[✔️] November 20, 2022 - Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
Richard at CredoandScreed.com
Sun Nov 20 13:20:28 EST 2022
/*November 20, 2022*/
/[ Some COP27 success reported NYT ]/
*In a First, Rich Countries Agree to Pay for Climate Damages in Poor
Nations*
After 30 years of deadlock, a new U.N. climate agreement aims to pay
developing countries for loss and damage caused by global warming. But
huge questions remain about how it would work.
By Brad Plumer, Lisa Friedman, Max Bearak and Jenny Gross
Nov. 19, 2022
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt — Negotiators from nearly 200 countries agreed
for the first time to establish a fund that would help poor, vulnerable
countries cope with climate disasters made worse by the pollution spewed
by wealthy nations that is dangerously heating the planet.
The decision regarding payments for climate damage marked a breakthrough
on one of the most contentious issues at United Nations climate
negotiations. For more than three decades, developing nations have
pressed for loss and damage money, asking rich, industrialized countries
to provide compensation for the costs of destructive storms, heat waves
and droughts fueled by global warming.
But the United States and other wealthy countries had long blocked the
idea, for fear that they could be held legally liable for the greenhouse
gas emissions that are driving climate change.
The agreement hammered out in this Red Sea resort town says nations
cannot be held legally liable for payments. The deal calls for a
committee with representatives from 24 countries to work over the next
year to figure out exactly what form the fund should take, which
countries should contribute and where the money should go. Many of the
other details are still to be determined...
The creation of a loss and damage fund was almost derailed by disputes
that ran into the dawn hours of Sunday over other elements of a broader
agreement, including how deeply countries should cut their emissions and
whether to include language that explicitly called for a phaseout of
fossil fuels, including coal, natural gas and oil. By 5 a.m. in Egypt,
negotiators were still debating those other measures.
Developing nations — largely from Asia, Africa, Latin America, the
Caribbean and South Pacific — fought first to place the loss and damage
fund on the formal agenda of the two-week summit. And then they were
relentless in their pressure campaign, arguing that it was a matter of
justice, noting they did little to contribute to a crisis that threatens
their existence. They made it clear that a summit held on the African
continent that ended without addressing loss and damage would be seen as
a moral failure.
“The announcement offers hope to vulnerable communities all over the
world who are fighting for their survival from climate stress,” said
Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s minister for climate change. “And gives some
credibility to the COP process.”
Pakistan, which spearheaded a group of 134 developing nations pushing
for loss and damage payments, provided a fresh reminder of the
destructive forces of climate change. Over the summer, Pakistan suffered
devastating flooding that scientists say was made worse by global
warming, resulting in more than 1,500 deaths, plunging one-third of the
country underwater and causing $30 billion in damages, even as Pakistan
contributes less than 1 percent of the world’s planet-warming emissions.
As the summit was nearing an end, the European Union consented to the
idea of a loss and damage fund, though it insisted that any aid should
be focused on the most vulnerable nations, and that aid might include a
wide variety of options such as new insurance programs in addition to
direct payments...
That left the United States, which has pumped more greenhouse gases into
the atmosphere than any nation in history, as the last big holdout. By
Saturday, as talks stretched into overtime, American officials said that
they would accept a loss and damage fund, breaking the logjam.
Still, major hurdles remain.
The United States and the European Union are pushing for assurances that
China will eventually contribute to any fund created — and that China
would not be eligible to receive money from it. The United Nations
currently classifies China as a developing country, which would make it
eligible for climate compensation, even though it is now the world’s
biggest emitter of greenhouse gases as well as the second-largest
economy. China has fiercely resisted being treated as a developed nation
in global climate talks.
There is also no guarantee that wealthy countries will deposit money
into the fund. A decade ago, the United States, the European Union and
other wealthy emitters pledged to mobilize $100 billion per year in
climate finance by 2020 to help poorer countries shift to clean energy
and adapt to future climate risks through measures like building sea
walls. They are still falling short by tens of billions of dollars annually.
While American diplomats agreed to a fund, money must be appropriated by
Congress. Last year, the Biden administration sought $2.5 billion in
climate finance but secured just $1 billion, and that was when Democrats
controlled both chambers. With Republicans, who largely oppose climate
aid, set to take over the House in January, the prospects of Congress
approving an entirely new pot of money for loss and damage appear dim.
