Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It would be difficult to get through life without the capacity to consider various options and to decide what to do. The lack of any decision criteria has caused many a donkey caught between two bales of hay to starve to death.
A lot has been written these last several days about the meaning, motivation and consequence of Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord; much more will be. The decision is unfortunate at many levels–not, however, at all levels.
The Paris Agreement on climate change is designed to weather the peaks and troughs of political commitment, over time and from country to country, while ensuring that ambition ratchets inexorably upwards over time.
Predictably there’s been a lot written over the last few weeks about the Paris Climate Agreement and whether the Trump administration will continue to sit with other nations. Driving the coverage is the on-again off-again meeting between Trump and a pack of senior advisors. The ultimate decision will remain for The Donald to make–purportedly after the G-7 summit at the end of May.
I realize I may be an outlier on this. The fact is I can’t imagine any good coming from the U.S. continuing to have a place at the table. Let me rephrase that—only the Trump administration stands to benefit.
In late 2015, the world agreed to limit the global temperature rise to “well below 2C”. Ever since the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change, scientists, think tanks and policymakers have been scrambling to define exactly what meeting this temperature limit will mean in policy and investment terms.
The Paris Agreement’s inclusion of “well below 2°C” and “pursue … 1.5°C” has catalysed fervent activity amongst many within the scientific community keen to understand what this more ambitious objective implies for mitigation.
Let me start with something to dispel the confusion about what models are for. When you deal with complex, adaptive systems, models are NOT meant to predict the future.
EU countries should close all of their coal plants by around 2030 if they want to stick to the Paris Agreement on climate change. This is the conclusion of a new report by research non-profit Climate Analytics. The cheapest way to meet Paris targets is to replace EU coal power with renewables and energy efficiency, it says.
The UN Paris Agreement on climate change aims to ensure increases in global temperature are less than 2C above pre-industrial levels, with an aspirational limit of 1.5C. However, the starting line of the “pre-industrial” era is not defined by the UN agreements, or by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Canada can’t increase tar sands production or build more pipelines if the world is to achieve the targets on global carbon emissions set by the Paris Agreement on climate. That’s the central conclusion of a new report by Oil Change International(OCI), a U.S. research and advocacy group dedicated to exposing the full costs of fossil fuel extraction.
In the wake of the Paris climate agreement, developing countries find themselves in need of analysts capable of monitoring their emissions.
