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Hard Numbers: Meet Bard, grim new climate report, Colombia’s Toro ban, Uganda’s anti-LGBTQ law, IMF approves Sri Lankan relief
1.5: A new UN report says the world has less than a decade to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (the 2015 Paris Agreement’s target). Industrialized countries must halve greenhouse gasses by 2030 and halt carbon dioxide emissions by the 2050s to avoid cataclysmic flooding, droughts, heat waves, and species extinction.
8: Bullfighting remains legal in eight countries worldwide, but that may soon change. The majority of Colombians want to end the practice, which has been a tradition since colonial times. Colombia’s Senate recently voted to ban bullfighting, but the legislation now faces a tough challenge in the lower house, where an earlier proposed ban was shot down last year.
10: Uganda’s parliament passed a harsh new anti-LGBTQ bill on Tuesday that could lead to 10-year prison sentences for those who engage in “same-sex activity” or identify as LGBTQ. If President Yoweri Museveni signs the bill – he has suggested he supports it – Uganda will become the first African nation to criminalize simply identifying as LGBTQ.
2.9 billion: Sri Lanka has secured a $2.9 billion rescue package from the IMF to aid in its economic recovery. After defaulting on its sovereign debt last year, the island nation faced its worst economic disaster since independence. The package will likely boost international investment, but strict austerity measures will hurt Sri Lankan households already struggling with sky-high inflation.
UN Environment Chief: “The truth is we are failing”
Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations' Environment Programme, issued a dire warning about climate change in a new interview with GZERO Media. In 2021, UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the world as standing “at the edge of an abyss,” and that next steps on climate were urgent and critical.
“I think if you ask people on Pacific islands whose lands have been lost, they've already fallen off,” Andersen told GZERO. “Or even if you ask people in California whose houses got burnt in a wildfire, they have fallen off.”
Andersen offered praise for the recent passage of the Biden Administration’s climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, but made it clear that more action is necessary to prevent the planet from reaching even higher, more dangerous temperatures.
“This is an existential threat. And yes, we are standing on the precipice,” Andersen said. “It'll take real leadership. It'll take courage. It'll take boldness. It'll take leaders understanding the responsibility that their populations have put on their shoulders when they put up their hands and said they wanted to lead their nations.”
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Pakistan underwater: Blame climate change
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody, Ian Bremmer here, and we're closing down the summer, so this will be your last Quick Take before I head back to New York City. And I thought I would talk a little bit about these disastrous, calamitous floods that are happening in Pakistan right now.
Pakistan can't catch a break, their economy is in free fall, given huge mismanagement internally, a lot of corruption, and getting hit by, of course, the inflation and the supply chain challenges that countries all over the world are facing. On top of that, massive political instability, given the ouster of the former prime minister. Big demonstrations across the country, especially now that he is facing potential incarceration from the court, that has claimed that he has made statements that amount to a promotion of terrorism, and so a massively divided country. And now you have over 1000 dead and over 10 million Pakistanis displaced from unprecedented levels of flooding.
I have to say, as I was writing about this a little bit online, I was a little surprised to see the level of online trafficking of fake news. Some circles, particularly in the United States, saying it's just weather. There are monsoons, there are floods that happen all of the time. That is of course true, and it's particularly true in South and Southeast Asia. Monsoon season is an annual occurrence, it's generally not when you want to show up in these countries, for example, we all know that, we've seen it. But glacial melting is unprecedented. And that is directly the consequence of global warming. Ice levels around the world are at record lows and they continue to be at record lows every year. You've got 7,000 glaciers in Pakistan, that's the largest number of glaciers outside the Arctic and Antarctic, outside the polar regions in the world. And so as they melt in unprecedented fashion, river levels are getting a lot higher.
