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===
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Purpose. The United States must grow its economy and maintain jobs for its citizens while playing a leadership role in global efforts to protect the environment. Over decades, with the help of sensible policies that do not encumber private-sector activity, the United States has simultaneously grown its economy, raised worker wages, increased energy production, reduced air and water pollution, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The United States’ successful track record of advancing both economic and environmental objectives should be a model for other countries.
In recent years, the United States has purported to join international agreements and initiatives that do not reflect our country’s values or our contributions to the pursuit of economic and environmental objectives. Moreover, these agreements steer American taxpayer dollars to countries that do not require, or merit, financial assistance in the interests of the American people.
Sec. 2. Policy.It is the policy of my Administration to put the interests of the United States and the American people first in the development and negotiation of any international agreements with the potential to damage or stifle the American economy. These agreements must not unduly or unfairly burden the United States.
Sec. 3. Implementation. (a) The United States Ambassador to the United Nations shall immediately submit formal written notification of the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The notice shall be submitted to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Depositary of the Agreement, attached as Appendix A. The United States will consider its withdrawal from the Agreement and any attendant obligations to be effective immediately upon this provision of notification.
(b) The United States Ambassador to the United Nations shall immediately submit written formal notification to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, or any relevant party, of the United States’ withdrawal from any agreement, pact, accord, or similar commitment made under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
(c) The United States Ambassador to the United Nations, in collaboration with the Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury, shall immediately cease or revoke any purported financial commitment made by the United States under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
(d) Immediately upon completion of the tasks listed in subsections (a), (b), and (c), the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, in collaboration with the Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury shall certify a report to the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs that describes in detail any further action required to achieve the policy objectives set forth in section 2 of this order.
(e) The U.S. International Climate Finance Plan is revoked and rescinded immediately. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall, within 10 days of this order, issue guidance for the rescission of all frozen funds.
(f) Within 30 days of this order, the Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary of Energy, Secretary of Agriculture, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Chief Executive Officer of the International Development Finance Corporation, Chief Executive Officer of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, Director of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, President of the Export-Import Bank, and head of any other relevant department or agency shall submit a report to the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs that details their actions to revoke or rescind policies that were implemented to advance the International Climate Finance Plan.
(g) The Secretary of State, Secretary of Commerce, and the head of any department or agency that plans or coordinates international energy agreements shall henceforth prioritize economic efficiency, the promotion of American prosperity, consumer choice, and fiscal restraint in all foreign engagements that concern energy policy.
Sec. 4. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented in a manner consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or any other persons.
THE WHITE HOUSE, January 20, 2025.
===
ggl 1 25
[### Putting America First In International Environmental ...
The White House (.gov)
https://www.whitehouse.gov › ... › Presidential Actions](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/putting-america-first-in-international-environmental-agreements/)
2 days ago — By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as ...
---
[### Trump Signs Executive Order Directing US Withdrawal ...
U.S. News & World Report
https://www.usnews.com › News › Science News](https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2025-01-20/trump-says-hes-withdrawing-the-us-from-the-paris-climate-agreement-again)
2 days ago — WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday directing the United States to again withdraw from the landmark ...
---
[### Trump just declared an 'energy emergency.' Here's what it ...
The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com › 2025/01/20 › trump...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/01/20/trump-day-one-executive-orders-energy/)
2 days ago — In a Day 1 executive order, President Donald Trump withdrew from the landmark climate accord. Additional orders on energy are expected.
---
[### Trump orders U.S. withdrawal from Paris Agreement ...
NPR
https://www.npr.org › 2025/01/21 › nx-s1-5266207 › t...](https://www.npr.org/2025/01/21/nx-s1-5266207/trump-paris-agreement-biden-climate-change)
1 day ago — President Trump issued a barrage of orders Monday targeting Biden-era initiatives on global warming. The decisions come on the heels of the ...
--
[### Trump signs executive order to withdraw US from Paris ...
WRAL.com
https://www.wral.com › news › state › clean-energy-shift...](https://www.wral.com/news/state/clean-energy-shift-trump-north-carolina-2025/)
2 days ago — Trump's “Drill, baby, drill” agenda, including exiting the Paris Agreement and halting wind leases, threatens North Carolina's clean energy ...
===
January 20, 2025
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Purpose and Policy. The previous administration has embedded deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices within every agency and office of the Federal Government. The injection of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) into our institutions has corrupted them by replacing hard work, merit, and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy. Orders to open the borders have endangered the American people and dissolved Federal, State, and local resources that should be used to benefit the American people. Climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.
To commence the policies that will make our Nation united, fair, safe, and prosperous again, it is the policy of the United States to restore common sense to the Federal Government and unleash the potential of the American citizen. The revocations within this order will be the first of many steps the United States Federal Government will take to repair our institutions and our economy.
Sec. 2. Revocation of Orders and Actions. The following executive actions are hereby revoked:
endit))
---
kert WSJ inside exxon strat many docs in discovey finder 1988 frank sprow
https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/exxon-climate-change-documents-e2e9e6af
"Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change" | SEJ
no lnx
WSJ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change
Internal documents show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately in the Tillerson era
By Christopher M. Matthews
and Collin Eaton
Sept. 14, 2023
2487 RESPONSES
Exxon Mobil issued its first public statement that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change in 2006, following years of denial. In public forums, the company argued that the risk of serious impact on the environment justified global action.
Yet behind closed doors, Exxon took a very different tack: Its executives strategized over how to diminish concerns about warming temperatures, and they sought to muddle scientific findings that might hurt its oil-and-gas business, according to internal Exxon documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former executives.
Exxon’s public acceptance in 2006 of the risks posed by climate change was an early act of Rex Tillerson, an Exxon lifer who became CEO that year. Some viewed him as a moderating force who brought Exxon in line with the scientific consensus.
The documents reviewed by the Journal, which haven’t been previously reported, cast Tillerson’s decadelong tenure in a different light. They show that Tillerson, as well as some of Exxon’s board directors and other top executives, sought to cast doubt on the severity of climate change’s impacts. Exxon scientists supported research that questioned the findings of mainstream climate science, even after the company said it would stop funding think tanks and others that promoted climate-change denial.
Exxon is now a defendant in dozens of lawsuits around the U.S. that accuse it and other oil companies of deception over climate change and that aim to collect billions of dollars in damages. Prosecutors and attorneys involved in some of the cases are seeking some of the documents reviewed by the Journal, which were part of a previous investigation by New York’s attorney general but never made public.
One of the lawsuits is from Hawaii’s Maui County, where wildfires killed more than 100 people in August. The lawsuit, filed in 2020, alleged the island faced increased climate-related risks, including more dangerous wildfires, caused by fossil-fuel companies. Some of the lawsuits may go to trial as soon as next year.
:{“I know how this information looks—when taken out of context, it seems bad,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in response to the Journal’s inquiry about the documents. “But having worked with some of these colleagues earlier in my career, I have the benefit of knowing they are people of good intent. None of these old emails and notes matter though. All that does is that we’re building an entire business dedicated to reducing emissions—both our own and others—and spending billions of dollars on solutions that have a real, sustainable impact.”}:
Under Woods, who became CEO in 2017, Exxon has committed to spend $17 billion over five years on emissions-reducing technologies. Exxon didn’t address detailed questions sent by the Journal.
WHAT’S NEWS
Exclusive: Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change
Tillerson declined to comment through a representative.
Exxon turned millions of pages of documents over to the New York attorney general during that office’s yearslong investigation, announced in 2015, into whether the company misled investors about the impact of climate regulation on its business. The Journal reviewed summaries of the documents that Exxon’s lawyers had determined were the most significant. After the attorney general narrowed the focus of the case, the documents weren’t made public.
The documents summarize emails between top executives, board meetings and Tillerson’s edits of speeches, among other things.
After a nearly three-week trial in 2019, Justice Barry Ostrager of the New York State Supreme Court ruled the New York attorney general failed to prove its case.
“Nothing in this opinion is intended to absolve Exxon Mobil from responsibility for contributing to climate change,” Ostrager wrote.
Throughout Tillerson’s tenure between 2006 and 2016, Exxon executives in their internal communications attempted to push back against the notion that humans needed to curtail oil and gas use to help the planet—despite the company’s public statements that action was needed.
In 2012, after the pre-eminent scientific authority on climate change warned of global calamity if carbon emissions continued unabated, Tillerson disagreed and directed Exxon researchers to “influence” the group.
As pressure mounted to stop drilling in the Arctic due to rapid glacial melting and other environmental impacts, Exxon fretted about a key project in Russia’s far north and worked to “de-couple climate change and the Arctic.”
July 2013
Exxon’s deal to explore the Arctic with Russia’s Rosneft came amid
growing public concern about melting polar ice caps. In an email discussion
with other executives about how to protect the project, a corporate issues
adviser wrote:
“
As this shapes up, part of the moral argument for leaving the Arctic alone
will be based on this notion that it is fundamentally unjust for the people
who prompted the ice melt to then profit from development. It’s one reason
I think we will need to push back hard- albeit in a nuanced way- against this
notion that the whole area is ‘pristine’ and untouched by the hand of man.”
“The general perception is that Tillerson was softer and stopped funding the bad guys” that were espousing climate change denial, said Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a charity that partly focuses on environmental issues. “This is the first X-ray into Tillerson’s head and shows he wanted to throw climate mitigation off the rails. It’s obituary-changing.”
The fund has issued grants financing litigation and other support for around two dozen cases against Exxon, whose predecessor, Standard Oil, was founded by family patriarch John D. Rockefeller. The fund has invested millions of dollars in a broader campaign against big oil companies.
Seminal warning
A study published earlier this year in the journal Science determined Exxon’s climate modelers had predicted warming temperatures with precision since the 1970s, in line with the scientific consensus. The study was funded, in part, by a grant from the Rockefeller Family Fund.
In the summer of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen issued what’s now seen as a seminal warning on climate change when he testified before Congress that Earth was warming dangerously and humans were causing it.
Frank Sprow, then Exxon’s head of corporate research, sent a memo to colleagues a few months later articulating what would become a central pillar of Exxon’s strategy.
