Governments 'Not on Track' To Cap Temperatures at Below 2 Degrees: UN (reuters.com)

Governments are not on track to meet a goal of the 2015 Paris agreement of capping temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) before the end of the century, a United Nations official said on Sunday ahead of climate-change talks in Bangkok this week. From a report: Patricia Espinosa, head of the Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which steers the climate talks, said both the public and private sector need to act with urgency to avoid "catastrophic effects". The Paris climate agreement, adopted by almost 200 nations in 2015, set a goal of limiting warming to "well below" a rise of 2 degrees C above pre-industrial times while "pursuing efforts" for the tougher goal of 1.5 degrees C. "1.5 is the goal that is needed for many islands and many countries that are particularly vulnerable to avoid catastrophic effects. In many cases it means the survival of those countries. With the pledges we have on the table now we are not on track to achieve those goals," Espinosa told Reuters in a telephone interview on Sunday in Bangkok.

Comments

We're hosed

[Anonymous Coward]

And we didn't even need the not-so-very-objective and not-so-very-honest(!) UNFCCC to figure that one out.

We did too little when we could back in the 70s and now we're too late and we're hosed. In fact, all the world is hosed.

This is one guaranteed to be lasting legacy. Hope you're proud of it.

Re: We're hosed

[Anonymous Coward]

And if we had spent the R&D money back in the '70s to boost renewable, sources of energy that don't emit greenhouse gases, we'd be much further along the process.

If we'd actually tax companies for their emissions and the effects to mitigate those emissions, we'd be a lot further along.

In general, too many places have done too little because ti would cost those in power money, even though it was other individuals that ultimately shoulder the consequences.

Re: We're hosed

[WindBourne]

Actually, we CAN stop it now. We just have to quit adding fossil fuel plants, esp coal, and then add only clean ; wind, solar, hydro, Geothermal, nuke. But that will not happen.

Re: We're hosed

[renegadesx]

This is Government, which is run by partisan politicians.
The right wont accept solar and wind and the left won't accept nuclear.

Re: We're hosed

[b0s0z0ku]

The French government did great in picking a nuclear energy policy in the 70s and using highly standardized reactors. Far better than the mess in the US or Asia, where every plant is a white elephant.

Re: We're hosed

[WindBourne]

it is not just in the west. America has not added a single coal plant in some 10 years, though we have added nat gas. This is much cleaner, but all it does is slow things down. It still has not stopped it. BUT, the real problem is that Asia, esp China, continues to ADD (not replace) MASSIVE numbers of coal plants. This needs to stop.

As to wind, the right is actually FINE with them. For example, which states have the most wind? Nearly all red. They KNOW that it is much cheaper.
Oddly, the right wing is split on solar, which is insane. BUT, I notice that they are not looking to remove the solar subsidies.
However, you are about 60% correct on nuclear. Basically, it is the far left, not just the left that fights nuclear. We are allowing a small group of idiots to control our nation. We really need to push this CURRENT gov right now, to help with nuclear (and ideally geo-thermal) power. I still think that the right way is to push for subsidy to help a 2-4 SMR based companies and several geo-thermal electricity companies, and also we need to require that all utilities have at least 2/3 of their power available through base-load systems. IOW, it can not be indeterminate energy, backed up by small amounts of batteries (though a hydro storage with at least say several days worth, might work).

Finally, I still maintain that America has the ability to get all nations on-board with a simple taxation. Sadly, we have the wrong president for it.

Re: We're hosed

[Anonymous Coward]

So why is your country, one of the highest emitters, with the most money, going all in on gas?
Why are you still pushing crappy fuel economy cars when transport is your biggest emitter?
Why are your levels so much higher than Europeans?
Why try to lecture others when you are basically the worst offenders?

Re: We're hosed

[Ocker3]

Except in Australia where a really advanced solar panel manufacturing tech came out of the CSIRO, the Conservative Prime Minister refused to spend Any money developing it for domestic markets, so the scientist took his patents to South Korea, helping them cut Australia largely out of the solar panel manufacturing industry.

Re: We're hosed

[jrumney]

Please explain how shale oil and hydraulic fracturing count as "sources of energy that don't emit greenhouse gases".

Re: We're hosed

[CaffeinatedBacon]

And what is America's / Windy's response?

Do they think it's at all serious that per country America should be the same as Australia? No they say fuck off, Australia is a tiny country.

Re: We're hosed

[Barsteward]

I think that he means USA produces more carbon dioxide per capita than China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita

Re:We're hosed

[Opportunist]

We're already at stage 4? That developed quickly, just weeks ago we still had discussions in phase 2.

