The first month of the Biden presidency was a flurry of climate action, sweeping away the openly denialist intransigence of the Trump administration.
After re-entering the Paris Agreement and canceling the Keystone XL pipeline on Day 1, President Biden swiftly rolled out an array of climate-related executive orders calling on all agencies to factor climate into their work. Top among them was an order to “center the climate crisis in U.S. foreign policy and national security.”
As part of this order, officials from across more than a dozen intelligence agencies, including the CIA, will produce a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) over the next four months on the national and economic security impacts of climate change, a high level of analysis for topics designated as significant threats to the United States.
“Now more than ever we can see the healthier, more just and sustainable world that climate actions can deliver,” said one Harvard doctor.
The yellow vest protests throughout France in 2018 were sparked in part by an increase in fuel prices as a measure to fight climate change. | Alain Pitton/NurPhoto via Getty Images
A new report details what needs to happen to meet climate change goals.
2050 is not that far away. The middle of the century is as close to us in time as the 1980s. It’s also the goalpost for many of the world’s big climate change targets — President Joe Biden has said that he wants to make the whole US economy carbon neutral by then. And even before that, he wants to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from electricity production by 2035.
That means there isn’t much time to act, and the foundation for the middle of the century is being laid right now. The actions we take or don’t take to ramp up clean energy and reduce emissions will be particularly consequential for climate change. But what exactly needs to be done to get there?
The researchers found that shifting to clean energy is feasible and easily pays for itself by eliminating the immediate and long-term harms from burning fossil fuels.
But they also placed a great deal of emphasis on making sure the costs and benefits of the shift to clean energy are spread equitably. This is essential, they conclude, to getting buy-in from a wide coalition for the major changes needed to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, there could be strong resistance that would undermine progress.
The fear of consequences of the shift to clean energy has thwarted many proposals to address climate change over the years. For example, the cap and trade legislation that passed the House in 2009 and died in the Senate the next year was framed by opponents as a tax that would hamper the economy.
“We all recognize that past transitions have been rocky, and policy approaches that focus only on worker retraining have been inadequate,” said Stephen Pacala, chair of the committee that produced the National Academies report, during a Tuesday press conference. “We risk a yellow vest movement in this country that could derail the transition.”
A clean energy transition is not simply a matter of replacing coal power plants with solar and wind energy. It is also about making sure that the communities that depend the most on fossil fuel industries are compensated for losses to their economies and that those who have suffered in the shadows of smokestacks have an opportunity to seize the light.
The transition to clean energy has to happen fast. That makes it harder to prevent people from being left behind.
With Biden’s 2035 clean energy target rapidly closing in and his 2050 target soon after, the transition has to begin now. And swift changes in the energy system are possible; one only needs to look at the last decade. During that time, natural gas prices fell by half, wind energy prices dropped by 70 percent, lithium-ion battery prices sank 85 percent, and solar slid by 90 percent. However, those shifts were also disruptive to many communities and have soured them on further shifts in the energy system.
“When paired with increasing energy efficiency, this has led to a rapidly changing electric power grid system that is much less carbon intensive, but in which coal power plant retirements have devastated communities across my home state of West Virginia,” said West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the incoming chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee, during a hearing on Wednesday. “The energy transition has increased hardships in areas of the United States that have powered our nation for decades.”
These difficult experiences are part of the challenge in building the support for the large but necessary shifts in how the US powers, heats, and fuels its economy. And the risk of leaving people behind will grow as the urgency for rapid and aggressive action mounts.
That’s why a key first step in accomplishing this transition, according to the National Academies, is to establish a social contract for the transition.
“Maintaining public support through a three-decade transition to net zero simply cannot be achieved without the development and maintenance of a strong social contract,” according to the report.
A “social contract” in this case is defined as a broad agreement across all levels of government and society to shift to a carbon-neutral economy. It would get input from everyone affected by the transition, strengthened by additional goals like addressing historical inequities in pollution exposure and making sure that the financial upsides redound to disadvantaged communities.
