Carbon Dioxide Will Persist in the Atmosphere Long After Current Decision Makers Have Left Their Roles: On Ethical Grounds, Young People Should Have a Say

Even if today’s college students live to be 100 years old, more than half of the CO2 released into the atmosphere during the four years they are in college will still be present there at the end of their lives – warming the planet and contributing to extreme events, like droughts, floods, and storms all the while – long after the decision makers behind those investment choices will have left office. The college students across the US who are arguing that their education should not be funded by actions that diminish the health of the world in which their future will unfold have a strong case, supported by the basic physics of the climate.

The New York Times has a front page article about the growing number of student-led campaigns at colleges and universities across the US calling on board’s of trustees to divest of investments in fossil energy companies. According to the article, some college administrations are listening to the students and taking steps to eliminate fossil fuel companies from their investment portfolios. Others are, so far, not agreeing with the link the students are making: that fossil fuel investment undermines the very future colleges and universities seek to prepare young people for.

As students around the US find their voice and begin to insist that their generation’s stake in the long-term future be taken into account in investment decisions at educational institutions, we, as we like to do on timely issues at Climate Interactive, ran the numbers, asking a simple question:

Just how long will the fossil fuel related decisions made by college Presidents and Board of Trustees today continue to impact the lives of current students?

Another Report Says We Are Steering the Planet Into a Dangerously Hot Future

Ahead of climate talks in Doha, Qatar next week, the UN Environmental Programme has released the third Emissions Gap Report. Climate Interactive Co-Director Beth Sawin is once again one of the report’s authors. Like the World Bank report released last week, this report reminds us that reducing our emissions is paramount.

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, summarized the Emissions Gap report by saying, “This report is a reminder that time is running out, but that the technical means and the policy tools to allow the world to stay below a maximum 2 degrees Celsius are still available to governments and societies”. The reminder that the gap between a 2 degree future and where we are now is still widening, and that countries are still putting forward targets that are far short of what is needed is sobering.

The Emissions Gap report goes beyond the stark assessments of where we are relative to where we need to be, by identifying sectors where dramatic reduction can be made to bridge the gap.

Copenhagen Goal Within Reach, But Only With Global Action Far Beyond Today’s Most Ambitious Actions

Even if the world also has sustained success eliminating deforestation, reducing emissions of non-CO2 greenhouse gasses and improving energy efficiency, new investment in fossil fuel infrastructure can’t occur much beyond 2015 in order to maintain a 50% chance of limiting temperature increase to 2°C in 2100.  Having a higher probability of achieving the 2°C goal or keeping these even odds of meeting the goal but delaying the end of the era of fossil fuel investment would require additional measures such as shutting down already-constructed fossil-fuel-using infrastructure before the end of its useful lifetime, further reducing energy demand, or achieving so called negative emissions, where CO2 is removed from the atmosphere and sequestered.

The goal of the Copenhagen Accord – to limit temperature increase to 2°C is still in reach – but the actions to get there are far beyond what we see being implemented around us today.

A thought experiment with our En-ROADS global energy model makes this clear.

What if, in 2015, we eliminated any new investment in fossil-fuel-using infrastructure, anywhere in the world?  En-ROADS shows a surge in creation of new low-carbon energy sources, and an improvement in the global temperature by 2100 compared to ‘business as usual’. Rather than the 4.5°C of temperature increase under ‘business as usual’, the scenario results instead in 3.2°C of warming.

In this thought experiment using the global energy system model En-ROADS, there is no new investment in fossil fuel using infrastructure after 2015, but the long lifetime of the existing infrastructure means that fossil fuel use continues well into the century.

Eliminating new fossil-fuel-using power plants, automobiles, and factories just a few years from now sounds very drastic, of course, so why don’t we see more impact on the global temperature? The figure to the left helps explain why: even though no new infrastructure is built after 2015, the existing infrastructure lives on (and continues to produce CO₂ emissions throughout its lifetime), only fading away in the second half of the century. (See the black wedge of energy from coal and the red wedge from oil in the figure).

Seeing a Bigger Picture in the Great Lakes: Systems Mapping for Powerful Insights

By Beth Sawin

A team from Climate Interactive recently used systems thinking tools to steer a group of Great Lakes leaders through these powerful questions on the health of the lakes:

How do the interconnected challenges of climate change, invasive species, and nutrient run-off impact the ecological and social health of the North American Great Lakes region?

UNFCCC Submissions Due February 28th: C-ROADS Assistance Available!

