The UN climate talks are facing some uncertainty

The Impact of Australia’s Election Results on Climate: An Independent Climate Journalist’s View of Australia, Britain, the United States and Brazil

Take into account the consequences of Australia’s federal election and the Conservative Party leadership contest in Britain, as well as possible consequences of a presidential contest in Brazil this month and a Senate election in the United States in November.

All these countries matter hugely in climate terms. Australia, Britain and the United States are among history’s biggest emitters. The Amazon rainforest has large amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide for the rest of the world to store.

In May, voters ousted the conservative coalition that had championed coal and gas and made Australia one of the climate laggards of the world. The country had updated its international climate targets after a new government led by the Labor Party took office.

John D. was a climate journalist and independent film maker who has won several honors including the Livingston Award. He recently was appointed the Ted Turner Professor of Environmental Media at The George Washington University. The opinions are of his own. CNN has more opinion.

The loss-and-damage issue isn’t about make-believe, but about the need to confront the rich nations of the world

Last year’s COP26 in Scotland resulted in promises to continue discussing the issue of “loss and damage” but there was no real action. It shouldn’t be put on hold for a long time. The bill is a long way from being due.

At that time, the small-island states of the alliance of small-island states argued that polluters should pay for the costs of pollution.

The failure to rein in fossil-fuel interests could also undermine the success of loss-and-damage negotiations, says Joab Okanda, senior Africa adviser for the advocacy organization Christian Aid, based in Nairobi. More fossil fuels have the effect of more loss and damage.

It is time for high-polluting countries such as the US to take the question seriously. The losses to territory, culture, life and property should be the responsibility of the polluter.

If you think the rich nations of the world are making real progress towards achieving limits on global warming, think again. In one essay, Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the Universities of Manchester, Uppsala and Bergen, puts it this way: “Wealthy nations must eliminate their use of fossils fuels by around 2030 for a likely chance of 1.5C, extending only around 2035 to 2040 for 2C… We are where we are precisely because for thirty years we’ve favoured make-believe over real mitigation.”

The less carbon that is put into the atmosphere, the less risk that is put into the climate system.

Climate Change and International Law: A case for international law involving human-caused warming, drought and heat waves, and a Peruvian farmer’s case

Over the decades, there have been many arguments against action. This was a problem for the future rather than the present, and that is the most laughable.

Sea level rise, as well as extreme drought, heat waves and storms, are unavoidable because global temperatures have already risen, according to scientists. Billions of people will need to adapt to a hotter Earth.

It’s been decades in the making, and it may feel like a new phenomenon. Human-caused warming is believed to be the cause of the deadly 2003 heat wave in Europe. That heat wave killed an estimated 20,000 people.

That $31 trillion in profits is about 60 times what would have been needed to cover economic losses from climate disasters in the world’s most vulnerable countries over that same period, according to the report. We know what harm burning fossil fuels has done to the world and we know that the profits of those companies should be seen as immoral.

Short of international efforts to fund a loss-and-damage process, countries and individuals are turning to the courts. A Peruvian farmer, for example, is suing a German fossil fuel company over a melting glacier that threatens his home and farm. The suit, filed in 2015, according to news reports, claims the German company, RWE, should be liable for its proportion of the damages, in line with the proportion of global fossil fuel pollution it has created. RWE is contesting the case and doesn’t want to be held responsible for the damage.

The Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law was formed by both Tuvalu and other countries. The aim is to see if there are claims in international courts.

The Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda said that litigation was the only way that the leaders of big countries would be taken seriously. “We want to force them to respond in a court of law.”

The Climate Crisis at the COP27 Conference: Where are we going? Why do we need more money? What are we missing? How much money is needed for climate adaptation?

At COP27, one of the biggest issues is going to be money that developed countries promised poorer nations years ago to help them cut emissions and adapt to the climate impacts they’re already experiencing. The industrialized nations have pledged to give $100 billion a year to the developing countries by 2020 since most of their emissions are making the planet hotter. But rich countries still haven’t delivered.

This is a raging debate, even within the conference. The youth activist who made headlines at last year’s conference by saying she would not attend this year, said during an event in London that the conference was not really working. The COPs are more about the opportunity for people in power to get attention, rather than about greenwashing.

