Day: October 1, 2019

Read the full story at ProPublica.

The leaders of more than 70 countries have made a promise that sounds nothing short of revolutionary. By 2050, they say they will reach “net zero,” putting no more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than can be somehow canceled out.

While the net zero buzzword was as ubiquitous at last week’s United Nations Climate Action Summit as the presence of teenage activist Greta Thunberg, the details of how the countries would reach their ambitious goals were elusive. There was little talk of eliminating the use of fossil fuels, a drastic but economically tricky and politically painful step that would guarantee those emissions reductions.

Instead, some experts fear, the answer involves an overreliance on offsets, a word that has become so unfashionable, it has been replaced by euphemisms like “nature-based solutions.” In general, offsets allow polluters to get credit for cutting their own emissions by paying someone in another city, state or country to reduce theirs.

Read the full story from Reuters.

Hundreds of workers from Google, Amazon and other technology companies on Friday joined climate-change marches in San Francisco and Seattle, saying their employers had been too slow to tackle global warming and needed to take more drastic action.

Read the full story at Inside Climate News.

Their research is helping answer existential questions of our time: How much will sea level rise, how fast, and what will be the impact on human civilizations?

Read the full story in The Conversation.

European governments often appear to champion low-carbon policies. Yet, in 2017, European Union countries collectively spent US$87 billion subsidising the cost of fossil fuels. Shockingly – at a time when the world needs to act to stop climate change – this is nearly 2.5 times more than they spent in 2010.

This increase in wasteful and environmentally devastating spending has been driven by a significant shift towards dirtier economic and environmental policies in nearly every EU country. And the key offenders contributing to this change have – perhaps surprisingly – been Germany and France. They are actually two of the most vocal proponents of interventionist climate policy.

In general, poor transparency makes it difficult to determine how much money is involved when quantifying fossil fuel subsidies. In my research I’ve developed an indirect method that infers the size of fossil fuel subsidies by comparing how much fossil fuels countries use. Countries that appear to use “too little” fossil fuels are indicative of polices that act like taxes. Conversely, countries using “too much” fossil fuels suggest that subsidies dominate. Using this techniques we can examine the size of subsidies across the EU.

My calculations show how central and eastern European countries have traditionally been the biggest fossil fuel subsidisers in the EU, generating 86% of the total or US$75 billion in 2010. The picture, however, is no longer as clear cut. In 2017, central and eastern European country subsidies accounted for only 50% of the EU’s US$87 billion total.