“If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against Greenhouse gas effects, substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur,” wrote Sprow. “Any additional R&D efforts within Corporate Research on Greenhouse should have two primary purposes: 1. Protect the value of our resources (oil, gas, coal). 2. Preserve Exxon’s business options.”
Sprow’s memo was adopted by Exxon as policy, he said in a recent interview.
Exxon stopped most internal climate research, instead funding it through university and research organizations, Sprow said. Exxon’s corporate research division was redirected from broader scientific study to focus on “science to support our business.”
Sprow said he and former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond acknowledged the climate was changing but questioned to what extent human activity was causing it and how serious and rapid the impacts would be. The January study in Science said that Exxon’s climate modelers mostly attributed the changes to humans.
Martin Hoffert, who worked as a consultant to Exxon on climate science in the 1980s, said Sprow’s memo sent another message: “It’s an oblique way of saying we’re in the oil business and we’re not going to get out of the oil business, and we’ll do everything we can to make money on the oil business.”
By the time Tillerson became CEO in 2006, Exxon’s positions on climate change had become a public-relations nightmare, according to Sprow, who retired from the company in 2005.
Public shift
Exxon’s public shift on climate change came after the Royal Society, a British scientific academy, criticized the company for spreading “inaccurate and misleading” views on climate science in 2006. Exxon responded in a letter that it recognized “the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere poses risks that may prove significant for society and ecosystems.”
An Eagle Scout and a civil engineer by training, Tillerson spent his entire career at Exxon before becoming CEO in 2006. He left in 2017 to become then-President Trump’s Secretary of State.
His views on climate change were influenced by the previous generation of Exxon executives, said former company executives who worked with him. During his tenure, Tillerson took little action to curb the company’s emissions and instead believed the onus was on governments to push companies to address climate change, they said.
In 2011, scientists working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, convened by the United Nations, warned of global calamity if carbon emissions caused temperatures to rise more than 4 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2100, its worst-case scenario.
Tillerson told a top Exxon climate researcher the scenario was “not credible,” the documents show. Tillerson was “dissatisfied with media coverage,” the researcher, Haroon Kheshgi, told colleagues in a 2012 email about the findings. Further, Tillerson wanted to engage with IPCC “to influence [the group], in addition to gathering info.”
Chris Field was the co-chair of an IPCC working group during Tillerson’s tenure at Exxon. He rejected Tillerson’s criticism that the worst-case scenario laid out by the group wasn’t credible. Though emissions reductions are preventing the worst case, Field said, the science has held up over time.
“I’m honestly flattered that he thought IPCC was consequential enough to want to influence it,” said Field, who is now director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He added that the IPCC process is structured to prevent undue influence from individual businesses or other entities and that the Exxon scientists he’d dealt with were professional.
While Tillerson and others played down the risks posed by climate change, Exxon’s scientists were themselves modeling alarming increases in carbon emissions without dramatic reductions in fossil-fuel consumption.
“It’s almost reluctantly that we address C02 emissions,” Scott Nauman, a corporate planning manager, wrote in a January 2009 email as the company was preparing its annual energy outlook. “It is not a positive story. Global emissions continue to rise throughout the outlook timeframe – that’s clearly a cause for concern.”
Exxon routinely pushed back against the idea that dramatic curtailment of fossil-fuel consumption was necessary. Instead, it suggested that technological solutions, including making cars and other machines more efficient, were the most effective measure to halt global warming. Fossil fuels are responsible for more than 75% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the IPCC.
Before giving a speech at an event hosted by Stanford University’s Global Climate & Energy Project in February 2009, Tillerson appeared to make edits to avoid embracing positions that would hurt Exxon’s business.
In one part of the draft speech he crossed out “oil, natural gas and coal will not meet all of the world’s needs to the year 2030.” Later, he added, “the most cost effective steps we can take to address this energy and environmental challenge is to extend our energy efficiency gains.”
Weeks earlier, Nauman had concluded in his January email that emissions would increase through 2030 despite such gains.
“We would like them to be lower, but given the state of technology, given the need for energy, given the practical choices for energy, emissions rise despite aggressive efficiency gains,” Nauman wrote.
‘Skeptic arguments’
In 2008, Exxon announced it would stop funding think tanks and other groups that questioned climate science, saying their positions “could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”
Exxon researchers continued to support scientific research that cast doubt on climate science and its impacts, documents show.
Later in 2008, Gene Tunison, a manager of global regulatory affairs and research planning, said Exxon should direct a scientist to help the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s influential lobbying group, write a paper about climate science uncertainty.
“I support [Exxon] co-authoring a paper on uncertainty in measuring GHGs,” Tunison wrote in an email.
May 2012
Exxon researchers met regularly about developments in climate science
but continued to discuss doubts about the scientific consensus. Ahead of
a meeting dubbed ‘Friday climate overview’ among Exxon’s top climate
scientists, one researcher said:
“Under ‘some skeptic arguments disproven’ - my question is, are there any
‘skeptic’ arguments that we consider to be not yet disproven, or credible
and worthy of further investigation?”
Tillerson also pushed back against some of the dire consequences of rising temperatures predicted by climate scientists. After a 2011 meeting, Tillerson’s chief of staff, William Colton, emailed colleagues about the CEO’s feedback on a draft disclosure about carbon emissions. Tillerson wanted the words “weather extremes and storms” deleted.
“His view was that even mentioning a possible connection between climate change and weather was possibly giving the notion more credibility than he would like,” Colton wrote.
During a 2012 board meeting about “Developments in Climate Science and Policy,” Exxon board member Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said there was “still uncertainty in predicting future climate changes and impacts.”
“Money and effort spent on climate change is misplaced,” said Brabeck-Letmathe, the former CEO of Nestlé.
In December 2015, Exxon publicly stated its support of the just-signed Paris climate agreement, a nonbinding United Nations treaty that commits countries to work to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius. Climate scientists have warned that if Earth warms more than 2 degrees it could cross irreversible climate tipping points. During his Senate confirmation hearing to become Secretary of State in 2017, Tillerson said he supported staying in the agreement.
Months before the treaty was signed, Tillerson had expressed skepticism about its aims.
Following a presentation on climate science to Exxon’s board of directors in April 2015, Tillerson called the 2 degrees target “something magical,” according to a summary of the meeting.
“Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough,” said Tillerson, noting that it was “very expensive” to cut the emissions needed to meet such a target.
June 2015
Tillerson received regular updates on climate science from Exxon’s chief
researchers and in some instances asked about uncertainty in
climate-change modeling. An Exxon executive wrote Kheshgi:
“Rex called this afternoon with a couple of pretty detailed questions on
climate science: [1] Do climate scientists understand and are they able to
quantify the radiative forcing/GHG/climate impacts of events like
volcanos and forest fires. If so, how and how well? Is there differentiation
between major events like Mt Pinatubo and other much smaller events?
[2] Does the climate modeling community include these events and
effects in their climate models and projections of future temperatures and
impacts? If so, how and how well? Are these types of events/impacts a
major or minor source of uncertainty?”
“When people like Tillerson argue that 2 degrees is magical, it’s in the context of how you try,” said Field, the former IPCC co-chair. “Two degrees can be affordable with the right costs and benefits globally, even if it is not the right costs and benefits for Exxon.”
Last week, the United Nations warned countries are far from meeting the Paris agreement’s goals. Exxon said in August that the world isn’t currently on track to reach the targets of the agreement, which it continues to support publicly.
Shortly after replacing Tillerson in 2017, Darren Woods spread the word that he was in search of transformative new ideas. A plan to invest in offshore wind projects made its way to the most senior levels of the company, according to people familiar with the proposal. Karen Hughes, a former top official in the George W. Bush administration and an adviser to Exxon, said she counseled that investing in renewable energy would be good for the environment and improve the company’s reputation.
To date, Woods hasn’t invested in renewable energy, arguing it’s a low-return business outside Exxon’s skill set. Instead the company has vowed to spend about $3.4 billion a year on average through 2027 curbing its emissions and helping other companies do the same, and investing in areas including carbon capture, biofuels and lithium mining. It also recently struck a deal to buy Denbury, which operates a large network of pipelines that move carbon dioxide, for about $5 billion.
Exxon currently plans to spend as much as $25 billion a year in capital expenditures through 2027, mostly on oil and gas.
Write to Christopher M. Matthews at christopher.matthews@wsj.com and Collin Eaton at collin.eaton@wsj.com
: 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8}:
Appeared in the September 15, 2023, print edition as 'Inside Exxon’s Climate Two-Step'.
---
2015 morano palin
The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), while it no longer receives ExxonMobil funding, is launching a film challenging the science of global warming in Paris on December 7, as part of its 20-year campaign undermining climate science.
tisch maine timeline:
2017 (June)
President Trump announces that the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate
Agreement
Stephen Bannon and the anti-globalist, climate denying contingent of White House advisors
trump the personal entreaties of Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Pope Francis, Ivanka Trump, Rex
Tillerson, European Union heads of state and many others. Oblivious to the fact that the
emissions standards under the Agreement are voluntary, subject to revision, and entail no
penalties for noncompliance, the President calls the deal “draconian,” imposing unfair standards
on American companies and employees. “At what point does America get demeaned? At what
point do they start laughing at us as a country?” Trump says. “We don’t want other leaders and
other countries laughing at us anymore. And they won’t be.”
The New York Times observes that
“Mr. Trump’s decision to abandon the agreement for environmental action signed by 195 nations
is a remarkable rebuke to heads of state, climate activists, corporate executives and members of
the president’s own staff, who all failed to change his mind with an intense, last-minute lobbying
blitz. The Paris agreement was intended to bind the world community into battling rising
temperatures in concert, and the departure of the Earth’s second-largest polluter is a major
blow,”* and its editorial board calls the withdrawal “disgraceful.”** Wall Street Journal
headlines declare: “U.S. Climate Pivot Puts a Reluctant China in Driver’s Seat: Trump’s
withdrawal from Paris accord gives China a new opening to exert sway on a big global issue” ***
Some find a May 30 op/ed in the Wall Street Journal by presidential advisors H. R. McMaster
and Gary Cohn as illuminating on the withdrawal decision in: “The president embarked on his
first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that theworld is not a ‘global community’ but an arena
where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”
:{
}:
Writes David Brooks in The New York Times: “That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project.