I mean, I guess the good news longer-term is that once the glaciers melt away completely, that will stop the bad news is it's going to mean extreme droughts hitting South Asia, and a lot more fighting, for example, geopolitically between India and China. So take the good with the bad. But as a consequence, even with the same levels of rain, you would be seeing greater levels of flooding. And also the highest level rains are hitting areas they've never hit before, again, as climate patterns change, given the warming in the atmosphere. And so the preparations the governments have made, in Pakistan they're never that great, are inadequate. Pakistan, of course, citizens are extremely upset about all of this. The government's very upset, they have themselves a very low carbon footprint, as does pretty much all of South Asia, India, Bangladesh, but they're getting hit among the hardest. You'll remember in the spring, or at least in my spring, India was having their highest temperatures ever. And that meant outdoor labor for a billion people was banned after 10:00 AM because it just wasn't safe for people to be outside, it had a big productivity hit for the country. And of course, that's going to get worse too. These are some of the poorest and most populated areas of the world.
The good news, and I do think it is truly good news, after decades of climate denialism, is that globally, the science is essentially accepted. We have 195 governments around the world, left-wing, right-wing, democratic, authoritarian, doesn't matter, that are a part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change under the aegis of the United Nations. They all agree on the basic science, they all agree that climate change is manmade, it is not just coming from cyclical changes in global weather patterns. We all agree there's 1.2 degrees centigrade of warming so far that's coming largely from record levels, again, human-induced, in carbon in the atmosphere now standing at 415 parts per million and going up every year. Ditto, record methane levels also impacted by record levels of deforestation.
And of course, the impact of all of that on extreme weather conditions, on rising sea levels, on reduction in biodiversity, on increase in extinctions. And even in the United States, where there used to be a severe political split between left and right, you don't really see that anymore. You see it among older Americans still, but among younger Americans, especially under 30, everyone pretty much accepts the basic science of climate change. And they're increasingly angry about it because of course it means that the world that young people will experience in the next 20, 30 years will be a lot more expensive, will be a lot more challenging to live in, a lot more difficult to travel around, than those that what we're experiencing now, that we're experienced 20, 30, 40 years ago. It is also true that as a consequence of all of this there's a massive amount of money that's being spent on transitions.
And by the way, yes, this is to renewables, so it's to solar and it's to wind and it's to electric vehicles, but it's also to nuclear power, which I guess is not technically speaking a renewable, though it clearly isn't a fossil fuel. And also from critically, from high carbon intensity to lower carbon intensity among fossil fuels. So for example, the United States right now has a per capita carbon emission levels that are roughly where they were in the 1940s. And that's a pretty good story. And it's largely a pretty good story because the United States has moved away from coal, almost completely towards gas, which is much lower in carbon emissions. The US is way behind the Europeans in terms of renewable energy, although the US is picking up on that front as well. And also part of the reason the Americans are paying so much attention, isn't just because of concerns of climate change, but also because most people in the US don't want the Chinese to become the supreme player in renewable energy in the next 30, 40, 50 years. And they're investing massively in solar and wind and nuclear and EVs and supply chain for all of those things. And if the Americans don't do it, then the US is gold in terms of fracking, but when suddenly everyone is moving to new energy sources that are cheaper, more efficient, more decentralized, the US will be behind the curve. And so that's driving a lot of investment as well.
The action is coming, there's no question. And it's coming around the world and you saw this with the most recent misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which is not going to reduce inflation, but is going to bring carbon levels in the United States, emission levels, much closer to the 50% reduction that's expected, that's pledged by 2030. I guess it gets you to 42%, which is actually not horrible. But still, we're looking at a path to 2.5 degrees of warming rather than the 1.5 that everyone, including my friend, Antonio Guterres and John Kerry and others are saying is absolutely essential. It's extremely unlikely that that is possible or plausible given where we are presently headed. And that means double the level of climate change, double the level of warming that the world is presently experiencing, and the greater it gets, of course, the bigger the impact. And that means that much more, I mean, these once-in-1,000-year storms, and you keep hearing people use that term, and they happen all the time, they should stop using the term frankly, because when you have new climate, you're going to have new one-in-1,000-year storms. And you should be changing that terminology, frankly, every year because the climate is no longer stable.
So anyway, that's where we are. And so I'm glad that we can talk about something where there is a basic global consensus, there's not much of that these days. But given how big a challenge it is, it's kind of rewarding that we've finally gotten there. And there's a lot more work to do. Talk to you all real soon, and I'll see you all from New York. Be good.
