China’s long-awaited national plan on greenhouse gas emissions has now been published. 

 However, it represents little progress on the previously announced ambitions of the world’s biggest carbon emitter.

The reaction among analysts was that the new climate plan is disappointingly short of fresh details. The main targets of the updated nationally determined contribution (NDC) are insufficient to keep the world on course to hold global heating to no more than 1.5C.  Climate campaigners say it is now time for the country to take more actions domestically to rein in greenhouse gas emissions this decade.

The new NDC is also far less than many analysts say China could easily manage. With its huge investments in renewable energy in recent years, the country has already made substantial changes to its high-carbon economy, and the plunging price of low-carbon technology should make the transition even easier, leading many analysts to conclude that China could, with not much extra effort, cause its emissions to peak in about 2025.

Belinda Schäpe, from the E3G thinktank, said the recent warning by the world’s leading climate scientists required nations to step up further than they were willing to do last year.

Li Shuo of Greenpeace said: “China’s decision on its NDC casts a shadow on the global climate effort. In light of the domestic economic uncertainties, the country appears hesitant to embrace stronger near-term targets, and missed an opportunity to demonstrate ambition. The planet cannot afford this being the last word. Beijing needs to come up with stronger implementation plans to ensure an emission peak before 2025.”

Helen Mountford, the vice-president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute, said China needed to strengthen its new near-term targets and measures to get on a pathway to reach its 2060 carbon neutrality goal, and that this was within its reach.

“Our analysis shows that China can step up its efforts to reducing emissions while also enjoying economic growth and a more sustainable environment,” she said.

Bernice Lee, the research director for futures at the Chatham House thinktank, said: “We cannot sugarcoat it. It is disappointing and off the mark and not befitting of the world’s largest emitter. It is symptomatic of a broader trend/shortfall where major economies are not making the kind of cuts needed to get 1.5C within reach just yet. China has lowballed its target and missed a chance to be recognised as a global leader. The plan says emissions will peak before 2030 – for all our sakes we need that date to be far sooner.”

China’s new climate plan falls short of Cop26 global heating goal, experts say | China | The Guardian

Across 40 different areas spanning the power sector, heavy industry, agriculture, transportation, finance and technology, not one is changing quickly enough to avoid 1.5C in global heating with all failing to make the “transformational change” needed to avert the most disastrous consequences of the climate crisis, with trends either too slow or in some cases even regressing, according to a new Systems Change Lab report.

The sluggish pace of decarbonization further highlights how the world is badly off track in its attempts to curb climate breakdown. From renewable electricity generation to meat consumption to public financing for fossil fuels, the report found that no indicator was showing the required progress to cut emissions in half this decade before eliminating greenhouse gases completely by 2050, which would give the world a chance to keep below 1.5C.

Three areas in particular – cement production, steel making and efforts to place a fee on carbon emissions – are stagnating, the report found. A further three – emissions from agriculture, the share of trips made by cars and the deforestation rate – are moving in the wrong direction.

“We need complete u-turns from these areas,” said Kelly Levin, chief of science at the Bezos Earth Fund, one of the report’s co-authors.  “With climate change you can’t just head in the right direction, you need to do it at pace. Without that, we will reach disastrous tipping points.”

Coal needs to be phased out five times faster than it is now, according to the analysis, while the pace of reforestation needs to be three times faster. Coastal wetlands need to be restored nearly three times faster, climate finance needs to grow 13 times faster and the energy intensity of buildings needs to drop at a rate almost three times faster than now. In wealthy countries across Europe and North America, the consumption of beef needs to reduce 1.5 times faster than it is now. 

“We need to pull out the stops in every sector, to transform our power generation, the diets we have, how we manage land and more, all simultaneously,” said Kelly Levin. “We need transformational change and it’s very clear the trends aren’t moving fast enough.”

“…we are moving too slowly to avoid 1.5C,” said Sophie Boehm, a climate researcher at World Resources Institute and report co-author. “If that continues, we will fall woefully short of the goals to avoid disastrous climate change. It’s very worrying we are not on track for any of these target areas.”

World is failing to make changes needed to avoid climate breakdown, report finds | Climate crisis | The Guardian

The Arctic has already heated to more than 2C (3.8F) above its pre-industrial average, with temperatures tipped to rise further. These northern latitudes are heating at more than twice the rate of the global average due to the rapid loss of sea ice, replacing a highly reflective white surface with the sea’s highly heat-absorbing blue-black.

For thousands of years, permafrost – ground that is frozen for two or more years in a row – has kept dead plant and animal matter locked in the deep-freeze beneath the tundra. These ancient remnants total up to an estimated 1,600 billion tonnes of organic carbon, almost twice as much as currently found in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Among those gases is methane, a gas up to 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2) at trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere during a 100-year period. Across 20 years, it can be 86 times more potent. Then there’s nitrous oxide – its warming potential roughly 300 times more than CO2 across a 100-year timescale.

