Will America ever stop building more highways?

As emissions rise, some environmentalists are turning their attention to widening roads as well as pipelines

By Shannon Osaka, The Washington Post, Feb. 15, 2024

For decades, the United States has built and expanded a 220,000-mile network of state and interstate highways, easing cross-country travel while dividing cities and boosting suburban sprawl.

But as the planet warms, some activists are fighting back — citing the future emissions of adding lanes and the devastation faced by communities razed to make way for them. Their push against giant multilane highways represents an emerging frontier for the environmental movement, which has historically been more focused on fossil fuel projects than seven-lane roads.

“We don’t often think of it in those terms, but expanding highways is essentially like building new oil pipelines,” said Ben Crowther, the policy director for America Walks. “It increases emissions in the same way.”

Last week, a coalition of almost 200 groups called for a nationwide moratorium on expanding highways — citing their environmental harm and the forced relocation of nearby low-income communities of color. A new national group called the Freeway Fighters is uniting local ones under one umbrella, helping activists learn from each other on how to slow expansion — from an almost $10 billion project to widen Interstate 45 around downtown Houston to a plan to enlarge Interstate 5 around Portland, Ore.

It might seem to be an improbable fight for a country long known for its “love affair” with the car. But with the United States aiming to cut emissions to zero by 2050 — and less than 1 percent of cars on the road electric — activists say America’s main transportation system has to change.

Historically, much of America’s public money spent on transportation has gone to highways. In 2017, $177 billion in public money went to highways, according to the Congressional Budget Office, more than double the $75 billion spent on mass transit and rail infrastructure. Even now, with many of the nation’s highways in disrepair, about 20 to 30 percent of all public highway spending goes to expansion, rather than programs to fix and repair existing roads.

State and local transportation officials say highway expansions can help relieve traffic jams, improve road safety and boost economic development. If planned correctly, they also argue that such projects can boost bus movement and ride-sharing.

Jim Tymon, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, said in a statement that each state transportation department “uses a wide variety of strategies to advance safety, mobility, and access across the state and in every community.”

But experts argue that expansion projects do little to reduce traffic congestion — and add to the country’s climate problems. Almost 30 percent of U.S. carbon emissions come from transportation — most of it from cars and trucks. While interstate highways make up only around 1 percent of the nation’s roads, they carry around a quarter of its traffic.

“We continue to spend significant amounts of money at the federal level and at the state level expanding our highway networks,” said Tony Dutzik, a senior policy analyst with Frontier Group. “Given the climate issues that we are already facing — and the fact that we are already building out a massive highway network around the country — I think it’s legitimate to ask whether that’s the right set of priorities.”

One of the arguments against such expansions is the theory that adding more lanes just leads to more traffic — what economists call “induced demand.” Sitting in traffic on a highway during rush hour may seem like an advertisement for expanding the highway — after all, more lanes allow a greater flow of traffic. Under that logic, traffic operates a bit like water through a pipe: The larger the pipe, the more water can get through.

But economists and traffic engineers say that’s not a good analogy. When lanes are added to a highway — or any road, for that matter — more cars arrive to fill the available space. People might decide to drive more, or the expansion might further develop an area and encourage people to move in.

“Induced demand is just what happens when you increase supply,” said Matthew Turner, a professor of economics at Brown University. In 2009, Turner and his colleague Gilles Duranton published a paper showing that vehicle miles traveled in U.S. cities increased “in exact proportion” to highways. The result has since been replicated in Japan, China and many countries around the world, including in Europe. “It looks like this is a fact about the world,” Turner said.

Turner says that this doesn’t mean building a highway is always the wrong choice — but that building a highway to reduce congestion is not effective. “If you are trying to build to reduce road congestion, you should stop,” he said. “If you are trying to add road congestion to facilitate people moving around, that’s a whole different thing.”

But anti-highway activists say this link between bigger roads and more highway traffic — combined with the heavy pollution burden on communities — should take expansions off the table.

Some environmentalists also say they feel betrayed that the Biden administration is not spending all of the approximately $350 billion in highway funding in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law on repairing existing highways.

According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, more than 20 percent of the funding, which is spread out over five years, so far has gone to expanding or widening roads. An additional 6 percent has funded new construction. According to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, 17 of the 20 largest highway projects supported by the infrastructure law include expansions.

“This money could have been used to change the status quo,” Crowther of America Walks said. “Instead, we’ve seen a doubling down on new highway projects.”

