[TheClimate.Vote] December 1, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*December 1, 2020*/

[it's their future]
*The UN canceled its 2020 climate summit. Youth held one anyway.*
By Joseph Winters on Nov 30, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic delayed COP26, the United Nations' annual 
climate summit, by a whole year. But it isn't stopping youth climate 
activists from holding their own Conference of the Parties.

"We can't let this pandemic stop us," said Iris Zhan, a 16-year-old high 
school junior from Columbia, Maryland. "We need to make progress and 
push as much as possible because of how urgent this is," she said.

Since November 19, 18 student staff, 216 volunteers like Zhan, and more 
than 350 youth delegates from 146 countries have been convening 
virtually for Mock COP26, a virtual summit meant to fill the void 
created by COP26's postponement. For several hours each day, they've 
attended online workshops, panels, and discussions with environmental 
activists and experts. Their goal is to craft a formal statement of 
policy demands that, when the conference ends on December 1, they'll 
deliver to Nigel Topping, the "High Level Climate Action Champion" 
designated to engage with stakeholders and promote climate action ahead 
of COP26.
Ideally, the statement will raise the bar for COP26 negotiators when 
they meet in Glasgow next November. "We're hoping to make a big 
difference," Zhan said.

The mock conference has been designed to address long-standing diversity 
problems within the environmental movement. To elevate voices from the 
countries at the greatest risk from climate change, Mock COP26 
organizers invited up to five delegates from each country in the 
economically disadvantaged global south, giving them greater voting 
power and more time to speak. Wealthier countries like the United States 
and Canada could only send up to three delegates.
Sofía Hernandez Salazar, a 22-year-old climate activist and a delegate 
from Costa Rica, said the mock conference's format helped address 
problems of representation that she had noticed while attending COP25 in 
Madrid.

"At real COPs, you mostly see men who are white and from Europe," she 
said, adding that delegations from the global south tended to have fewer 
negotiators.

Darien Castro, a 23-year old delegate from Ecuador, echoed the 
sentiment. "It's important to include marginalized groups," he said, 
rather than allowing the needs of Indigenous communities, rural areas, 
and island nations to be drowned out by the interests of superpowers. 
"These people have knowledge, but many people just don't care about 
that."Next year's COP26 has already been criticized for a lack of 
inclusivity -- most notably due to its imbalanced gender ratio. A U.K. 
plan released in September showed a 100 percent male team of 
negotiators, senior politicians, and civil servants for the climate 
talks, prompting outcry from the Fridays for Future movement, which 
helped organize Mock COP26.

Kevin Mtai, a 24-year-old conference organizer from Soy, Kenya, said he 
has been pleased to see the innovations in the mock conference's format 
-- not only how it has prioritized at-risk communities, but also how it 
has elevated young voices. At last year's COP, he said, he had been 
disappointed to see young people excluded from negotiations, even though 
they are the ones who will face the most severe consequences of climate 
change.

"Global leaders from COP need to see how we have been running this 
conference so they can take a leaf from us," Mtai said. "Next year, they 
need to include more youth in the discussion."

For the first week of the conference, delegates spent time developing 
"high-level statements" to represent their countries' interests. Those 
statements were finalized on Wednesday and posted to the Mock COP26 
YouTube channel -- a three-minute speech for each country. Now, the 
remaining time until December 1 will be devoted to writing up their 
final demands for world leaders.

ClientEarth, an environmental law nonprofit, is helping the delegates 
polish their demands into a legal document that could, hypothetically, 
be adopted into law by the delegates' home countries.
"It's an uphill fight, but I'm optimistic that it's going to get a lot 
of attention," said Ellie Gold, a legal researcher for ClientEarth who's 
been working with the Mock COP26 delegates.

Even if the statement doesn't gain a foothold in countries' legislative 
chambers, Zhan said she hopes it will send a clear message to world 
leaders: Center the needs of the global south, don't allow fossil fuel 
interests to direct the conference, and, of course, listen to the youth 
climate movement.

"If COP was youth-led," she said, "we would make so much more progress 
than we have in the last decade."
https://grist.org/climate/the-un-canceled-its-2020-climate-summit-youth-held-one-anyway/



[Watch where the money goes]
*How climate change could spark the next home mortgage disaster*
Taxpayers are backing more than a trillion dollars in home mortgages, 
but the agencies buying them are neglecting to consider climate risks.
By ZACK COLMAN - 11/30/2020
With its lively parks and colorful bungalows, Hialeah, Fla., has been 
the gateway to the American middle class for thousands of Cuban immigrants.