The planet is 2 degrees warmer than it was in the late 1800s, and is expected to warm by 5 degrees by the end of the century.

The money is supposed to go toward new and improved infrastructure that might help keep people safe in a warming world. That might look like cities designed to be better at beating the heat or communities that are less likely to be wiped out in a wildfire. It could mean expanded warning systems that can warn people if there is a storm or flood. Even more funding is required for adaptation projects in order to keep pace with the rising costs of adaptation in developing countries. The people most affected by climate disasters aren’t always included in planning tables and advocates are pushing for more locally led solutions.

Other wins have simply put emitters on the path to making good on last year’s promises. Fransen points to the United States, where the recent Inflation Reduction Act represented a massive step toward meeting its pledge of a 50 percent emissions reduction from 2005 levels. The US is not on track to reach the commitment. Further upping the ante on its goals this year would “strain credibility,” she says, given the nation’s political gridlock.

Fransen is one of the people who keeps track of emissions plans and whether countries are sticking to them. It is difficult to take stock. For one thing, it means actually measuring how much carbon nations emit. It also involves showing the effects those emissions will have on the climate 10, 20, or 100 years from now.

Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to determine how much CO2 humanity is producing—or to prove that nations are holding to their pledges. The origin of the signal is muddy because the gas is all over the atmosphere. Carbon is released by decaying vegetation and thaw permafrost further complicating matters. It’s like looking for a water leak in a swimming pool. Researchers have tried pointing satellites at the Earth to track CO2 emissions, but “if you see CO2 from space, it is not always guaranteed that it came from the nearest human emissions,” says Gavin McCormick, cofounder of Climate Trace, which tracks greenhouse gas emissions. That is why we need more advanced methods. For instance, Climate Trace can train algorithms to use steam billowing from power plants as a visible proxy for the emissions they’re belching. Other scientists have been making some progress using weather stations to monitor local emissions.

Climate, assessment and accountability in the fight against COVID-19: How many lives could have been saved by a more equitable distribution of vaccines in lower-income countries?

More than one million lives might have been saved if COVID-19 vaccines had been shared more equitably with lower-income countries in 2021, according to mathematical models incorporating data from 152 countries. The emergence of the variant of the illness might have been slowed by more vaccine distribution and a drop in infections.

Many of the focus will be on evaluation, assessment and accountability. “We can’t just move on to new commitments without getting a grip on whether the current commitments are being carried out,” says climate-policy analyst David Waskow.

Malaria eradication is threatened by mosquito-resistant mosquitoes, which have made their way from Asia to Africa. In a study in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia — the site of a malaria outbreak — Anopheles stephensi accounted for almost all adult mosquitos found near the homes of participants with the disease. The notorious species can be found in urban environments. If not protected, more than 100 million people in Africa could be at serious risk of contracting the disease. There is no silver bullet for this fast-spreading vectors, says Fitsum Tadesse.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03572-0

The Truth behind the CO2 Global Emissions Predictions and Implications for the Security and Security of the First 100 years of the Cold War

The US armed forces put out more CO2 than any nation in the world. But militaries are largely spared from emissions reporting. Eight researchers outline how to hold militaries to account in the global carbon reckoning.

One billion people in Africa are missing from a data driven plan for the world. “That’s the troubling truth behind net-zero emissions proposals.” She argues that we can’t we can’t engage meaningfully with the concept of net zero — at COP27 and in general — without Africa-specific data, appropriate models and African expertise.

Mller is back in academia and he has learned some valuable lessons after working at the internet giant. Don’t be a hero. The only way to finish a task is to put your mental health at risk and hide flaws in the system.

The Rise of CO2 and the Implications for the Future of the World’s Largest Economy and the Environment after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

There have been some big changes since then. The Russian invasion of Ukraine will loom over this year’s meeting. The invasion further complicated relationships between the world’s largest economies and ended global fossil fuel markets. One immediate effect of the war is multiple countries including China have increased their short-term reliance on coal-fired power plants, which are the most intense global source of greenhouse gas emissions.

But there have been positive developments as well. Renewable energy, such as wind and solar, is growing rapidly. According to the International Energy Agency, global demand for fossil fuels will peak in the mid-20th century.