Already that’s a tall order, and it might end up being more difficult than developing more energy-dense batteries or cheaper wind turbines.
The report isn’t clear on how exactly to build this base of support, but it calls for more input from people on the front lines of the energy transition — both those who stand to lose and those who stand to gain — into the policies needed to accelerate the move, whether that’s a carbon tax or a clean energy standard.
President Biden has already taken steps in this direction with a series of executive orders that emphasize clean energy, mitigating climate change, and addressing environmental racism. But he’s also already facing powerful opposition from the fossil fuel industry for his orders to limit fossil fuel development on public lands and revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.
The question now is whether the resistance to even more ambitious actions on climate change will overwhelm the momentum, and whether the proposals for a just transition prove convincing for those affected. All the while, the time to act is running out.
Themes make everything more fun, according to that friend who was always making you put on a costume for their parties pre-pandemic. Our newly elected president, Joe Biden, seems to agree. Possibly thinking some fun is just what the country needs right now, Biden dedicated each day of his first full week in office to a different theme, starting with “buying American” on Monday and racial equity on Tuesday. And Wednesday, it was climate day.
“We’ve already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis,” Biden said in a speech at the White House on Wednesday afternoon. “We can’t wait any longer. We see it with our own eyes, we feel it. We know it in our bones. And it’s time to act.”
Through three sweeping executive orders, Biden brought to fruition all kinds of promises he made on the campaign trail to address climate change. He directed federal agencies to stop subsidizing fossil fuels and to stimulate clean energy development. He hit the pause button on issuing new oil and gas drilling leases on federally owned lands and waters and requested a review of existing leases. (To be clear, that’s not a ban on fracking generally, which Biden can’t do unilaterally.) He hit the play button on developing a plan for the U.S. to fulfill its emissions-reduction obligation under the Paris Agreement. He hit fast-forward on getting solar, wind, and power transmission projects sited, permitted, and built.
“When I think of climate change and the answers to it, I think of jobs,” Biden said in his address before signing the orders.
To that end, he ordered all federal agencies to get behind the wheels of American-made electric vehicles and to procure carbon-free electricity. He kicked off research into how to pay farmers to sequester more carbon in their soils. He revived a conservation jobs program from the New Deal era under a new name — the Civilian Climate Corps — to plant trees, protect biodiversity, and restore public lands. Along those lines, he also pledged to conserve at least 30 percent of national lands and oceans by 2030, a nod to the biodiversity initiative known as 30×30 that more than 50 other countries have signed on to.
Transitioning to clean energy presents an existential threat to communities that rely on jobs and revenue from fossil fuels, and the order nodded to the idea of a “just transition.” Biden formed a new interagency group to coordinate investments in these communities and tasked it with advancing projects to clean up environmental messes, like abandoned coal mines and oil and gas wells.
The other side of a “just transition” is addressing the disproportionate health and economic burdens Black, brown, and Native American communities suffer from living near polluting infrastructure and in areas vulnerable to climate impacts, products of systemic racism. To that end, Biden took steps to put environmental justice on the agenda of every agency, including the Department of Justice. At the center of this strategy, he created an initiative called “Justice40,” which requires 40 percent of the benefits of climate-related spending to serve “disadvantaged communities.” (Which spending, which communities, and how these “benefits” will be measured have yet to be determined.)
And while Biden didn’t formally declare a climate emergency, as some activists had hoped, he did recognize the threat of climate change in another way. One of the orders elevates the climate crisis to a national security priority, reviving a memorandum issued at the end of Barack Obama’s second term that was swiftly revoked under Trump. To start, it orders Biden’s Lloyd Austin, Biden’s secretary of defense, to prepare a risk analysis on the security implications of climate change.