Hialeah was the place where home ownership, an unattainable goal under 
the Communist regime of their homeland, became a reality. And as in many 
American communities -- rich and poor, of every ethnic makeup -- the 
American dream for families in Hialeah was helped along by the 
taxpayer-funded mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Their 
willingness to purchase the loans on homes in the area provides local 
lenders with a steady flow of cash to invest in the community.
...the American dream for families in Hialeah was helped along by the 
taxpayer-funded mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Their 
willingness to purchase the loans on homes in the area provides local 
lenders with a steady flow of cash to invest in the community...
- -
Despite that grim prognosis, the federal government keeps pumping 
mortgage money into Hialeah, as it does in hundreds of other communities 
now facing grave dangers from climate change. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac 
hold the majority of home mortgages in some Hialeah neighborhoods. More 
significantly, federal taxpayers hold greater than 60 percent of 
mortgages on homes in some areas outside the specially designated 
federal floodplain, according to an analysis of federal data by Amine 
Ouazad, an associate economics professor at Canadian business school HEC 
Montréal...
- -
"It just has not reached that level of concern. And it never does, 
right?" Clifford Rossi, a former senior risk officer at both Fannie Mae 
and Freddie Mac, told POLITICO. "It never reaches the point of people 
really kind of being forward-thinking about this until the crisis is 
upon you or about to hit you in the face."
- -
Hialeah is just a tiny part of a much larger risk pool, but it 
encapsulates the conundrum facing policymakers. Homeownership rates in 
the city are relatively low, at less than 46 percent. Meanwhile, Fannie 
Mae and Freddie Mac have a congressionally approved mandate to put more 
people, especially those from traditionally underserved backgrounds, in 
homes of their own...
- -
Officials at the FHFA, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, 
maintain that taxpayers are protected by flood insurance requirements. 
Parts of Hialeah, though, don't fall into the floodplain, a result of 
outdated maps that do not consider future flood scenarios arising from 
climate change -- a problem that, policymakers maintain, is replicated 
in communities across the country. But pricing climate change into 
mortgage terms would wreak havoc in the real estate market -- a hit 
that, while protective of taxpayers in the long run, runs counter to the 
missions of the relevant agencies. Turning off the mortgage spigot in 
communities affected by climate change would disproportionately affect 
people of color, whose neighborhoods are more likely to be plagued by 
violent weather.

The result, many current and former federal housing officials 
acknowledge, is a peculiar kind of stasis -- a crisis that everyone sees 
coming but no one feels empowered to prevent, even as banks and 
investors grow far savvier about assessing climate risk...
- -
For now, however, "There's a tendency not to want to address these hard 
issues and we allow a lot of capital to go in" to at-risk neighborhoods, 
added Golding, who is now executive director of the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology Golub Center for Finance and Policy.

Fannie Mae did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Freddie Mac 
referred POLITICO to FHFA.

The mortgage giants appear to be taking fledgling steps to understand 
the true cost of climate-threatened loans on their books. In June, 
Fannie Mae hired a vice president of climate-risk analytics. The agency 
previously issued a request for proposals to analyze climate exposure to 
homes that are outside the 100-year floodplain, and therefore do not 
require flood insurance coverage, which was first reported by POLITICO.
- -
As with most aspects of climate change, there's a lack of certainty: 
Mortgage assessors can't say exactly when and exactly where life- and 
property-destroying events will occur, even if they know the risks of 
them will increase.

A further reason for caution is that any actions taken by the two 
mortgage giants would be highly disruptive in themselves: A refusal to 
buy mortgages on homes in certain areas would potentially choke off 
lending in those areas, driving down housing prices. For those already 
owning homes in those areas, equity could disappear overnight. Some 
owners, realizing their homes were worth less than their mortgages, 
might simply refuse to pay, triggering foreclosures and igniting some of 
the forces that created the financial crisis of 2008-2009.

But failing to take preventative action in anticipation of climate 
changes risks a far greater downturn...
- -
Currently, the mortgage market is cross-subsidized: Borrowers in New 
Mexico are implicitly subsidizing Florida homes through the securities 
of mortgage pools Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sell to private investors.

Those securities are opaque, and for good reason, mortgage experts 
argue: They exist to generate more cash flow to keep lending fluid. 
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- in effect, taxpayers -- guarantee the 
principal on those investments even if hurricanes or wildfires wipe out 
the homes...
- -
"The investment community is wanting to get more granularity and 
understanding as to where their risks are," said risQ Chief Commercial 
Officer Chris Hartshorn. "Right now, these assets have been priced 
irresponsibly."

