I am optimistic about COP 28
The Status of Climate Change: A Year after the Inflation Reduction, Now is the Right Time to Set a 2.6 Degree Celsius Target
The target of 2.6 degrees Celsius has been established due to current policies. This is still a very frightening position to be in. It’s not possible to end up with a 2.6 degree Celsius increase. The UN stocktake made it clear that we are far from being on track to meet our climate targets. We’ve shaved a degree off our trajectory. The worst-case scenario seems less and less likely.
Over the past decade, I’ve become a bit less skeptical. Yes, global emissions and temperatures are still rising, and we’ve seen a year of recording-breaking heat wave events. It’s easy to look at these trends and assume that we’re in the same hopeless position as we were in 2015. We are not.
The nation can go to 6 percent with the use of solar panels and wind turbines. The inflation reduction act allocated hundreds of billion of dollars to accelerate decarbonization and included tax breaks for home improvements such as better insulation, and switch to electric appliances. It was also meant to juice the domestic green economy: According to one study, it has already created almost 75,000 jobs and spurred $86 billion in private investments.
The Biden sdministration also announced today that it’s providing more than $6 billion in investments for climate action, $3.9 billion of that going toward modernizing the grid. The way to decarbonize most of the economy is by using clean electrons. We need to upgrade our local grid infrastructure to support charging heavy-duty vehicles.
The nation needs an overhaul to cope with the ever increasing amount of extreme weather and to allow for more renewable energy. The average number of power outages increased from 2000 to 2010 by about 64 percent, according to the report. The US needs a grid that’s better able to ferry electricity from renewable-energy hot spots, like solar power generated in the sunny Southwest and wind power from the gusty Midwest. “Undergrounding” more powerlines, especially in the parched West, would prevent the infrastructure from igniting catastrophic blazes, like the Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018.
The Paris COP 2015 target had to be 1.5 degrees Celsius, but the small island Developing States had a very different understanding of climate change
COPs—or Conferences of the Parties—are annual events convened by the United Nations where world leaders try to hash out a deal to limit climate change. In 2015, the Paris group set a target of keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius. While this was bold and aspirational, it hit on a very clear disconnect: Leaders can promise ambitious targets without the slightest intention of scaling up action to meet them.
The world was on track to hit 3.6 degrees Celsius of warming in the year 2015. The target limit of 2 degrees Celsius was not set to be reached, so leaders promised to achieve even more. That would have been great if they had put incredibly ambitious policies on the table. But they didn’t. The new target seemed like a cruel promise to the people of Small Island Developing States who have a difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius in their livelihoods. I was more pessimistic than before while those at Paris celebrated.
UN climate chief Christiana Figueres has said that over the past six years, the world has “failed to live up to the commitments” it made during the Paris Climate Agreement. “The US and other nations still have a long way to go,” she added. Figueres had earlier said that the world is on track to exceed the target of 2.6C of warming.