India is seeing the largest emissions growth due to rising coal and oil consumption. China, the world’s largest emitter, is expected to see emissions fall by nearly 1% this year, while the country’s coal use is projected to remain flat. Overall, though, scientists estimate that emissions from coal burning will increase by around 1% and could set a new record, driven mostly by a renewed reliance on coal-fired power plants in India and Europe.

But it is still possible to change course, the report states. If humans can limit warming to no more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius), some of the more catastrophic effects of climate change can be avoided. Sea levels will rise less. Heat waves and storms would be less deadly. And many ecosystems on land and in the oceans would be more able to adapt or recover.

How Much Do We Need to Pay for Its Costs? A U.N. Secretary General’s Climate Meeting Addressed with World Leaders

They argue that wealthier nations should pay for the problems they caused, including the cultural losses that happen when towns and villages must relocate. The wealthier countries have agreed to keep discussing but have not committed to providing new funding.

It will require a lot of investments. There’s no way to escape it. But there’s also a lot of money to be made eliminating emissions from the global economy. And experts say the cost of not dealing with this problem could be ruinous.

In the United States alone, quickly cutting carbon emissions could grow the country’s economy by $3 trillion over the next 50 years, says Deloitte, the consulting firm. If the United States doesn’t respond to climate change, it could cost it $14.5 trillion over the next five years.

Experts say making good on that promise is crucial to keep poorer nations on board with efforts to cut emissions. But they also say that $100 billion is just a fraction of the money the developing world is going to need.

The international climate negotiations got underway today with dire warnings about climate-driven disasters, pleas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and a plan for a global weather early warning system.

The U.N. Secretary general warned about climate hell earlier this week and we are racing to do our part to avert it.

He mentioned the fact that the global population is expected to hit eight billion during the climate meeting. “How will we answer when baby 8-billion is old enough to ask ‘What did you do for our world, and for our planet, when you had the chance?'” Guterres asked a room full of world leaders.

The United States is doing what it takes to keep the world on the fight against climate change, and why it is important to do what you can, and how you can do it

About half the world isn’t covered by multi-hazard early warning systems, which collect data about disaster risk, monitor and forecast hazardous weather, and send out emergency alerts, according to the U.N.

The $3.1 billion that will be set up over the next five years will be used to provide early-warning systems in places that don’t already have them. More money will be needed to maintain the warning systems longer-term.

The prime minister of the island states that she went further in her speech to other leaders. She said corporations that profit in the fossil-fuel intensive economy include oil and gas companies.

Those corporations should help pay for the costs associated with sea level rise, stronger hurricanes, heat waves and droughts around the world, she argued, and especially in places like her nation that are extremely vulnerable to climate change and don’t have the money to protect themselves.

AT&T wants to see where they are vulnerable to climate change and how they can become resilient.

The Climate Risk and Resilience Portal will initially provide information about temperature, precipitation, wind and drought conditions. Additional risks such as wildfire and flooding will be added in the coming months.

More than two dozen countries say they’ll work together to stop and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030 in order to fight climate change.

More than one-third of the world’s forests are maintained by the European Union, which together with 26 other countries forms the Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership.

At COP26 last year, more than 140 countries agreed to conserve forests. The United Nations says that there isn’t enough money spent to preserve forests, which capture and store carbon.

And yet so many governments—Norway, Australia, and the United States, to name just a few—are still approving new fossil fuel projects. There are early signs that efforts to combat climate change are beginning to work. Yet more public and private money is still being spent on financing fossil fuels than on climate change mitigation and adaptation in its entirety.

“It’s fundamentally about who is most responsible,” said Fatima Denton, a Gambian scholar, longtime U.N. official and member of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group. “There’s a solidarity issue here that’s only going to become bigger as the crisis grows. Support for that idea is needed now.”

The United States is acting. “Everyone has to act,” Mr. Biden said. It is the duty and responsibility of global leadership. Countries that are in a position to help should be supporting developing countries so they can make decisive climate decisions.”

He promised to provide $11.2 billion annually by 2024 to help develop countries transition to wind, solar and other renewable energy. That money, which is different from a loss and damage fund, was promised by wealthy nations under the 2015 Paris agreement. Last year, Mr. Biden secured just $1 billion toward that goal from Congress.