It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs.”**** Al Gore’s statement on the
withdrawal declares that “Removing the United States from the Paris Agreement is a reckless and
indefensible action. It undermines America’s standing in the world and threatens to damage
humanity’s ability to solve the climate crisis in time. But make no mistake: if President Trump
won’t lead, the American people will. Civic leaders, mayors, governors, CEOs, investors and the
majority of the business community will take up this challenge. We are in the middle of a clean
energy revolution that no single person or group can stop. President Trump’s decision is
profoundly in conflict with what the majority of Americans want from our president; but no
matter what he does, we will ensure that our inevitable transition to a clean energy economy
continues.”*****
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers states that “We may have our
first post-rational president,” and that “It is possible that last week will be remembered as a
hinge in history — a moment when the United States and the world started moving on a
path away from the peace, prosperity and stability that have defined the past 75
years.”******
The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reports that US voters favor
staying in the Paris Agreement by a margin of 5 to 1, and that half of Trump voters support staying
in, with fewer than 3 in 10 saying we should not stay in.******* The formal process of
withdrawal will likely take four years, and not be final until after the 2020 presidential election.
[see 2015 (December)]
*Michael Shear, “Trump Will Withdraw U.S. From Paris Climate Agreement,” New York Times, June 1, 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/climate/trump-paris-climate-agreement.html
**Editorial Board, “Our Disgraceful Exit From the Paris Accord,” New York Times, June 1, 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opinion/trump-paris-climate-change-agreement.html
***Brian Spegele and Te-Ping Chen, “U.S. Climate Pivot Puts a Reluctant China in Driver’s Seat,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2017,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-climate-pivot-puts-a-reluctant-china-in-drivers-seat-1496380249
****David Brooks, “Donald Trump Poisons the World,” New York Times, June 2, 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/opinion/donald-trump-poisons-the-world.html
*****The Climate Reality Project, “Statement by Former Vice President Al Gore on Today’s Decision by the Trump Administration
to Withdraw from the Paris Agreement,” June 1, 2017, https://www.climaterealityproject.org/press/statement-al-gore-us-commitmentparis-agreement
******Lawrence Summers, “After 75 years of progress, was last week a hinge in history?” Washington Post, June 4, 2017,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-75-years-of-progress-was-last-week-a-hinge-in-history/2017/06/04/2085b91e-47cf11e7-bcde-624ad94170ab_story.html?utm_term=.7ccf9ee984ec
*******Jennifer Marlon, Eric Fine, and Anthony Keiserowtiz, “Majorities of Americans in Every State Support Participation in the
Paris Agreement,” Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, May 8, 2017,
http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/paris_agreement_by_state/
2X?
also seth borenstein
wASHINGTON (AP) —Announcing that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, President Donald Trump misplaced the blame for what ails the coal industry and laid a shaky factual foundation for his decision.A look at some of the claims in a Rose Garden speech and an accompanying fact sheet about the deal to curtail emissions responsible for global warming:
WHITE HOUSE: The Paris climate accord “would effectively decapitate our coal industry, which now supplies about one-third of our electric power.”
THE FACTS: The U.S. coal industry was in decline long before the Paris accord was signed in 2015. The primary cause has been competition from cleaner-burning natural gas, which has been made cheaper and more abundant by hydraulic fracturing. Electric utilities have been replacing coal plants with gas-fired facilities because they are more efficient and less expensive to operate.
TRUMP: Claims “absolutely tremendous economic progress since Election Day,” adding “more than a million private-sector jobs.”
THE FACTS: That’s basically right, but he earns no credit for jobs created in the months before he became president. To rack up that number, the president had to reach back to October. Even then, private-sector job creation from October through April (171,000 private-sector jobs a month) lags just slightly behind the pace of job creation for the previous six months (172,000), entirely under President Barack Obama.
TRUMP: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
THE FACTS: That may be so, but Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, is not Trump country. It voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in November, favoring her by a margin of 56 percent to Trump’s 40 percent. The city has a climate action plan committing to boost the use of renewable energy. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, a Democrat, has been an outspoken supporter of the Paris accord, and tweeted after Trump’s announcement that “as the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future.”
WHITE HOUSE: “According to a study by NERA Consulting, meeting the Obama administration’s requirements in the Paris Accord would cost the U.S. economy nearly $3 trillion over the next several decades. By 2040, our economy would lose 6.5 million industrial sector jobs — including 3.1 million manufacturing sector jobs.”
THE FACTS: This study was paid for by two groups that have long opposed environmental regulation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Council for Capital Formation. Both get financial backing from those who profit from the continued burning of fossil fuels. The latter group has received money from foundations controlled by the Koch brothers, whose company owns refineries and more than 4,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines.
The study makes worst-case assumptions that may inflate the cost of meeting U.S. targets under the Paris accord while largely ignoring the economic benefits to U.S. businesses from building and operating renewable energy projects.
Academic studies have found that increased environmental regulation doesn’t actually have much impact on employment. Jobs lost at polluting companies tend to be offset by new jobs in green technology.
WHITE HOUSE, citing a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “If all member nations met their obligations, the impact on the climate would be negligible,” curbing temperature rise by “less than .2 degrees Celsius in 2100.”
:{THE FACTS: The co-founder of the MIT program on climate change says the administration is citing an outdated report, taken out of context. Jake Jacoby said the actual global impact of meeting targets under the Paris accord would be to curb rising temperatures by 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.
“They found a number that made the point they want to make,” Jacoby said. “It’s kind of a debate trick.”
One degree may not sound like much, but Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute in Germany, says, “Every tenth of a degree increases the number of unprecedented extreme weather events considerably.”}:
Annotated White House talking points:[audio]
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also ref
150 pp
https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/jun/01/fact-checking-donald-trumps-statement-withdrawing-/
also ref
no lnx
Donald Trump announced that the United States will withdraw from the Paris accord on climate change. All but two countries signed the agreement. But Trump said the deal puts the United States at a disadvantage.
"The United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord," Trump said June 1, 2017, "but begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States."
The Paris accord had several ambitious goals. Signatories agreed to do their part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep the world’s temperature to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above what it was before industrial production took root.
Each country set its own targets, with reductions to begin in 2020. By mid century, the goal would be zero greenhouse gas emissions.
President Barack Obama had pledged to reduce emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
Wealthy nations agreed to provide $100 billion a year to help developing countries move away from fossil fuels and use more renewable power supplies.
We reviewed a number of claims Trump made during his White House speech. (We’ll be updating this article.)
Trump: The Paris Agreement would result in "lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production."
Trump cited a number of negative statistics about the predicted economic impact from the climate deal, including a $3 trillion drop in gross domestic product, 6.5 million industrial sector jobs lost and 86 percent reduction in coal production, all by 2040.
Take these statistics with a grain of salt.
All of these statistics come from a March 2017 study, prepared by NERA Economic Consulting, that estimates the potential impact of hypothetical regulatory actions necessary to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The study makes assumptions that gave several economics and environmental professors pause when reacting to the NERA study for ClimateFeedback.org.
Yale professor Kenneth Gillingham said the NERA model tends to result in higher costs than other economic models. The study assumes certain hypothetical regulations, but "one could easily model other actions with much lower costs," and it also ignores the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, like avoiding the negative effects of climate change.
Additional professors pointed out that the study assumes:
• that other countries don’t make emission reductions in line with the Paris Agreement, therefore leading American companies to relocate;
• that industries are static and don’t change to adapt to the regulations, and;
• that there would be no increase in clean electricity generation compared to the baseline scenario.
In other words, the NERA model makes assumptions that generate an extreme result.
"The NERA model provides useful information, but it is important for it to be taken in context of model results from other models and not cherry-picked as was done here," Gillingham said.
The Paris Agreement would result in "lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production."
In a speech – Thursday, June 1, 2017
Trump: "China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So, we can't build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement."
Under the Paris agreement, each country publicly declares how much it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and what it will do to get there. So in that sense, the agreement doesn’t allow or disallow specific actions, like building plants.
Regardless, China has actually taken steps to stop building coal plants. In January, China stopped construction of 103 new coal-fired plants. The move sidelined scores of projects where work had already begun and put 120 gigawatts of capacity on hold.
Between the effects of an economic slowdown and an effort to move toward less-polluting sources, China has cut its use of coal three years in a row.
The key benchmark under the Paris agreement is the overall reduction in emissions. Climate Action Tracker, a project of three research groups, reported in May that "China’s carbon dioxide emissions appear to have peaked more than a decade ahead of its Paris Agreement commitment."
China has promised that by 2030, it would reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 60–65 percent below 2005 levels, and increase the share of non-fossil energy to around 20 percent.
Still, the Climate Action Tracker assessment comes with a warning.
Researchers said that China’s goals are "not ambitious enough to limit warming to below 2°C, let alone the 1.5°C limit in the Paris Agreement, unless other countries make much deeper reductions and comparably greater effort than China."
Donald Trump
President
"China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So, we can't build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement."
In a speech – Thursday, June 1, 2017
Trump: "Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree -- think of that; this much -- Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount."
Trump’s statement about the amount of temperature reduction expected under the treaty is broadly accurate but needs some additional context.
According to John Reilly, who co-directs the Joint Program on Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT, the Paris agreement would reduce global temperature by two-tenths of one degree Celsius compared with earlier climate treaties.
The Paris deal was expected to reduce global temperatures by building on the earlier 2009 Copenhagen Accord, imposing deeper carbon emission cuts on signatories and bringing new countries like China into an international climate pact.
Yet as the Paris Agreement was under negotiation, Reilly co-authored an MIT report that criticized the deal for not making steep enough cuts in emissions to reach the Paris agreement’s ambitious goal of capping this century’s temperature increases at 2 degrees Celsius.
"Those pledges shave 0.2 C of warming if they’re maintained through 2100, compared with what we assessed would have been the case by extending existing measures (due to expire in 2020) based on earlier international agreements in Copenhagen and Cancun," Reilly said in October 2015, when the MIT study was published. "We are making progress, but if 2 C stabilization is our goal, it’s not nearly enough."