“The Biden-Harris Administration has taken the strongest actions of any Administration in history to reduce carbon pollution in transportation,” Samantha Keitt, a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration, said in an email. She pointed to funding in the infrastructure law for electric buses, public transit, EV charging stations, and bicycle and pedestrian projects.

President Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act also included money to tear down highways that divided communities. But that program only has $1 billion in dedicated funds — a tiny sliver of the tens of billions of dollars going to expanding existing highways. The infrastructure law also included approximately $3 billion in a program that could remove roads dividing neighborhoods.

The Biden administration has encouraged the adoption of electric cars as a path to meeting climate goals. But it will be difficult to deploy EVs fast enough to completely remove emissions from transportation. According to one study in the journal Nature Climate Change, 90 percent of vehicles would need to be electric by 2050 to meet climate goals. And even if EV adoption accelerates dramatically, many gas-powered cars will still be on the road by mid-century.

Beyond the climate impact, activists argue that highways displace communities of color and expose neighborhoods to deadly air pollution. According to one analysis of data from the National Air Toxics Assessment, the risk of respiratory illness is 3.4 times higher for people living less than one mile from a highway than for those living more than 10 miles away.

“We’re thinking about air quality and what it does to people’s bodies,” said Ally Smither, a singer and an organizer for Stop TxDOT I-45, a group opposing the Houston highway expansion.

Coalitions resisting highway expansions can include a range of different groups — community efforts, environmental groups and other civic organizations. In the push to stop the widening of I-45, neighborhood groups are joined by public health advocates, bike organizations and the local chapter of the youth-led Sunrise Movement.

Kendra London, a Houston activist and the founder of Our Afrikan Family, learned about the expansion project four years ago. Since then, she has hosted community meetings and scheduled bike tours to show the houses and residents who will be displaced if the project, which is estimated to demolish over 1,000 homes, goes through. “We’re left out of too many vital conversations,” London said.

Activists have rallied hundreds of highway opponents at public meetings and protested outside of state transportation offices. Other groups file civil rights lawsuits or complaints under the National Environmental Policy Act, which triggers stringent reviews for many major projects.

“Turn out as many people as you possibly can and put up a show of force,” Crowther said.

Some states are challenging the status quo outright. The Colorado Department of Transportation has set strict emissions targets in response to a 2019 law. The new rules require the state to analyze how highway expansions would increase emissions — including induced demand — and offset those increases with transit, bike or pedestrian projects elsewhere.

Matt Frommer, a senior transportation associate at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, said the rules had helped block an expansion of Interstate 25 after the state realized that the project would exceed new pollution limits.

The state plans to spend some of the hundreds of millions of dollars saved on bus and transit projects.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/02/15/will-america-ever-stop-building-more-highways/

Insight: No global carbon price? Some companies set their own

By Ross Kerber, Simon Jessop and Peter Henderson

BOSTON/DUBAI/SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 11 (Reuters) - A growing list of global companies are setting a price or charging themselves for each metric ton of their carbon emissions, looking to shape their investments and business for future pollution taxes or other new climate rules.

Their prices are all over the place, from less than $1 per metric ton of carbon emissions to $1,600, the most of any company worldwide, set by California drugmaker Amgen.

Regulators, too, have offered a range of prices, including the Biden administration's "social cost," of carbon, around $200, and a suggestion from the International Monetary Fund that it should be at least $85 by 2030.

Incorporating the cost of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions into business decisions has been a dream of climate activists for decades as a way to force corporations to cut emissions.

While a standardized global carbon price is not going to be set at the COP28 climate summit underway in Dubai, the concept has many uses in business such as enabling executives to charge their own divisions extra to use power from fossil fuels, thus making renewables more attractive.

"While there are other strategies to do so, failure to use this tool could imply that companies may be failing to adequately plan for the medium- to long-term realities of the cost of carbon," said Amir Sokolowski, global director for climate change at CDP.

An analysis by the non-profit for Reuters found that 20% of 5,345 global companies making climate-related disclosures said they used an internal carbon price last year, up from 17% the year before. Another 22% planned to do so in the next two years, although historically only a fraction of the companies that planned to implement one have done so.

The analysis from CDP, not previously published, reveals both that companies have embraced the new planning tool but also that much debate remains about what prices will spur significant action by companies to cut emissions.

Shown the trends, several analysts told Reuters the emerging picture is one of executives getting ready for some type of new emissions regulation even if they lack a clear sense of what's ahead.