The First Meeting of Climate Change Experts in the U.S.: Requirements for Methane Emission Measurements and Reductions

For the first time, Mr. Biden announced, the U.S. government will require domestic oil and gas producers to detect and fix leaks of methane, a greenhouse gas that traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide does in the short run. Methane emissions in the United States come from the fossil fuel industry, which leaks the odorless odorless gas and is often deliberately released by gas producers. Stopping methane from escaping into the atmosphere is critical to slowing global warming, scientists say.

There was a silver lining to this, as delegates from low and middle-income countries came away with an agreement to create a new fund to help cover the costs of climate- change impacts.

The final 10-page summary document, which was agreed on 20 November, says that limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels requires “rapid, deep and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” by 2030.

But calls to phase out fossil fuels were blocked by oil-producing states, and some delegates struggled to find reasons to be cheerful about the glacial pace of decarbonization. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked an energy crisis that resulted in a lack of progress on fossil fuels.

Although there is value in bringing people together to share ideas and build momentum, she fears that the core purpose of the meeting — to push world leaders to commit to stronger action and hold them accountable — has been lost. I have never seen anything like this before. We’ve reduced the whole thing into a grand spectacle,” she says.

For the first time, researchers and activists are at the talks, they described disbelief as government negotiators spent multiple days haggling over single words in the document.

“I am just, quite simply shocked about the [negotiating] process I have seen,” says Blutus Mbambi, program coordinator at the Centre for Climate Change Action and Advocacy in Lusaka, Zambia. “But we will keep on advocating. We’ll keep pushing.

The fund would support countries experiencing the effects of climate change, such as Somalia, where more than seven million people are facing hunger from an ongoing drought, or Pakistan, where floods this year caused around US$30 billion worth of damage.

The US climate envoy John Kerry said that existing funds could pay for the damage done to the environment by a fund. US negotiators also opposed the suggestion that high greenhouse-gas emitters should accept liability for their historical emissions, fearing this could lead to claims running potentially into trillions of dollars.

The United States was put under pressure to follow by the European Union, but it was initially sceptical. The fine print will have to be considered at the conference next year.

The final document supports the reform of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which are critical to the survival of the global economy. The International Monetary Fund have a $1 trillion available for lending to countries in financial distress, but very few of them are for climate finance. Sarah Colenbrander, who studies climate finance at the Overseas Development Institute in London, says the endorsement of reform is significant. That’s because it comes from countries that are also shareholders in these institutions, and can make change happen.

Although the negotiations received a boost from a separate deal announced at the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, in which wealthy countries agreed to provide $20 billion to help Indonesia wean itself off coal, much of the attention at COP27 was on the European rush for natural gas.

Germany has a deal with Egypt to advance green hydrogen and exports of liquified natural gas as other governments and companies are courting projects in Africa.

European leaders insist that these measures are short-term fixes that won’t detract from their long-term commitments, but the optics are very bad, says Narain. Before the crisis, the rhetoric from the higher-income countries was that nobody was going to fund fossil-fuel projects in lower-income countries, she says. Everybody wants us to increase supply.

These tensions had tangible impacts on the negotiations at COP27. Language calling to phase out of fossil fuels was jettisoned from the final text, while new wording was added proposing accelerated development of ’low-emission’ energy systems, which many fear will be used to justify further natural-gas development.

Mohammed Salem Nashwan, who studies construction engineering at the Arab Academy of Science, Technology and Maritime Transport in Cairo, is not certain that there will be much progress on fossil fuel issues at the upcoming COP28 in the Middle East. “The host is heavily linked to the fossil-fuel industries,” he says.

The COP27 deal also says that “safeguarding food security and ending hunger” is a fundamental priority, and that communities can better protect themselves from climate effects if water systems are protected and conserved. By contrast, last year’s Glasgow Climate Pact made no mention of agriculture, food or water.

The new additions are welcome, says Claudia Sadoff, executive director of CGIAR, a global network of agricultural research centres, but she adds that “the text on the food crisis is not supported by actions that need to be taken”.

Arguments over money resurface at every COP. They will return in a year at COP28 which is due to be held in the United Arab Emirates. The size of the loss-and-damage fund, who will contribute and which countries will benefit are all yet to be discussed.