However, Reilly said that tackling climate problems depends on taking a series of incremental steps to reduce carbon emissions, and noted that pulling out of the Paris agreement would require even bigger reductions in the future.
Donald Trump
President
"Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree -- think of that; this much -- Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount."
In a speech – Thursday, June 1, 2017
Trump: China "can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not us."
Trump claimed that under the agreement, China — the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — can increase emissions for more than a decade but prevented the United States from doing so.
"They can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not us," Trump said.
This doesn’t accurately describe the agreement. All parties to the Paris Agreement communicate what’s known as their Intended Nationally Determined Contribution toward the goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations.
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China’s intentions include maxing out carbon dioxide emissions around 2030, if not sooner, and to increase to about 20 percent its proportion of non-fossil fuels, such as renewables. The United States’ intentions include reducing emissions by 26 to 28 percent below its 2005 level in 2025.
These intentions draw from a November 2014 China-U.S. agreement on climate change, before the Paris deal came into effect.
Back in 2014, now Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., claimed that the bilateral deal left China off the hook for 16 years. That wasn’t accurate, either.
The agreement outlined intentions, it was not binding, and China was already planning to cut down on its emissions. Experts then told us that while theoretically China could meet its emissions target simply by shutting down major plants on Dec. 31, 2029, it would be risky to wait that long rather than slowly working toward the goal. China also pledged a 20 percent increase in non-fossil-fuel use, and that’s something that would take years to carry out, experts said. We rated McConnell’s claim Mostly False.
Trump: "At 1 percent growth, renewable sources of energy can meet some of our domestic demand. But at 3 or 4 percent growth, which I expect, we need all forms of available American energy, or our country will be at grave risk of brownouts and blackouts."
Trump has consistently argued that the United States economy can grow at 3 percent or 4 percent a year, but that’s not a realistic expectation.
While that level of growth was common between 1948 and 2005, it hasn’t happened since -- and economists we checked with recently were skeptical that it could happen with any consistency in the near future.
So that makes Trump’s concerns about growth-related brownouts and blackouts seem unwarranted.
Economic growth, economists say, stems from two major factors: population growth and improvements in productivity. But neither of these factors are well positioned to drive 3 percent or 4 percent growth, they say.
The working-age population isn’t growing as fast as it used to due to lower birth rates. And Trump himself wants to curb the other way population can grow -- through immigration.
Meanwhile, productivity growth is equally out of reach of policymakers. "You can create bubbles to prop up GDP growth for a few years, such as the 2005 to 2008 housing bubble, but to boost productivity growth materially and durably, you need to make important changes over long numbers of years," said Chris Lafakis, a senior economist at Moody’s. "You also need transformative technological innovation, which is not predictable."
Trump: "India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020. Think of it. India can double their coal production. We're supposed to get rid of ours."
India does have plans to nearly double its coal production, and the agreement does not prevent that. But the Paris Agreement does not even mention the word coal, nor does it do anything to put a global moratorium on coal.
Each signatory has set its own goals and has to report on its progress.
A 2015 report by the Economic Times, a financial daily from India, discussed a plan of Coal India Limited, a state-owned coal mining company, to double its coal production by 2020.
The story goes on to give the caveat that the doubling of production is subject to land acquisition and environment clearance, all of which is yet to happen.
Coal India produces around 84 percent of India's overall coal production, and its decision to double coal production would technically mean India is planning to almost double its coal production.
"The environment is non-negotiable and we are extremely careful about it," Anil Swarup, the top bureaucrat in the coal ministry, told Reuters in 2015. "(But) our dependence on coal will continue. There are no other alternatives available."
But is India allowed to double coal production by 2020?
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change says the Paris Agreement requires all parties to put forward their best efforts through "nationally determined contributions" (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the years ahead.
This means all parties will have to regularly report on their emissions and implementation efforts.
India, in ratifying the agreement on October 2, 2016, said it would follow a path of low carbon commitment in tandem with its national laws and development agenda, including eradication of poverty. India also committed to reduce emissions 33 to 35 percent of 2005 levels by 2030.
What it effectively means is that the agreement allows the nations who signed the Paris Agreement to set their own reduction targets to help achieve the overall target of reducing the rise in global warming below 2 degree Celsius.
Trump: "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris. I promised I would exit or renegotiate any deal which fails to serve America's interests."
Invoking the city of Pittsburgh, Pa., has a certain irony, because the city voted overwhelmingly for Trump's rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Clinton won almost 60 percent of the vote in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh. The percentage was even higher in many precincts within the city of Pittsburgh itself. (Allegheny County includes a range of suburbs in addition to the city.)
That said, the picture changes if you look at the surrounding counties, particularly Beaver, Fayette, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland counties. These areas -- which are heavily blue-collar, disproportionately rural, especially reliant on energy extraction, and historically Democratic -- went particularly strongly for Trump in 2016. Hillary Clinton managed to win only about 30 to 40 percent of the vote there.
Trump's success in counties like these helped him flip Pennsylvania to the Republican column and win the presidency. But across the country, cities such as Pittsburgh with a more urban, educated population went heavily for Clinton.
A final note on Manila
Trump opened his speech saying his team was tracking the terrorist attack in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines. The most recent reports say that the gun fire that took place at a resort came from a lone man aiming to rob gamblers.
Our Sources
Linked in the story.
tag archive BS eg CPP
https://us5.campaign-archive.com/?u=40608ac93880d1cb2444f1d20&id=cde62a1e98
trump's energy order won't ruin the planet
President Trump's executive order on energy and climate
policies has induced much criticism from environmental groups. In USA Today, Lomborg shows that the scrapped Clean Power Plan would only ever have reduced temperature rises by 0.023°F (0.013°C) at the end of this century.
Trump's order shows that the Paris climate treaty is merely a toothless "paper tiger" which can't fix global warming.
For that, we need green R&D
franta says trump used same economists ~ paris that were used ~ kyoto, same args: montgomery?
Staying in Paris Agreement Would Have Cost Families $20K
Nov 5th, 2019
COMMENTARY BY
Nicolas Loris
@NiconomistLoris
Former Deputy Director, Thomas A. Roe Institute
Nick is an economist who focused on energy, environmental, and regulatory issues as theHerbert and Joyce Morgan fellow.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
President Donald Trump is right to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
Global compliance with the Paris Agreement has been nothing short of abysmal.
Those who are clamoring for action on climate change are the ones who should actually be most upset with what a sham the Paris agreement is.
Copied
Editor’s note: The U.S. just took a new, major step to leaving the Paris Agreement, a climate change deal between several countries. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, “Today the United States began the process to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Per the terms of the Agreement, the United States submitted formal notification of its withdrawal to the United Nations. The withdrawal will take effect one year from delivery of the notification.”
Pompeo added in his statement, made late Monday:
As noted in his June 1, 2017 remarks, President [Donald] Trump made the decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement because of the unfair economic burden imposed on American workers, businesses, and taxpayers by U.S. pledges made under the agreement. The United States has reduced all types of emissions, even as we grow our economy and ensure our citizens’ access to affordable energy. Our results speak for themselves: U.S. emissions of criteria air pollutants that impact human health and the environment declined by 74% between 1970 and 2018. U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions dropped 13% from 2005-2017, even as our economy grew over 19 percent.
Here’s a version of a previously published article from Heritage Foundation researcher Nick Loris on why the Paris Agreement wouldn’t significantly affect the climate–but would cost America jobs and would hurt some families’ incomes.
President Donald Trump is right to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. While the climate is indeed changing and human activity is playing a role, the chances of looming climate catastrophe are simply unrealistic and not grounded in reality.
But even granting such a looming catastrophe, the Paris Agreement itself would do little to alter the climate. To have any impact whatsoever on climate, the entire world would either have to quickly change the way it consumes energy or simply remain undeveloped. Both options are devoid of reality.
While many countries are rapidly expanding their use of renewable power, forecasts indicate that coal, oil, and natural gas will continue to provide the overwhelming majority of the world’s energy needs well into the future. For developing countries, the highest priorities are to reduce energy poverty and improve living standards.
Those who are clamoring for action on climate change are the ones who should actually be most upset with what a sham the Paris agreement is. It’s been celebrated as a breakthrough achievement of the world’s developed and developing countries coming together, but it is anything but that.
>>>The Right Way to Ensure a Cleaner Environment
With no enforcement mechanisms in place and no repercussions for failing to meet emissions reduction targets, countries are essentially free to do whatever they want,[AS IF HERITAGE HADN'T OPPOED FROM GIT] meaning they will continue on their business-as-usual trajectory without making any changes. China, for instance, can peak its emissions in 2030 even though projections have their peak emissions falling before that year.
India, for its part, has pledged to reduce its emissions levels, or cuts its ratio of carbon emissions to gross domestic product. That ratio may well go down so long as carbon emissions rise at a slower rate than GDP, but carbon emissions will keep rising all the same.
Actually, India committed to emissions reductions that are less than what the country would achieve if it continues on the same track it is currently on today. In other words, it set the bar so low that it can continue along its businesses-as-usual trajectory of emissions intensity and come out looking like a climate hero.
As the Manhattan Institute’s Oren Cass wrote, “It’s easy to slim down to 180 pounds, if you weigh 175 to begin with.”
Pakistan was more honest than most about its emissions prospects, stating bluntly, “Given the future economic growth and associated growth in the energy sector, the peaking of emissions in Pakistan is expected to take place much beyond the year 2030. An exponential increase of [greenhouse gas] emissions for many decades is likely to occur before any decrease in emissions can be expected.”
Global compliance with the Paris Agreement has been nothing short of abysmal. In fact, most nations will soon fail to meet the deadlines they agreed to.
The original hope that each nation’s contribution might somehow push other countries to “do more” is not playing out. This deal was a hodgepodge of arbitrarily defined commitments with no enforcement mechanism. It was doomed from the start.
Following through with the Obama administration’s commitments would impose clear economic harm on the U.S. by driving energy prices higher—and that’s just a small part of the overall cost. Americans would pay more for food, health care, education, clothes, and every other good and service that requires energy.