For those unfamiliar with them, the 4 stages of climate denial:

1. There is no climate change.
2. Ok, there is a climate change, but it's normal, not man made.
3. Ok, it is man made, but it's been warmer before, so no problem.
4. Ok, it is a problem, but it's too late anyway.

The beauty is that, no matter what stage we're on, we needn't do anything about it.

Re: We're hosed

[Opportunist]

We'd have to put younger people into office, all right, but for another reason: They will still be alive in 30 years and live in the hellhole they'd create. Those in power today know fucking well that they'll be dead in 30 years.

Re: We're hosed

[Applehu Akbar]

What benefited France most of all was a policy of simply not listening to yammerheads and just plowing ahead with construction. That's how we need to approach it: develop a legal principle that "I don't like it" does not give you standing to argue court cases over technology.

Re: We're hosed

[AmiMoJo]

Not really. The reason French nuclear energy companies are struggling to stay in business and desperately looking overseas for business is that the French taxpayer got fed up of them living off nuclear welfare. It was supposed to be cheap and clean, but turned out to be neither and as usual all the costs were socialized (i.e. taxpayers pick up the bills).

Of course now they want the same level of subsidy from other governments, but are maintaining their standard level of incompetence with cost overruns and the most expensive form of energy on the planet. The new reactors being built in the UK by French company EDF (with Chinese investment money) are guaranteed to get 3x the price of current wind energy, and that ratio is getting worse every day.

They should have put the money into offshore wind + storage, but lacked vision and EDF is good at bribery.

Re:We're hosed

[Opportunist]

Yes. I stopped caring.

Re: We're hosed

[guruevi]

We did but then Greenpeace decided that "nuclear is bad" and so we're now stuck with gas, oil and other options that are way worse.

Re: We're hosed

[Luckyo]

Shale is literally the primary reason for natgas switch in US. In shale production, methane is the "undesirable consequence of extraction process" which used to do nothing but cause severe risk of catastrophic explosion. Which is why it's generally flared off in a safe fashion.

And now, it's increasingly captured instead, and then transported to CCGTs which are rapidly replacing other burner plants in US, because transport over short to medium distances via infrastructure that is rapidly being built up as we speak is very cheap. And in process, halving CO2 emissions for the same energy produced (look at the emissions per energy produced on methane vs coal for example).

The main reason why US is actually better than countries like Germany in reducing the emissions in spite of vocal declarations of the latter and lack of such declarations on the part of the former is the natgas switch. And this is a trend that is set to continue for quite a while. So if you're an environmentalist who's primary concern is global warming, shale is something you should be championing, not something to fight against.

But modern environmentalism has nothing to do with that. It's now a strange religion that mostly combines elements of primeval nature worship (wasn't it great when people weren't here to destroy the nature?) and plain anti-human tendencies (humans are a blight on this planet and it will be better when they're all gone). Those that are actually working towards goals to reduce emissions, i.e. nuclear power generation industry, are some of the most persecuted by the environmentalist movement because they make a great case against those two tenets.

Re: We're hosed

[Luckyo]

Main shale byproduct is methane. Methane when burned for energy produces about half CO2 compared to coal. The only other byproduct of the burn is water.

Parent is trying to spin a sarcastic narrative, possibly to mask the fact that main reason why US has been reducing its CO2 output more than for example Germany because of success of fracking and replacement of other burner plants with CCGTs burning methane.

Switch to methane to massively reduce CO2 emissions isn't an element unique to US, as most other Western countries with ready access to methane try to do it as well (example: UK). However methane is notoriously difficult to transport over the sea routes, and is best transported over pipelines as that doesn't require the energy expenditure to compress it into liquid form.

Such infrastructure is only really possible due to shale revolution in US, which made methane basically a free waste product, which states and federal government could mandate to build pipe networks to transport across the country (and now is starting to feed Mexico due to excess availability, likely resulting in solution to many of Mexico's energy and lowering its CO2 emissions). Second best infrastructure in the world after that is methane from Russia being piped to Europe, alongside similar pipes from Norway, Scotland and North Africa.

Methane is the short to medium term solution to getting CO2 emissions under control. Cutting burner emissions to two thirds to a half is a great stepping stone to the solution. Absolutist crazies will of course continue with their "but my solar and wind" mantra, never realizing that the main reason for their proliferation in US in Europe is the proliferation of CCGTs that can in fact function as spinning and cold reserve in economic fashion due to cheap fuel and fast spin-up and load-accepting times.

Re: We're hosed

[drinkypoo]

And if we had spent the R&D money back in the '70s to boost renewable, sources of energy that don't emit greenhouse gases, we'd be much further along the process.