“Sending U.S. taxpayer dollars to a U.N. sponsored green slush fund is
completely misguided,” said Senator John Barrasso, Republican of
Wyoming. “The Biden administration should focus on lowering spending at
home, not shipping money to the U.N. for new climate deals. Innovation,
not reparations, is key to fighting climate change.”
For their part, a variety of European nations have voluntarily pledged
more than $300 million to address loss and damage so far, with most of
that money going toward a new insurance program to help countries
recover from disasters like flooding. Poorer countries have praised
those early efforts while noting that they may ultimately face hundreds
of billions of dollars per year in unavoidable, irreversible climate
damages.
“We have the fund, but we need money to make it worthwhile,” said
Mohamed Adow, executive director of Power Shift Africa, a group that
aims to mobilize climate action across the continent. “What we have is
an empty bucket. Now we need to fill it so that support can flow to the
most impacted people who are suffering right now at the hands of the
climate crisis.”...
There was a brewing debate over what to call the new fund. Developing
nations consider it “compensation” and climate activists often refer to
it as “reparations.” But diplomats, particularly the Americans, called
the money “loss and damage resources.”
In addition to a loss and damage fund, developing nations used the
climate talks to push for reforms at two of the world’s biggest lending
institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
The agreement reached in Sharm El Sheikh broaches the possibility of
both institutions paying into the loss and damage fund. Heavy debt is
one of the main obstacles developing countries face in being able to
respond adequately to climate-driven crises, both immediate and long-term.
The two-week summit, which was scheduled to end Friday, stretched into
Saturday as negotiators from nearly 200 nations clashed over several
thorny issues. The talks come at a time of multiple crises. Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine has roiled global food supply and energy markets,
stoked inflation and spurred some countries to burn more coal and other
alternatives to Russian gas, threatening to undermine climate goals.
At the same time, rising global temperatures have intensified deadly
floods in places like Pakistan and Nigeria, as well as fueled
record-breaking heat across Europe and Asia. In the Horn of Africa, a
third year of severe drought has brought millions to the brink of famine.
One area of concern at the talks was whether nations would strive to
keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7
degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, a goal that nations
emphasized at climate talks last year in Glasgow. Beyond that threshold,
scientists say, the risk of climate catastrophes increases significantly...
There was a brewing debate over what to call the new fund. Developing
nations consider it “compensation” and climate activists often refer to
it as “reparations.” But diplomats, particularly the Americans, called
the money “loss and damage resources.”
In addition to a loss and damage fund, developing nations used the
climate talks to push for reforms at two of the world’s biggest lending
institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
The agreement reached in Sharm El Sheikh broaches the possibility of
both institutions paying into the loss and damage fund. Heavy debt is
one of the main obstacles developing countries face in being able to
respond adequately to climate-driven crises, both immediate and long-term.
The two-week summit, which was scheduled to end Friday, stretched into
Saturday as negotiators from nearly 200 nations clashed over several
thorny issues. The talks come at a time of multiple crises. Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine has roiled global food supply and energy markets,
stoked inflation and spurred some countries to burn more coal and other
alternatives to Russian gas, threatening to undermine climate goals.
At the same time, rising global temperatures have intensified deadly
floods in places like Pakistan and Nigeria, as well as fueled
record-breaking heat across Europe and Asia. In the Horn of Africa, a
third year of severe drought has brought millions to the brink of famine.
One area of concern at the talks was whether nations would strive to
keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7
degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, a goal that nations
emphasized at climate talks last year in Glasgow. Beyond that threshold,
scientists say, the risk of climate catastrophes increases significantly...
The planet has already warmed by an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius, and
scientists have said that countries need to cut their carbon emissions
more quickly and more significantly to keep warming to 1.5 degrees
Celsius. The world is currently on a trajectory to warm by 2.1 to 2.9
degrees Celsius by the end of this century.
Every fraction of a degree of additional warming could mean tens of
millions more people worldwide exposed to life-threatening heat waves,
water shortages and coastal flooding, scientists have found. A
1.5-degree world might still have coral reefs and summer Arctic sea ice,
while a 2-degree world most likely would not.
