I am fairly positive about COP28
The 5th National Climate Assessment of the United States: Implications and Challenges of the Paris Agreement, Planned Action, and Modernization
The fifth National Climate Assessment of the United States was released today, after a season of record heat and hurricanes that rapidly intensified into monsters. The experts from every US state gave input to the report and laid out the consequences climate change will have on the country and what we can do about it. It’s similar to the more dire reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which detail the newest science on global warming and how to stop it, as well as strategies for slowing it.
This has been partly achieved by countries stepping up their efforts—exactly what the Paris Agreement was designed to inspire. It has a “ratchet” mechanism, where countries are expected to increase their ambitions over time. And they’ve done this, not only setting more ambitious targets, but also putting more ambitious policies in place. Many countries now have net-zero targets: If they actually meet them, it’s projected that we could stay under 2 degrees Celsius of global warming.
The nation’s ability to deploy solar panels and wind turbine is related to how fast it can get to that 6 percent. To that end, last year’s Inflation Reduction Act allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to accelerate decarbonization; for instance, tax breaks for home improvements like better insulation and switching to electric appliances and heat pumps. It was also meant to juice the domestic green economy: According to one study, it has already created almost 75,000 jobs and spurred $86 billion in private investments.
The Biden administration has provided more than six billion dollars in investments for climate action and $3.9 billion for modernizing the grid. “Clean electrons are really the way we’re going to decarbonize most of the economy,” says Zaidi. “That’s going to require us to upgrade our local grid infrastructure, for example, for charging of heavy-duty vehicles.”
The nation’s energy grid needs an overhauled to cope with increasingly extreme weather and accommodate more renewable energy. Today’s report notes that the average number of power outages affecting more than 50,000 customers jumped by about 64 percent in the period from 2011 and 2021, compared to the period from 2000 to 2010. The US needs a grid that’s better able to ferry electricity from renewable-energy hot spots, like solar power generated in the sunny Southwest and wind power from the gusty Midwest. “Undergrounding” more powerlines, especially in the parched West, would prevent the infrastructure from igniting catastrophic blazes, like the Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018.
Climate change, the Paris climate summit, and the small island Developing States (SIDS): What has the world learned from Paris 2015?
COPs—or Conferences of the Parties—are annual events convened by the United Nations where world leaders try to hash out a deal to limit climate change. In 2015, the Paris group arrived at a target of keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius. This was bold, but it hit on the fact that a leader can promise ambitious targets without even thinking about scaling up action to meet them.
The world was on course to hit 3.6 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century. The goal of 2 degrees Celsius set in 2009, was already out of reach, so leaders promised to achieve even more. That would have been great if they had put incredibly ambitious policies on the table. They did not. And without such policies, this new target seemed like a cruel promise to those for whom the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius is their livelihoods—mostly the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) scattered across the world’s oceans. While those at Paris celebrated, I left more pessimistic than ever.