Companies are "getting ready for the reality that it’s going to be required" said Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz. But the median prices are still too low to have a major impact on corporate decision-making, making the effort a "mixed bag", the Nobel Prize winner said.

Companies do not have a simple path to follow, since using a high carbon price can dramatically change investment plans, while using a low one can bring charges of "greenwashing."

Several executives who spoke with Reuters said internal pricing plans help them cut emissions and clarify the implications of capital spending and other business activities for the planet.

Market prices for carbon offsets can range from $5 to $1,500 a metric ton, said Joe Speicher, chief sustainability officer at software maker Autodesk (ADSK.O), opens new tab.

Autodesk has steadily raised its internal carbon price to $20. Ideally regulators would clarify how companies should treat emissions costs, Speicher said. "Wouldn't it be nice to have a public authority to help to create a more coherent market?" he said.

The company uses the price to help identify things like the value of its investments in carbon-removal projects, he said.

TYING IN TO MARKETS

Various carbon markets operate globally, including the European Trading System (ETS), where carbon currently trades around $70 per metric ton.

British Airways owner IAG in its CDP disclosure offered a range of internal carbon prices from 10 to 130 euros (about $11-$140) per metric ton that are used in connection with or to prepare for different regulations and agreements, including UK emissions targets and ETS compliance.

Different regulatory approaches have resulted in a range of prices around the globe, said IAG Sustainability Insights Manager Michael Evans.

The multitude of price by companies reflects many different factors, he said: "Variations in carbon prices can reflect wider economic outlooks, levels of financial investor interest, and even energy demand."

Many companies have designed their own internal mechanisms. When carmaker Volvo embraced internal carbon pricing, it could not find a good model to follow because "very, very few companies" used such prices throughout their business, Jonas Otterheim, Volvo's head of climate action, said in an interview.

Volvo has incorporated a "shadow price" of 1,000 krona per metric ton, about $92, in decisions ranging from which model vehicles to produce to what materials to use in factories. Adding the cost of carbon pollution to aluminum, for instance, made using aluminum created with renewable energy a "super high priority" because it has less than a quarter of the carbon emissions of typically made material, he said.

Similarly, Volvo reconsidered the real cost of its bigger cars as stricter EU rules come into effect.

The discussion "actually made us change the whole volume planning of the company to say that we should not prioritize some cars versus other even though they look more profitable, because they will actually sort of give us a penalty that other cars won't," Otterheim said.

Drugmaker Amgen assesses an "internal fee" of $1,000 per metric ton on higher-emitting projects. Proceeds are then used to fund emissions-cutting projects. For example, a utility expansion project in Ireland added $700,000 to its sustainability budget, a spokesperson said.

In its 2023 CDP climate report, Amgen said it also uses an "investment evaluator" to judge whether to buy new emissions-reduction equipment, using an even higher price for carbon.

"Sustainability projects that cost more than traditional projects but are less (than) $1,600 per (metric ton) of CO2e emissions reduced are considered reasonable for design," the report states. Amgen as a science-based company aims to be carbon-neutral within its own operations by 2027, the spokesperson said.

Several analysts who spoke with Reuters offered a range of views about what price companies should use.

Gunther Thallinger, a board member of German insurer Allianz and a member of a U.N. climate advisory council, said a comprehensive global carbon market would be "a massive boost" to efforts to cut emissions. But the current variation in prices is a problem, especially with some prices below $5 per metric ton.

"I fear this is going in the direction of greenwashing," he said.

However, Anita McBain, head of EMEA ESG Research for Citi, said practical uses matter more than high prices.

“We'd rather see a carbon price with teeth than one without. We'd rather see a $25 price that's actually influencing decisions versus a $75 price that's just a tick-the-box," she said.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/no-global-carbon-price-some-companies-set-their-own-2023-12-10/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Power-Up&utm_term=121123&user_email=4c48fcdbb12eee6826c7817244fc1960521df71996adb905afbfc4e36d0f936d

The problem with every country’s promise to phase out fossil fuels

Nobody is really planning for a fossil fuel phaseout

Analysis by Shannon Osaka, The Washington Post, Dec. 20, 2023

Last week, world leaders celebrated a climate first: a call by nearly 200 countries to “transition away” from fossil fuels. Many heralded the agreement as a new phase in climate talks and the beginning of the end of fossil fuels.

