Climate Flashcards
What did the Paris Agreement do?
It aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, by:
Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.
(unexpected as opposed to 2°C agreed upon in Copenhagen - largely due to coalition/campaign of LICs)
Also, acknowledged that even at 1.5°C rise there will be associated losses.
What was the UNFCCC “Tanaloa Diaogue”?
How the IPCC tries to balance being “policy relevant” without being “policy prescriptive”.
An open dialogue asking:
- Where are we?
- Where do we want to get to?
- How do we get there?
Where are we?
Anthropogenic global warming has reached 1°C, with a likely range of 0.8 to 1.2°C, and is increasing at 0.2°C per decade
Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate
Difficulty posed to scientists?
Issue with establishing timescale e.g. 12 years which is completely out of scale with timeframe at which earth is warming.
Difficult to gather public records e.g. on heat deaths, in developing countries where data does not exist.
What is a misconception?
Further 0.5°C of warming is not “in the pipeline” – widespread misunderstanding that emissions to date commit us to substantial further warming. They don’t. Future emissions determine future warming. So whether temperatures reach 1.5°C or 2°C or higher depends on decisions (or indecisions) to be made from now on.
What are the moral hazards of scenario-building?
IAM scenario: a global emissions pathway consistent with a heavily simplified (“partial equilibrium”) model of the global economy subject to strong assumptions, objectives and constraints:
- Early adoption of a global carbon price.
- All decision-makers become rational agents after 2020.
- All available policy levers adjusted to achieve temperature goal.
- Policy choices minimize costs, often with perfect foresight.
- Universal compliance with climate policy.
What would it cost to reach net zero?
Assuming global expenditure on energy remains at 10% of GDP, growing at 2.7% per year…
Additional energy-related investment for 1.5°C is <1% of global GDP, or <10% of projected spending on energy if that remains at ~10% of global GDP
Investment required for almost complete decarbonization by 2050 is a relatively small fraction of global energy expenditure: the problem is not resources or capacity.
Advantages of carbon pricing?
1) Justice argument: “polluter pays.”
X - But it’s only justice if the polluter pays the polluted.
X - What about impacts on future generations?
2) Economic efficiency argument: “markets discover least-cost mitigation options”
X - Which means we put off developing the more expensive mitigation options as long as possible
Disadvantages of relying on carbon pricing?
1) We put off deploying the most expensive, but also the most crucial, mitigation options until the last minute.
2) Which increases the risks they won’t work, or are more expensive than expected, so we either
- Reduce emissions by reducing consumption
- Relax the climate target.
3) It also means actual expenditure on mitigation (as opposed to redistribution) is pushed as far as possible onto the next generation.
INTERGENERATIONAL INJUSTICE - the longer we don’t clean up emissions, the harder and more expensive it is for future generations to deal with.
Controversy over CCS?
Currently the main beneficiary of successful CCS development is the owners of fossil fuel assets.
Technologies assumed not the be used until carbon pricing is sufficiently high to make expensive investment viable.
CO2 injected into ocean trenches would lead to extinction of all biota (highly specialised) - not viable.
However:
There are other places where we can inject, relying on tech developments to see. Takes long to see if it works and convince public of it (novelty of large-scale geo-engineering project frightens people). Hence why needs to start now! Otherwise will be deployed too late to be useful.
Conclusions of CCS?
We introduce mandatory sequestration now, or we won’t meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.
There is one institution in the world with the capital and the expertise to solve the climate change problem:
The 6 $Tn/year global fossil fuel industry
But no single country or company has any incentive to invest seriously in CCS, even though the industry as a whole needs it to survive in a net zero world.
How can we get the environmental movement to embrace mandatory sequestration as a key part of the solution to climate change?
