Heading into the December global climate talks in Paris, India’s leaders continue to assert they will not announce when their greenhouse gas emissions will peak.
One leading Indian politician, however, former Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, recently said that the country could plateau emissions starting in 2025 or 2030. Ramesh, a former self-described “economic hawk,” called this goal “doable and necessary for India.”
For many years, India had been teaming up with China in international climate negotiations to argue that the rapidly developing countries did not need to take major early action to constrain emissions since the rich countries were responsible for the vast majority of cumulative emissions. This argument has become progressively weaker as the reality of human-caused climate change made the dangers of inaction more and more obvious — and as the price of renewable power just kept dropping.
The big game changer, though, was the U.S.-China climate deal announced last November. The United States committed to a 26 to 28 percent reduction in carbon pollution by 2025 compared to 1990 levels — and China for the first time committed to peak in carbon pollution by 2030, if not sooner.
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As December’s UN climate summit in Poland rapidly approaches, it is shaping up to be a race against time to prepare the so-called Paris rulebook, which will govern how the landmark climate agreement will actually be implemented.
Members of the European Parliament voted on Wednesday (10 October) in favour of increasing the EU’s Paris Agreement emissions pledge by 2020. They also urged the European Commission to make sure its long-term climate strategy models net-zero emissions for 2050 “at the latest”.
A new USAID report focuses on the intersection of climate exposure and state fragility worldwide. It finds that the factors that make a country vulberable to large-scale conflict are similar to those that make it vulnerable to climate change. The report thus offers a way for global audiences with an interest in climate and security to identify places of high concern.
A big difference. That was the conclusion the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came to when it assessed the differences between a 1.5°C and a 2°C warmer world in a landmark special report published in early October. The leading scientific authority on climate change found that the world is likely to pass the 1.5 °C mark between 2030 and 2052 if current emission trends are not interrupted.