But beneath the U.N. agreement lies a darker truth: No fossil fuel company or country has a real plan for phasing out fossil fuels. On the contrary, almost all expect to continue extracting coal, oil and gas far into the future — far beyond what is needed to cut emissions in line with climate goals of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), or even 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

And part of the reason is that almost every country and company sees itself in a unique position: as the future last producer of fossil fuels.

“Every country has their own reason why they should be the last,” said Michael Lazarus, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute and one of the authors of the Production Gap Report, which analyzed countries’ plans for fossil fuel expansion.

In recent years, the gap between countries’ plans for fossil fuels — and the downward trajectory needed to hit climate goals — has become a yawning chasm. According to the Production Gap Report, a project of the U.N. Environment Program and research groups, countries’ projections and plans for fossil fuel production in 2030 are more than double the amount needed for a 1.5-degree Celsius warming limit.

The report analyzed fossil fuel production estimates from the governments of 20 large fossil fuel-producing countries, including the United States, Russia, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates. By 2050, the gap is projected to be even larger — according to the study, countries expect to produce 2½ times more fossil fuels in 2050 than would align with a target of 2 degrees Celsius.

At that threshold, scientists predict higher sea level rise, increased extreme heat and a greater possibility of crossing catastrophic tipping points than at 1.5.

“It’s a complete disconnect between what governments are planning for and what is required to meet Paris goals,” said Greg Muttitt, a senior associate at the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

Part of the reason for that disconnect, Lazarus said, is that many countries think they should keep producing fossil fuels while others stop. Norway, for example — which generates almost all of its electricity from renewables and has one of the highest percentages of electric vehicles in the world — touts the low carbon intensity of its oil and gas and argues that its exports are essential to Europe’s energy security.

Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states argue that they can produce oil and gas at lower cost than their competitors; the United States plans for its emissions to be “abated” through carbon capture and storage so they won’t pollute the atmosphere.

The result is nations rushing to gain the upper hand and market share before the world turns more solidly toward renewables. “There’s a rush to produce while the social license remains somewhat intact,” Lazarus said.

And oil and gas companies are doing the same thing. While some are paying lip service to the idea of switching to renewables (largely European majors) or building out carbon capture and storage (largely U.S. majors), their investments in these areas are minuscule.

According to an analysis from the International Energy Agency, fewer than 3 percent of fossil fuel companies’ capital expenditures — the amount they spend on physical things — now fund clean energy. By 2050, the agency projects, 50 percent of those expenditures should support clean energy if the world hopes to hit its climate goals.

Carbon capture and storage faces similar headwinds. Each year the world captures only 45 million tons of the CO2 produced by fossil fuels — a rounding error compared with the over 36 billion tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere. And a lot of the CO2 that is captured ultimately goes into drilling for more oil.

But just like world leaders, many oil and gas companies seem to be betting they’ll survive beyond their peers. “Some oil companies thus seem to be planning to be among the last producers standing,” Jason Bordoff, the director of the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy, wrote recently.

Climate change has always been filled with contradictions — those who use the smallest amount of fossil fuels suffer the worst impacts, for example. But in recent years, the fossil fuel contradiction has become the largest of all. More than 2,000 fossil fuel lobbyists were estimated to attend the most recent climate summit in Dubai; this year, the United States is projected to extract more oil and gas than ever before and is currently producing more oil than any country in history.

“We can’t solve the climate crisis without solving the biggest cause of it, which is fossil fuels,” said Kelly Trout, the research co-director of Oil Change International.

But many countries appear to believe they can do just that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/20/fossil-fuel-companies-phase-out/

Now for Some Good News About Climate

Costs for renewables have plummeted and growth is exceeding expectations

By Ed Ballard, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 27, 2023

There is no shortage of bad green-energy news. Automakers are fretting about electric-vehicle growth, higher interest rates are smashing financial plans, permitting for big projects still takes forever and offshore wind is a mess. 

But for every setback, there is a Sun Streams. This cluster of solar farms will cover more than 13 square miles of desert west of Phoenix. By 2025, it will provide enough electricity for roughly 300,000 homes, bringing Arizona’s largest utility closer to its goal of a zero-carbon grid.

The scale of the development, mostly owned by renewables company Longroad Energy, is part of a staggering surge in renewable energy. Driven by falling costs and better technology, growth in renewables has consistently exceeded expectations.

The big annual United Nations climate summit starts later this week in Dubai. What has become clear after years of talking is that few countries or businesses or people are willing to sacrifice much to limit climate change. The explosion of clean energy offers hope for cutting fossil-fuel use. 