In anticipation of the Feb. 28th deadline, modeling and simulation analysis is available from Climate Interactive to support parties and observers who are preparing submissions with suggestions for increasing the level of ambition of the global climate negotiations.

Last December when the  Durban Platform was agreed to at COP-17 it included a call for negotiating parties and observer organizations to  submit “their views on options and ways for further increasing the level of ambition” in the global climate negotiations.

As one of many organizations around the world highlighting the scientific imperative for increasing that ambition we were pleased to see that solicitation, and now, with the deadline for submissions less than one month away, we are happy to announce that, during the month of February, Climate Interactive’s analytical team will be setting aside some time to assist those parties and observer organizations who are preparing submissions where scenario modeling could help clarify the submission or add rigor to the argument.

We can either help get your organization or delegation set up with the latest version of our freely available C-ROADS simulation in order to run your own analysis or, for a limited number of cases, we can provide customized analysis to support your submission. To see some examples of the types of questions that can be asked and answered with C-ROADS, take a look at our Climate Scoreboard pages, or some of our analysis of the Durban talks themselves.

To learn more and discuss what might be possible please contact CI co-director, esawin(at)climateinteractive.org

Cheap Natural Gas Has the Potential to Weaken a Critical Feedback Loop Needed for the Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy

Early adoption of renewable energy helps jump start the transition to a low-carbon economy via a reinforcing feedback loop. Anything that diminishes early adoption of renewable energy – including competition from ultra-cheap fossil fuels -  slows down this  transition.

Recent reports that unusually low natural gas prices in the US may be weakening homeowner’s enthusiasm for investing in solar panels are  a cause for concern, especially considering a dynamic we have begun exploring with En-ROADS (our interactive scenario-testing tool that explores the dynamics of creating a low-carbon economy). In En-ROADS, just as described in the latest news accounts, when there is a lot of cheap gas around the growth in renewables tends to be slower.

On the surface, these reports seem to be telling the tale of a one-time event: cheaper gas this year means fewer new solar installations this year. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story.

Consider the  virtuous cycle shown in the diagram above: with more units of solar  installed there is more learning by doing. Costs  of solar fall, leading to greater attractiveness of solar and even more units of solar installed, and so on.

But here’s the glitch – if the falling cost of natural gas makes  the attractiveness of solar decline, then the early installations that launch the virtuous cycle falter, and the whole reinforcing process can lose momentum.

The impact of cheap gas is NOT  just a smaller number of new installations this year; it’s a future loss in the speed at which solar becomes more affordable. Think of money not invested in a retirement account; it’s not just that the balance is lower, but that a lower balance earns interest more slowly.

Transparent, Real-Time Analysis Works

Climate Interactive is a small team with big goals.

One of our founding goals was to offer rapid turnaround analysis of the most important climate and energy issues, and to make that analysis available ‘open source’. In doing so, we reasoned, we’d be boosting the effectiveness of the many, many parties –- from negotiators to civil society leaders — who are calling for climate policy ambitious enough to be consistent with the latest science. And, if such groups found our analysis helpful and clarifying, we assumed they would share it with their networks and constituencies, reaching more people than our small team ever would on its own.

Over the years, from Copenhagen to Cancun, this has been a productive formula for us, and it paid off again in Durban, where we analyzed the impact of waiting until 2020 to increase the ambition of pledges.

• The Washington Post covered our analysis on Dec 6th: U.N. climate talks move slowly as new studies urge more dramatic emissions cuts;
• Out of dozens of side events offered that day, the analyses from our team was included in the ECO – the Climate Action Network handout, widely read across the COP;
• In a youth briefing Jonathan Pershing was asked: “The current commitments that are on the table put us on a trajectory to around 4.3°C according to analysis by Climate Interactive.  Are you suggesting that the commitments that have been put on the table are good enough and we should now look at 2020 and beyond?”;
• Civil society groups 350.org and Avaaz organized a global online petition drive that got 700,000 signatures in 48 hours. The petition said: “The world cannot afford delay on climate action. I urge you to abandon your proposal to postpone a binding global agreement until 2020, and stand with vulnerable countries around the world by stepping up your ambition and accelerating your timeline for bold climate action.”;
• The “Climate Progress” blog of Joe Romm reposted our findings; and
• Our analysis was shared within the TckTckTck network (a global alliance of more than 300 civil society groups). It also was included in a joint press release from Greenpeace and WWF.