What's really going to bake your noodle is that back in the '70s, PC PV solar panels could repay their energy investment in less than seven years, and they already had a median lifespan over twenty years. So if we had just started deploying them AFAP, we would have been doing very well. Many of those panels could still be in service today. Instead, the fossil fuel industry convinced us all that it was a big scam and that what we needed was to dig up what's left of trees sequestered millions of years ago and set it on fire, because profits.

Re: We're hosed

[dj245]

You're spot on. I'm a coal and natural gas steam turbine engineer and I have seen the industry evolve even in my short career of just 12 years. We have made tremendous progress in a very short time. But it is and never will be enough for some people. Many of those in the industry are fed up with helping to provide a vital service to support the wind and solar ramp up and getting nothing but distain and "we'll eliminate your job" from the public. It's no wonder that energy policy has become extremely polarized. I've had enough of it, and am leaving to start a small business in a completely unrelated field.

Re: We're hosed

[dehachel12]

Since when is it the government's job

Do some research on the amount of money spent on the oil wars in the middle east. The government did the oil industry's bidding.

Re: We're hosed

[Luckyo]

You're not the only one. I've seen the stone-faced "green" activists back when the company I was a temp in did a project in Narva, which transformed what was essentially the most polluting power plants in the world into far less wasteful. This is not an exaggeration, those plants burn shale rock, which is essentially 70% various deep underground elements and 30% oil-like mixture. Soviet era plants literally could not work for more than two weeks at a time because it would develop what locals called a "goat", the massive amount of sticky, toxic residue from burn process that would cling to the heat exchangers in the burner. And the stuff that actually burned just spread all that toxic stuff out of the pipe in the form of particulates in well over hundred kilometre radius. Not to even mention the NOx and SO2 related acid rain issues.

I've read analyses that something like 5-7% of trees within the range of exhaust raining down from those plants literally died standing due to the extreme toxicity of that exhaust. And airways-related illnesses in the region were very high. Said activists were invited to showcase that our tech basically pushed SO2 and NOx exhaust from horrifyingly high to zero, and the post-filter which ensured that the toxic ash would also go to zero in the exhaust.

They sat there stone-faced, and when I listened to them after the lecture was done, it was all about "how this will justify existence of this plant". Basically fuck the people who had to breathe the toxic stuff and were getting their power and livelihood from it. Just fuck them, in the name of the utopia. It disillusioned me with the entire movement.

Re: We're hosed

[Luckyo]

Nobody wants any meaningful methane leakage on your oil/gas extraction facility. See Deepwater Horizon for reasons why.

As for "carbon tax", it's already in as a punitive taxation regime on the more polluting production systems. Take it too far and you get to Denmark and its catastrophic state of affairs, where spinning reserve is taken offline because it's punished, yet more wind goes up. Resulting in a grid that is wholly dependent on Swedish and Norwegian interconnects and hydro supply and legislation to literally stop coal plants they made unprofitable via those taxation regimes from closing, because they desperately need them to back up wind power.

This is something most people ignore. You can't run a modern grid without spinning reserve and cold reserve and intermittent renewables being intermittent need close to 100% cold reserve and a large amount of spinning one. If you don't have it, you have a third world grid with intermittent, randomly cutting off power supply. If you want to find out what that's like and what that leads to, research Lebanese generator mafia and comprehend that you will have no meaningful industry if that were to occur.

So you don't get to put status quo against Harvey. You get to put Lebanese level of infrastructural disaster against Harvey, because US isn't Denmark, and doesn't have convenient mountainous neighbours with massive surplus of hydro and willing to sell you usage of those at as a spinning reserve at extortionist levels of premium + grid companies that literally tell Denmark to bend over and take it from behind as happened about a year ago. And if you pick Lebanese kind of a grid, but you are indeed anti-humanist.

Give me a break

[WindBourne]

Paris, like Kyoto, was a joke. It did nothing to address real emissions. Until an accord is implemented that brings all nations down together, nothing will improve. things will become worse because massive numbers of coal plants are being added while idiots defend it.

Re:Give me a break

[archer, the]

China still has a few coal plants in the works, although it did stop construction on some. India says it will stop building coal plants in 2022. While the US isn't adding new coal plants, the current administration is attempting to keep the existing ones in service longer.

Basically, we need to do what we can as individuals, and the cheapest (and maybe most important) thing there is voting to get people of sound mind into government.