Climate change has been called a “threat multiplier” in that it intensifies all other national security concerns, like economic and geopolitical competition among nations, political extremism, and food and water insecurity. In a recent op-ed, Sherri Goodman, who served as the first deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security under the Clinton administration, gave several examples of how this is already happening around the world: Recruiters for the Islamic State are enlisting farmers who have lost their livelihoods due to drought. Drought is also exacerbating the poverty and the food insecurity driving migrants from Central America into the U.S. Fish are migrating too — into contested areas in the South China Sea, creating tensions for fishermen. In the Arctic, melting ice and permafrost are opening up new trade routes and creating a rush for resources.
“We need to understand better how to curb climate risk in the region, but also how that’s going to affect geopolitical competition, potentially with Russia, China, and others,” Goodman told Grist in an interview.
Requiring agencies to analyze national security threats through the lens of climate change could change how military resources are allocated and where foreign aid is delivered. It could also mean shoring up infrastructure in the United States to withstand extreme weather and sea-level rise. Goodman pointed to domestic threats like military resources strained by disaster response, bases threatened by rising water, and troops’ inability to train on extreme heat days.
Policymaking via executive order is a famously fraught endeavor, with orders vulnerable to legal challenges and subject to be overturned by a future administration. But even so, climate day delivered a lot at once, directing billions out of agency budgets to the cause — a fact that John Kerry, the new special presidential envoy for climate, acknowledged in a press conference on Wednesday morning about Biden’s climate plans. “But you know what? It costs a lot more if you don’t do the things we need to do,” he said. “It costs a lot more.”
Water at critically low levels across Turkey after lack of rainfall leads to most severe drought in a decade
Major cities across Turkey face running out of water in the next few months , with warnings Istanbul has less than 45 days of water left.
Poor rainfall has led to the country’s most severe drought in a decade and put the megacity of 17m people close to running out of water, according to Turkey’s chamber of chemical engineers. The Ankara mayor, Mansur Yavaş, said earlier this month the capital had another 110 days’ worth in dams and reservoirs.
The future of the world’s largest rainforest looks bleak. A new report for Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development concluded that the Amazon rainforest will collapse and largely become a dry, shrubby plain by 2064. Development, deforestation and the climate crisis are to blame, study author and University of Florida geologist Robert Toovey Walker found, UPI reported. Walker reviewed recent research, offering that heavy development in Amazonian[Read More…]
What’s left of the Rio Grande forms much of the US-Mexico border. (Photo: Shutterstock/Piotr Kalinowski)
2020 was alarming, unforgettable and traumatic—and not only because of COVID-19. Lethal natural hazards are increasing in frequency under our changing climate, and 2020 is a testament to that.
The year 2020 will no doubt go down in history for other reasons, but it is also on target to be one of the warmest on record. And as the climate warms, natural hazards will happen more frequently – and be ever more lethal.
We are early career researchers in meteorology, geography and environmental sciences, and each of us focus on a different hazard. We may not have been as in demand as our colleagues in virology departments, but we nonetheless had a particularly interesting and busy year. So while attention was often focused elsewhere, perhaps understandably, here are some of the meteorological extremes recorded in 2020.
Wicked wildfires
The year began with apocalyptic scenes of wildfires in Australia, fuelled by heatwaves. It was an image that would play out time and time again in 2020.
Through July and August, the west coast of the US was ablaze. The worst wildfire season in 70 years again coincided with a heatwave, with Death Valley in California recording America’s highest temperature for at least a century – maybe ever.
A forest fire near the city of Cuiaba, Brazil, August 2020. Rogerio Florentino / EPA
By September, the Amazon rainforest and the world’s largest wetland to its south, the Pantanal, were on fire. More than a quarter of those fires happened in forest that had not been disturbed by deforestation.
In September 2019, fires in the Amazon had made worldwide headlines. In 2020 there were actually 66% more fires in that month, but attention was elsewhere.
Savage storms
In November, super typhoon Goni made landfall in the Philippines while at maximum intensity, with sustained wind speeds of 195mph. One of the strongest storms to ever make landfall worldwide, Goni directly affected nearly nearly 70 million people, leading to at least 26 fatalities – a number that would have undoubtedly been higher if not for the evacuation of almost 1 million people.
