-engineering”.
Doing anything less would be merely observing the ongoing terracide while striving for reform.
In my view the best of these options, Afforestation for Biochar, is unique in being remedial (i.e. recovering airborne CO2 and so treating the problem) as distinct from mitigatory (e.g. using windpower to raise spray to enhance clouds’ albido, and so treating the symptom).
This option’s potential global yield, reportedly of recovering around 9.0 GTC /yr, is about an order of magnitude greater than what Farm-Wastes Biochar could achieve, and would begin the process of reducing airborne carbon while the struggle with major polluters continues. The evident hazard of compounding feedbacks is ample to discredit any pretence that Biochar usage would reduce the need to cut pollution outputs.
Yet the Left (which for decades largely ignored the climate issue until, under GW Bush, it was seen as a useful tool for denouncing conservative capitalist interests) now seeks what would be a phyrric victory, where GHG transgressors (the US) would be fully penalized by some notional future treaty, and no such remedial option should be allowed to interfere with this goal. Hence the widely reported ‘Monbiot Fallacy’ as regards Forest Biochar, ‘that an excellent option should not even be attempted, in case it were done really badly.’
What this folly obstructs is not merely the much needed global reforestation, but also the development of proper UN regulation of sustainable afforestation for biochar and of its local legitimacy in terms of social justice, thus neatly serving the cowboys’ best interests.
For those who may lack experience of the sustainability of productive forestry, I’d observe that the area of temperate cloud forest in the land I manage is of ancient Oak Coppice, which thrives on cyclical harvests and regrowth, and has likely been serving the local community well since pre-Roman times.
Its biodiversity is not bad either – yesterday I watched a pair of Goshawks patrolling its southern flank, seeking their lunch . . .
So when people say we shouldn’t afforest a giga-hectare of non-farm land for biochar to raise farm yields by interring carbon “in case it’s done badly,” (regardless of the horrific food shortages now looming up) try asking them, just what do they know about silviculture?
