Planet Week: Five years of the Paris Agreement
Welcome to Planet Week, where we highlight the last week of environmental news and what it means for our Planet.
Welcome to Planet Week, where we highlight the last week of environmental news and what it means for our Planet.
Last week, Amazon became the largest corporate buyer of clean energy. Coca-Cola ranked the world’s worst plastic polluter — again. And the Planet saw its hottest November on record.
In case you missed it, here’s what else happened around the Planet:
Monday, December 7
Trump refuses to tighten soot standards
United States President Trump continues to leave his mark on environmental policy: Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency refused to tighten restrictions on soot — the nation’s most widespread deadly air pollutant.
The move goes against the EPA’s own research, which found that tightening restrictions could save roughly 12,200 lives a year.
“The Trump administration’s EPA has repeatedly and deliberately hid the harmful impacts of its rollbacks to environmental justice communities, meaning low-income and minority populations,” Amit Narang, a Public Citizen’s regulatory policy advocate, told The Washington Post.
Exxon postpones climate solution project
To avoid a climate catastrophe, we need all the solutions we can get, including carbon capture and storage — a technology that essentially sucks carbon out of the air and injects it into the ground.
Oil giant ExxonMobil was set to clean up its industry (and its image) by building a large carbon-capture facility in Wyoming. Now those plans and others are on hold indefinitely because of the COVID-19 pandemic, reports Bloomberg. Combined with a lack of government support and regulation, carbon capture looks dead in the water.
UK opens first charging-only station
In a huge step toward its planned country-wide ban on the sale of gas-powered vehicles, the United Kingdom opened its first all-electric car charging station.
This location has 36 electric vehicle chargers that can deliver up to 350 kilowatts of power — enough to provide 200 miles of range in 20 minutes — all at a lower price than gasoline. In the next five years, Gridserve, the company operating the station, plans to build 100 “Electric Forecourts”, which run entirely on renewable energy sources. The Verge has the full story.
Tuesday, December 8
Arctic Report Card signals bleak future
The Arctic is undergoing a complete biological transformation thanks to warming temperatures and melting ice, according to an annual assessment released last week.
This year in particular scientists saw some scary numbers: Average ocean temperatures over most of the Arctic Ocean were 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer in August 2020 than previous Augusts. Sea ice extent at the end of summer was the second-lowest in recorded history. And extreme fires contributed to record air temperatures and snow loss in northern Russia.
“Nearly everything in the Arctic, from ice and snow to human activity, is changing so quickly that there is no reason to think that in 30 years much of anything will be as it is today,” Rick Thoman, one of the editors of the assessment, told The New York Times.
Wednesday, December 9
UN: We’re on pace for 3 degrees of warming
This week, the United Nations released yet another report, the Emissions Gap Report, which finds that the Planet is on pace to exceed 3 degrees Celsius of temperature rise this century — over one degree higher than the limit set by the Paris Agreement to avoid a climate catastrophe.
But there is a silver lining. Countries can help close this “emissions gap” and put us within reach of Paris targets by planning green recoveries in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report highlights the need for countries to invest in zero-emissions technologies and infrastructure, reduce fossil fuel subsidies, halt the construction of new coal plants, and promote nature-based solutions. Carbon Brief gives a deepdive.
Does it seem like we’re getting bombarded by bad-news studies? This week in Planet Days, we summarize three recent reports and what they mean for our climate crisis.
Human-made materials outweigh all living things
Humanity’s footprint has been growing for decades. And this sprawling footprint is not only large — it’s heavy. Heavier, in fact, than all living things on Earth, according to a new study published in Nature.
Scientists determined that 2020 (give or take six years) is the crossover point, where all human materials — concrete, metals, plastics — officially outweigh Earth’s living biomass — plants, fungi, animals. The rate at which this trend is accelerating is mind-boggling: According to the authors, by 2040, human-made materials will weigh triple the Earth’s biomass.
“Some people think that humanity is just one species out of many and that we’re tiny and the world is huge. But our impact is not tiny,” co-author of the study Ron Milo told TIME. “Having a number really quantifies that.”
Saturday, December 12
Five years of the Paris Agreement
On Saturday, world leaders met at the Climate Ambition Summit — an event that marked five years since the signing of the Paris Agreement — to make pledges and renew commitments to avoid a climate crisis.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres opened the Summit, calling on all leaders “to declare a State of Climate Emergency in their countries until carbon neutrality is reached.” Despite a once-again urgent address, leaders made only small tweaks to their pledges, reports Reuters.
There were some bright spots, though: 15 countries shifted from “incremental” to “major” increases in their emissions pledges on Saturday, according to a press release. Additionally, on Friday, the U.K. said it would end government support for fossil fuel projects overseas, and the European Union confirmed its pledge of cutting 55% of emissions by 2030, reports The Guardian.
Lacking ambitious enough plans, Brazil, Russia, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. were not invited to speak at the Summit.
Bonus
Pygmies live to see another fire season
By the end of the Austrian fire season earlier this year, nearly three billion animals had been affected. Scientists feared pygmy possums, one of the smallest possums in the world, had all but disappeared on Kangaroo Island due to the blazes — until recently.
“This capture is the first documented record of the species surviving post-fire,” Pat Hodgens, a fauna ecologist, told The Guardian Australia. “The fire did burn through about 88% of that species’ predicted range, so we really weren’t sure what the impact of the fires would be, but it’s pretty obvious the population would have been pretty severely impacted.”
Have a great week,
Brandon and Sam