But it wasn’t just wind that posed serious hazards in the western Pacific in 2020. Tropical storms Linfa and Nangka caused significant flooding across Vietnam, exacerbating the problems caused by an unusually active monsoon. More than 136,000 homes were flooded and more than 100 people died.
Two major hurricanes, Eta and Iota, caused significant damage in Honduras and Nicaragua. They made landfall in the region in November, just two weeks and 15 miles apart. This is a humanitarian crisis yet one that has received relatively little attention overseas.
A woman in Colombia looks out at the destruction caused by Hurricane Iota. Mauricio Duenas Castaneda / EPA
Frightening floods
The world’s deadliest flooding this year took place in east Africa in March through May. At least 430 lives were lost and an estimated 116,000 people were displaced in Kenya alone. The previous dry season was particularly wet, and was followed by above average rainfall during the “long rains” of March-May, meaning the vast Lake Victoria had twice its normal rainfall.
Africa on May 5 and 6, 2020: areas experiencing flood watch (red), warning (orange), or advisory (green) conditions. NASA / Margaret T. Glasscoe (JPL)
Though the rainfall was predicted in advance, locust outbreaks and COVID meant vulnerable people were already less able to handle the floods and secondary hazards such as widespread landslides and a cholera outbreak. The wet conditions were also ideal for further breeding of desert locusts. When it rains, it truly does pour.
Devastating droughts
Water crises caused by droughts and resource mismanagement were ranked as the fifth highest risk in terms of impact in the 2020 Global Risks Report – greater than infectious diseases and unemployment.
The severe drought across central and western US is the first billion-dollar drought of 2020, contributing to a record-breaking 16 weather and climate disasters with USD$1 billion or more in damages in the US in 2020 alone.
Conditions during 2020 represented the latest phase of a “mega-drought” over the past 20 years. By the peak in summer, a third of the US was in a moderate drought and much of the west was under severe to extreme drought. This coincided with abnormally hot summer temperatures and over 2 million acres of land burned nationwide, further enhancing drought conditions in a vicious cycle.
The Rio Grande river, a major source of water supply for southwest states, would have completely ceased to flow had water providers not decided to pause existing water diversion schemes. Other impacts included crop damage from one in 50 year dry soil moisture conditions and a rise in dust storms reminiscent of the 1930s Dust Bowl.
Drought conditions across the lower 48 states, on August 11 2020. NASA
The latest seasonal outlooks estimate that drought conditions may extend westwards and persist into 2021, complicating the recovery from a difficult year.
The northern hemisphere summer saw repeated heatwaves, culminating in mid-August. Japan, for instance, had record-breaking temperatures with cities across the country having multiple days at 40°C. In one week, more than 12,000 people were admitted to hospital with heat-related illnesses. Even the UK’s heatwave, accompanied by tropical nights, caused 1,700 excess deaths.
An all too familiar sight. Juan Carlos Caval / EPA
2020 was alarming, unforgettable and traumatic – and not only because of COVID-19. Lethal natural hazards are increasing in frequency under our changing climate, and 2020 is a testament to that.
Chloe Brimicombe, Elliott Sainsbury, Gabrielle Powell, and Wilson Chan CommonDreams
What’s left of the Rio Grande forms much of the US-Mexico border. (Photo: Shutterstock/Piotr Kalinowski)
A forest fire near the city of Cuiaba, Brazil, August 2020. Rogerio Florentino / EPA 
A woman in Colombia looks out at the destruction caused by Hurricane Iota. Mauricio Duenas Castaneda / EPA 
Africa on May 5 and 6, 2020: areas experiencing flood watch (red), warning (orange), or advisory (green) conditions. NASA / Margaret T. Glasscoe (JPL) 
Drought conditions across the lower 48 states, on August 11 2020. NASA 
An all too familiar sight. Juan Carlos Caval / EPA 