Mortgage investors already have, at least implicitly, said the same. As 
Hurricane Harvey barreled down on Texas in 2017, securities that Fannie 
Mae and Freddie Mac sell to private investors in what's known as a 
"credit risk transfer" went haywire, spiking 150 basis points -- or 1.5 
percent -- amid fears that the storm would obliterate entire 
communities. When the credit risk transfer market settled after Harvey, 
the Association of Mortgage Investors, a trade group representing 
mortgage securities buyers, asked Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to remove 
mortgages vulnerable to climate change from those offerings.
That spike occurred because, unlike with most of the mortgage-backed 
securities that the mortgage giants sell, private buyers take the loss 
on credit risk transfers if mortgages default. The idea is to relieve 
taxpayers of the risk of having to cover for potential losses, putting 
it on private investors instead. But that solution can only work for so 
long, especially given the pressure investors have put on the mortgage 
giants to remove loans on properties at risk of climate change from 
those offerings, said Rossi, the former Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac risk 
officer.

Rossi called the letter "a clarion call" that investors were skeptical 
of the risks the mortgage giants were taking on from climate-exposed 
properties -- so Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took the loans out of the 
credit risk transfer pool, he said, letting climate-vulnerable mortgages 
pile up on their own books.

"In a still relatively low-risk environment relative to the rest of 
their portfolio they can get by pulling those loans out and putting them 
aside," Rossi said. "But over time, that's going to pose challenges for 
them."
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/30/climate-change-mortgage-housing-environment-433721


[animals uneasy XR video]
*Margaret Atwood, Emma Thompson, Lily Cole and others raise awareness of 
animals almost extinct*
Streamed Nov 30, 2020
Extinction Rebellion
Join us for an evening with writers and earth activists Margaret Atwood, 
Amitav Ghosh, Emma Thompson, Lily Cole, Bianca Jagger and many others to 
raise awareness of animals at threat of extinction.
Over the coming decade over one million species face extinction. It is 
estimated that 200 species go extinct every day. We can remain silent or 
we can lend our voices however best we can to try to save them.

We have 20 writers and cultural figures reading new work and speaking to 
specific animals at threat from extinction. You'll hear from: Margaret 
Atwood on the Tasmanian devil; Homero Aridjis on the Vaquita porpoise; 
Emma Thompson on the puffin; Ben Okri on the tiger; Taiwanese artist Wu 
Ming-Yi on the pangolin; Bianca Jagger on the eastern gorilla; Judy Ling 
Wong on the snow leopard; Amitav Ghosh on the Irrawaddy dolphin… as well 
as Nana Oforiatta Ayim, Lily Cole, Prerna Singh Bindra, Lydia Millet, 
Sangu Iyer, Laura Jean McKay, Laura Coleman, Elizabeth Kolbert and more.

Chloe Aridjis, David Lindo the Urban Birder, entomologist Erica 
McAlister, Mya-Rose Craig aka 'BirdGirlUK', and BBC Springwatch's 
Gillian Burke are our five illustrious comperes.

On the Brink takes place online on Monday November 30th at 7pm GMT to 
commemorate Remembrance Day for Lost Species (www.lostspeciesday.org).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTYYGng1m9g starts about 2:45 mins


[Promises]*
****Top court gives France three months to fulfil climate change 
commitments*
In a ruling hailed by campaigners as "historic", France's top 
administrative court on Thursday gave the government a three-month 
deadline to show it is taking action to meet its commitments on climate 
change.

The government of France, which brokered the landmark 2015 Paris 
Agreement on climate change, was hauled before the Council of State by 
Grande-Synthe, a low-lying northern coastal town which is particularly 
exposed to the effects of climate change.

The Council, which rules on disputes over public policies, noted that 
"while France has committed itself to reducing its emissions by 40% in 
2030 compared to 1990 levels, it has, in recent years, regularly 
exceeded the 'carbon budgets' it had set itself."

It also noted that President Emmanuel Macron's government had, in a 
decree in April, deferred much of the reduction efforts beyond 2020.

Despite Macron's headline 2017 promise to "make our planet great again" 
-- a swipe at climate denialist US President Donald Trump who vowed to 
"make America great again" -- France is far off track to meet its 
commitments under the 2015 treaty...
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20201119-court-gives-france-three-months-to-fulfil-climate-change-commitments



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - December 1, 1987 *

During a Democratic presidential debate on NBC, Rep. Richard Gephardt 
states that the US must work with the Soviet Union on addressing 
international environmental issues such as the ozone layer and 
greenhouse gas emissions, noting, "The problem we've had with these 
issues is not that we don't know what to talk about; the problem we've 
had is that America hasn't been a leader."

  (25:10--26:03)
  http://www.c-span.org/video/?20-1/Presidential


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