[TheClimate.Vote] November 29, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/November 29, 2019/

[Thursday Europe]
*'Our house is on fire': EU parliament declares climate emergency*
Bloc warned against making symbolic gestures not backed up by concrete 
action
Jennifer Rankin in Brussels - 28 Nov 2019

The European parliament has declared a global "climate and environmental 
emergency" as it urged all EU countries to commit to net zero greenhouse 
gas emissions by 2050.

The vote came as scientists warned that the world may have already 
crossed a series of climate tipping points, resulting in "a state of 
planetary emergency".

Intended to demonstrate Europe's green credentials days before a crucial 
UN climate conference in Madrid, the vote also ratchets up pressure on 
Ursula von der Leyen, the incoming president of the European commission, 
who declared this week that the EU would lead the fight against "the 
existential threat" of the climate crisis.

Although passed with a comfortable majority, with 429 votes in favour, 
225 votes against and 19 abstentions - MEPs across the political 
spectrum warned against making symbolic gestures.Environmental 
campaigners said the declaration was not backed by sufficient action. 
"Our house is on fire. The European parliament has seen the blaze, but 
it's not enough to stand by and watch," said Greenpeace's EU climate 
policy adviser, Sebastian Mang, shortly before the vote. In a separate 
vote on Thursday, MEPs backed a resolution stating that current EU 
climate targets were "not in line" with the 2015 Paris climate 
agreement, which calls for keeping global heating "well below" 2C above 
pre-industrial levels, but aiming to cap temperature rises at 1.5C.

MEPs backed a tougher target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 55% 
by 2030, an improvement on the current 40% target, but derided by Green 
politicians and campaigners as inadequate.

Pascal Canfin, the French liberal MEP who drafted the climate emergency 
resolution, said: "The fact that Europe is the first continent to 
declare climate and environmental emergency, just before COP25, when the 
new commission takes office, and three weeks after Donald Trump 
confirmed the United States' withdrawal from the Paris agreement, is a 
strong message sent to citizens and the rest of the world."

MEPs from the European parliament's largest group, the centre-right 
European People's party, were split over the "climate emergency" 
language. The group had wanted to declare "a climate urgency" instead, 
because the German word emergency, der Notstand, left some MEPs uneasy, 
because of its associations with a Nazi-era law.

The EPP's environmental spokesman, Peter Liese, said the climate 
emergency was "a fake debate" that hid the real decisions needed to 
reduce emissions. "There is an urgency to act, but no state of emergency 
to declare. Emergency can also be interpreted as undermining fundamental 
rights, like freedom of press and democracy."

However, scores of EPP MEPs joined Liberals, Socialists, Greens and the 
radical left in voting through the climate emergency resolution.

The Eurosceptic European Conservatives and Reformists group opposed the 
text, although individual British Tories either supported or abstained 
from the vote. "Ramping up the rhetoric does not get us away from the 
serious discussions that now need to take place," said its Czech 
environment spokesman, Alexandr Vondra.
- - -
The group did not assess the UK, which has submitted a draft national 
energy and climate plan to the European commission. The government has 
committed to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and suggested that the UK 
could link to the EU's emissions trading system, one of many 
politically-charged issues to be decided during the post-Brexit talks.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/28/eu-parliament-declares-climate-emergency



[how money buys opinions]
*Billionaire Buys 'Climate Change' On Google*
Bloomberg announced he was seeking the Democratic nomination for U.S. 
president earlier this week along with plans to spend up to $US1 ($1.5) 
billion of his own fortune on his campaign. That huge chunk of change 
will cover all aspects of the campaign, including ad buys. On Google, at 
least, he's using his fortune to buy ads touting himself as the climate 
candidate, a mantle Washington Governor Jay Inslee left behind when he 
dropped out of the race earlier this year.

Journalist Kate Aronoff tweeted about seeing Bloomberg ads pop up 
whenever she searched climate-related terms. A non-scientific survey of 
the responses to the tweet as well as my friends and coworkers reveals 
that Bloomberg ads are indeed appearing at the top of searches for 
phrases including "climate change," "climate crisis," "climate 
breakdown," "global warming," and this year's word of the year, "climate 
emergency."
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/11/billionaire-buys-climate-change-on-google/



[Court rules]
*PG&E loses gambit to avoid California's inverse condemnation rules*
Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s bankruptcy judge has rejected the 
utility's attempt to reduce its liability for the 2017 and 2018 
wildfires by circumventing a tough California legal doctrine.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Dennis Montali said in a written decision 
Wednesday that PG&E can be held strictly liable for damage caused by its 
power lines under the state doctrine of inverse condemnation. The 
decision is a win for wildfire victims, who could have had a much harder 
time securing as much money as they are seeking had Montali sided with 
the company...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/PG-E-loses-gambit-to-avoid-California-s-inverse-14867871.php



[PR stunt or comment]
*Boris Johnson replaced by ice sculpture after dodging election debate 
on climate crisis*
By Rob Picheta, CNN
November 28, 2019
(CNN)Boris Johnson was criticized by party leaders and represented by a 
dripping ice sculpture after refusing to appear in a televised election 
debate focusing on climate change.