These higher costs would be spread across the entire economy and would shrink overall economic growth and employment. Heritage Fovundation analysts estimated that the regulations required to meet the Obama administration’s commitments would impose the following costs by 2035:
An overall loss of nearly 400,000 jobs, half of which would be in manufacturing.
A average total income loss of more than $20,000 for a family of four.
An aggregate GDP loss of over $2.5 trillion.
Other countries would continue getting a free pass under the agreement, but if the U.S. signed back on, one can be sure that environmental activist lawsuits would make sure the U.S. kept its obligations.
To make matters worse, the climate regulations encompassing the U.S. target may not even achieve the desired results and would require additional regulations. And that would just be the beginning. The Paris Agreement requires ever-increasing targets as time goes on, which would further increase the cost of compliance. These efforts would return us to the same costly and ineffective policies that the current administration is unwinding.
Congress should instead advance pragmatic policies that will actually drive innovation in energy and environmental protection.
This piece originally appeared inThe Daily Signal
SEE MAIN NOdE anno
Statement by President Trump on the Paris Climate Accord
ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT
Issued on: June 1, 2017
...
PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. (Applause.) Thank you. I would like to begin by addressing the terrorist attack in Manila. We’re closely monitoring the situation, and I will continue to give updates if anything happens during this period of time. But it is really very sad as to what’s going on throughout the world with terror. Our thoughts and our prayers are with all of those affected.
Before we discuss the Paris Accord, I’d like to begin with an update on our tremendous — absolutely tremendous — economic progress since Election Day on November 8th. The economy is starting to come back, and very, very rapidly. We’ve added $3.3 trillion in stock market value to our economy, and more than a million private sector jobs.
I have just returned from a trip overseas where we concluded nearly $350 billion of military and economic development for the United States, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. It was a very, very successful trip, believe me. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you.
In my meetings at the G7, we have taken historic steps to demand fair and reciprocal trade that gives Americans a level playing field against other nations. We’re also working very hard for peace in the Middle East, and perhaps even peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Our attacks on terrorism are greatly stepped up — and you see that, you see it all over — from the previous administration, including getting many other countries to make major contributions to the fight against terror. Big, big contributions are being made by countries that weren’t doing so much in the form of contribution.
One by one, we are keeping the promises I made to the American people during my campaign for President –- whether it’s cutting job-killing regulations; appointing and confirming a tremendous Supreme Court justice; putting in place tough new ethics rules; achieving a record reduction in illegal immigration on our southern border; or bringing jobs, plants, and factories back into the United States at numbers which no one until this point thought even possible. And believe me, we’ve just begun. The fruits of our labor will be seen very shortly even more so.
On these issues and so many more, we’re following through on our commitments. And I don’t want anything to get in our way. I am fighting every day for the great people of this country. Therefore, in order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord — (applause) — thank you, thank you — but begin negotiations to reenter either the Paris Accord or a really entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers. So we’re getting out. But we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair. And if we can, that’s great. And if we can’t, that’s fine. (Applause.)
As President, I can put no other consideration before the wellbeing of American citizens. The Paris Climate Accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries, leaving American workers — who I love — and taxpayers to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production.
Thus, as of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country. This includes ending the implementation of the nationally determined contribution and, very importantly, the Green Climate Fund which is costing the United States a vast fortune.
Compliance with the terms of the Paris Accord and the onerous energy restrictions it has placed on the United States could cost America as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025 according to the National Economic Research Associates. This includes 440,000 fewer manufacturing jobs — not what we need — believe me, this is not what we need — including automobile jobs, and the further decimation of vital American industries on which countless communities rely. They rely for so much, and we would be giving them so little.
According to this same study, by 2040, compliance with the commitments put into place by the previous administration would cut production for the following sectors: paper down 12 percent; cement down 23 percent; iron and steel down 38 percent; coal — and I happen to love the coal miners — down 86 percent; natural gas down 31 percent. The cost to the economy at this time would be close to $3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs, while households would have $7,000 less income and, in many cases, much worse than that.
Not only does this deal subject our citizens to harsh economic restrictions, it fails to live up to our environmental ideals. As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do, I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States — which is what it does -– the world’s leader in environmental protection, while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters.
For example, under the agreement, China will be able to increase these emissions by a staggering number of years — 13. They can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not us. India makes its participation contingent on receiving billions and billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid from developed countries. There are many other examples. But the bottom line is that the Paris Accord is very unfair, at the highest level, to the United States.
Further, while the current agreement effectively blocks the development of clean coal in America — which it does, and the mines are starting to open up. We’re having a big opening in two weeks. Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, so many places. A big opening of a brand-new mine. It’s unheard of. For many, many years, that hasn’t happened. They asked me if I’d go. I’m going to try.
China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So we can’t build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement. India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020. Think of it: India can double their coal production. We’re supposed to get rid of ours. Even Europe is allowed to continue construction of coal plants.
In short, the agreement doesn’t eliminate coal jobs, it just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States, and ships them to foreign countries.
This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States. The rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris Agreement — they went wild; they were so happy — for the simple reason that it put our country, the United States of America, which we all love, at a very, very big economic disadvantage. A cynic would say the obvious reason for economic competitors and their wish to see us remain in the agreement is so that we continue to suffer this self-inflicted major economic wound. We would find it very hard to compete with other countries from other parts of the world.
We have among the most abundant energy reserves on the planet, sufficient to lift millions of America’s poorest workers out of poverty. Yet, under this agreement, we are effectively putting these reserves under lock and key, taking away the great wealth of our nation — it’s great wealth, it’s phenomenal wealth; not so long ago, we had no idea we had such wealth — and leaving millions and millions of families trapped in poverty and joblessness.
The agreement is a massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries. At 1 percent growth, renewable sources of energy can meet some of our domestic demand, but at 3 or 4 percent growth, which I expect, we need all forms of available American energy, or our country — (applause) — will be at grave risk of brownouts and blackouts, our businesses will come to a halt in many cases, and the American family will suffer the consequences in the form of lost jobs and a very diminished quality of life.
Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree — think of that; this much — Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount. In fact, 14 days of carbon emissions from China alone would wipe out the gains from America — and this is an incredible statistic — would totally wipe out the gains from America’s expected reductions in the year 2030, after we have had to spend billions and billions of dollars, lost jobs, closed factories, and suffered much higher energy costs for our businesses and for our homes.
As the Wall Street Journal wrote this morning: “The reality is that withdrawing is in America’s economic interest and won’t matter much to the climate.” The United States, under the Trump administration, will continue to be the cleanest and most environmentally friendly country on Earth. We’ll be the cleanest. We’re going to have the cleanest air. We’re going to have the cleanest water. We will be environmentally friendly, but we’re not going to put our businesses out of work and we’re not going to lose our jobs. We’re going to grow; we’re going to grow rapidly. (Applause.)
And I think you just read — it just came out minutes ago, the small business report — small businesses as of just now are booming, hiring people. One of the best reports they’ve seen in many years.
I’m willing to immediately work with Democratic leaders to either negotiate our way back into Paris, under the terms that are fair to the United States and its workers, or to negotiate a new deal that protects our country and its taxpayers. (Applause.)
So if the obstructionists want to get together with me, let’s make them non-obstructionists. We will all sit down, and we will get back into the deal. And we’ll make it good, and we won’t be closing up our factories, and we won’t be losing our jobs. And we’ll sit down with the Democrats and all of the people that represent either the Paris Accord or something that we can do that’s much better than the Paris Accord. And I think the people of our country will be thrilled, and I think then the people of the world will be thrilled. But until we do that, we’re out of the agreement.
I will work to ensure that America remains the world’s leader on environmental issues, but under a framework that is fair and where the burdens and responsibilities are equally shared among the many nations all around the world.
No responsible leader can put the workers — and the people — of their country at this debilitating and tremendous disadvantage. The fact that the Paris deal hamstrings the United States, while empowering some of the world’s top polluting countries, should dispel any doubt as to the real reason why foreign lobbyists wish to keep our magnificent country tied up and bound down by this agreement: It’s to give their country an economic edge over the United States. That’s not going to happen while I’m President. I’m sorry. (Applause.)
My job as President is to do everything within my power to give America a level playing field and to create the economic, regulatory and tax structures that make America the most prosperous and productive country on Earth, and with the highest standard of living and the highest standard of environmental protection.
Our tax bill is moving along in Congress, and I believe it’s doing very well. I think a lot of people will be very pleasantly surprised. The Republicans are working very, very hard. We’d love to have support from the Democrats, but we may have to go it alone. But it’s going very well.
The Paris Agreement handicaps the United States economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country’s expense. They don’t put America first. I do, and I always will. (Applause.)
The same nations asking us to stay in the agreement are the countries that have collectively cost America trillions of dollars through tough trade practices and, in many cases, lax contributions to our critical military alliance. You see what’s happening. It’s pretty obvious to those that want to keep an open mind.
At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country? We want fair treatment for its citizens, and we want fair treatment for our taxpayers. We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore. And they won’t be. They won’t be.
I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris. (Applause.) I promised I would exit or renegotiate any deal which fails to serve America’s interests. Many trade deals will soon be under renegotiation. Very rarely do we have a deal that works for this country, but they’ll soon be under renegotiation. The process has begun from day one. But now we’re down to business.
Beyond the severe energy restrictions inflicted by the Paris Accord, it includes yet another scheme to redistribute wealth out of the United States through the so-called Green Climate Fund — nice name — which calls for developed countries to send $100 billion to developing countries all on top of America’s existing and massive foreign aid payments. So we’re going to be paying billions and billions and billions of dollars, and we’re already way ahead of anybody else. Many of the other countries haven’t spent anything, and many of them will never pay one dime.
The Green Fund would likely obligate the United States to commit potentially tens of billions of dollars of which the United States has already handed over $1 billion — nobody else is even close; most of them haven’t even paid anything — including funds raided out of America’s budget for the war against terrorism. That’s where they came. Believe me, they didn’t come from me. They came just before I came into office. Not good. And not good the way they took the money.