“We are coming short on many dimensions, and we have an enormous amount of work to do,” said Rich Lesser, global chair of Boston Consulting Group. “But, equally important, our ability to make progress on the technology side has dramatically exceeded our expectations.”

In 2009, the International Energy Agency predicted that solar power would remain too expensive to compete on the grid. It continued to underestimate the growth of renewable energy and EVs. Last year, more than four-fifths of the world’s new power capacity was renewables, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency. 

Subsidies drove early growth in wind and solar, then technology refinements and large-scale manufacturing made them cheap. Lithium-ion batteries, which power cars and store electricity on the grid, plunged in price, too. Sun Streams will have enough batteries to power about 40,000 Teslas. 

Money is continuing to flow into these projects despite green energy’s headwinds. Longroad, the developer, said on Monday it raised $600 million of debt finance to expand its portfolio in a deal led by Apterra Infrastructure Capital, an affiliate of Apollo Global Management.

Research firm Rystad Energy estimates that we are on course to burn enough oil, gas and coal to heat the planet by between 1.6 degrees and 1.9 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, depending on how urgently governments act to speed up the transition. 

That is rosier than many other forecasts, though it exceeds the international target of 1.5 degrees that is seen as a comparatively safe limit. 

Rystad’s bullishness comes from the sun. Chief Executive Jarand Rystad said the spread of solar panels is compensating for lagging sectors such as offshore wind, which has been hobbled by cost overruns and snarled supply chains.  

BloombergNEF expects solar panels installed this year to add nearly 400 gigawatts of generating capacity. That is 4.5% of the generating capacity of the world’s power plants in 2022. On the current trajectory, transition bulls argue, it is a matter of when renewables erode fossil-fuel use, not if. 

The IEA expects demand for coal, gas and oil to peak this decade. To be sure, many fossil-fuel-producing companies and countries are betting on a long future for their products, and peak-oil talk has been wrong before. 

But it is also easy to underestimate the pace of change. Projections by the U.S. Energy Information Administration didn’t foresee how quickly renewable energy and natural gas would erode U.S. coal consumption. 

Much depends on China, where the growth of wind and solar coincides with new coal projects. Optimists say coal plants will act as backup in a system increasingly dominated by renewables. China leads the world in long-duration battery projects, according to BloombergNEF. 

Jarand Rystad says fossil-fuel power generation in China is close to a peak. “The tipping point is very soon,” he said.

The average cost of solar power fell nearly 90% between 2009 and 2023, with onshore wind declining by two-thirds, according to BloombergNEF. If costs continue to fall as installations increase, “the policy and finance spheres should prepare for a rapid disruptive transition,” wrote academics in the journal Nature Communications last month.

Similar declines are starting to reshape transportation. EV costs are falling, and infrastructure is improving. The total cost of ownership of small and midsize EVs is now cheaper than gasoline-powered vehicles in China and Europe and could hit that point in the U.S. next year, according to the Economics of Energy Innovation and System Transition project led by the University of Exeter.

In this view, renewables, batteries and EVs will become more popular as they get cheaper and better. Emerging green-energy technologies such as hydrogen, which is benefiting from government support and a surge in private investment, could follow the same path. 

“We have…underestimated sometimes inflection cost curves, and how quickly adoption happens,” said Kyung-Ah Park, head of ESG investment management and managing director of sustainability at Temasek, the Singapore state investment company with a portfolio valued above $280 billion. “I think you’re going to see more of that,” she added, saying other technologies will benefit from policy tailwinds.

Investors including Temasek put up 1.5 billion euros, or about $1.64 billion, for a low-carbon steel plant in Sweden in September as more money flows into decarbonizing industrial processes. H2 Green Steel will replace coal with hydrogen, produced using renewable electricity. Porsche plans to use H2’s steel in its cars. 

Investors are funding startups trying to produce better electrolyzers—machines that use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Companies are locking in future supplies of hydrogen. Fertilizer producer OCI Global is securing green hydrogen to make ammonia, oil major TotalEnergies plans to use it in refineries, and shipping giant Maersk is ordering low-emissions methanol fuel, some of which will be made using green hydrogen.

At a recent event in London, Bill Gates said innovation in carbon-intensive industries such as steel and cement has far exceeded his expectations since he launched his Breakthrough Energy initiative to fund climate tech in 2015. 