Covering a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, this frozen vault is being thawed by rising temperatures, extensive wildfires and unprecedented heatwaves in Siberia and other far-northern regions. In turn, that is transforming the carbon sink of the Arctic into a source of greenhouse gases.

Scientists are increasingly warning that the melting Arctic could push the planet into a vicious cycle of uncontrolled heating as vast stores of carbon in thawing ground release powerful greenhouse gases by creating a dangerous feedback loop – one in which human activities such as burning fossil fuels and farming livestock heat up the atmosphere, prompting permafrost to thaw and release additional greenhouse gases. That causes further heating, further thawing and further emissions, threatening to bring about the worst impacts of climate changes far faster than expected.

“This is likely to accelerate because of the scale of the warming we’re seeing in the Arctic,” Rachael Treharne, an Arctic ecologist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, who studies the impact of thawing permafrost and wildfires on climate change, explained. “Already, we’re looking at irreversible changes.”

Scientists have been shocked that higher temperatures conducive to permafrost thawing are occurring roughly 70 years ahead of projections. Permafrost’s polluting potential begins when the damper, warmer conditions of thawing ground jumpstart microbes to produce carbon dioxide or methane as they feast on decomposing organic matter in boggy, once-hard soil. Thawing bedrock compounds this problem. As temperatures rise and pressures change, frozen deposits of naturally occurring methane and other hydrocarbons inside the permafrost turn into gas, which may be released through cracks into the atmosphere.

“We can more or less control the burning of fossil fuels through political decisions and economic regulations,” said Dmitry Zastrozhnov, a lecturer and geologist at the Institute of Earth Sciences at St Petersburg State University who is studying the release of methane from Siberian limestone areas. “But we cannot ask permafrost to stop releasing methane. We cannot control nature.”

Arctic ground ‘literally collapsing’ amid abrupt thaw | Climate Crisis News | Al Jazeera

 “[climate] Goals are aspirational. If they are not backed up with policies and financing, they remain empty promises.” – Tania Miranda, director of Policy and Stakeholder Engagement in the Environment and Climate Change Programme at the Institute of the Americas. 

 Livestock generate about 32% of anthropogenic, or human-generated, methane, mainly from the planet’s billion-plus cattle. Climate scientists have warned that methane is playing an ever greater role in global heating. Cutting methane emissions, it has been said, is the strongest lever we have to slow climate heating over the next 25 years.

Failure to take action on methane emissions by the world’s biggest meat and dairy companies is fuelling the climate crisis, say campaigners.

The new ranking, published today, names the three worst-performing meat and dairy corporations as two French companies – Groupe Bigard and Lactalis – and the Japanese company Itoham. The ranking was based on an examination of the companies’ climate targets “to see if they had any methane action plans or reporting and to see what research they were doing”, said Nuša Urbancic of Changing Markets Foundation, the ranking’s co-author.  Urbancic added that meat and dairy corporations were being “given a free pass by governments”.

Even companies that ranked best – Switzerland’s Nestlé, France’s Danone and New Zealand’s Fonterra – were doing too little, said the report. 

 For example, none of the 20 companies, which together represent the “vast majority” of livestock sector emissions, have concrete methane reduction targets, it said. The company closest to having a methane action plan, the ranking found, was Nestlé, although it failed to “include any milestones or key performance indicators”.

Although more than half the ranked companies were undertaking research into methane reduction, mainly via methane-reducing feed, the report said none appeared to be contemplating lowering animal numbers or replacing animals with other protein sources.

New Zealand is the only country to pass legislation to cut greenhouse gases from livestock, but with farming emissions still rising, the government has been advised cow numbers will need to be cut to meet targets.

Meat and dairy giants feed climate crisis by dragging their heels on methane | Meat industry | The Guardian

Every 17 hours a billionaire is created, and every 17 hours 17,000 people die from hunger.

World Food Programme executive director, David Beasley, is calling upon U.S. billionaires to give just 0.36% of the increase in their collective wealth since the start of the pandemic to help prevent 42 million people from starving to death.

“Billionaires need to step up,” he said, with a one-time donation of “six billion dollars to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don’t reach them.” Beasley said governments are “tapped out” and that addressing the hunger crisis was especially critical amid “a perfect storm of conflict, climate change, and Covid.”

“It’s not complicated,” said Beasley. “All I’m asking for is .36% of your net worth increase. I’m for people making money, but, God knows, also for you helping people who are in great need right now. The world is in trouble… and you’re telling me you can’t give me .36% of your net worth increase?”

“What if it was your daughter starving to death?” Beasley asked. “What if it was your family starving to death?”

“I am not opposed to anyone making money, but I AM opposed to people dying of hunger when there’s $400 trillion of wealth in the world today.”

In an earlier statement Beasley warned that the climate emergency stands to worsen an already grim scenario of global food insecurity.

“The climate crisis has the potential to overwhelm humanity. The world is not prepared for the unprecedented rise in hunger we will see if we do not invest in programs that help vulnerable communities adapt and build resilience to our changing climate,” adding that “the climate crisis is fueling a food crisis.”