In 2015, the United Nation’s departing top climate officials reportedly described the $100 billion per year as “peanuts,” and stated that “the $100 billion is the tail that wags the dog.” In 2015, the Green Climate Fund’s executive director reportedly stated that estimated funding needed would increase to $450 billion per year after 2020. And nobody even knows where the money is going to. Nobody has been able to say, where is it going to?
Of course, the world’s top polluters have no affirmative obligations under the Green Fund, which we terminated. America is $20 trillion in debt. Cash-strapped cities cannot hire enough police officers or fix vital infrastructure. Millions of our citizens are out of work. And yet, under the Paris Accord, billions of dollars that ought to be invested right here in America will be sent to the very countries that have taken our factories and our jobs away from us. So think of that.
There are serious legal and constitutional issues as well. Foreign leaders in Europe, Asia, and across the world should not have more to say with respect to the U.S. economy than our own citizens and their elected representatives. Thus, our withdrawal from the agreement represents a reassertion of America’s sovereignty. (Applause.) Our Constitution is unique among all the nations of the world, and it is my highest obligation and greatest honor to protect it. And I will.
Staying in the agreement could also pose serious obstacles for the United States as we begin the process of unlocking the restrictions on America’s abundant energy reserves, which we have started very strongly. It would once have been unthinkable that an international agreement could prevent the United States from conducting its own domestic economic affairs, but this is the new reality we face if we do not leave the agreement or if we do not negotiate a far better deal.
The risks grow as historically these agreements only tend to become more and more ambitious over time. In other words, the Paris framework is a starting point — as bad as it is — not an end point. And exiting the agreement protects the United States from future intrusions on the United States’ sovereignty and massive future legal liability. Believe me, we have massive legal liability if we stay in.
As President, I have one obligation, and that obligation is to the American people. The Paris Accord would undermine our economy, hamstring our workers, weaken our sovereignty, impose unacceptable legal risks, and put us at a permanent disadvantage to the other countries of the world. It is time to exit the Paris Accord — (applause) — and time to pursue a new deal that protects the environment, our companies, our citizens, and our country.
It is time to put Youngstown, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — along with many, many other locations within our great country — before Paris, France. It is time to make America great again. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. Very important. I’d like to ask Scott Pruitt, who most of you know and respect, as I do, just to say a few words.
Scott, please. (Applause.)
ADMINISTRATOR PRUITT: Thank you, Mr. President. Your decision today to exit the Paris Accord reflects your unflinching commitment to put America first.
And by exiting, you’re fulfilling yet one more campaign promise to the American people. Please know that I am thankful for your fortitude, your courage, and your steadfastness as you serve and lead our country.
America finally has a leader who answers only to the people — not to the special interests who have had their way for way too long. In everything you do, Mr. President, you’re fighting for the forgotten men and women across this country. You’re a champion for the hardworking citizens all across this land who just want a government that listens to them and represents their interest.
You have promised to put America First in all that you do, and you’ve done that in any number of ways — from trade, to national security, to protecting our border, to rightsizing Washington, D.C. And today you’ve put America first with regard to international agreements and the environment.
This is an historic restoration of American economic independence — one that will benefit the working class, the working poor, and working people of all stripes. With this action, you have declared that the people are rulers of this country once again. And it should be noted that we as a nation do it better than anyone in the world in striking the balance between growing our economy, growing jobs while also being a good steward of our environment.
We owe no apologies to other nations for our environmental stewardship. After all, before the Paris Accord was ever signed, America had reduced its CO2 footprint to levels from the early 1990s. In fact, between the years 2000 and 2014, the United States reduced its carbon emissions by 18-plus percent. And this was accomplished not through government mandate, but accomplished through innovation and technology of the American private sector.
For that reason, Mr. President, you have corrected a view that was paramount in Paris that somehow the United States should penalize its own economy, be apologetic, lead with our chin, while the rest of world does little. Other nations talk a good game; we lead with action — not words. (Applause.)
Our efforts, Mr. President, as you know, should be on exporting our technology, our innovation to nations who seek to reduce their CO2 footprint to learn from us. That should be our focus versus agreeing to unachievable targets that harm our economy and the American people.
Mr. President, it takes courage, it takes commitment to say no to the plaudits of men while doing what’s right by the American people. You have that courage, and the American people can take comfort because you have their backs.
Thank you, Mr. President.
END
ucs negin 10 21
...The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Since 2014, ExxonMobil has given more than $5 million on top of its annual dues to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—a major player in blocking action on climate change for decades. A few years after becoming an ExxonMobil grantee, the Chamber gained some unwanted notoriety by financing awidely debunked report that then-President Trump cited as a primary rationale for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.
In 2019, however, the Chamber appeared to flip 180 degrees, declaring on its website, "Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option." The assertion that human activity is merely contributing to climate change is inaccurate, given that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause, but the statement did represent a quantum leap from when the association spuriously maintained in comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 that "a warming of even 3 [degrees Celsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans."
That said, the Chamber vowed in an August 24 press release to "do everything [it] can to prevent" the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill—which would slash carbon emissions from the electric power and transportation sectors—"from becoming law." And in a section on its website addressing climate change, the Chamber calls for "the increased use of natural gas" to make "further progress."
Increase the use of natural gas?! That runs counter to what climate science says about the need to swiftly decarbonize the energy sector, essentially trading one major carbon pollution source—coal—for another—methane, which is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxidein warming the planet. Moreover, according to a December 2019 study in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the boom in natural gas use over the last decade alone have now surpassed the emissions avoided by closing coal-fired power plants.
ref NERA
~ paris cop 21
Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Regulations On the
Industrial Sector
Prepared for:
American Council for Capital Formation Center for
Policy Research
Report Sponsors inst 21st c energy COC
March 2017
https://accf.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170316-NERA-ACCF-Full-Report.pdf
Paul Bernstein, Ph.D., Associate Director W. David Montgomery, Ph.D., Affiliated Consultant Bharat Ramkrishnan, Senior Analyst Sugandha D. Tuladhar, Ph.D., Associate Director
only 100 countries have even reported #?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/climate-change-2655060913/
jj comm dr
United Nations warned Friday that the planet is barreling toward2.7°C of warming by the end of the century, a nightmare scenario that can be averted only if policymakers take immediate and sweeping action to slash greenhouse gas emissions.
Even if the 191 parties to the Paris climate accord meet their current commitments, global greenhouse gas emissions will still rise 16% by 2030 compared to 2010 levels, according to a new report published by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The goal of the 2015 Paris agreement is to limit global warming to below 2°C—and preferably to 1.5°C—above pre-industrial levels. An analysis released earlier this week found that the climate targets and actions of just one country—The Gambia—are in line with the critical 1.5° goal.
"This is what betrayal looks like," Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted in response to the latest U.N. findings. "Whatever our so-called 'leaders' are doing, they are doing it wrong."
Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of U.N. Climate Change, said in a statement that the international community must "peak emissions as soon as possible before 2030 and support developing countries in building up climate resilience."
"The 16% increase is a huge cause of concern," said Espinosa. "It is in sharp contrast with the calls by science for rapid, sustained, and large-scale emission reductions to prevent the most severe climate consequences and suffering, especially of the most vulnerable, throughout the world."
The U.N. analysis came as U.S. President Joe Biden met with world leaders and announced that the United States is partnering with the European Union in an effort to cut methane emissions—a powerful driver of global warming—by nearly 30% by the end of the decade.
In its landmark report last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasized that a "strong, rapid, and sustained" reduction in methane emissions is necessary to prevent the worst of the planetary crisis.
The IPCC also estimated that keeping global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels would require a 45% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030—a mark that the international community is currently on track to miss badly, according to the new U.N. report.
António Guterres, the secretary-general of the U.N., said in a statement Friday that 2.7°C of planetary heating would be "catastrophic" and that world leaders are "rapidly running out of time" to act.
"This is breaking the promise made six years ago to pursue the 1.5°C goal of the Paris agreement," said Guterres. "Failure to meet this goal will be measured in the massive loss of lives and livelihoods."
running hard trump 2.0 2024? no choice but 2x 3x down?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/ted-cruz-2650069802
when President Joe Biden announced his intent to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was one of the first Republican lawmakers to publicly slam the newly-elected president's decision. Echoing a line from former President Donald Trump, Cruz claimed to be protecting the interests of Pittsburgh over Paris. Almost immediately after he shared his statement via Twitter, critics began firing back.
Now, according to CBS-Pittsburgh, local official Rich Fitzgerald has a message for the embattled Texas senator.When asked about Cruz's remarks, Fitzgerald did not mince words when he expressed his level of disdain for the Republican lawmaker. He also offered a clear message to Cruz: stay out of Pittsburgh business.
"Outrageous. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He's been a climate denier. He was a COVID denier. We believe in science around here," Fitzgerald told KDKA. "We'll run what we need to do here, Senator, and keep your nose out of our business."
https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/climate-change
JC cmn dreams
More than 250 scientists and scholars from 30 countries have issued an open letter calling on policymakers to "engage more with the growing risk of societal disruption and collapse due to damage to the climate and environment," arguing that only then "might communities and nations begin to prepare and so reduce its likelihood, speed, severity, harm to the most vulnerable, and to nature."
The letter, a version of which appeared GUK in The Guardian Sunday, comes on the heels of a pair of United Nations reports warning of the dire direction in which the planet is headed. As U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres put it: "The state of the planet is broken. Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal."
This weekend, world leaders will hold the Climate Ambition Summit 2020to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris climate agreement. After failing in the years since then to cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with that accord, the letter says, "we must now face the consequences."
While "some armed services already see collapse as an important scenario, requiring planning," the letter notes that "the topic is not well reported in the media, and mostly absent from civil society and politics," even though such collapse "is already the experience or memory of many communities in the Global South."
The U.K. arm of Extinction Rebellion shared pieces of the letter on Twitter with photos of climate activists around the world demanding urgent action:
Denouncing media coverage that "typically cites people who condemn discussion of the topic," the letter says that "ill-informed speculations, such as on foreign misinformation campaigns, or impacts on mental health and motivation, will not support serious discussion. Rather, such claims risk betraying the thousands of activists and community leaders whose anticipation of collapse is part of their motivation to push for change on climate, ecology, and social justice."