Johnson's Conservative Party complained to the UK's broadcasting 
watchdog Ofcom ahead of the Channel 4 event, which saw Labour leader 
Jeremy Corbyn, Liberal Democrat Jo Swinson and the heads of the UK's 
other main parties quizzed on their plans to tackle the climate crisis 
ahead of next month's poll.
The party said its offer of having minister Michael Gove stand in for 
Johnson was rejected by Channel 4, complaining the decision "effectively 
seeks to deprive the Conservative Party of any representation and 
attendance at the Channel 4 News debate."...
- - -
The event took place on the day that scientists warned the earth is 
heading to a "tipping point," and hours after the European Parliament 
voted to declare a climate emergency. The UK became the first country to 
make such a declaration in May, after Corbyn's Labour Party led a 
successful push to do so.
Corbyn earlier announced a plan to plant 2 billion new trees by 2040.
Johnson's refusal to appear in the debate gave further fuel to charges 
that he is dodging scrutiny during the campaign. Several opposition 
figures criticized him on Thursday for refusing to confirm he would take 
part in an interview with BBC presenter Andrew Neil, which all of the 
other major leaders have done...
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/28/uk/uk-election-climate-debate-boris-johnson-ge19-gbr-intl/index.html



[Watch out]
*Federal Government Is Failing on Climate Readiness, Watchdog Says*
A new Government Accountability Office report finds little progress has 
been made in reducing the nation's vulnerability to climate change
By Thomas Frank, E&E News on November 27, 2019
A nonpartisan federal watchdog agency assailed the Trump 
administration's response to climate change in a damaging new report 
that criticized President Trump's reversal of environmental policies 
imposed by President Obama.

The Government Accountability Office, which has warned since 2013 about 
the nation's exposure to the impacts of climate change, says the federal 
government is now failing to make any progress on improving climate 
resilience.

The GAO puts climate change on its high-risk list of vulnerabilities and 
poorly run federal programs that pose a significant threat to the public.

In the case of climate change, the threat is largely financial: Federal 
taxpayers have spent more than $450 billion on disaster aid since 
2005—including $19 billion that Trump and Congress approved in June. 
Spending will grow as hurricanes, wildfires and flooding cause 
increasing damage.

The report released Friday features a significant downgrade from March, 
when the GAO said the government was taking some steps to protect the 
nation and federal taxpayers from the increasing damage caused by 
climate change.

"The federal government has made little measurable progress since 2017 
to reduce its fiscal exposure to climate change," the newest GAO report 
concludes.

The 72-page report never uses Trump's name. But it criticizes two 
executive orders he signed, saying they weakened the federal effort to 
combat climate change and build resilience.

Trump's highly publicized executive order in March 2017, which revoked 
an Obama order tightening environmental protection, reversed the federal 
government's leadership on climate change, the GAO said (Climatewire, 
March 29, 2017.)

A Trump executive order signed in May 2018, which revoked another Obama 
environmental order, weakened the federal government's ability to 
counter climate change by eliminating a requirement that federal 
agencies develop climate-resilience plans.

The result: The federal government now receives the worst grade in all 
five categories on which the GAO rates the government's progress in 
reducing the nation's exposure to climate change and in getting climate 
change off the high-risk list.

"We assessed the federal government's progress since 2017 related to 
climate change ... and found that the federal government had not met any 
of the criteria for removal from the high-risk list," the GAO said.

In a report released Feb. 15, 2017, three weeks after Trump took office, 
the GAO said the federal government had partially met four of the five 
criteria and had not met the fifth.

In March, the GAO said the government had partially met three of the 
criteria while failing to meet two criteria.

The federal government has never fully met any of the five criteria 
since the GAO put climate change on its high-risk list in 2013.

The ongoing failures have left the federal government with a scattershot 
approach to building the nation's climate resilience when it should be 
leading the effort by setting and helping pay for national climate 
goals, the GAO said.

"The federal government does not have a strategic federal approach for 
investing in the highest priority climate resilience projects," the GAO 
said.

Federal agencies are pursuing their own strategies with "ad hoc funding 
for projects that may convey some climate resilience benefits," the GAO 
said. But even with those efforts, "federal investment in projects 
specifically designed to enhance climate resilience to date has been 
limited."

The GAO has urged the federal government since 2009 to better coordinate 
its effort to improve climate resilience. Its latest report amounts to a 
plea for federal leadership on climate change by setting goals for 
climate resilience, prioritizing and implementing projects and 
monitoring climate risks.

In 2005, the state Legislature consolidated all of the disparate local 
planning entities into a single agency, the Coastal Protection and 
Restoration Authority, which took charge of identifying resilience 
projects to reduce flood risk and coastal land loss. The authority has 
published three coastal master plans evaluating potential projects. Its 
newest plan, published in 2017, identified $50 billion in high-priority 
projects to be done as funding becomes available.