WFP Chief: Billionaires Should Donate Mere 0.36% of Pandemic Profits to Feed 42 Million Starving People (commondreams.org)

Should the world be beseeching and begging billionaires to end hunger? 

Should the world be depending upon the billionaires’ largesse and philanthropy?

Experts estimate that some 18 million people in Bangladesh will be forced to move by rising sea levels by 2050.  

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman presented a series of plans to address the dangers of global warming.

But critics say the moves are just a smokescreen to keep fossil fuels propelling its economy. Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, announced it planned to raise crude production from 12 million barrels a day to 13 million barrels by 2027 – a move scientists, energy experts say goes against what is needed to stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

Saudi Arabia has justified the contradictory moves of reducing its own carbon emissions while still taking oil out of the ground and selling it worldwide as part of a plan to create a “circular carbon economy“. This envisions continuing to extract carbon-filled fuel out of the earth while employing new technologies to capture, store or sell its emissions – essentially an offset scheme.

 Critics have accused the Saudis of “greenwashing” – or claiming something is good for the environment when in reality the opposite is true.

Matthew Archer, a researcher at the Graduate Institute Geneva, explained, “It’s absurd to think that an economy based on the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels can be ‘circular’ in any meaningful sense of the word. The only way it works is if you rely on technologies that don’t exist yet,” said Archer. “These initiatives are … full of language that’s as ambitious as it is ambiguous, with very few concrete plans and no accountability mechanisms.” 

Archer said, the only way to rapidly decarbonise to avert catastrophic consequences of global warming is to ban new fossil fuel developments and invest massively in renewable energy and public infrastructure projects. “Anything short of that isn’t just greenwashing, it’s dangerous and delusional.”

‘Dangerous and delusional’: Critics denounce Saudi climate plan | Climate Crisis News | Al Jazeera

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman presented a series of plans to address the dangers of global warming.

But critics say the moves are just a smokescreen to keep fossil fuels propelling its economy. Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, announced it planned to raise crude production from 12 million barrels a day to 13 million barrels by 2027 – a move scientists, energy experts say goes against what is needed to stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

Saudi Arabia has justified the contradictory moves of reducing its own carbon emissions while still taking oil out of the ground and selling it worldwide as part of a plan to create a “circular carbon economy“. This envisions continuing to extract carbon-filled fuel out of the earth while employing new technologies to capture, store or sell its emissions – essentially an offset scheme.

 Critics have accused the Saudis of “greenwashing” – or claiming something is good for the environment when in reality the opposite is true.

Matthew Archer, a researcher at the Graduate Institute Geneva, explained, “It’s absurd to think that an economy based on the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels can be ‘circular’ in any meaningful sense of the word. The only way it works is if you rely on technologies that don’t exist yet,” said Archer. “These initiatives are … full of language that’s as ambitious as it is ambiguous, with very few concrete plans and no accountability mechanisms.” 

Archer said, the only way to rapidly decarbonise to avert catastrophic consequences of global warming is to ban new fossil fuel developments and invest massively in renewable energy and public infrastructure projects. “Anything short of that isn’t just greenwashing, it’s dangerous and delusional.”

‘Dangerous and delusional’: Critics denounce Saudi climate plan | Climate Crisis News | Al Jazeera

 Jubilee Debt Campaign, a leading anti-poverty charity, show that 34 of the world’s poorest countries are spending $29.4bn (£21.4bn) on debt payments a year compared with $5.4bn (£3.9bn) on measures to reduce the impact of the climate emergency.

Uganda had said it would spend $537m between 2016 and 2020, including funds from international agencies and donors, on climate-related projects to adapt the country’s infrastructure and deal with climate emergencies. However, the $107.4m annual budget is dwarfed by external debt payments which will total $739m in 2021, rising to $1.35bn in 2025.

Ausi Kibowa, from the Southern and Eastern Africa Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI), based in Uganda, said: “Owing to the immense financial pressure on Uganda from the debt crisis, the Ugandan government is unable to spend what is need to protect people from the damage inflicted by climate change. Furthermore, it is intensifying fossil fuel extraction in order to pay the debt. To address climate injustice, debt relief must be part of the forthcoming UN climate talks.”

Heidi Chow, executive director of Jubilee Debt Campaign, said, “Lower income countries are handing over billions of dollars in debt repayments to rich countries, banks and international financial institutions at a time when resources are desperately needed to fight the climate crisis,” she said.“In Glasgow, wealthy polluting nations need to stop shirking  their responsibilities and provide climate finance through grants, as well as cancel debts.”

International bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have encouraged developing world countries to fund development projects using bank loans and bonds. Borrowers expect interest rates to fall over time as they became trusted to make regular repayments. But low income countries still regularly pay more than 10% interest on loans compared to an average 1.5 to 2.5% paid by rich countries.

Poorer countries spend five times more on debt than climate crisis – report | Climate crisis | The Guardian