“One point five is not just a number that somebody invented,” Espen
Barth Eide, Norway’s minister of climate and environment told the
conference on Friday. He spoke about “the paramount difference, the
dramatic difference between warming that ends at 1.5 and 2 degrees.”
“Entire countries that are present here will simply disappear from the
surface of the planet. Most of all the ice on the world will melt,” he
said. “Cities we love and live in will be gone. It’s such a drama in
front of us that we simply have to make sure that we stick to what we
were told to do in Glasgow.”
One of the biggest obstacles to a deal at this year’s talks, negotiators
said, was the chaotic management style of the Egyptian hosts, whose job
it is to understand the concerns of each country and then broker a deal.
Diplomats complained that the Egyptian presidency held
middle-of-the-night meetings and allowed delegates to see only snippets
of potential text. Technical issues with sound delayed negotiating
sessions. Lack of easy access to food and water also slowed down
progress; negotiators had to hunt for sandwiches and coffee in the
sprawling venue.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this in 25 years,” said one
longtime delegate, who asked not to be identified because talks were
still ongoing. The delegate called the process “untransparent, chaotic,
unpredictable.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/climate/un-climate-damage-cop27.html
- -
/[ points in the COP27 negotiations - NewYorker ]/
*How to Pay for Climate Justice When Polluters Have All the Money*
The COP27 climate conference, in Egypt, was in large part a global
search for cash.
By Bill McKibben
November 19, 2022
You can imagine the tension—the anger—that comes from watching your part
of the world dry up or flood, knowing that the countries whose pollution
caused your problems also have enough dollars to repair the damage. The
moral argument couldn’t be more straightforward: Americans have produced
almost a quarter of the excess carbon in the atmosphere; a quarter of
the damage should be on our tab. And yet we have not yet started to pay
it, not in any straightforward way: Congress won’t spend tax dollars on
reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans; they’re even more
unlikely to do it for survivors of the climate crisis in Africa or Asia.
At least, not in sums remotely equal to the damage: at cop27, a handful
of the usual countries (think Denmark) pledged climate-relief aid on the
order of about seventy-five million dollars, with an “M.” The initial
estimate of the damage from Pakistan’s wild summer of flooding, by
contrast, is about forty billion dollars, with a “B.”...
So there needs to be some less direct way of accessing the wealth of the
north. More than half the world’s capital is in the U.S. and Europe;
more than a third of it is in the U.S. alone. Much of that money lies in
retirement accounts—money that isn’t charitable, and won’t simply be
turned over to cover what the U.N. calls the “loss and damage” of
climate change, no matter how just the claim of the poor nations might
be. But the trillions of dollars in those funds could provide the
financing that the developing world needs for an energy transition—and
if African nations have the funding to build, say, solar arrays, they
can generate lower-cost clean energy and produce a return for American
pensioners. At the moment, though, that’s unlikely. Investing in an
American wind farm is relatively easy; the pension fund can predict
their earnings based on a hundred years of historical returns from
utility companies. Investing in a Senegalese solar company that lacks a
track record, and which could be at the whims of the local political and
judicial system, would be a different story. Because such investments
are relatively risky, pension funds would charge prohibitively high
interest...
- -
There are even farther-reaching demands for reform of the global
financial system. Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, has put
forward what’s being called the Bridgetown Agenda, named for her capital
city. It calls for the I.M.F. to issue half a trillion dollars in
“special drawing rights,” or other financial instruments to help boost
investment in the Global South. “It’s a way of rethinking the
institutions created after World War Two” at the Bretton Woods
agreement, Gallagher said. “It would fully integrate climate into their
mandates,” which, she said, is necessary, because the classic debt trap
(where poor countries have to keep borrowing just to pay off the
interest on old debts) has been replaced with a “climate-debt trap.”
Countries suffer one climate disaster after another, accruing enormous
economic damage and having to borrow more simply to build back to where
they were. Such policies require governments like ours to pony up more
cash, but the poor nations are not without leverage: world leaders such
as Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, of Bangladesh, and former Maldives
President Mohamed Nasheed have raised the idea of a global debtors’
strike, arguing that the high emitters have not kept their side of the
bargain. If enough countries decided not to pay interest to countries
that continue to spew carbon, they could conceivably influence the
larger financial system...