While celebrating our role in these remarkable events, we also soberly acknowledge that, in the end, Durban did not increase the ambition of 2020 pledges to be in line with a feasible 2°C pathway. Our efforts helped the world to see, without any illusion, what was being decided, but we didn’t get a better deal.

So, we’ll be keeping at it, in 2012 and beyond.  We’ll be ‘adding up’ current pledges, and we’ll be offering analysis of the ‘how-to’ of the  transition to a low carbon economy, which is, after all, the fundamental re-orientation needed to deliver a liveable climate. As long as there are leaders out there calling for policy that matches the science, we’ll be doing what we can to offer analysis that helps them make their case.

Durban Talks Open the Door to a Future Global Legal Agreement, But Produce No Immediate Strengthening of Pledges

With the close of COP-17, parties to the UNFCCC maintained the same inadequate emissions reduction pledges, thus committing the world to a more costly and risky path forward than is needed given the immediate availability of cost-effective measures to reduce emissions and begin the transition to a low-carbon economy.

As our previous analysis showed, postponing the adoption of more ambitious targets until after 2020 would commit countries to rates of CO₂ emissions reductions after 2020 far larger than what has been seen either historically or in energy system model projections.  By failing to agree to a mechanism to increase the ambition of mitigation targets before 2020, the decisions made at COP-17 place unnecessary burdens  on future generations who will have to work much harder and endure  much greater costs and risks as a result of these decisions.

Without new pledges for emissions reduction on the table, our Climate Scoreboard analysis projects future global temperature increases far above the global goal of 2°C (3.6 °F) , pointing towards temperature increase of 4.3°C (2.6 – 6.9°C) or 7.7°F (4.6 – 12.3°F) by the end of the century.

Even though countries were unable to agree to increase the ambition of 2020 pledges, many cost effective mitigation opportunities exist today; and the costs will fall as low-carbon, efficient technologies develop and scale. Commitments lacking the necessary ambition delay these cost reductions and the maturation of the technologies needed to make a sustainable, low-carbon economy a reality.

To Avoid Expensive and Disruptive Rates of Emissions Reduction In Coming Decades Parties Must Increase the Ambition of 2020 Pledges Today

To see a reposting on Joe Romm’s Climate Progress blog, click here. And a corroborating report by ClimateWorks Foundation here plus another by Climate Analytics here.

Postponing commitment to ambitious targets until after 2020 would commit countries to rates of CO2 emissions reductions in decades beyond 2020 that exceed those typically seen in the current generation of energy system models, making future efforts to limit temperature increase to 2°C more expensive and disruptive than needed. Without deeper reductions than are currently pledged by 2020, future generations will have sustain very rapid rates of reduction in emissions.

In the press and in the halls of the climate negotiations some parties, including the US, have been saying that 2020 pledges are essentially fixed in the form of the voluntary commitments made under the Cancun Agreement, and that current political and economic pressures mean that the time for more ambitious commitments to emissions reductions can come only after 2020.

There Doesn’t Have to be an Emissions Gap

Following on last year’s Emissions Gap report which was influential in the Cancun COP-16 climate negotiations, Climate Interactive Co-Director, Beth Sawin,  again this  year contributed to a UNEP/European Climate Foundation assessment, Bridging the Emissions Gap, which was released in advance of COP-17.

As with last year’s report, the Bridging the Gap Report looks across various studies of the emissions reduction pledges within the UNFCCC  and finds that a significant gap still exists between expected emissions under the pledges and emissions consistent with a likely chance of limiting temperature increase to 2°C. The report include CI’s Climate Scoreboard as one of the 10 modeling studies assessing the pledges.

Even in the most optimistic scenarios examined in the report, the gap between expected emissions under the pledges and the 2020 emissions consistent with limiting temperature increase to 2°C was 6 Gtons CO2e. Under less optimistic scenarios the gap could be as large as 11 Gtons CO2e.

The new report goes beyond quantifying  the Emissions  Gap to also look across studies of technologically feasible options for reducing emissions and finds a package of measures, from increasing the rate of improvement in energy efficiency to scaling up low carbon fuel supplies, for reducing the 2020 Emissions Gap to zero.

Just as Climate Interactive is finding with our new En-ROADS model of the transition to a low carbon economy, Bridging the Emissions Gap shows that while the world is currently facing a serious gap between the pledges of nations and the level of emissions reductions that are needed, the gap is actually one of determination and political will, not one of physical or technological constraint.