For more of Ian Bremmer's weekly analyses, subscribe to his GZERO World newsletter at ianbremmer.bulletin.com
Nations don’t need carbon to grow their economies, says John Kerry
If John Kerry were only able to accomplish one thing as US climate change czar, he'd focus on changing the minds of the one-third of countries in the world that say they're "entitled" to pollute because they didn't before.
For Kerry, it's a fallacy that heavy carbon use is the only way to develop an economy because these nations can leapfrog from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
If we are able to cut by half the amount of carbon we're now releasing into the atmosphere by the end of the decade, he says, we may be able to meet the Paris Climate Agreement goal of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
"Currently, we're on a track to blow through 2 degrees, let alone 1.5. This is the urgency that people need to understand," he says. "Promises are fine, but they don't get the job done. It's the implementation that gets the job done. So, we're working on something called implementation plus."
Watch the GZERO World episode: Ukraine War: Has Putin overplayed his hand?
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How did COVID affect climate, US-China relationship?
On the one hand, UN Secretary-General António Guterres believes COVID has fractured trust between mainly rich and poor countries, especially on vaccines, as the pandemic "demonstrated our enormous fragility." On the other hand, it generated more trust in science, especially on climate — practically the only area, Guterres says, where the US and China can find some common ground these days.
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: UN Sec-Gen: Without trust, catastrophe awaits
UN Secretary-General Guterres has a warning for disunited nations
In a frank (and in-person!) interview, António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, speaks with Ian Bremmer at the UN ahead of the annual General Assembly week. Guterres discusses COVID, climate, the US-China rift, and the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan, and does not mince words when it comes to the dire state of the world. "We are standing at the edge of an abyss," Guterres warns. COVID is "defeating" the global community and a climate catastrophe is all but assured without drastic action. Amidst this unprecedented peril, there remains a startling lack of trust among nations. And yet, there is still hope.
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UN Chief: Still time to avert climate “abyss”
For UN Secretary-General António Guterres, the pandemic has made the world even more divided than it was before COVID. That's especially true on climate, in his view, because rich and poor countries simply don't trust each other anymore. If we want COP26 to succeed, Guterres says we must rebuild that trust — or face the consequences of inaction. "If you are on the verge of an abyss, you must be careful about your next step."
Watch his interview with Ian Bremmer on the latest episode of GZERO World.
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Will politics destroy the planet?
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a happy week to you all. I want to talk about the latest report, a very significant one from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. They release them every few years as sort of the state of the world on climate, on global warming, on sea level rise, on changes, and extreme storms, and droughts, and precipitation levels. And no one should be surprised that this is not a particularly happy piece of news. I mean, of course, so many headlines around major wildfires in California, and Oregon, and Turkey, and Greece, and others around the world and major flooding challenges.
I mean, it's not been a happy situation. But this report, one thing I can say, to start off it, is that it should give us cause for optimism. Is that with over 200 countries participating, you get an overwhelming consensus around where the state of climate change actually is. There's still a lot of uncertainty as to what the longer-term implications will be, particularly variability around things like how much sea level rise will go, to what extent you will end up with complete melting of the Arctic polar cap up, for example.
But over 200 countries, including most of the significant carbon emitters, the fossil fuel producers, and exporters, all participated. They all basically said, "Yeah, this is real." I mean, climate denialism, which you saw in significant pieces of politics, certainly in my own United States and in the Gulf states, in the Middle East, you're not seeing that anymore. There is an understanding and a general consensus that it's real and the level of the impact is no longer something that even the companies that are involved, whose business models are fundamentally dependent on things like oil and gas and coal, they may be making very different arguments on what one needs to prioritize and how one engages in transition. But no one out there is really, they don't believe this is happening. That itself compared to where we were five, 10 years ago is a positive thing.
Another thing I would say is we are now seeing, I mean, in terms of where there is consensus. There's consensus that humans are responsible for a rise in temperature on the planet. On average, over one centigrade degree already, about 1.1, the headline number. Interestingly, this report claims that there is still an opportunity for the world to move to 1.5 degrees centigrade. The 1.5 is already baked in. You can't possibly do less than that. But if you're able to significantly reduce carbon emissions by 2040, functionally net zero, you can keep it at 1.5.
