Earth Hour: Millions participate in global switch-off to raise climate change awareness

26.03.18

News

Earth Hour: Millions participate in global switch-off to raise climate change awareness

Millions of people in countries around the world switched off their lights for Earth Hour to raise awareness about climate change and other environmental issues, reports the Independent. Earth Hour has spread to more than 180 countries, since beginning in Sydney in 2007, is meant to “inspire millions to take action for our world”, according to WWF, which manages the event. Key landmarks participating this year included the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Pyramids of Egypt and New York’s Empire State Building. Indian environment minister Harsh Vardhan said earth hour is “an opportunity to adopt a shifting of the consumption culture, and behaviour change towards sustainability”. Earth hour was widely covered in the media, including in Telegraph, the Washington Post, Time, the Associated Press, the Hill, the Express and BusinessGreen. The Guardian carried readers plans and inspirational messages of how they are going further than the hour.

Minister cites climate change in rejection of opencast coal mine

Guardian

The government has rejected plans for an opencast coal mine in Northumberland on the grounds that it would exacerbate climate change, reports the Guardian. Communities secretary Sajid Javid said he had concluded a new coal mine at Highthorn should not go ahead. The decision was the first time the UK government had rejected a planning application citing climate change as the reason, according to environmental lawyers ClientEarth.

Shell faces shareholder push on climate change goals

Financial Times

Activist shareholders in Royal Dutch Shell are preparing a renewed push for the firm to adopt more ambitious goals for tackling climate change, reports the Financial Times. Shell is expected to face a shareholder resolution calling at its annual meeting in May for a radical shift away from fossil fuels. Climate activists are disputing Shell’s claim that its goal is in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change: “The ambitions announced by Shell are inconsistent with the Paris agreement, in particular when taking into account expected global energy demand growth,” said Mark van Baal of Follow This, the shareholder group that has submitted a resolution calling for more aggressive targets. A Sunday Timesfeature looks at how Shell is preparing for a world where its main product is much less in demand. Ben van Beurden, chief executive of Shell, has committed to investing as much as $2bn (£1.4bn) a year into a range of new businesses, from renewable power generation to charging points for electric cars, it notes.

Pepper skies with salt to slow global warming

The Times

The latest notion for slowing the pace of global warming, proposed at a scientific conference in Texas, would involve dusting the atmosphere above the Earth’s surface with a fine layer of table salt, writes Times science correspondent Oliver Moody on an article trailed on the front page of the paper. The proposal is similar to some other geoengineering proposals in its function to help Earth reflect more of the Sun’s rays. “The tricky part [for doing this] is finding a substance that would be both cheap and safe enough. … It occurred to [Robert Nelson, a senior researcher at the US Planetary Science Institute], that one of the most reflective and easily available substances he could get his hands on would be sodium chloride, or ordinary table salt.” A separate article in San Francisco Chronicle looks at a geoengineering experiment which aims to sprinkle reflective sand on a frozen lake in Alaska to try to stop it from melting. A study published last year, covered by Carbon Brief found artificially cooling the planet through solar geoengineering could have some dramatic side effects if it is carried out in an unregulated way.

Destruction of nature as dangerous as climate change, scientists warn

The Guardian

Human destruction of nature is rapidly eroding the world’s capacity to provide food, water and security to billions of people, according to a major new UN-backed report. “The time for action was yesterday or the day before,” said Robert Watson, the chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) which compiled the research. Worldwide the biggest threats to nature are from habitat loss, invasive species, chemicals, and climate change, the report found. The authors stressed the close connection between climate change and biodiversity loss; by 2050, they believe climate change could replace land-conversion as the main driver of extinction. The new report was widely covered, including in Reuters, DeSmogBlog, Associated Press, the Express and the MailOnline.

Lack of chargers delays switch to electric cars

The Times

Demand for electric vehicles is being held back by “massive gaps” in charging station locations across the country, according to a new survey by HSBC, reports the Times. While around 47,000 plug-in cars were registered last year, only 173 public charging points became available, the survey shows. The report found there were nearly 17,000 people in the UK for every public charge point, a ratio it said needed “urgent” attention. A separate article in theSunday Times looks at whether the UK can generate enough power to meet the soaring demand for energy due to electric cars charging overnight. It also looks at a National Grid project exploring how to upgrade services’ power cables to cope with a surge in demand from electric vehicles and help to reduce range anxiety. It notes that National Grid thinks flexible and smarter use of power will likely mean that peak demand rises by only 4GW to 10GW. “That would involve spreading demand so there is not a huge surge at 5.30pm when people arrive home from work and plug in their cars.”