Thorny emissions problems now have competing possible solutions. One Breakthrough-backed startup, Boston Metal, recently raised $262 million to make green steel via a method that uses electricity rather than hydrogen. Two others, Rondo Energy and Antora Energy, are manufacturing thermal batteries that store electricity as heat—a way to power high-temperature processes while using up surplus renewable power. 

“The fact that solar and wind costs have come down so dramatically has opened up a whole new set of options,” said Dolf Gielen, an energy economist at the World Bank.

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/now-for-some-good-news-about-climate-27236f56?mod=hp_lead_pos10

Why many scientists are now saying climate change is an all-out ‘emergency’

Escalating rhetoric comes as new study shows there are just six years left to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius at current CO2 emissions rate

By Shannon Osaka, The Washington Post, Oct. 30, 2023

Bill Ripple had never been an activist.

The Oregon State University ecologist had spent his career wandering through the hills and canyons of Yellowstone National Park, tracking the health of wolves and other large carnivores. Nor was he particularly outspoken: As a college student, he was so concerned about taking a debate class that he considered dropping out and returning to his family farm.

But then, in 2018, Ripple saw pictures of a town called Paradise, Calif., completely destroyed by wildfire. Houses had disappeared in the blaze; all that remained were twisted hunks of metal and glass. Ripple started writing a new academic paper. He called it: “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.” He sent it to colleagues to see if anyone wanted to sign on. By the time the paper was published in the journal Bioscience in 2019, it had 11,000 signatures from scientists around the world — it now has more than 15,000.

“My life completely changed,” Ripple said. He is the subject of a 30-minute Oregon State documentary; he gets constant media requests and calls to collaborate from scientists around the world. Last week, he published a new paper on the state of the climate system.

It was called “Entering Uncharted Territory.”

“Scientists are more willing to speak out,” Ripple said. “As a group, we’ve been pretty hesitant, historically.” But, he added, “I feel like scientists have a moral obligation to warn humanity.”

After a few years of record-breaking temperatures and extreme weather events, Ripple’s experience is a sign of how climate scientists — who once refrained from entering the public fray — are now using strident language to describe the warming planet. References to “climate emergency” and “climate crisis,” once used primarily by activist groups like the British-based Extinction Rebellion or the U.S.-based Sunrise Movement, are spiking in the academic literature. Meanwhile, scientists’ communication to the media and the public has gotten more exasperated — and more desperate.

On Monday, scientists released a paper showing that the world’s “carbon budget” — the amount of greenhouse gas emissions the world can still emit without boosting global temperatures more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — has shrunk by a third. The world has only six years left at current emissions levels before racing past that temperature limit.

“There are no technical scenarios globally available in the scientific literature that would support that that is actually possible, or can even describe how that would be possible,” Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, told reporters in a call.

Tim Lenton, one of the co-authors on Ripple’s most recent paper and a professor of earth system science at the University of Exeter, said that 2023 has been filled with temperatures so far beyond the norm that “they’re very hard to rationalize.”

“This isn’t fitting a simple statistical model,” he said.

Lenton said he isn’t afraid to use terms like “emergency” or “climate and ecological crisis.”

It wasn’t always this way. In the 2000s and even early 2010s, most scientists shied away making any statements that could be seen as “political.” Jacquelyn Gill, a professor of climate science and paleoecology at the University of Maine, said that when she was doing her PhD in those years, senior academics warned her against deviating at all from the science when interacting with the media or the public.

“We were actively told if we start to talk about solutions, if we start to talk about the policy implications of our work, we will have abandoned our supposed ‘scientific neutrality,’” Gill said. “And then people will not trust us anymore on the science.”

Susan Joy Hassol, a science communication expert who has worked with climate researchers for years, says that even a decade ago, climate scientists were uncertain what their role was in communicating the dangers of rising temperatures. “I think at least some of them felt that scientists communicate through IPCC reports,” Hassol said, referring to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “‘We do our science, we publish, we put together these reports, and it’s kind of up to other people to listen.’”

Now, she said, that has changed. “We have reached this stage of crisis,” she said.

It isn’t just the fact that emissions aren’t going down — or that policy hasn’t responded quickly enough to the challenge. (Carbon dioxide emissions related to energy use have continued to climb, even after the brief downturn of the coronavirus pandemic.) As the impacts of climate change escalate, scientists say, their language has changed to meet the moment.

When it comes to terms like “climate emergency,” Gill says, “it’s a little bit of strategy and a lot of honesty.” While climate scientists are still discussing whether warming is accelerating, she added, “it’s clear the impacts are becoming more noticeable and in-your-face.”

