Category: Climate

While the falling price of crude oil is giving consumers cheaper energy, it’s threatening long-term global pollution-control efforts. Reduced national income from energy taxes and “a low-growth economic environment” might spur countries to curtail their emissions-curbing pledges for after 2020, leading to more emissions of carbon for a longer time, said Zoe Knight, head of the HSBC Holdings Inc.’s climate change center in London . These proposals will be submitted under a United Nations climate-protection process starting in March. Public money “for funding low-carbon energy scale-up and energy-efficiency retrofits could be scarcer,” Knight said yesterday in an e-mailed note. Reduced government funds “leads to difficult choices on capital resource allocation, which in turn could mean high carbon lock-in over the long run,” she said. The International Energy Agency said in November that the world would probably reach by 2040 an emissions ceiling recommended by a panel of scientists formed […]

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While the falling price of crude oil is giving consumers cheaper energy, it’s threatening long-term global pollution-control efforts. Reduced national income from energy taxes and “a low-growth economic environment” might spur countries to curtail their emissions-curbing pledges for after 2020, leading to more emissions of carbon for a longer time, said Zoe Knight, head of the HSBC Holdings Inc.’s climate change center in London . These proposals will be submitted under a United Nations climate-protection process starting in March. Public money “for funding low-carbon energy scale-up and energy-efficiency retrofits could be scarcer,” Knight said yesterday in an e-mailed note. Reduced government funds “leads to difficult choices on capital resource allocation, which in turn could mean high carbon lock-in over the long run,” she said. The International Energy Agency said in November that the world would probably reach by 2040 an emissions ceiling recommended by a panel of scientists formed […]

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Heavy smog darkens the skies over Beijing in November 2014. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images) Summary Organizing a significant, global legal agreement at the U.N. Climate Summit in Paris in late 2015 will not be easy. Every country has its own priorities; for some, imposing constraints on economic growth by limiting greenhouse gas emissions is a political nonstarter. For others, moving toward renewable energy sources and limiting certain environmental risks — such as smog or rising sea levels  — are top priorities. The 2014 U.N. Climate Summit in Lima, Peru, has helped to maintain some momentum for a climate agreement ahead of the Paris meeting, but if any deal is reached, it will be watered down and will lack concrete enforcement measures. Analysis The countries that participated in the 2011 U.N. Climate Summit in Durban, South Africa, signed a pact to work toward a legal agreement that would be signed at […]

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The U.S. Drought Monitor, which publishes its colorful drought map every Thursday , this week is expected to show a slight decline in the dark brown parts of California suffering the most acutely from a drought that has parched the state four years in a row. It’s raining in California again this week, but 80 percent of the state is in an extreme drought, with over half in an exceptional drought. So it should come as no surprise that a series of recent storms dousing the state are a long way from ending a particularly long overall dry streak that recent research estimates is the most severe in 1,200 years. But any drop of rain provides some relief — along with the threat of mudslides and flash floods . Drought Monitor, Dec. 9, 2014 State reservoir levels are inching up. The Lake Oroville reservoir reached its low mark on […]

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SAN FRANCISCO — The Arctic continues to warm faster than the rest of the globe, and with greater repercussions, scientists are reporting. The new findings appear in the Arctic Report Card , first published in 2006 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and updated annually. The report card catalogs the wide-ranging changes caused by the rising temperatures, in large part driven by emissions of greenhouse gases. Snow cover, measured since 1967, was below average and set a record low in April in the Eurasian region of the Arctic. Sea surface temperatures are rising, particularly in the Chukchi Sea, northwest of Alaska, where the waters are warming at a rate of almost one degree Fahrenheit per decade. The extent of Arctic sea ice, which retreats in summer, did not hit a record low in 2014. But it was the sixth lowest since satellite measurements began in 1979, and the […]

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A plan to limit fossil-fuel pollution in all nations for the first time came a step closer as envoys from more than 190 countries agreed on the key parts of a deal they plan to adopt next year to fight global warming. After two weeks of discussions in Peru organized by the United Nations , the diplomats agreed on the detail of pledges from all nations on curbing greenhouse gases . Richer countries gave an assurance they’re on track to mobilize $100 billion a year in climate aid by 2020. The decision sets the framework for a landmark agreement the UN intends to adopt in December 2015 in Paris that will rein in the emissions damaging the atmosphere. It included last-minute concessions to some of the poorest nations in the world, who are concerned the system will impose costly and painful changes on their economies. “We are on track […]

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Manuel Pulgar-Vidal (right), COP20 president and Peru’s environment minister, and Christiana Figueres, UNFCCC executive secretary UN global warming talks in Lima finally reached an agreement early on Sunday after a marathon round of haggling that pushed the meeting more than 30 hours past its scheduled closing time. “Thank you very much,” said the relieved conference chair, Peruvian environment minister, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who worked frantically through the night to resolve a clash between the US, China and other countries that delayed a final agreement. But the deal agreed by delegates from more than 190 countries on a work plan for a global climate treaty to be sealed in Paris next year came after a series of compromises that many observers said had weakened the outcome. “It’s been watered down, but it’s not a roadblock,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists in the US. Some of the sections […]

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Residents exercising amid heavy smog on the Bund in Shanghai as local meteorological… Read More Photographer: AFP Via Getty Images Two weeks of debate on how to limit carbon pollution across the globe ended with a deal that failed to resolve the toughest debate: how to narrow the divide between industrialized countries and poor ones that believe they need fossil fuels to help expand their economies. Diplomats at the United Nations talks in Peru agreed on the data they’ll provide in the first quarter to support emissions goals for a pact to be signed in Paris next December. The discussions that finished in early hours of Sunday ran more than 30 hours overtime as nations fought about how to differentiate between those who’ve become rich on the back of burning fossil fuels and those who say they need cheap energy to develop. “The fact that it was so tough […]

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ENLARGE Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal slams his mallet to approve and close the discussion on a proposed compromise document at the climate talks in Lima. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images LIMA, Peru—The U.S. and other wealthy countries persuaded their developing-nation peers to advance a framework that for the first time would spread the burden of economically painful emission cuts across all nations. The compromise reached at early Sunday at climate talks in Lima—part of negotiations aimed at reaching a final, comprehensive climate pact next year in Paris—would require every country to submit plans for cutting their carbon footprints in the coming months. The final deal being negotiated would be a departure from earlier agreements that put the responsibility of such cuts only on highly industrialized countries. But 13 days of United Nations-organized talks also showed that a North-South divide remains over which countries should shoulder most of the costs of […]

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LIMA, Peru — Shortly before 2 a.m. on Sunday, after more than 36 straight hours of negotiations, top officials from nearly 200 nations agreed to the first deal committing every country in the world to reducing the fossil fuel emissions that cause global warming . In its structure, the deal represents a breakthrough in the two-decade effort to forge a significant global pact to fight climate change . The Lima Accord, as it is known, is the first time that all nations — rich and poor — have agreed to cut back on the burning oil, gas and coal. But the driving force behind the new deal was not the threat of sanctions or other legal consequences. It was global peer pressure. And over the coming months, it will start to become evident whether the scrutiny of the rest of the world is enough to pressure world leaders to […]

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