EU must end new petrol and diesel car sales by 2030 to meet climate targets

20.09.18

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EU must end new petrol and diesel car sales by 2030 to meet climate targets

The sale of new petrol and diesel cars must be phased out in Europe before 2030, or the automotive industry risks blowing its carbon budget within 5-10 years, according to new analysis from the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). They warn that “stark measures” need to be taken to retain a 66% chance of meeting the 1.5C goal set by the Paris Agreement – including a drop in conventional car sales from around 15m this year to 5m in 2022. Prof Horst Friedrich, the DLR’s director, told the Guardian: “Auto CO2 emissions need to peak as soon as possible…Looking at the dwindling carbon budget it is crucial to push low-emitting cars into the market, the earlier the better, to renew the fleet.” He added: “It would be much easier to keep a 2C target because there is a higher carbon budget and therefore more time to implement the necessary measures”. However, a draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that 2C of warming would expose around 10 million more people in coastal areas to floods, storm surges and crop damage than 1.5C of warming would. EurActiv also has the story. In related news, the German chancellor Angela Merkel has suggested that Germany should work with other European countries to develop its own battery cell production for electric cars, Reutersreports. She told a news conference in Berlin: “I think we should, within the framework of our own strategic abilities, work with other European countries on our own battery cell production”. Elsewhere, the Gulf Times reveals that an electric car plant in Qatar is planning on producing a 700hp green car with a range of 1000km on a 10-minute single charge, a project that will cost $9bn.

Sustained levels of moderate global warming ‘could melt the gigantic East Antarctic Ice Sheet’

Mail Online

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the largest ice sheet in the world, is at risk of melting if global temperatures rise by just 2C, scientists have discovered. They found that 2C of warming, a temperature limit set in the Paris Agreement, could cause sea levels to rise by up to 4m (13ft). Dr David Wilson of Imperial College London, who led the research, commented: “What we have learned is that even modest warming of just two degrees, if sustained for a couple of thousand years, is enough to cause the ice sheet in East Antarctica to retreat in some of its low-lying areas…With current global temperatures already one degree higher than during pre-industrial times, future ice loss seems inevitable if we fail to reduce carbon emissions.” The Sun also has the story.

Danish turbine builder earns ‘bumper’ £4.5bn on UK windfarm

Daily Telegraph

Wind power giant Ørsted has cashed in on a contract to build the world’s largest offshore wind farm in British waters, selling its stake in Hornsea One to an infrastructure fund for £4.5 billion. Formerly known as Dong Energy, the company has already started building the 174-turbine project capable of powering more than a million homes. The Times also carries the story.

McKenna says she’s ‘not a quitter’ on climate change issues at G7 ministers meeting

The Globe and Mail

Canada’s environment minister Catherine McKenna has said she’s no “quitter”, despite calls from Canada’s most prominent environmentalist for her to leave her job, and a G7 meeting that didn’t shift her American counterpart’s opposition to the Paris climate agreement, the Globe and Mail reports. David Suzuki described her as an “apologist” for a government that supports the fossil fuel industry, in a story published by La Presse yesterday.

Comment

Climate change is making storms like Hurricane Florence worse

Brandon Miller, CNN

Hurricane Florence is “a sobering example of how a warmer planet has worsened the impacts of hurricanes”, writes Brandon Miller, in a feature delving into the science of the storm. “Warmer oceans mean more moisture is available in a warmer atmosphere”, he explains. “This certainly helped make Florence the wettest tropical system to strike the US East Coast”. Another “threat enhancer” is sea level rise: “ocean levels along the East Coast have risen by nearly a foot in the past century, thanks primarily to global ocean warming”. The piece closes with: “Florence and Harvey should not be treated as an example of what human-fueled global warming could bring us at some point in the future. They are unfortunate examples of what global warming, caused by ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions, is doing to storms in the present day.” Elsewhere, analysis in the New York Times reaches a similar conclusion: “When hurricane Florence struck the Carolinas last week, humanity played a role in the destruction.” An op-ed in USA Today notes that: “extreme weather has its origins, of course, in extreme temperatures”. It goes on to suggest that Florence “shows we need clean, stable energy infrastructure”. Yet many of the residents of North Carolina affected by the hurricane remain unconvinced by climate change science, according to the Guardian: “Scientists warn that human-induced climate change is responsible for an increase in the number and severity of storms…But many who weathered the tempest, deep in Trump country, don’t believe global warming fueled it and don’t think humans are the problem.”

Don’t deploy negative emissions technologies without ethical analysis

Dominic Lenzi William Lamb Jerome Hilaire Martin Kowasrch and Jan Minx, Nature

A group of scientists from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin, warn that the vast scale at which negative emissions technologies would need to be implemented to meet the Paris Agreement goals raises ethical concerns. They highlight that “there has been no systematic evaluation of the ethics of carbon removal methods by the climate assessment community or professional philosophers”. The piece continues: “Negative emissions technologies could be a valuable way to avoid dangerous climate change. But they might become an unjust gamble that uses future generations as collateral.” Backers of carbon dioxide removal have called the technology ‘imperative’ to stop the planet overheating, Reuters reports.

Science

Ice loss from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet during late Pleistocene interglacials

Nature

Sustained warming of 2C above pre-industrial levels “may be sufficient to cause ice loss from the Wilkes Subglacial Basin” in East Antarctica, a new study warns. The research team used marine sediments and geochemical records to estimate ice margin retreat and thinning in the vicinity of the Wilkes Basin during four previous warm “interglacials” that occurred between ice ages over the past 450,000 years. They found that the ice sheet had retreated from its current size during some interglacials when Antarctic air temperatures were 2C warmer than pre-industrial for 2,500 years or more. The results “indicate a close link between extended Antarctic warmth and ice loss from the Wilkes Subglacial Basin”, the authors conclude.

It’s not the heat, it’s the vulnerability: attribution of the 2016 spike in heat-associated deaths in Maricopa County, Arizona

Environmental Research Letters

Record numbers of deaths during the summer heatwave of 2016 in Maricopa County in Arizona, US, were a result of “a shortcoming in preparedness and response efforts for heat” rather than the meteorological conditions, a new study suggests. Using a statistical model based on records of deaths and their relationship with temperature, the researchers simulated the 2016 heatwave and found it should have fallen “near or below the historical average number of heat-associated deaths”. This means that “factors other than the weather were mostly responsible for the surge in deaths in 2016”, the researchers say. The findings “highlight the importance of non-meteorological factors as drivers of temporal variability in the health burden associated with heat”, they conclude.

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