Re:Give me a break

[rtb61]

The Australian coal mining thing is not what it seems, actually more likely a scam. So borrow tons of money, especially from government to build new coal mine and power station, build it all up, sell it and then when it can't not compete because of pricing pressure from natural gas and watch it all go belly up because of course the profit comes from developing and selling it and then betting it will go bankrupt (privatise the profit and socialise the loss). No sure how far that model spreads into Indonesia or Poland but it likely is an element, just the normal psychopathic way of doing business.

Yeah, coal is screwed and Trump was playing pump and dump with his buddies (talking up coal so his buddies so sell out before it all collapses and the public ends up wearing the bankruptcies). It is pretty clear now, that most of the attacks on renewables had no basis in reality and were straight up PR=B$ attacks paid for by the fossil fuellers to keep the profits up and fuck everyone and everything else.

Re:Give me a break

[CaffeinatedBacon]

Do you even understand the links you are posting?

China increased about 3.1 per cent in the first half of 2018 compared with the same period last year. The main driver of that was coal-fired power generation. Figures from the National Bureau of Statistics show a leap of 9.4 per cent in electricity use across the same period.

So electricity is up 9% but coal is only up 3%...
Coal's % of electricity is decreasing. Other sources are rising twice as fast as coal.

As we know from your previous comments, only America is entitled to use so much coal.
You remember , that country with twice the per capita CO2 emissions.

Re:Give me a break

[Kjella]

Those who think we can reduce total emissions are delusional.

1. The world population is growing
2. More people get access to electricity/cars
3. As they get richer, they use it more

That we're making cleaner power and cleaner cars is only reducing that impact a bit. There's a billion Indians wishing they were rich enough to run AC. It's more like do you want 2x or 3x today's emissions, not how big the reduction will be.

Re:Give me a break

[AmiMoJo]

You are begging the question by making two faulty assumptions.

1. Technology never gets more efficient. Clearly modern cars are more efficient, electronics have got orders of magnitude more efficient (not least because we want to run on battery power). Modern homes require less heating and cooling and there are still big improvements that can be made there.

2. Renewable energy can't provide a significant proportion of the energy we need. Clearly it can, especially in areas of high growth like India and China and Africa.

Re:Give me a break

[will_die]

Trump was not looking at selling coal in the USA, natural gas is cheaper.
The market for that coal is other countries. Since the start of 2016 over 1600 new coal plants have started construction or have funding and they need coal. In 2017 the USA increase exports of coal by 50% and is now producing around 15% of all coal.

That boat sailed ...

[CaptainDork]

... 40 years ago.

We passed the deadline and there's no catching up.

So it is written, so let it be done.

Tell that to the anti-nuclear body

[Anonymous Coward]

They'd rather have climate change than nuclear power. Apparently climate change isn't a major issue and it's much more important to prevent the development of nuclear power and to block the construction of more modern nuclear power plants.

Re:Tell that to the anti-nuclear body

[blindseer]

Fukushima and Chernobyl both exploded.

Those were nuclear power plants built in the 1960s and 1970s. You know what was also built at that time? A lot of things, I know that. What comes to mind are the De Haviland Comet and Ford Pinto. The Comet was known to fall from the sky without explanation, and the Ford Pinto of the time was known to burst into flames with minor accidents. Does this mean we should stop flying jets and driving cars?

We don't build nuclear reactors today like we used to in the 1970s, just like the planes and cars we build today aren't like what we used to build in the 1970s. There's a lot of old nuclear reactors from the 1970s operating today, and it would be nice to see them replaced with something more efficient and safer. It would be so much easier to do so if we didn't have idiots that thought nothing has changed in nuclear power since Bee Gees released "Stayin' Alive".

Nuclear power is the safest energy source we have. Safer than even wind and solar. That doesn't mean we should rely on nuclear as our only energy source, but it does mean we should make it part of our energy solution.

Why I like nuclear power:
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...

Go fuck yourself caffeinated bacon/crimson tsunami

[WindBourne]

And yet, America continues to drop our coal faster than other nations.
However, we are not dropping as fast as your nation is adding coal plants.
And Go fuck yourself, as you like to say.

Re:Geoengineering

[Opportunist]

The problem with organic CO2 sinks is that they die at some point, decompose and return that CO2 into the air. We could of course somehow bury them really deep and hope that it never comes back up. That's already been done by nature some couple million years ago, also worked pretty well, at least until one species was stupid enough to dig it back out.

Re:Go fuck yourself caffeinated bacon/crimson tsun

[LynnwoodRooster]

China emits twice the CO2 as the US. I'm not sure how that translates into the US being worse. Supposedly, the climate doesn't care about how much CO2 each person emits individually, it's the entire total that matters. And right now - that is China. Unless you want to create CO2 rations for everyone? How about wealth rations? Food rations? Time rations?