I want to be clear, from our climate practice at Eurasia Group, none of us believe that is going to happen. We think that the most positive realistic scenario is more like 2.5 degrees centigrade of warming. We think we are presently on a trajectory of 3.5 degrees of warming and the calamitous implications of that for the global economy, for human development are very, very real. Actually, this report with the 1.5 degree, it was more optimistic than I expected. I suspect a big part of that is because it is politically very contentious to throw away the 1.5-degree goal that so many countries have been publicly setting and hanging their recommendations on. They want to show politically that we can still get there. Again, I don't think the politics exists for that.
What that means though, even at that level, is that a lot of climate change by 2050, which for most of us is, kind of the foreseeable lifespan outlook that we're thinking about is already locked in, baked in, if you will, in terms of the global average. It means that you will have a foot of sea level rise, irrespective of what is done globally. It means that you will have extraordinary heat waves and climate extremes that will affect every area of the world at the 1.1 degree increase in temperature. That shows that it's not just Sub-Saharan Africa, it's everything. It's Europe, it's Eurasia, it's Asia, it's the North, it's the Southern Hemisphere. Not nearly as much data or certainty in terms of precipitation levels. Not nearly as much certainty about where sea level is going, but a significant amount of certainty as to what this means for temperatures.
I also would mention that one big thing that isn't mentioned at all in this report are the implications of all the die offs from flora and fauna, from animals, the extinctions that we are increasingly seeing at. I mean, truly levels that are unprecedented in millennia. And that is, we don't know. Science is really uncertain about what it means when you take big pieces of the ecosystem out of the equation. What kind of genetic engineering are we going to try to engage in to address those problems? And can we avoid the worst-case scenarios of what could be a breakdown in food chain, for example? A breakdown in sustainability that comes from the life that exists on the planet, as you are engaging in such a short-term dramatic change in the climate environment that they live in.
Another thing I would just mention is one of the reasons why I think that the 2.0, 2.5 degrees are so unlikely and we're more likely to hit 3.5, is because I'm a political scientist, and I'm looking at the differentiated responses of different countries around the world. The United States from a per capita carbon consumption perspective has been decreasing for decades now. And per capita carbon consumption in the United States today is far lower than it was 10, 20 years ago.
But in China, which is industrializing, which has a lot more people than the United States, 1.4 billion, they now have well over 2X the total carbon emissions that the United States does. They'll be 3X in relatively short order, in a couple of years. Part of the reason for that is because they need so much more energy to produce for their population. Per capita, much less carbon usage than in the United States, radically less.
But today, almost 60% of energy consumption inside China comes from coal. And a lot of their export too, to even poor countries around the world is coming from fossil fuels. India, less wealthy than China. Same population. Going to outstrip their population in very short order. They want to industrialize too. And the ability of the wealthy countries to convince India, China, to actually start hitting net zero targets is going to require a conversation of equity about the fact that we have done, in the wealthy countries, most of the historical carbon emissions while the Chinese and the Indians are trying to catch up to our living standards today.
Per capita, ours are far higher than those of the Indians, the Chinese and other countries around the world. Don't they matter as people? What kind of an equity conversation are we going to have with them? Given the lack of trust and given the unwillingness of most people to think about, to value the long-term future on the planet for their kids, for their grandkids, the discount variable we all have, the uncertainty around what new technologies might be able to unlock. We know we have a bird in the hand today. That makes these conversations much more challenging.
Even before you get to the G-Zero and the lack of global coordination and the lack of leadership, even in my own country, the partisanship and the inability of a Biden administration that cares a lot more about climate than previous administrations, but still very constrained in what they can actually do. So, for all of these reasons, our orientation is more still towards 3.5, with an upset scenario for the planet at maybe 2.5 degrees centigrade. And this 1.5, is, in my perspective, an overly optimistic take.
We'll be talking a lot more about that in the future. Hope this is worthwhile for everyone and talk to y'all real soon.