Beth Sawin Illuminates the Emissions Gap For U.S. Media

Climate Interactive Co-Director Beth Sawin is one of the co-authors of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report, which is getting widespread coverage, as eyes focus on this year’s climate negotiations hosted by the tiny oil-rich middle eastern country of Qatar. Below is coverage of the negotiations featuring Climate Interactive from Live Science. Beth was also interviewed yesterday by radio station KUOW in Seattle. 

What Can Climate Talks in Doha Accomplish?

Published on Live Science 26 November 2012, written by Wynne Parry

The international community’s attempts to address global warming, and its potentially devastating consequences, resume in earnest today (Nov. 26), as delegates gather in Doha, Qatar.

This is the latest round in two decades of U.N. climate talks that have sought to stem rising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which climate scientists warn will lead to devastating sea-level rise, changes in weather and other natural systems.

Our Three Big Impacts

By Drew Jones, Beth Sawin, and Stephanie McCauley

What has our impact been?

Eight people, dozens of partners, five years, and two simulation models — what does it add up to?

Here’s our informal assessment of how much of a contribution we’ve made to the global effort to curb climate change

Together with our partners, we see three big areas. We have:

Christiana Figueres with Beth Sawin at the UN Climate Talks in Bonn, April 2010

1. Kept things honest. Our mentor Dana Meadows operated out of the theory that societies will only find fundamental solutions to the challenges we are facing when the escape hatches of wishful thinking have been closed, and we’ve been working hard to follow her lead. When, in the first week of the Copenhagen summit, some global organizations began proclaiming that success was close at hand, we re-grounded our global audience in biogeochemical realities and watched the “spinning” subside, with global effects. When, during the Durban summit, some parties argued that current pledges were good enough to meet climate goals, we ‘ran the numbers’ with clarity and precision, providing solid backing to the young people and climate advocates who were questioning such easy assertions (view our Durban results blog post). More recently, when voices rose to declare an energy miracle or natural gas bridge solution to climate, while dismissing efficiency and renewables, we ran the numbers, changed minds, and noted that the words of key thought-leaders changed as well.

“[Climate Interactive’s] software speaks numbers, not spin – and in the end it’s the numbers that count.” — Bill McKibben in the UK Guardian

2. Improved policy design by top decision-makers. We have helped powerful leaders advocate for sound long-term policy. We have made John Kerry better armed with scientific insight, Jonathan Pershing more exact, China’s climate ministry more able to reach targets, EU’s Jacquie McGlade more clear, Bill McKibben more numerate, international analysts empowered, Hal Harvey supported by modeling, the media more informed and millions of activists grounded in solid science.

The hundreds of C-ROADS users can be found worldwide in more than 70 countries.

3. Motivated, inspired, and empowered, creating new possibilities (while avoiding manipulation and zealotry). We have motivated action and reduced emissions through the hundreds of thousands of global professionals and citizens who have taught others with our tools (C-ROADS, C-Learn online, Scoreboard, iPad Pathways app, Climate Momentum, Bathtub), shown others our videos (Beth Sawin on the Scoreboard, Drew Jones on TEDx, Travis Franck’s webinar, John Sterman’s lecture), led their kids through our first or second science museum interactive exhibits, or lived a successful global climate deal through World Climate, our mock-UN “serious game” played around the world.

Not bad for eight people, dozens of partners, five years, and two simulation models. Let’s see what is next.

Please be in touch if you’d like to support our emerging work.

China-U.S. Collaboration Launches Powerful New Simulation

For over two years Climate Interactive has been working with Tsinghua University in China to create a learning tool to model the climate goals of Chinese provinces. Because of our work with Tsinghua, they have been able to provide the Chinese government with a new easy-to-use tool in order to meet their climate and energy goals.

China has committed to a 40-45% decrease in the carbon intensity of the overall Chinese economy by 2020. In order to meet this goal the Chinese government and provincial leaders set targets for the provinces to adjust their GDP, energy intensity, and fuel mix. To create true engagement from the leaders at all levels, however, there needed to be a shared understanding of how to reach these goals, and methods for calculating progress.