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides 
daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news a twww.eenews.net.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/federal-government-is-failing-on-climate-readiness-watchdog-says/



[Data rules]
*Power Up: Climate catastrophe alert: Emissions spiked under Trump and 
the world is taking notice*
U.N. WARNS MAJOR CLIMATE ACTION IS NEEDED NOW: Venice is flooding, 
California and Australia are on fire, Qatar is on its way to becoming 
unlivable without outdoor air conditioning … some might say the planet 
"clearly and unequivocally faces a climate emergency." ​

The United Nations's annual "emissions gap" report out today is sure to 
deepen those concerns: "Global temperatures are on pace to rise as much 
as 3.9 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the 
century," our colleague Brady Dennis reports.

And the United States, once a global leader on climate change, is not 
helping matters -- we've seen our energy-related carbon dioxide 
emissions spike in 2018 under President Trump, after a previous gradual 
decline.

The report, which examines where we're heading versus the goals of the 
2015 Paris climate accord, is an indication of just how far off-track 
the world remains. International leaders agreed nations need to keep the 
Earth's average temperature increases "well below" 2 degrees Celsius by 
the end of the century to avoid widespread and catastrophic climate events.

The report finds that closing the gap will require action on a grand 
scale at a politically turbulent moment:

"Global greenhouse gas emissions must begin falling by 7.6 percent each 
year beginning 2020 -- a rate currently nowhere in sight -- to meet the 
most ambitious aims of the Paris climate accord, the report issued early 
Tuesday found," per Brady. "Its authors acknowledged that the findings 
are 'bleak.' After all, the world has never demonstrated the ability to 
cut greenhouse gas emissions on such a scale." "Our collective failure 
to act early and hard on climate change means we now must deliver deep 
cuts to emissions," Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. 
Environment Program, said in a statement. "We need to catch up on the 
years in which we procrastinated."
More ambitious: In fact, the report says nations need to take more 
dramatic measures than outlined in the Paris accord, which Trump said 
early in his tenure the United States wouldn't honor.

"To hit the more ambitious target of no more than 1.5 degrees of 
warming, they found, nations would need to ramp up their pledges 
fivefold," Brady reports.

"Every year of delay beyond 2020 brings a need for faster cuts, which 
become increasingly expensive, unlikely and impractical," the report 
states. "Delays will also quickly put the 1.5C goal out of reach."

Our current reality: Twenty percent of the planet has *already warmed* 
by 1.5 degrees celsius, per an analysis by our colleagues tracking 
dangerous hot zones across the world.

And things aren't getting better: Since the Trump officially ceded the 
United States position on Paris and rolled back other key environmental 
regulations, the rest of the world has followed suit.

"Investment in renewable energy in the developing world also dropped 
significantly in 2018, according to an analysis released Monday by 
BloombergNEF, which tracks worldwide energy trends," Brady writes.
"Chinese investment in clean energy is plummeting -- down from $76bn 
during the first half of 2017, to $29bn during the first half of this 
year," according to the Financial Times's Leslie Hook. "Fraying 
multilateralism has further eviscerated the climate accord, which lacks 
any enforcement mechanism."

Key quote: "Now that the U.S. has withdrawn from the Paris agreement, 
the entire global response to climate change is shifting," Chinese 
policymaker Li Junfeng told Hook. "We have to be realistic…There's no 
point in being in a rush."
Slivers of hope: At the U.N. climate conference in Spain next month, 
global leaders will face pressure to do something. And it's not all doom 
and gloom -- some countries are crafting more aggressive climate policy.
"Already, 70 countries have told U.N. officials they plan to craft more 
ambitious national climate pledges in 2020 -- even as some of the 
world's largest emitters have yet to follow suit," Brady reports. 
"Scores of private companies have set their own targets, vowing to 
investors to sharply cut their carbon footprints. A growing list of 
states and cities have pushed ahead with policies aimed at meeting the 
goals of the Paris accord, even as the U.S. government remains on the 
sidelines." Glass half full: "A number of encouraging developments have 
taken place," the report reads, "and the political focus on the climate 
crisis is growing in several countries, with voters and protesters, 
particularly youth, making it clear that it is their number one issue."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/powerup/2019/11/26/powerup-climate-catastrophe-alert-emission-spiked-under-trump-and-the-world-is-taking-notice/5ddca94388e0fa652bbbda38/



*This Day in Climate History - November 29, 2014 - from D.R. Tucker*
The New York Times reports:

    "Since the economically crippling oil embargo of 1973, every
    American president has pledged to seek and achieve energy independence.

    "That elusive goal may finally have arrived, at least for the
    foreseeable future, with the failure of Saudi Arabia and its 11 oil
    cartel partners in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
    Countries to agree to a production cut that would put a brake on
    plummeting crude prices."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/29/business/energy-environment/free-fall-in-oil-price-underscores-shift-away-from-opec.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
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