None of these financial schemes precisely addresses the demand that the
most vulnerable nations are making: for money to cover their devastating
losses and damages. On Saturday, however, as the conference came to a
close, negotiators, including those from the U.S., tentatively agreed to
a concrete step in the right direction—the formation of a
loss-and-damage fund within the next year, albeit without any details on
who will fund it or how much that funding will amount to. There’s also
an insurance scheme—Global Shield, its backers are calling it—that might
offer relief in the aftermath of crises. These steps will not produce
forty billion dollars when a country like Pakistan floods, at least not
anytime soon, nor will they repair the grinding, slow-motion
crises—desertification, drought, sea-level rise—that pose some of the
worst risks on an overheating planet. But they are evidence of how hard
the Global South is pushing, and how unimpeachably just their demands are..
COP27 is one more reminder, however, that justice only proceeds,
fitfully, through politics. Rebalancing the world’s wealth, even a
little, is the trickiest of political tasks. Yet our chances for a
livable world may depend on it.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-to-pay-for-climate-justice-when-polluters-have-all-the-money
/[ Novice journalist delivering sophisticated summaries ] /
*South Africa plans to switch from coal to clean energy, Rainn Wilson
changes his name | Recap*
Beckisphere Climate Corner
Nov 19, 2022
... Remember to talk about the climate crisis every day and support your
local news organizations!
Timestamps-
00:00 Intro
02:00 Extreme weather events
03:42 Climate studies
16:20 Climate victories
22:41 Rue break
23:07 Climate fails
27:21 One more climate victory
28:18 Closing notes
Source list-
https://heavenly-sceptre-002.notion.site/Climate-Recap-Nov-19-11c4eb08b63b4653a4e182edbac157f5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAQNsUn27TY
/[ helps you recharge ] /
*Google Maps got a big update that shows where fast-charging EV stations
are and more*
PUBLISHED THU, NOV 17 202211:11 AM EST
-- Google Maps was updated to show “fast charging” options when looking
for a station to charge your EV.
-- Next week, an augmented reality feature called Search with Live View
will be available in six cities on Google Maps.
-- Google also added accessibility information to maps globally.
*Find fast chargers for your electric car*
If you drive an EV, you’ll be able to filter charging stations to find
the most time-efficient option. So, if you search for a “charging
station” in Google Maps, for example, a new option appears that allows
you to filter out to show only “fast charge” stations that are
compatible with the plug your car uses. It builds on an earlier update
that allows users to search for stations by plug compatibility.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/17/google-maps-updates-for-ev-charging-augmented-reality-and-accessibility.html
/[ How to setup your solar panels - and a good channel to connect with ]/
*$279 Ground Mount Solar Array - DIY Friendly!*
DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua3A_1uH1Jg
- -
*Top 10 Beginner Mistakes When Building a DIY Solar System*
DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3dNJAe8XEc
/[ Inevitable future - an opinion ]/
*The Global Carbon Surveillance State Is Coming*
Nov. 16, 2022
David Wallace-Wells
OPINION
For decades, those of us wondering why so little action had been taken
to reduce carbon emissions, and why the public felt so little urgency
about that failure, would sometimes lament that carbon dioxide was
invisible. Unlike the pollution that smogged up cities, set rivers on
fire and inspired the Clean Air and Water Acts here and similar
legislation abroad, the stuff that was damaging the climate was being
put into the atmosphere without anyone really seeing it.
That’s why one of the most fascinating developments from this year’s
major climate conference, COP27, which kicked off Nov. 6 with the U.N.
secretary general António Guterres declaring that the world was on a
“highway to climate hell,” is a new online tool released by the
nonprofit coalition Climate Trace that allows us to see emissions in
near-real time.
For a while, we’ve used ballpark estimates for emissions from countries,
industries and the planet as a whole. The point of the Climate Trace
project is to bring it down to the level of individual polluting
facilities: to make it possible to track climate-damaging carbon
released from more than 72,000 “steel and cement factories, power
plants, oil and gas fields, cargo ships, cattle feedlots,” as The Times
put it — to name just a handful of the sources...
- -
The Climate Trace project doesn’t turn that carbon from invisible to red
or green, and it is only one of many recent efforts to better assess the
real-time state of emissions rather than imprecise approximations and
modeling. But it marks another step toward what is beginning to seem
like the inevitable development of a sort of global carbon surveillance
state — one which, even independent of any global enforcement mechanism,
promises to change some aspects of the conventional picture of climate
change and what is causing it.
