Climate finance needs to rise sharply to $5 trillion a year globally by 2030 to fund measures to fight climate change, researchers said, warning that transformation across economies is too slow to meet international temperature goals.
World needs $5 tln in annual climate finance by 2030 to act fast (trust.org)
Gender equality in the EU is still a long way off.
“It will take nearly three generations to achieve gender parity at the current pace,” said the 2021 Gender Equality Index report from the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE).
The unequal burden usually carried by women in unpaid household work and childcare was exacerbated by the pandemic and global lockdowns.
EU is ′three generations′ away from gender equality — report | News | DW | 28.10.2021
Glasgow’s Scottish Events Campus (SEC) has formally become United Nations territory for the duration of the global conference.
Juan Pablo Osornio, of Greenpeace International, explained “Glasgow is essentially about who the world belongs to and who we are as human beings”
He added, “Long-term pledges are not worth the paper they are written on, unless they are anchored on national policy, backed by enforcement, and motivated on action: on coal plants being shut down and wind farms being open; on no more internal combustion engine cars on the street, replaced with a safe, comfortable, fast and carbon free transportation system; and on abundant, lush and diverse ecosystems all over the world.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres predicted a “catastrophic global temperature” and has said that “ We are still on track for climate catastrophe even with the last announcements that were made.“ He pointed out that “We know that humanity’s future depends on keeping global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030. And we also know that, so far, parties to the Paris Agreement are utterly failing to keep this target within reach.”
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.”
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.”
The biggest wage squeeze in British economic history will leave the average worker almost £13,000 a year worse off by the middle of the 2020s The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the UK’s leading tax and spending thinktank, said.
The IFS said wage stagnation was expected to continue. By 2026, it said average household earnings would be £30,800, compared with £43,700 if wages had risen at the same pace as in the two decades before the banking crisis.
The 2010s were the weakest decade for real wage growth since the Napoleonic wars.
Paul Johnson, the IFS director, said the real-terms damage to household incomes was unprecedented in modern history, with weaker economic growth and higher inflation to blame. “The gap between what we might have expected on the basis of pre-financial crisis trends and what is actually happening is staggering,” he said.
The independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) warned that the cost of living could rise at its fastest rate for 30 years. Its latest forecast predicted that inflation, which measures the change in the cost of living over time, is set to jump from 3.1% to an average of 4% in 2022.
The Resolution Foundation says real wages will fall in 2022 in ‘weakest decade for pay growth since 1930s’. It said that despite a spending spree, real wages would fall again next year. The tax bill by £3,000 a household by 2027. The Resolution Foundation, an independent thinktank, said real wages would grow by only 2.4% between May 2008 (as the financial crisis hit) and May 2024, compared with 36% real wage growth between May 1992 and May 2008.
The hit to real wages would be caused by rising inflation leading to a “flat recovery for household living standards”, amid surging energy prices and persistent supply chain problems, it said.
By 2025, incomes for people on middle incomes will fall by 2%.
3.2 million of the 4.4 million families that felt the benefit of pandemic-related welfare increases would be worse off.
UK’s annual tax bill ‘to rise by £3,000 a household by 2027’ | Autumn budget 2021 | The Guardian
“Buried” in a report published by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) is that mortgage interest payments were set for their biggest rise since at least 2008.
The OBR figures for predicted year-on-year growth in mortgage interest payments – included in one of the main report’s supplementary tables – suggest homeowners need to be braced for a 5.6% increase in costs next year, rising to 13% in 2023 before falling back to 5.4% in 2024
Householders with the average mortgage of £211,000 could see their payments go up by more than £500 a year. The data indicated that an average borrower on a standard variable rate of 3.26% would find their payments rising by more than £42 a month, or £510 over a year. For a fixed-rate home loan of 2%, the increase would be £25 a month, or £300 a year.
The investment firm AJ Bell said some people with larger mortgages could have to pay more than £1,000 extra a year.
AJ Bell said the data suggested that those who signed up to a record low two-year fixed-rate deal earlier this year could face a big rise when they came to remortgage in the first half of 2023.
“Someone with £250,000 of borrowing who fixed earlier this year and renewed in 2023 would see £600 a year added to their mortgage costs, while someone with £450,000 of borrowing would see their costs hike by £1,068 a year,” said Laura Suter, head of personal finance at the firm. She added that someone on a current average variable rate deal of 2.4% and who had a £250,000 mortgage could find their annual costs increasing by £696 by 2023, while those with £450,000 of borrowing would see their costs rising by £1,260 a year.
Interest rates are at a historic low of 0.1%, but the financial markets have priced in a rate rise when the Bank of England meets next week, which could lift the base rate to 0.25%, and then a 0.25-point increase in December. With two more 0.25% hikes forecast for next year, that could take the base rate to 1% by the end of 2022.
Banks and building societies have already started pulling their cheapest mortgage deals from the market, with some brokers saying that price changes had been coming “thick and fast” during the past few days.
Homeowners face biggest hike in mortgage costs since 2008 | Mortgages | The Guardian
Saudi Arabia and the UAE have summoned Labanon’s ambassadors to protest against Lebanon’s Information Minister George Kordahi’s criticism of the Riyadh-led military coalition fighting rebels in Yemen.
Kordahi said during an interview that the Iran-backed Houthi rebels are “defending themselves … against an external aggression”, adding that “homes, villages, funerals and weddings were being bombed” by the coalition. He also called the seven-year war in Yemen “futile” and said it was “time for it to end”.
