Billionaires aim for Global Climate Action
GOVERNORS, mayors, CEOs and billionaire philanthropists gather in San Francisco this week to take aim at global warming as the world awakens to the all-too-real threat of climate change run wild.
The three-day Global Climate Action Summit, which kicks off today, will see hundreds of cities, regions and companies worth hundreds of billions pledge to run on solar or wind power within a few decades.
California’s governor and host Jerry Brown, whose crusade for clean energy started in the 1970s, set the tone by approving landmark legislation Monday that commits his state to purging CO2 from its electricity grid by 2045.
“We all have the opportunity and the obligation to do our part to combat climate change,” he told AFP hours after signing the bill into law.
Even heavy industry giants in emerging economies such as UltraTech Cement and Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers in India, and South Africa chemicals multinational Sasol, have joined the clean energy-only bandwagon.
Major cities will likely announce greenhouse gas emissions trending downward, and governors will unveil partnerships supporting indigenous efforts to sustainably manage tropical, carbon-dense forests.
Nearly 1,000 institutional investors managing trillions in assets have, at least in part, turned their backs on planetwarming fossil fuels.
“This summit is going to be a showcase for the whole world in terms of climate action,” said Ethan Elkind, head of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley.
California’s electricity pledge “shows that it is possible to decarbonize while continuing to grow your economy and produce jobs at the same time,” he told AFP.
But the flurry of promises and promissory notes run headon into two hard and unyielding realities, one political and the other rooted in the physics of a warming planet.
A UN tally of all the local carbon-reduction initiatives so far reveals “encouraging potential” but will ultimately fall short without deeper commitments from national governments, UN Environment chief Erik Solheim said Monday.
CO2 emissions — after remaining stable for three years, raising hopes that they had peaked — rose in 2017 to historic levels.
“If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change,” UN SecretaryGeneral Antonio Guterres said in a speech Monday.
The 196-nation Paris climate pact inked in 2015 calls for capping global warming as “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and vows to strive for a 1.5 C limit if possible.
But even if nations honor voluntary carbon-cutting vows submitted in an annex to the treaty, we are trending toward a 3.5 C world, a scenario scientists say would pull at the fabric of civilization.
With only a single degree Celsius of warming since the pre-industrial benchmark, our planet is already coping with a crescendo of climate impacts including deadly droughts, erratic rainfall, and storm surges engorged by rising seas.
US President Donald Trump opted out of the Paris Agreement, and has repealed many climate policies of his predecessor, Barack Obama.