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Asia will lose land as the planet warms, says IPCC's Ko Barrett
Last August, a landmark IPCC report underscored the urgency of the climate crisis — with big implications for Asia, the region most at risk. Ko Barret, vice president at the IPCC, says Asia should especially watch out for a combination of sea level rise above the global average and a lot more rain than usual that'll together result in shorelines receding along the Mekong delta.
Barrett spoke during the first of a two-part Sustainability Leaders Summit livestream conversation sponsored by Suntory. Watch here.
Taliban takeover embarrassing for Biden; political impact of wildfires
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on the Taliban's rapid territorial gains, the politics of climate change and two court cases gaining political attention in Canada and China.
Is the US drawdown in Afghanistan going as planned?
Well, yes, in the sense that the US is quickly wrapping up military activities on the ground in Afghanistan, the longest standing war in American history will be over in just a few weeks. Not going as planned in the sense that the Taliban is retaking territory much faster than it had been expected. And the US State Department recently told all Americans living in Afghanistan get the hell out because the Americans can't protect them. This is embarrassing for the US, but ultimately, a much bigger problem for the Afghans, and of course for other countries in the region, China, India, Pakistan, Iran. I think it will be an embarrassment for Biden on his administration, but on balance, not going to affect him very much politically. Remember, under both Trump and Biden, even Obama, overwhelming majorities in the United States wanted the Americans to get out of Afghanistan.
Are the global wildfires igniting political fires?
Well, I would say that people are paying a lot more attention to how quickly climate change is affecting their direct environment. We've seen this in California and Oregon. We've seen it in Greece and Turkey, floods as well in China, in Germany, displacing millions of people and creating casualties. And of course, this baseline already quite literally baked in. You saw in the major United Nations report that came out just on Monday this week, this is becoming, I mean, this idea that we are guaranteed to move towards 1.5 degrees centigrade minimum of warming. That means every year what you're seeing, that's still probably the best that we're going to have going forward. And it's horrible to think about that really for our futures, for our children's futures, the fact that these disasters are only going to get worse at least for the next 20 to 30 years before we potentially hit a new status quo.
A Chinese court has upheld a Canadian citizen's death sentence. What message is Beijing trying to send to Ottawa?
Well, this is also when the daughter of the founder of Huawei isn't having her trial going on. The Chinese government saying the two are absolutely not linked, but of course there is no such thing as coincidence when you have high level political trials in a country that has no rule of law. They want to see the CFO of Huawei declared not guilty and let free. She has been under house arrest now for, I think something like a couple of years now, and of course the US is looking for her extradition. There are also the cases of the two Michaels where you still have not had, even though the cases have gone through, we have not seen a sentencing. And this is in a country where 99% of cases that go through do lead to convictions, criminal cases, so again, no rule of law. These are political decisions and what the Chinese are doing very much linked to how the Canadians decide to act on this case that the Chinese government sees as very much a political football.
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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.
A firefighter tries to extinguish a wildfire burning in the village of Pefki, on the island of Evia, Greece.
Want to fix climate change? This is what it’ll take.
In recent weeks, countries as varied as Canada and the US, Iran, Turkey and Greece have experienced some of the worst heat waves, droughts, and wildfires in decades. Meanwhile, unprecedented torrential rain and floods have hit China and Germany. These climate-related disasters have killed scores of people, left thousands homeless, and cost billions from damaged infrastructure and property.
As Elizabeth Kolbert told us a few months ago, we're screwed unless we all do something about climate right now. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agrees.
The IPCC, which represents the world's top climate scientists and is backed by national governments, published on Monday its first review of climate science since 2013. For the first time, the IPPC now says that climate change is unequivocally caused by humans, and that it's directly linked to the extreme weather events we're seeing recently.
First, some bad news. The latest data show that global surface temperatures have risen faster since 1970 than in any other half century in the past two millennia. And the IPCC warns that some of the damage will be permanent: in two decades it'll be an average 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than during 1850-1900. We're getting close to various "tipping points" — when the planet undergoes abrupt changes in response to global warming that can't be reversed no matter what we do, like polar ice caps or coral reefs vanishing.
Now some (sort of) good news. The IPCC says that maybe, just maybe, it's not too late to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. For that to happen, though, the world must halve its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, and for all countries to attain "net zero" emissions — taking as much carbon out of the atmosphere as putting into it — by 2050.
So, what'll it take to actually get this done?
Between countries, governments will need to work together a lot more closely than they have in a long time to agree on ways for all nations to do their part — and sustain such efforts over time.
Among the top polluters, to meet the IPCC's 2050 deadline the US and the EU will have to convince China to go "net zero" a decade earlier than Beijing now plans to, and perhaps offer India the cash Delhi has long demanded for poor countries that have polluted far less per capita yet are now being asked to cut emissions by as much as rich industrialized nations. The Chinese and Indians will likely need assurances that Americans and Europeans won't back out later on (like the US having to rejoin the 2015 Paris climate deal signed by Obama but later cancelled by Trump.)
Climate activists like Uganda's Vanessa Nakate say nations in Africa — which is barely responsible for causing climate change but will suffer some of its worst effects — will need incentives from wealthy countries to pursue green growth. So will crucial middle-income economies like Brazil (please stop burning the Amazon) or Indonesia.
Within countries, politicians and citizens will need to find on climate the common ground that's otherwise absent nowadays. That means that French President Emmanuel Macron and the gilet jaunes will have to figure out how to get rid of diesel without unfairly taxing low-wage workers. In the US, some Republicans may have to acknowledge that climate change is real and back a long-term plan that creates green jobs and invests in sustainable infrastructure, although maybe not as much as the Green New Deal.
Even in China, where debate on climate change is less open than in democracies, Xi Jinping knows that he must strike a balance between burning coal to deliver economic prosperity and investing in alternatives to protect Chinese people from a climate dystopia.
Importantly, the private sector must be on board. Governments don't pollute nearly as much as companies, especially those in countries with lax regulations. Businesses must come under intense pressure by both lawmakers and consumers to never put profits over the planet, and that they too must all go "net zero."
What's more, they should share all the technology they develop to curb emissions, particularly carbon capture and storage.
Is such cooperation even possible right now? The urgent tone in the IPCC report raises the stakes for COP26, the global climate summit to be held in Glasgow in November. It may be the last opportunity we get in the narrow window we still have to come up with a global consensus on how to save the planet from... ourselves.
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