When asked about drone attacks, which the Houthis have launched repeatedly into Saudi Arabia along with missiles, he answered, “Yes, but see also the damage that is being done to them as a nation … they are being bombed by planes.”
Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that it handed the ambassador a memorandum protesting against Kordahi’s “offensive” remarks. It also expressed its regret about the “insulting” statements, saying they were “clearly biased towards the terrorist Houthi militia that threatens the security and stability of the region”.
United Arab Emirates – also a member of the coalition – also condemned Kordahi’s statements and said it had also called in the Lebanese ambassador. Kordahi’s “disgraceful and biased” comments “offended the member countries of the coalition,” it said.
Kuwait also summoned Lebanon’s charge d’affaires in protest.
The Gulf Cooperation Council’s secretary-general said Kordahi’s comments reflected little understanding and were a superficial reading of events.
Kordahi explained, “I am against Arab-Arab wars … accusing me of hostility to Saudi Arabia is rejected.”
Saudi Arabia has shunned Lebanon for years because of Hezbollah’s strong influence in Lebanese state affairs, which it also says has sent fighters to Yemen. Saudi Arabia has classified the Lebanon-based Al-Qard Al-Hassan Association as a “terrorist” entity, citing links to activities supporting Lebanon’s Shia group Hezbollah. All assets belonging to the association has been frozen. Al-Qard Al-Hassan Association although registered as a charity, operates like a bank with dozens of branches and even ATMs.
Saudi Arabia, UAE summon Lebanon envoys over Yemen war criticism | Human Rights News | Al Jazeera
Saudi Arabia designates Hezbollah’s financial arm as ‘terrorists’ | Hezbollah News | Al Jazeera
Experts were unanimous that unless we keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the earth will suffer heatwaves, cyclones and storms, entire animal and plant species will die out, and large numbers of people forced to flee their homes. To avoid such a fate there are some scientists calling for plans to cool the planet with geoengineering, looking at it as a potential means of reversing the damage. Geoengineering is a way of using technology to cancel out the environmental effects of human actions.
“There are two categories of geoengineering,” said Roland Séférian, a climatologist at France’s Meteorological Office. The first – and most controversial – involves ways of “modifying solar radiation”, Séférian noted. One such idea is to “reproduce what happens during volcanic eruptions when clouds of dust emerge in the sky and form a kind of screen between the sun and the earth, cooling the atmosphere in the process”.
Another technique is to “whiten” cloud formations by spraying salt into the atmosphere to reflect more of the sun’s rays – and consequently heat – thereby limiting the warming of the oceans. But research into this technology is still in its infancy.
As things stand, these are still just ideas scientists are thinking about. Dozens of plans have been suggested – some rather fanciful and of dubious plausibility – including putting mirrors in space and even modifying the earth’s trajectory.
One approach we’re already using a lot in trying to address climate change is projects to take CO2 out of the atmosphere such as planting lots of trees. There may not be enough arable land for planting forests.
Aside from that natural means of capturing carbon, two technologies are mentioned as potential methods of taking CO2 out of the atmosphere.
The first is called direct air capture (DCA), which involves installing kinds of vacuum cleaners to suck CO2 out of the air. The carbon is then buried underground. Some 20 such projects are already in place across the globe.
The second technology is called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). This means producing energy by burning biomass – such as wood and agricultural waste – trapping the resultant CO2 and burying it underground.
Neither technology has proven its worth.
Carbon capture can only happen through the transport of CO2 – which requires pipelines and storage space; the kind of infrastructure oil companies have and stand to profit handsomely from.
Geoengineering is something only rich developed countries can afford to do and not the undeveloped and developing nations which lack the fundings yet will endure the worst effects of climate change.
Further, since geoengineering technologies still at an embryonic stage, researchers do not know what unintended consequences they might create.
“Even with the best scientific models, it’s hard to see exactly what would happen if people tried to absorb or bounce back solar radiation,” Séférian said. “CO2 capture and storage also raises questions: What would happen if the carbon leaks during transport? How long could it stay buried?” Séférian added, “It’s certainly something that we should be talking about, but it’s not a priority at these stage. The important thing is reducing CO2 emissions. Geoengineering comes later.”
Could a technological fix save the planet from climate change? (france24.com)
Capitalists will seek any answer that does not threaten their profit margin and especially solutions which will make money for them. The simplest remedy to the climate crisis, ending market expansion and profit accumulation but those will not be on any COP26 agenda
The world will need to shut down nearly 3,000 coal-fired power plants before 2030 if it is to have a chance of keeping temperature rises within 1.5 Celsius, according to research by climate think tank TransitionZero.
TransitionZero said there are currently more than 2,000 GW of coal-fired power in operation across the world, and that needs to be slashed by nearly half, requiring the closure of nearly one unit per day from now until the end of the decade.
The need to close nearly 1,000 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity would put the onus on China – the world’s biggest source of climate-warming greenhouse gas and owner of around half of the world’s coal-fuelled plants – to accelerate its shift towards cleaner electricity.
“The logical conclusion is that half of the effort will need to come from China,” said Matt Gray, TransitionZero analyst and author of the report. “I think it is fair to say that keeping the lights on and keeping buildings warm will be the exclusive priority of the Chinese government coming into winter,” he said. “But our hope is for this crisis to be seen as a wake-up call for being reliant on coal-fired power.”
World should shut nearly 3,000 coal plants to keep climate goals (trust.org)