A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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Kevin Lamarque/Pool/AFP/Getty |
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It’s a weird, whiplashy week in climate news. Last weekend, the Biden administration wrapped up participation in the U.N. climate conference known as COP26, trumpeting achievements such as methane reduction pledges, moves toward tougher emissions targets, and more. On Monday, the Biden administration announced that it would block oil and gas drilling around Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. On Tuesday, the White House submitted a treaty amendment to the Senate, aiming to reduce planet-warming hydrofluorocarbons. And on Wednesday, the Biden administration is holding the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history. The land up for grabs lies in the Gulf of Mexico and is about twice as large as Florida.
As Dharna Noor trenchantly wrote in The Boston Globe: “Wait, what?”
TNR’s Kate Aronoff will have the details about the implications of today’s sales—the first under the current administration—on Thursday. Activists had hoped Biden might halt the practice of allowing drilling on federal lands altogether, given the potential for spills, not to mention the estimates showing that any new investment in fossil fuel extraction will make capping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) impossible.
The move embodies the same sort of disconnect Kate wrote about earlier this week when she recapped what she saw taking place at COP26: Even as the U.S. highlighted climate victories to the press, negotiators behind closed doors blocked more ambitious plans, including setting up a climate financing facility for countries already battered by the climate crisis. |
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{{#if }} Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help. Here’s a special offer to subscribe to The New Republic. |
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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{{/if}} Depending on your news consumption habits, you may already have read several summaries of what COP26 did and didn’t accomplish. I’m partial to this bottom-line assessment from Scientific American [emphasis added]: |
The final 11-page document, called the Glasgow Climate Pact, says that greenhouse gas emissions must fall by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 for global warming to be maintained at 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. It notes that, under existing emissions reduction pledges, emissions will be nearly 14% higher than in 2010 by 2030.… The deal also includes commitments from some countries on ending deforestation, reducing methane emissions and a pledge from the financial sector to move trillions of dollars of investments into companies that are committed to net-zero emissions. However, modelling suggests that the promises will still not be enough to limit global warming to 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, the goal stated in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
If countries meet their 2030 targets, global temperatures will still rise 2.4 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2100, according to an analysis by Hoehne and colleagues that was published on the website Climate Action Tracker during the first week of COP26. |
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Heading into the final stretch of 2021, U.S. and global climate policy is in a tough place. It’s clear that there’s been progress from last year, when Trump officials were undoing every environmental regulation they could get their hands on as they headed toward the door. But it’s also clear that the results have fallen far short of ambitions. Blowing through two degrees Celsius of warming (about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), as we are currently on track to do, has disastrous implications: It could cause ocean acidity to increase by almost 30 percent by 2050, raise the risk of a totally ice-free Arctic summer to 80 percent, expose almost 388 million people to water scarcity, open up huge new swaths of land to malaria, disrupt crop yields, and tank global per-capita GDP by 13 percent by 2100—to cite just some of the fallout, as per data from an interactive tool built by CarbonBrief. Heck of a time for a lease sale.
The Apocalypse Soon newsletter is taking a brief break these next two weeks, so, looking ahead to Thanksgiving, I’ll leave you with this apt bit of holiday news from The Washington Post: In addition to labor shortages, rising food prices, exacerbated by climate change, are now messing with the nation’s pie supply.
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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That’s how much food prices have risen globally in the past year, thanks to lower harvests and supply chain disruptions. |
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“Opportunistic retrofitting,” Bloomberg CityLab reports, crunching some numbers, can cut a home’s energy emissions by at least 25 percent. “For an idea of the scale of this opportunity, if only 1% of our roughly 83 million existing single-family homes could reduce their energy use by 25%, U.S. carbon emissions would be reduced by more than 1.6 million metric tons annually.” |
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The White House’s plan to reduce methane emissions has a big blind spot: animal agriculture. |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
Terrific reporting from a partnership between The New York Times and the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network dropped today, showing how leather car seats tie into a deforestation chain stretching to ranchers in the Amazon: |
A luxury vehicle can require a dozen or more hides, and suppliers in the United States increasingly buy their leather from Brazil. While the Amazon region is one of the world’s major providers of beef, increasingly to Asian nations, the global appetite for affordable leather also means that the hides of these millions of cattle supply a lucrative international leather market valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.… To track the global trade in leather from illegal ranches in the Brazilian rainforest to the seats in American vehicles, The Times interviewed ranchers, traders, prosecutors and regulators in Brazil, and visited tanneries, ranches and other facilities. |
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