Hassol said that the shift is simple. In the 2000s, she said, climate change wasn’t yet at the level of an emergency. She recalls a 2009 report called “The Copenhagen Diagnosis,” which analyzed climate science to date and made suggestions for how to reach net-zero carbon emissions. If world governments had acted swiftly, the world would have had to cut emissions only by a bit over 3 percent per year. “We called that the bunny slope,” Hassol recalled.

If, on the other hand, governments waited until 2020 to start the transition, cuts would have to be much steeper — up to 9 percent per year. “We called that the double-black diamond,” she said. Despite the brief respite in CO2 emissions during the pandemic, humanity’s trajectory has veered closer to the double-black diamond.

At the same time, many scientists realize that even the best communication in the world isn’t enough to overcome the inertia of a system based on fossil fuels — and the resistance of various oil and gas companies.

“The problem is not that scientists haven’t been communicating clearly enough,” Hassol said. “We communicated pretty darn clearly. Anyone who wanted to hear the message — it was there.”

Chico Harlan contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/10/30/climate-emergency-scientists-declaration/

How carbon prices are taking over the world

A quarter of global emissions are now covered, and the share is rising fast

The Economist, October 1, 2023

If global warming is to be limited, the world must forget about fossil fuels as fast as possible—that much almost everyone agrees upon. How to do so is the complicated part. Economists have long favoured putting a price on carbon, a mechanism that Europe introduced in 2005. Doing so allows the market to identify the cheapest unit of greenhouse gas to cut, and thus society to fight climate change at the lowest possible cost. Others, including many American politicians, worry that such schemes will provoke a backlash by raising consumer costs. Under President Joe Biden, America is instead doling out hundreds of billions of dollars to nurture green supply chains.

Yet, remarkably, the rest of the world is now beginning to look more European—with carbon prices spreading in countries both rich and poor. Take Indonesia, the world’s ninth-biggest polluter. Although it releases 620m tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent a year, with almost half its soaring energy consumption coming from coal, the country has green ambitions. On September 26th, at the launch of its first carbon market, Joko Widodo, the president, talked up its prospects as a hub for the carbon trade, and local banks duly snapped up credits from a geothermal-energy firm. The country also introduced a local emissions-trading scheme in February, which requires large coal-fired plants to buy permits for emissions above a threshold.

In short, even in countries better known as polluters than as green leaders, things are shifting. By the start of 2023, 23% of the world’s emissions were covered by a carbon price, according to the World Bank, up from just 5% in 2010 (see chart). The spread will only accelerate over the coming years as more countries come around to the advantages of carbon pricing, and existing schemes expand their reach. On October 1st the eu launched a groundbreaking policy under a dreary name. The “carbon border adjustment mechanism” (cbam) will, by 2026, start to levy a carbon price on all the bloc’s imports, meaning that European companies will have a strong incentive to push suppliers around the world to go green.

The spread of carbon prices is happening in three ways. First, governments are creating new markets and levies. Indonesia is one example. If all goes to plan, its market will eventually be combined with a carbon tax. In April Japan launched a voluntary national market for carbon offsets, which will work alongside an existing regional cap-and-trade policy in place in Tokyo. Participants, accounting for 40% or so of the country’s pollution, will be required to disclose and set emissions targets. Over time the scheme will become stricter, with auctions of carbon allowances for the energy industry due to begin in 2033. Meanwhile, Vietnam is working on an emissions-trading scheme to be established in 2028, in which firms with emissions above a threshold will need to offset them by buying credits.

Second, countries with more established markets are beefing up their policies. On September 24th China’s National Climate Strategy Centre announced that its emissions-trading scheme, which is the world’s largest, will move from only focusing on the carbon intensity of coal power plants, to focusing on both their intensity and total emissions. The scheme will be linked with a dormant carbon-credit market, allowing plants to meet their obligations by purchasing credits for renewable power, planting forests or restoring mangroves. Australia, which scrapped its original carbon price in 2014, has reformed a previously toothless scheme known as the “safeguard mechanism”. Since July large industrial facilities that account for 28% of the country’s emissions have had to reduce emissions by 4.9% a year against a baseline. Those that fail must buy carbon offsets, which trade at a price of around $20 a tonne.