In order to create a tool to track the progress of the Chinese provinces, a team led by Professor Zhang Xiliang at Tsinghua University began using system dynamics models, the technology of which grew out of MIT Sloan School of Management and is behind C-ROADS. The system dynamics models are a contrast from the spreadsheet models that were used to set the targets, which are not geared towards flexible “what if” testing. What they sought was a user-friendly, interactive simulation such as C-ROADS, which has been used by multiple governments as part of the UN climate change negotiations. Professor Zhang’s Low Carbon Economy team had the data, an understanding of the Chinese energy system, and a staff of modelers to create the tool, but their partnership with the Climate Interactive team enabled them to put these elements together to create a successful model.

What we do and why are we doing it: a radio interview with Climate Interactive

What is it that keeps an organization like Climate Interactive ticking? Co-directors Drew Jones and Beth Sawin, along with team member and MIT professor, John Sterman, joined Radio Green Talk host Diana Dehm to discuss this and elaborate on why we provide the tools that we do.

Check out the interview here.

During the program John discusses how we use role playing to help people viscerally experience some of the dynamics at the climate change negotiations in the World Climate Exercise. As Drew put it,

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.

Beth Sawin On Hurricane Irene from Vermont Bioneers: The Big Four Lessons

One lesson from Vermont's response to Irene is that the fabric of community and caring is a critical resource for recovery after a disaster. Shown here are volunteers at a damaged farm in Randolph, VT.

At the end of August, Vermont was hit by catastrophic flooding as result of Hurricane Irene, which dumped six inches of rain on already saturated hillsides around the state.

On Saturday, I (Beth Sawin) was one of two panelists (along with Bill McKibben via Skype) asked to reflect upon lessons Irene and Vermont’s response to it might offer to all of us, as a part of the Vermont Beaming Bioneers Conference in Montpelier, VT.

I found myself with four lessons to offer:

1. Like it or not, we are entering a new era; it’s time to begin expecting the unexpected.

2. Given that there are limits to how much and how quickly communities, families, businesses and governments can adapt, we need to work harder than ever to eliminate heating-trapping greenhouse gas pollution. As members of impacted communities we have direct experience and the moral authority that we can bring to the climate and energy policy debate in the US and internationally.

3. Being prepared for extreme weather events may require new technologies and new infrastructures, but it also calls on, and can be served by, good old-fashioned community building. from strong local businesses to effective volunteer organizations, a lot of what was most helpful in the aftermath of Irene was a pre-existing web of connection and caring.

4. The window of opportunity for adaptation is during ‘normal times,’ not after a disaster. It is in our day to day planning and investment decisions that we make our world more resilient and better prepared for disaster. Immediately after a disaster the need to get ‘back to normal’ makes it very difficult to be innovative and experimental.

Tropical Storm Irene Hits Close to Home

Source: Burlingon Free Press Facebook

Climate Interactive Co-Director Beth Sawin (who is coping with life in newly flooded Vermont – she and family are okay BTW) posted a timely perspective on this week’s Irene disaster on Romm’s Climate Progress blog and Burlington Free Press. We’re sharing it here as well.

My daughter, Jenna, will miss her first day of high school on Wednesday. Woodstock, Vermont, where her school lies, is essentially shut down by flooding. The covered bridge in Quechee I drove across just last week is ruined, and the store where I bought hurricane provisions is just now emerging from floodwaters. Across the state, 13 towns are stranded, 250 roads are impassable and more than 30 bridges are closed.

Okay, Irene was no Katrina. My family is fine. But, as a builder of climate simulations that connect burning fossil fuels to destruction like Irene’s, my ‘day job’ in the ‘real world’ and my home-life in a beautiful corner of Vermont finally collided.

Mexican Environment Minister Elvira – “Emissions Gap Report Will Be One of the Most Influential Documents Since AR4″

At a press conference at the UNFCCC climate talks in Mexico today UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner formally presented the Emissions Gap Report to the government of Mexico, and panelists including Mexican Environment Minister Juan Rafael Elvira, UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Chris Huhne, and UN Ambassador from Grenada,  Dessima Williams, spoke about the importance of the report in helping the world achieve the goal of limiting temperature increase to 1.5 or 2.0°C.

You can watch the press conference here, what follows below are few key themes.