The letter continues:
People who care about environmental and humanitarian issues should not be discouraged from discussing the risks of societal disruption or collapse. That could risk agendas being driven by people with less commitment to such values.
Some of us believe that a transition to a new form of society may be possible. That will involve bold action to reduce damage to the climate, nature and other people, including preparations for major disruptions to everyday life. We are united in regarding efforts to suppress discussion of collapse as hindering the possibility of that transition.
"We have experienced how emotionally challenging it is to recognize the damage being done, along with the growing threat to our own way of life," the letter concludes. "We also know the great sense of fellowship that can arise. It is time to invite each other into difficult conversations, so we can reduce our complicity in the harm, and be creative to make the best of a turbulent future."
Signatories and supporters of the letter shared it on social media with the hashtag #scholarswarning, offering their summaries of what the letter calls for and detailing why they signed on to it.
"We're saying we must confront the real possibility of climate collapse so that we can do our utmost to avoid it," American climate scientist Peter Kalmus, a signatory to the letter, saidin a tweet Sunday. "This is as far from 'doomerism' as you can get."
In a statement, University of Cumbria professor Jem Bendell, another signatory, explained that "we come from dozens of countries and subject disciplines and perceive a resistance by the establishment to serious engagement in adapting to the increasing disruptions to food, water, health, and the economy."
"It is time to listen to the scholarship," Bendell added, "and try to reduce harm from societal disruption and even collapse."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_Nations_Climate_Change_Conference
The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 21 or CMP 11 was held inParis, France, from 30 November to 12 December 2015. It was the 21st yearly session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 11th session of the Meeting of the Parties (CMP) to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.[1]
The conference negotiated the Paris Agreement, a global agreement on the reduction of climate change, the text of which represented a consensus of the representatives of the 196 attending parties.[2] The agreement enters into force when joined by at least 55 countries which together represent at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.[3][4][5]On 22 April 2016 (Earth Day), 174 countries signed the agreement in New York, [6] and began adopting it within their own legal systems (through ratification, acceptance, approval, or accession).
According to the organizing committee at the outset of the talks,[7] the expected key result was an agreement to set a goal of limiting global warming to "well below 2 °C" Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. The agreement calls for zero net anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to be reached during the second half of the 21st century. In the adopted version of the Paris Agreement,[3] the parties will also "pursue efforts to" limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C.[2] The 1.5 °C goal will require zero emissions sometime between 2030 and 2050, according to some scientists.[2]
Prior to the conference, 146 national climate panels publicly presented a draft of national climate contributions (called "Intended Nationally Determined Contributions", INDCs). These suggested commitments were estimated to limit global warming to 2.7 °C by 2100.[8] For example, the EU suggested INDC is a commitment to a 40 percent reduction in emissions by 2030 compared to 1990.[9] The agreement establishes a "global stocktake" which revisits the national goals to "update and enhance" them every five years beginning 2023.[3] However, no detailed timetable or country-specific goals for emissions were incorporated into the Paris Agreement – as opposed to the previous Kyoto Protocol.
A number of meetings took place in preparation for COP21, including the Bonn Climate Change Conference, 19 to 23 October 2015, which produced a draft agreement.[10]
Contents
1 Background
2 Location and participation
3 Negotiations
4 Outcome
4.1 Non-binding commitments, lack of enforcement mechanisms
4.2 Institutional investors' contribution to limiting fossil fuels
5 Declarations of non-state parties
6 Financing
7 Demonstrations
8 See also
9 References
10 External links
Background
Global carbon dioxide emissions by country in 2015.
China (29.5%)
USA (14.3%)
EU (9.6%)
India (6.8%)
Russia (4.9%)
Japan (3.5%)
Other (31.4%)
[Shows the top 40 CO2 emitting countries and related in the world in 1990 and 2012, including per capita figures. The data is taken from the EU Edgar database.]
According to the organizing committee of the summit in Paris, the objective of the 2015 conference was to achieve, for the first time in over 20 years of UN negotiations, a binding and universal agreement on climate.[11] Pope Francis published an encyclical letter called Laudato si' intended, in part, to influence the conference. The encyclical calls for action against climate change: "Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it."[12] The International Trade Union Confederation has called for the goal to be "zero carbon, zero poverty", and its general secretary Sharan Burrow has repeated that there are "no jobs on a dead planet".
...
Negotiations
COP 21: Heads of delegations.
The overarching goal of the Convention is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit the global temperature increase. Since COP 17 this increase is set at 2 °C (3.6 °F) above pre-industrial levels.[17] However, Christiana Figueres acknowledged in the closing briefing at the 2012 Doha conference: "The current pledges under the second commitment period of the Kyoto protocol are clearly not enough to guarantee that the temperature will stay below 2 °C and there is an ever increasing gap between the action of countries and what the science tells us."
During previous climate negotiations, countries agreed to outline actions they intended to take within a global agreement, by 1 October 2015. These commitments are known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs.[18] Together, the INDCs would reduce global warming from an estimated 4–5 °C (by 2100) to 2.7 °C, and reduce emissions per capita by 9% by 2030, while providing hope in the eyes of the conference organizers for further reductions in the future that would allow meeting a 2 °C target.[19]
Think-tanks such as the World Pensions Council (WPC) argued that the keys to success lay in convincing officials in the U.S. and China, by far the two largest national emitters: "As long as policy makers in Washington and Beijing didn't put all their political capital behind the adoption of ambitious carbon-emission capping targets, the laudable efforts of other G20 governments often remained in the realm of pious wishes. Things changed for the better on 12 November 2014 when President Obama and General Secretary Xi Jinping agreed to limit greenhouse gases emissions."[20]
President Obama insisted on America's essential role in that regard: "We've led by example [...] from Alaska to the Gulf Coast to the Great Plains [...] we've seen the longest streak of private job creation in our history. We've driven our economic output to all time-highs while driving our carbon pollution down to its lowest level in nearly two decades. And then, with our historic joint announcement with China last year, we showed it was possible to bridge the old divide between developed and developing nations that had stymied global progress for so long [...] That was the foundation for success in Paris."[21] Harvard University published a case study on one aspect of the negotiations, focussing on the protection of forests.[22]
Outcome
Main article: Paris Agreement
On 12 December 2015, the participating 196 countries agreed, by consensus, to the final[23] global pact, the Paris Agreement, to reduce emissions as part of the method for reducing greenhouse gas. In the 12-page document,[3] the members agreed to reduce their carbon output "as soon as possible" andto do their best to keep global warming "to well below 2 degrees C".[24] In the course of the debates, island states of the Pacific, the Seychelles, but also the Philippines, their very existence threatened by sea level rise, had strongly voted for setting a goal of 1.5 °C instead of only 2 °C.[25][26] France's Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, said this "ambitious and balanced" plan was an "historic turning point" in the goal of reducing global warming.[27] However, some others criticized the fact that significant sections are "promises" or aims and not firm commitments by the countries.[28]
Non-binding commitments, lack of enforcement mechanisms
The Agreement will not become binding on its member states until 55 parties who produce over 55% of the world's greenhouse gas have ratified the Agreement. There is doubt whether some countries, especially the United States,[29] will agree to do so, though the United States publicly committed, in a joint Presidential Statement with China, to joining the Agreement in 2016.[2]
Each country that ratifies the agreement will be required to set a target for emission reduction or limitation, called a "nationally determined contribution," or "NDC," but the amount will be voluntary.[30][31] There will be neither a mechanism to force[32] a country to set a target by a specific date nor enforcement measures if a set target is not met.[31][33] There will be only a "name and shame" system[34] or, as János Pásztor, the U.N. assistant secretary-general on climate change, told CBS News, a "name and encourage" plan.[35]
Some analysts have also observed that the stated objectives of the Paris Agreement are implicitly "predicated upon an assumption – that member states of the United Nations, including high polluters such as China, US, India, Canada, Russia, Indonesia and Australia, which generate more than half the world's greenhouse gas emissions, will somehow drive down their carbon pollution voluntarily and assiduously without any binding enforcement mechanism to measure and control CO2 emissions at any level from factory to state, and without any specific penalty gradation or fiscal pressure (for example a carbon tax) to discourage bad behaviour."[36]
Institutional investors' contribution to limiting fossil fuels
Speaking at the 5th annual World Pensions Forum held on the sidelines of the COP21 Summit, Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs argued that institutional investors would eventually divest from carbon-reliant firms if they could not react to political and regulatory efforts to halt climate change: "Every energy company in a pension fund's portfolio needs to be scrutinized from purely a financial view about its future, 'Why is this [a company] we would want to hold over a five- to 20-year period?'... If we continue to hold major energy companies that don't have an answer to a basic financial test, we are just gambling. We have to take a fiduciary responsibility – these are not good bets."[37]
Some US policy makers concurred, notably Al Gore, insisting that "no agreement is perfect, and this one must be strengthened over time, but groups across every sector of society will now begin to reduce dangerous carbon pollution through the framework of this agreement."[38]
Declarations of non-state parties
Eiffel Tower illuminated in green in response to the One heart, One tree campaign]
As is usual before such major conferences, major NGOs and groups of governments have drafted and published a wide variety of declarations they intend to seek a consensus on, at the Paris conference itself. These include at least the following major efforts:
ICLEI at its World Congress, launched the new Transformative Actions Program (TAP) intended to progress local and subnational action ahead of COP21[39] to build on its 2005 COP11 (Montreal summit) commitments,[40] Triple Bottom Line framework arising from that, and other local efforts.
European capital and large cities for climate action en route to COP 21 Declaration, adopted 26 March 2015 by "representatives of EU capitals and large cities of 28 EU Member States at the Mayors Meeting organized by Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, and Ignazio Marino, Mayor of Rome, who argue that "urban areas exposed to climate change are also essential innovation testing zones",[41] which is the focus of the ICLEI mechanisms, metrics and 2005 declaration.
