The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed directly below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic A New Call to End Gas and Oil Production by 2034
Dear Diary. With each passing minute we lose a small amount of our global carbon budget, or the amount of carbon pollution we can afford to put into the atmosphere before irreversible harm occurs to our climate before a set off tipping point factors are breached. For example, once Arctic Sea ice is gone during summer, the albedo of darker waters is such that continued melting will occur over Greenland, raising sea levels no matter how much we electrify every device in the future from that point on.
A new report from the University of Manchester indicates that rich countries must end gas and oil production by 2034 before our planetary carbon budget runs out. On this site I’ll always post as the main topic for the day any legitimate report indicating how bad and how fast climate change will occur. This one falls into the how fast department. What I’ve seen from various reports so far in association with running out of the global carbon budget falls in the range from about 2029-2050 for ending gas and oil production. In any case, our time for righting our climate ship is getting very short.
Please do what you can to convince your government representative that change is necessary and soon. Here is a new Washington Post discussing that new University of Manchester report and many more climate related items that can be found be hitting the following link:
The Climate 202 Analysis
Rich countries must end oil and gas production by 2034, report says
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By Maxine Joselow with research by Vanessa Montalbano March 22, 2022
Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! We wanted to give a shout-out to Tom Hinz, a reader from Bozeman, Mont., who sent us tips for decorating our desks, per our request yesterday. Tom wrote that “it seems totally appropriate to decorate the newsroom with as much foliage as possible,” and we couldn’t agree more. 🌳😂
Rich countries must end oil and gas production by 2034, report says
Rich nations must end oil and gas production within 12 years to give the world a shot at meeting the goal of the Paris agreement — and to give poor countries a “fair chance” to replace their lost income from fossil fuels, according to a report by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester released late Monday.
The report looked at the global carbon budget — the amount of carbon that the world can afford to emit without blowing past 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of global temperature rise, the more ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris accord.
It found that to have a 50 percent chance of meeting this target, developed countries must phase out oil and gas production by 2034. Developing countries would have until 2050 to end their production.
“This is what the science is clearly telling us. It’s a bit of basic arithmetic. That’s all it is,” Kevin Anderson, a co-author of the report and a professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester, told The Climate 202.
Anderson co-authored the report with Daniel Calverley, an independent climate researcher. Their work was commissioned by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a think tank focused on sustainability.
The researchers classified each country by its capacity to maintain a vibrant economy without revenue from oil and gas. Their main findings were:
- “Highest capacity” countries with average non-oil gross domestic product per person of $50,000 must end production by 2034, with a 74 percent cut by 2030. They include the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
- “High capacity” countries with average non-oil GDP of nearly $28,000 must end production by 2039, with a 43 percent cut by 2030. They include Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Kazakhstan.
- “Medium capacity” countries with average non-oil GDP of $17,000 must end production by 2043, with a 28 percent cut by 2030. They include China, Brazil and Mexico.
- “Low capacity” countries with average non-oil GDP of $10,000 must end production by 2045, with an 18 percent cut by 2030. They include Indonesia, Iran and Egypt.
- “Lowest capacity” countries with average non-oil GDP of $3,600 must end production by 2050, with a 14 percent cut by 2030. They include Iraq, Libya and South Sudan.
“This new study is a timely reminder that all countries must phase out oil and gas production rapidly with wealthy countries going fastest, while also ensuring a just transition for workers and communities that rely on it,” Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in a statement.
“Additionally, wealthy countries can and must provide the support and resources less wealthy countries need to make the same transition,” she added.
The politics
Scientifically speaking, the report is clear about the dangers of burning more fossil fuels. But politically speaking, the report’s recommendations could be a tough sell for world leaders, as demonstrated by the U.N.climate summit in Scotland last year.
At the high-profile summit, Denmark and Costa Rica led the formation of the Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance, a first-of-its-kind initiative that seeks to set an end date for new oil and gas production.
- The “core members” of the initiative are Costa Rica, Denmark, France, Greenland, Ireland, Quebec, Sweden and Wales.
- However, the four biggest oil-producing countries — the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Canada — have still not joined the alliance.
In the United States, the American Petroleum Institute, the nation’s largest oil and gas lobbying group, has urged the Biden administration to unleash fossil fuel production on federal lands and waters after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine roiled global energy markets.
Asked for comment on the report, a spokeswoman for the trade group said in an email: “The current crisis in Europe is a clear reminder that ensuring continued access to affordable, reliable energy while tackling the climate change cannot be an either/or proposition. We can and must do both, and as populations grow and economies expand, our industry will play a critical role for decades to come in meeting rising demand for affordable, reliable and cleaner energy around the world.”
Anderson, the co-author of the study, ultimately lamented the lack of political willpower to tackle climate change at the speed and scale that the science demands.
“Physics doesn’t care about ephemeral politics,” he said. “It just cares about [carbon dioxide] molecules.”
Related:
Here are some other “ET’s” notes recorded over the last couple of days:
Here is more climate and weather news from Thursday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)
Now here are some of today’s articles and notes on the horrid war on Ukraine:
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Guy Walton “The Climate Guy”