Comment

The Paris Climate Accords Are Starting to Look Like Fantasy

New York Magazine

“Remember Paris?,” asks David Wallace-Wells in the New York Magazine “It was not even two years ago that the celebrated climate accords were signed – defining two degrees of global warming as a must-meet target and rallying all the world’s nations to meet it – and the returns are already dispiritingly grim.” Wallace-Wells goes on to discuss recent findings from the International Energy Agency announced that carbon emissions grew 1.7% in 2017, as well as the recent “raft of distressing papers about what beyond compliance is required to stay below 2C”. In particular, he points to one article in the new issue of Nature Climate Change which tried to quantify the suffering that would be avoided if the planet were kept below 1.5C of warming, rather than 2C. “Their answer: 150 million more people would die from air pollution alone in a two-degree-warmer world than in a 1.5-degree-warmer one. … Numbers that large can be hard to grasp, but 150 million is the equivalent of 25 Holocausts.”

Europe’s $38 Billion Carbon Market Is Finally Starting to Work

Jeremy Hodges Ewa Krukowska & Mathew Carr, Bloomberg

Europe’s carbon market is finally starting to work the way it was intended, reports Bloomberg in a feature looking at recent developments in the market and the reaction from different sectors. Thirteen years after it was created to limit carbon-dioxide emissions, prices for the allowances are rising. Hedge funds that abandoned the market are piling back in, prompted by new measures from EU policymakers which are expected to keep the cost of pollution on an upward trajectory through 2030. The feature says: “It’s also a good sign for the global effort to rein in climate change, showing that market mechanisms and government policy can persuade industry to step away from fossil fuels in a way that doesn’t create turmoil in the broader economy.” Carbon Brief wrote an in-depth explainer last December looking at whether reforms to the EU carbon market would raise carbon prices.

Good news about renewables: but the heat is still on to cut fossil fuel use

Editorial, The Observer

Figures for 2017 published last week show global emissions from energy have jumped back up again, to a historic high, says an editorial in the business section of the Observer. “For optimists, it was tempting to view three years of flatlining global carbon emissions, from 2014-16, as the new normal,” it says. “We now know celebrations should be put on hold.” The problem for the climate, it adds, is that more than 70% of the growth came from fossil fuels, a “sobering reminder that stratospheric growth in renewables is not enough”. It says: “Renewables put a brake on emissions but they don’t stop coal, oil and gas from being dug out of the ground. … Leaders must take the much more politically difficult decision to penalise fossil fuels. The means are many: economy-wide carbon taxes are an obvious one that many energy firms claim to support. Bans on extraction of fossil fuels are a more extreme example. We must vote for those politicians who are bold enough to do this.”

Science

Forest loss and Borneo’s climate

Environmental Research Letters

Deforestation in Borneo has increased local daily temperatures and temperature extremes, and reduced daily rainfall, a new study finds. Using a combination of ground-based observations since 1951 and satellite data from 2002 onwards, the researchers identify a a “strong island-wide relationship” between forest loss and local climate. For example, areas of the island with more than 15% forest loss saw a greater than 15% reduction in rainfall, the researchers say. The deforestation-climate relationship was most pronounced for southeast Borneo, the study finds, which has lost 40-75% of its forests since 1973.

Food supply and bioenergy production within the global cropland planetary boundary

PLOS ONE

Feeding a future global population of nine billion as well as growing significant amounts of bioenergy will not be possible without converting more land for crops, a new study says. Using a global land use model, the researchers assess the feasibility of meeting future demands for food and bioenergy without exceeding the “planetary boundary” of converting more than 15% of the Earth’s ice-free land surface to cropland. The results suggest that meeting these criteria would require a “major change in the demand-side of the food system or advancing biotechnologies”, the paper concludes.

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