- -
The basics, of course, remain the same: The world’s carbon emissions are
produced primarily from the burning of fossil fuel, and the power,
transportation and industrial sectors dominate. But examining the flow
of pollution in a more granular and detailed way does change some
features of the carbon landscape in three key ways.
To begin with, methane begins to look much more significant. Typically,
when we talk about emissions we talk about carbon dioxide, of which
about 40 gigatons a year are released globally. But the true total
figure of planet-warming emissions, calculated using a standard called
carbon dioxide equivalent, is about 50 gigatons each year, with most of
the additional 10 gigatons coming from methane, another greenhouse gas,
produced both from industrial activity like fracking and from
agriculture, land-use changes and melting permafrost. In recent years
there’s been a flurry of research documenting the sources of methane,
which had been somewhat secret and elusive before. The studies almost
invariably found that much more of it was being released than was
previously acknowledged. (A study published in 2019, for instance,
suggests that oil and gas emissions in the south central region of the
United States were twice the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimate.)
Second, it starts to seem less intuitive that we should build our
understanding of emissions and decarbonization around the unit of the
nation. For most of the decades in which laypeople have been worrying
about climate, countries have been the conventional framework for
tabulating emissions because they were the basic building block of
climate policy — and because our best hopes for cutting emissions seemed
to rest on things like national carbon taxes and renewable subsidies, we
tracked progress country by country as well.
But the atmosphere doesn’t recognize borders, and the Trace satellites
show outsize damage being done by, for example, an oil and gas field in
Algeria producing more than 73 million tons of emissions, an iron and
steel factory in China producing 22 million tons and a coal-powered
power plant in West Virginia producing 10 million tons. (You can
rabbit-hole through the mesmerizing and intuitive data here.)
Removing borders from our model of carbon emissions doesn’t just draw
attention to polluting sites and industries, as the Trace satellite data
suggests, it also raises the question of who within those countries is
responsible — which individuals have the largest carbon footprints. And
while at the moment that data is as invisible to satellites as it is to
the naked eye, the sub-national distribution of emissions has been a
growing preoccupation of climate researchers in recent years, with more
and more attention paid particularly to the unequal distribution of
emissions within countries (as opposed to the much more known unequal
distribution between countries).
- -
The emerging surveillance state also points the way to a third change in
the way we think about emissions, offering another piece of the emerging
framework for global sanctions and climate litigation. In the United
States, dozens of lawsuits are already proceeding against individual
companies, part of a broader global movement to push climate action into
the courts to hold nations accountable to their own promises, as well as
corporations for their damages and greenwashing. Clarity of data helps
here, as it will in any future effort to incorporate emissions into
trade agreements, too.
Sunshine isn’t a simple solution or even a real disinfectant when it
comes to climate — we’ve done more damage to the planet’s future since
nearly 1,700 scientists signed a warning to humanity about it 30 years
ago than in all the history of humanity that came before. But one hopes,
at least, that knowing more will be better than knowing less, in part by
making clear that warming is not the vague result of industrial
civilization in general but of the very particular one we have built —
and which we can now watch corroding our future in real time, whatever
the world’s leaders do with that information.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/16/opinion/environment/surveillance-state-climate-change.html
/[Looking back at show tunes -- pretty funny TV show for 2005 - hard to
find video ]/
/*November 20, 2005 */
November 20, 2005: TBS airs "Earth to America," a two-hour
climate-awareness special executive-produced by Laurie David, featuring
Larry David, Bill Maher, Tom Hanks, Steve Martin and Leonardo DiCaprio,
among others.
*TBS Presents: Earth To America*
Ben Dubin -- Sep 4, 2020
November 20, 2005 Speciall
497 views posted Sep 4, 2020
Aired November 20, 2005 Special
Tom Hanks is the host of this show with a comic approach to raise
awareness concerning the environment.
https://youtu.be/TBMy1kl6w-4 video from 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/19/arts/television/19eart.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
https://www.google.com/search?q=Earth+to+America+video&rlz=1C1SQJL_enUS792US792&oq=Earth+to+America+video&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.7488j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:1aa6b1f1,vid:TBMy1kl6w-4
=======================================
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