This is an excellent idea, not least because it will help to establish areas in which experts largely agree — or disagree — and so identify instances in which further research could help to unpick outstanding questions. But it doesn’t go far enough. The IPCC should also prepare an evidence synthesis on climate finance itself. Romain Weikmans, a researcher at the Université LIbernite de Bruxelles, said that the lack of synthesis means the most basic concepts and methodologies are disputed. It’s not just loss and damage: the ins and outs of mitigation and adaptation finance are also still hotly disputed.

Donor countries, for example, count money that has been pledged or promised, say for investment in flood defences or wind energy. LMICs prefer to count money that is received by projects on the ground, so it’s important to keep this in mind. Donors also count loans — which account for the lion’s share of climate finance — whereas LMICs would prefer to count only grants or other money that does not have to be repaid. Then there’s the question of scope. If a new housing development in an area of high temperatures is fitted with special cool roofs, say, some would like to count the whole development as climate finance, whereas others would say just the roof part qualifies.

An agnostic perspective on the dark arts of denial and disinformation: The carrot encourages people to elect more renewable, clean machines

Agnotologists will investigate and teach the dark arts of denial and disinformation—how big data, graphs and figures, and digital communication technologies can all be used to challenge independent scientific research findings. Students will learn how various tools (such as academic experts, public relations firms, and lawyers) and arguments (such as “the problem is too complex” or “there are bigger contributors to the problem”) are used across industries (including by pharmaceutical, tobacco, and fossil fuel companies) and understand how to recognize common patterns of denial. The students may remember how the pesticide industry has paid public relations firms since the ’90s to set up grassroots groups that appear to be grass roots, and the most popular climate activist in the world.

A set of standards to combat the creation of ignorant will be created by agnotologists in the year of 2023. Society’s trust in science can mean the difference between life and death: A study of 126 countries found that where trust in science is high, citizens are more confident about vaccination (controlling for the individual’s own trust in science).

Knowledge remains our best hope to save the planet and ourselves, and a deeper understanding of ignorance will show us what the powerful don’t want us to know.

The missed opportunity would be a huge difference in 2022, if it had happened. “I feel a lot more heartened about climate change now than I ever have,” says Jonathan Foley, executive director of the nonprofit Project Drawdown, which advocates for climate action. We’re not as screwed as we would have been. I’ll take that as an encouragement because there is a little more wind in the sails. Like, Hey, wait a minute, things are really starting to pivot.”

My fellow Americans, meet the new approach to climate action in the US: the carrot. Taxpayers who make greener choices are rewarded by the Inflation Reduction Act, which is a completely different proposal than the one that called for a tax on carbon emissions. It allocates nearly $400 billion in rebates and tax breaks for people to buy electric vehicles and solar panels, or outfit their homes with heat pumps or better insulation. You can save $1,800 a year on your energy bills if you electrify your life. “That’s really the promise here, to get people onto clean, efficient, and affordable electric machines.”

If you don’t know what it involves in terms of home upgrades, plugging leaks that let in outdoor air is the only way to update insulation. A heat pump extracts heat from outdoor air to warm a home, then reverses in the summer to act like an air conditioner. The appliance can run on electricity and still use renewable energy like rooftop solar. They are so efficient that even if you had to run them on energy generated with fossil fuels, you’d still be way better off emissions-wise than with a traditional furnace.)

“Striking outside the Stockholm parliament”: How a single teenager can get a little help and how to respond to climate catastrophes

Four and a half years ago, she began “striking” outside of Swedish parliament — a single teenager with a single sign. She was 15. She made a mark at the United Nations climate conference in Poland when she told diplomats and negotiators that they were not mature enough to tell it like it is.

The cumulative impact on my understanding of the crisis through its data, cross-cultural reflections, and pathways for step- by-step change became fascinating after a few weeks of reading The Climate Book.

“Make-believe” is what Anderson means. In her own chapter, journalist Alexandra Urisman Otto describes her investigation into Swedish climate policy, specifically its net zero target for 2045. She discovered a discrepancy between the official number of greenhouse gases emitted each year — 50 million tons — and the real figure, 150 million tons. That lower, official figure leaves out “emissions from consumption and the burning of biomass,” which means the target is way off, she writes. The world would be headed for a major increase in temperature if all countries had not been off by that amount.

