Canada shocks COP21 silly
Canada surprised attendees and negotiators at the climate talks in Paris on Sunday by calling for a more ambitious target for cutting greenhouse gases than the UN’s own 2-degree target, the National Observer reported.
“Canada’s Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna told a stunned crowd that she wants the Paris agreement to restrict planetary warming to just 1.5 Celsius warming —not two degrees.”
‘Freaking out’
The National Observer said that “Claire Martin, a Green Party observer, said, “‘I was freaking out. I was writing it all down like a nut. Canada supports legally binding provisions, and we are committed to following through. She wants a five-year review, and it must be ‘ambitious’ and ‘accountable.'”
This is not the same as legally binding countries to reach their target, the newspaper reported. “Countries’ targets will still be outside the agreement. But McKenna’s office added: ‘There should also be a legally binding requirement in the agreement that countries improve their targets regularly’.”
‘Over the moon’
Green leader Elizabeth May said: “I am over the moon.”
“It creates a very ambitious trajectory for reduction of emissions, but it’s what’s required. If we’re going to keep low-lying island states from going under water, that’s what’s required. If we want to have a reasonable prospect of not having the Greenland ice sheet create five- to eight-metre sea level rise, it’s what’s required. It’s a safer zone than two [degrees], which represents a lot of irreparable, irreversible damage to large parts of the world. So 1.5 is good.”
“Canada is redefining itself in Paris, but it will need to take its leadership home to prove that they really are back,” an observer told the newspaper.
“Dale Marshal, of Canada’s organization Environmental Defence, added Canada would confirm its climate leadership if it put in a ‘credible financing package’ for a developing-country’s ‘Loss and Damage fund’, and continued work to get an ambitious mechanism that allows reviews of targets and financing before 2020.”
Toning down the hype
“What matters is the practical reality of how governments will regulate carbon dioxide.” That’s how Raymond James Equity Research summed up the possible outcome from the Paris climate talks in a research note Monday. “There will be what might be called a peer pressure mechanism for encouraging compliance. But if any given country fails to deliver, the agreement is not going to provide a penalty.
“China has been the world’s top emitter since 2006, when it overtook the U.S. China’s current emissions (30% of the world total) exceed the U.S. (15%) and European Union (10%) combined.
“Increased receptiveness on the part of China and India is a key enabler of COP21’s pending agreement. To be clear, though, China and India are still not signing up to targets (even voluntary ones) that would require them to reduce emissions in absolute terms. Under any plausible scenario, their emissions will increase meaningfully by 2030, as compared to current levels. China is on the record with a pledge to stop increasing emissions by 2030, while India is not even willing to go that far,” the analysts said.
A fact of life
“Decarbonization is a fact of life for the global energy complex – and all of the industry verticals that are linked to it,” the analysts said. “Emissions from developing countries … have soared over the past 25 years, so in these countries the regulatory course corrections will be inherently more difficult. COP21’s role in this process is not revolutionary (the impression you might have gotten from overhyped media reports) but rather incremental: the first international agreement on capping emissions that encompasses both industrialized and developing countries,” the analysts pointed out.
Where are the negotiations, exactly?
Wired’s Nick Stockton chronicled his difficulty locating actual negotiations at the Paris venue.
“When one talks about being at the Paris climate negotiations, what one is really talking about are a half-dozen warehouses. Each is filled with artificially warmed air, thousands of people, and lots of booths, displays, flatscreen TVs, partitioned meeting rooms, and cafés. Finding a real life negotiation is actually kind of hard.”
Stockton said he uncovered a clue as to where the negotiations were being done. “Look for the events that do not invite media.” In that way he found a negotiation room and camped outside it: “In essence, that room was filled with many poor countries trying to convince a few rich countries to part with some fraction of money. Which explains a lot about the few negotiators I’ve met: the forehead-rubbing, the long blinks, and the labored looks of annoyance when asked how things are going.”
As more than one observer of the climate change movement has suggested, could the goal of the movement be to get people/entities/governments/taxpayers/companies to hand over their money to the movement?
Greenpeace International co-founder says climate change movement is just a money-grab, looks at COP 21 and a competing climate change meeting
Last summer, Oil & Gas 360® interviewed Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace International about his history founding Greenpeace International and why he left. These were his views on the climate change movement:
“It wasn’t very long before I became skeptical of the growing alarmism around the subject [of global warming and climate change]. It was one thing in the early years to have this interesting possibility that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and would cause a warming of the climate. But alarmists came in just like they do in nearly everything. And if you don’t think something horribly catastrophic is happening, then they accuse you of denying the whole thing—denying that humans have any role whatsoever in climate, denying that that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, denying that it might cause warming—none of that is included in skepticism.
“What skeptics are skeptical about is that this is an international emergency that must have trillions of dollars thrown at it,” Moore told Oil & Gas 360®.
Fear and fundraising
“There’s no useful product in climate change other than fear. Fear and fundraising. So there’s lots of money in climate change, but it’s all because people are pushing the line that it’s so terribly dangerous that we have to spend all this money in order to find out more about it,” Moore said.
“So you’ve got a completely dysfunctional framework here that evolved out of this completely dysfunctional self-interested clique of elites who are pushing the idea that human CO2 emissions are going to cause dangerous or catastrophic climate change. When there is, in fact, no evidence in the real world that that is happening.”
Dr. Moore had this to say about COP21 in this clip from an article he wrote for the occasion:
“There are two climate conferences going on in Paris this month. One, the 21st Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP21) attended by about 40,000 people, and the other, The Paris Climate Challenge 2015, attended by about 40 people.
“The big conference is conveniently situated next to Europe’s largest private jetport, all the better to bring in the thousands of dignitaries from around the world. How else could they attend without flying in fossil-fuel-powered aircraft? There is no discussion of science at this conference as the science is considered to be settled. Catastrophic human-caused global warming and climate change will be upon us unless we can keep temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius. The only way to do that is a drastic reduction in fossil fuel consumption with a goal of terminating it altogether as soon as possible. This would eliminate 85 percent of civilization’s energy supply in a world where more than a billion people still have no electricity.
“Meanwhile the Paris Climate Challenge meeting, in a small conference room near the Trinité–d’Estienne d’Orves Metro station in Paris, is focused almost entirely on the science of climate, with a couple of contributions by political pundits critical of current climate policy. These are an eclectic collection of experts who have spent the better part of their lives steeped in the study of all aspects of climate change; so-called “ocean acidification”, sea-level rise, extreme weather events, the long-term history of climate (millions of years), solar and other natural influences on climate, and the fact that the science is not settled and the debate is not over.”
New study: growth in CO2 levels has dropped in the past two years
On Dec. 7, 2015, an article called “Reaching Peak Emissions” was published by seven scientists who studied the growth of global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry. They discovered that growth in CO2 emissions from those sources has retreated in the past two years.
Chart: Reaching Peak Emissions – Nature.com
“We present new data for 2014 and a projection for 2015 indicating that the rapid growth in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry since 2000 slowed dramatically in the past two years despite continued global economic growth. Time will tell whether this surprising interruption in emissions growth is transitory or a first step towards emission stabilization.”
The scientists give credit for the slowed growth in CO2 emissions to the reduction in the use of coal by the industrialized nations and because of implementation of renewable energy.
Chart: Nature.com – Reaching Peak Emissions