The final way in which carbon markets are spreading is through cross-border schemes. The eu’s programme is by far the most advanced. In cbam’s pilot phase importers of aluminium, cement, electricity, fertiliser, hydrogen, iron and steel will need to report “embodied” emissions (those generated through production and transport). Then, from 2026, importers will have to pay a levy equivalent to the difference between the carbon cost of these embodied emissions in the eu’s scheme and any carbon price paid by the exporter in their domestic market. Free permits for sectors will also be phased out, and the housing and transport industries will be brought into the market.

Many of these schemes will take time to have an impact. Lots in Asia are flimsy, with prices set too low to produce meaningful change—well below the eu’s current price of €80-90 ($85-95), which is itself only approaching climate economists’ estimate of the social cost of carbon. For instance, half the coal plants covered by China’s emissions-trading scheme face a negative carbon price, meaning that they are in effect paid to burn the dirty fuel, since their emission intensity is below the national average, says Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a think-tank. The scheme also fails to create an incentive to shift from coal to other sources of power, he notes.

Across the world, activists criticise the ability of firms to use offsets to indulge in what they term “greenwashing”, where companies falsely present themselves as environmentally friendly. Some schemes also struggle to prove they have led to emissions reductions. In 2022 a team of academics, led by Andrew Macintosh of Australian National University, argued that reforestation used as carbon credits in Australia’s scheme either did not happen or would have happened irrespective of payments for offsets. An independent review has since recommended changes to how the scheme works.

Yet even carbon-pricing programmes that are limited will still help change behaviour, for the simple reason that they encourage the monitoring of emissions. After its launch two years ago, China’s emissions-trading scheme was dogged by fraud, with consultants alleged to have helped firms produce fake coal samples. A crackdown was announced by officials earlier this year, who are now satisfied with the quality of data. Despite the absence of a carbon price, American firms also face incentives to monitor emissions. President Biden has proposed a rule that all businesses selling to the federal government must disclose their emissions and have plans to reduce them. Many large firms have set voluntary net-zero targets as part of their marketing efforts. Apple, the world’s largest, has pledged to make its supply chain entirely carbon neutral by 2030.

And manufacturers around the world now face a still greater incentive to accurately track their carbon footprints: cbam. The eu’s ultimate goal is to tackle “carbon leakage”. Before cbam’s introduction, Europe’s carbon price meant that domestic industries faced an extra cost compared with those in countries with less ambitious decarbonisation plans. This gave importers an incentive to source material from abroad, even if these inputs were dirtier. To compensate for this, the eu handed out permits to industrial producers. These will now be phased out as cbam is phased in.

During the pilot phase, cbam simply presents an extra hurdle (what economists call a “non-tariff barrier”) for exporters to the bloc. To comply, European firms must report the embodied emissions of their imports. If such data do not exist, importers must use reference values provided by the eu. In order to nudge foreign companies to change their behaviour and prove that their emissions are lower, these are based on the emissions of the dirtiest firms in the bloc. From 2026 importers will have to pay the difference between the amount embodied emissions would be charged under the eu’s emissions-trading scheme and whatever carbon price the products pay at home.

Carbon border tariffs may themselves multiply over the coming years. In Australia the government recently announced a review into the country’s “carbon leakage”, which will examine such an option. In 2021 America and the eu paused a trade dispute, begun by President Donald Trump, by starting negotiations over a “Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminium”. America wants the two trading partners to establish a common external tariff on more polluting steel producers. Since America does not have a domestic carbon price, such a policy would flout the rules of the World Trade Organisation. But if the eu and America do not come to an agreement, the Trump-era tariffs and the eu’s retaliatory measures will be reinstated.

There is a domino effect to carbon pricing. Once an industry is subject to a carbon price its businesses will naturally want their competitors to face the same rules. Therefore owners of coal power plants will lobby to ensure that gas power plants operate on a level playing-field. Governments in exporting countries also have an incentive to ensure that their domestic firms pay a carbon price at home rather than a tariff abroad. If Asia’s factories are pressed to reduce their emissions anyway by schemes such as cbam, then its governments are leaving money on the table by not levying a carbon price of their own.

The question is whether the dominoes will fall fast enough. Almost no emissions-trading schemes are aimed at emissions from residential property or cars, for instance, where consumers would really feel the pain. In choosing to introduce carbon-pricing schemes, and then to make them broader and more muscular, policymakers have most economists firmly on their side—and are proceeding much faster than is commonly realised. But future policymakers will need to make such policies even more intrusive if the effects of climate change are to be minimised. For that to happen, they will have to win over voters, too.