Sometimes the term includes burning wood for energy and other materials. Burning wood for energy causes more emissions per unit of energy than fossil fuels, explain Karl-Heinz Erb and Simone Gingrich, both social ecology professors at Vienna’s University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences.

Alice Larkin, professor of climate science and energy policy at the University of Manchester, adds “a highly significant complication” to this disturbing picture: international aviation and shipping aren’t typically accounted for in national emission targets, policies, and carbon budgets, either.

Saleemul Huq, director of a Bangladeshi international center for climate change, puts the point squarely: The communities most devastated by climate change “are overwhelmingly poor people of colour.” But Bangladeshi citizens shouldn’t be thought of as passive victims, Huq emphasizes. The global north rarely sees communities preparing for the effects of climate disasters in ways that are not seen here. An elderly widow living alone will be given two children from the high school to pick her up in case of an emergency.

Globally, then, what to do? First, we can hold industrial and corporate interests accountable and push back on their messages placing the burden solely on the individual, a tactic that allows the worst of the status quo carbon-emissions activities to continue.

Beyond this, it’s not enough “to become vegetarian for one day a week, offset our holiday trips to Thailand or switch our diesel SUV for an electric car,” as Thunberg puts it. Participation in recycling is seen as the greatest example of greenwashing on the planet today. The plastic that is recycled ends up being dumped or burned after a couple cycles.

We can follow Thunberg’s example and give up flying, or reduce it if we have one. Three further steps, out of many offered in the book, are these: Switch to plant-based diets. Protect forests, salt marshes, mangroves, the oceans, and all the animal and plant life of these habitats to support natural climate solutions. The media should focus more on the root causes of the heat wave and collapse of the glacier, as well as the solutions to the problem. The media has the right to create a necessary transformation of our global society.

Social norms can change, according to Thunberg. If we can keep climate justice front and center, then that’s our greatest source of hope.

The Impact of Climate Change on Lives in Highly Vulnerable Regions: Strategies, Progress, and Challenges for the World Leaders

Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist emerita at William & Mary. She wrote Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity. Find her on Twitter @bjkingape

Immediate solutions such as quickly adopting renewable sources of electricity and banning new oil and gas drilling are included in those choices. They are also more aspirational ones, such as investing in research that could one day allow technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the air.

That kind of extreme warming would spell disaster for billions of people, as well as critical ecosystems, and would lead to irreversible sea level rise and mass extinction of plants and animals.

The things that are really scary are what Solomon Hsiang refers to as the bad outcomes when talking about climate change.

The hope is that the new report will serve as a shared scientific foundation for those negotiations, as well as a menu of solutions available to world leaders.

Investments in reducing emissions are an investment in the health and education of the people that we care about, as well as economic opportunities and protection of the people we care about.

The authors write that between 2010 and 2020 there was a 15 times higher mortality from floods, droughts and storms in highly vulnerable regions.

According to the report, people living in low-income countries, low-lying areas and island nations are some of the most vulnerable communities.

The Alaskan Fires During 2022: Two Years of Climate Change in Australia, and a New Gas Well for Power Plants and Oil Plants

Alaska is a hot place, and the summers are so warm it is almost inevitable that there will be a fire. In June 2022, lightning strikes set the drought-stricken land ablaze, winds whipped up flames, and long curtains of fire soon ripped through previously untouched tundra, pushing plumes of thick smoke up into the atmosphere. Firefighters were powerless to contain the blazes. Almost two million acres were ravaged by fire in a single month.

There is a 600-million-barrel oil-drilling project in the north of the state, which was just approved by US president Joe Biden, which will further heat the world and make Alaska an epicenter of fire. Emissions of 66 coal-fired power plants will be created by the fuel from the willow project.

Territorial greenhouse emissions, which are those that result from activities within a nation’s borders, are part of the problem. The current system doesn’t hold one nation to account for exporting fossil fuels to another nation, just as it doesn’t credit them for the export of renewable energy.

Australia showed off this behavior last month. The federal government voted in through an election that was dominated by concerns aboutclimate change and gave Santos approval to sink up to 116 new gas wells. This is despite Australia’s east coast experiencing two record-breaking floods last year that proved to be the most expensive in Australian history, costing insurers around AU$3.35 billion (US$2.24 billion). The deluges were almost undoubtedly climate-change-related.