Private, corporate and private-public partnerships
At the World Summit of Regions for Climate (WSRC) in Paris 2014, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Founder of R20, invited a coalition of governments, businesses and investors to sign a draft "Paris Declaration" at World Climate Summit in Lima 2014, World Green Economy Summit 2015 in Dubai and COP21.[42]
The Shift Project by French business organizations.[43]
Indigenous peoples efforts include:
Asian indigenous peoples declaration[44]
IPACC acting for African indigenous peoples[45] in particular but also worldwide[46]
A vast range of groups and peoples "seeking presence in post-2015" development, e.g. the Centre for Autonomy and Development of Indigenous People in Nicaragua[47]
Many indigenous polities and sovereignties seeking recognition under the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples[48] who demanded recognition and change also in 2014 at the 2014 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Lima.[49] In 2015 this will include those with specific grievances, e.g. the Wabanaki Confederacy in its opposition to hydraulic fracturing and Energy East, has announced it will send a diplomatic representative regarding events in 2013 in New Brunswick that highlighted the relative imbalance of power to resist fossil fuel corporations even on unceded lands:
"Canada is the home to 75% of the worlds [sic] mining corporations, and they have tended to have relative impunity in the Canadian Courts" - Winona LaDuke[50]
Women's Earth and Climate Action Network seeking "powerful submissions by worldwide women" sharing "stories, struggles, solutions and action plans ... [a] women's climate justice mobilization"[51]
Countries of the Mediterranean Sea. Dam Bridge, Strait of Gibraltar, S.A. (PPEGSA). The first draft PresaPuente adapting to climate change is designed to protect the Mediterranean from the imminent rising waters caused by the polar thaw. More than 24 countries, over 500 million people, more than 15,000 islands and thousands of kilometres of coast which can be saved from flooding.
Solar alliance: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at the 2015 G-20 Summit that he, along with French President François Hollande, intends to propose creating an alliance of solar-rich countries similar to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).[52][53] Ahead of the climate summit, the two leaders sent written invitations to over 100 countries to join the coalition proposed to be called the International Agency for Solar Policy and Application (InSPA).[54]
A vast range of other activities[55] in preparation to influence the major decisions at the conference.
Financing
Greenpeace activists, demanding 100% renewable energy at Climate March 2015 in Madrid.]
The conference was budgeted to cost €170m (US$186.87m at the time). The French government said that 20% of the cost would be borne by French firms such as EDF, Engie (formerly known as GDF Suez), Air France, Renault-Nissan and BNP Paribas.[56]
Demonstrations
Around the world, 600,000 took part in demonstrations in favour of a strong agreement, such as the Global Climate March organized by 350.org (and other events such as Alternatiba, Village of Alternatives). Paris had a ban on public gatherings in the wake of recent terrorist attacks (state of emergency), but allowed thousands to demonstrate on 12 December against what they felt was a too-weak treaty.[57] There was also an illegal demonstration in Paris, including violent clashes between police and anarchists, ten policemen were injured and 317 people arrested .[58][59]
On 30 November, the first day of the conference, a "climate strike" was organised by students in over 100 countries; over 50000 people participate.[60]
See also
Environmental politics
IPCC Fifth Assessment Report
Paris Agreement
Phase-out of fossil fuel vehicles
...
Every country around the world would see economic gains from combating the climate crisis and trying to keep global heating within the bounds of the Paris agreement, according to a new study published in Nature Communications.
The straw man argument against taking action on the climate crisis is that the cost of limiting emissions and investing in green infrastructure is too steep and would cripple economies. It turns out, according to the research, that the opposite is true.
In fact, the study found that if nations around the world fail to curtail greenhouse gas emissions within the bounds of the Paris agreement, the global economy will lose anywhere from $150 trillion to nearly $800 trillion by the year 2100, as CBS News reported. The upper end of the range is if countries fail to meet their current commitments, which are inadequate to meet the Paris agreement as they are expected to lead to 3 degrees Celsius in warming.
The study's authors, from the Beijing Institute of Technology and other Chinese institutions, billed their findings as a self-preservation strategy for government, according to The Guardian.GUK
The researchers calculated the potential benefits of emissions reductions by looking at the social welfare aspects of cutting greenhouse gases and its affect on economic growth. They found that the benefits from cutting emissions would provide the largest boost to developing countries with large populations of poor and vulnerable people, who are most likely to be negatively affected by droughts, floods, fires, storms and food shortages, as The Guardian reported.
While all countries would benefit in the long term, the most immediate benefits would go to developing countries with high emissions, such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria and China, according to The Guardian.
The Paris agreement is composed of voluntary commitments known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, made by each country in the accord. The main aspect of the commitments is to reduce greenhouse emissions by cutting the burning of fossil fuels, thus reducing global warming and the adverse impacts of warming. However, many countries are witnessing economic damage from the coronavirus lockdowns and are rethinking their commitment to their NDCs. Already, government bailouts for the fossil fuel industry and the airline industry are in the works, as well as a rollback of their carbon emission reductions, as CBS News reported.
"A number of studies have proved that current [NDCs] are not enough to achieve the global warming targets," said Biying Yu, from the Beijing Institute of Technology and a co-author of the study, as CBS News reported.
The research shows that the choice between climate action and economic growth is in fact a false dichotomy. The authors' work concludes that countries could reach their climate goals and at the same time see an increase in their net income.
According to CBS News, Yu and her team calculated ideal strategies for countries to improve their NDCs, minimize economic losses and maximize gains. They found that if nations are able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then the net global economic benefit would range between $127 trillion and $616 trillion by the end of the century.
"Early and quick action will provide a better chance to close the widening emissions gap, even though a large amount of abatement cost would occur in the short term," said the study.
"The literature overwhelmingly shows the economic benefits of serious mitigation efforts exceed the costs in the long run," said Noah Kaufman, a climate and energy economist from Columbia University, to CBS News.
However, Yu is concerned that governments will be short-sighted and balk at the upfront cost of investing in infrastructure to combat the climate crisis. She also sees that the climate emergency takes commitments from every country.
"Combating climate change is not a matter for one country. It requires collective action and cooperation from all countries around the world," Yu explained, as CBS News reported. "Let's work together and save ourselves"...
ctr-pt: to covid bailout bill as dis cap'l
https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-crisis-economic-growth-2645724784.html
Every country around the world would see economic gains from combating the climate crisis and trying to keep global heating within the bounds of the Paris agreement, according to a new study published in Nature Communications.
The straw man argument against taking action on the climate crisis is that the cost of limiting emissions and investing in green infrastructure is too steep and would cripple economies. It turns out, according to the research, that the opposite is true.
In fact, the study found that if nations around the world fail to curtail greenhouse gas emissions within the bounds of the Paris agreement, the global economy will lose anywhere from $150 trillion to nearly $800 trillion by the year 2100, as CBS News reported. The upper end of the range is if countries fail to meet their current commitments, which are inadequate to meet the Paris agreement as they are expected to lead to 3 degrees Celsius in warming.
The study's authors, from the Beijing Institute of Technology and other Chinese institutions, billed their findings as a self-preservation strategy for government, according to The Guardian.GUK
The researchers calculated the potential benefits of emissions reductions by looking at the social welfare aspects of cutting greenhouse gases and its affect on economic growth. They found that the benefits from cutting emissions would provide the largest boost to developing countries with large populations of poor and vulnerable people, who are most likely to be negatively affected by droughts, floods, fires, storms and food shortages, as The Guardian reported.
While all countries would benefit in the long term, the most immediate benefits would go to developing countries with high emissions, such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria and China, according to The Guardian.
The Paris agreement is composed of voluntary commitments known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, made by each country in the accord. The main aspect of the commitments is to reduce greenhouse emissions by cutting the burning of fossil fuels, thus reducing global warming and the adverse impacts of warming. However, many countries are witnessing economic damage from the coronavirus lockdowns and are rethinking their commitment to their NDCs. Already, government bailouts for the fossil fuel industry and the airline industry are in the works, as well as a rollback of their carbon emission reductions, as CBS News reported.
"A number of studies have proved that current [NDCs] are not enough to achieve the global warming targets," said Biying Yu, from the Beijing Institute of Technology and a co-author of the study, as CBS News reported.
The research shows that the choice between climate action and economic growth is in fact a false dichotomy. The authors' work concludes that countries could reach their climate goals and at the same time see an increase in their net income.
According to CBS News, Yu and her team calculated ideal strategies for countries to improve their NDCs, minimize economic losses and maximize gains. They found that if nations are able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then the net global economic benefit would range between $127 trillion and $616 trillion by the end of the century.
"Early and quick action will provide a better chance to close the widening emissions gap, even though a large amount of abatement cost would occur in the short term," said the study.
"The literature overwhelmingly shows the economic benefits of serious mitigation efforts exceed the costs in the long run," said Noah Kaufman, a climate and energy economist from Columbia University, to CBS News.
However, Yu is concerned that governments will be short-sighted and balk at the upfront cost of investing in infrastructure to combat the climate crisis. She also sees that the climate emergency takes commitments from every country.
"Combating climate change is not a matter for one country. It requires collective action and cooperation from all countries around the world," Yu explained, as CBS News reported. "Let's work together and save ourselves."
climate crisis paris agreement greenhouse gases fossil fuels
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Corporate Leaders to Trump: Withdrawing From the Paris Agreement Makes Bad Business Sense
12/19
ew
Trump says fulfilling the country's commitment to the Paris climate agreement would be bad news for the U.S. economy, but the growing tally of business leaders pledging to take action anyway suggests otherwise. These businesspeople understand that while climate action costs money, climate change costs far more.
More than 2,200 businesses and investors have signed on to the "We Are Still In" pledge — even as Trump moves ever-closer to official U.S. withdrawal. The group standing behind the 2015 climate deal represents a whopping 70 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP), and thousands more have joined other corporate climate and sustainability programs, such as the We Mean Business coalition and the Science-Based Targets Initiatives.
And while many corporations are still contending with their own outsize roles in creating the climate crisis (along with other environmental and social woes), many are already on their way to implementing the changes necessary to meet their carbon emissions targets.
Tech superpower Apple, for instance, is now running all of its facilities in 43 countries on 100 percent clean energy — in some cases sending surplus energy from its solar farms back to the local grid. Apple is also securing commitments from its suppliers to switch to renewables. Over in the fashion industry, sneaker giant Nike has committed to diverting 99 percent of its footwear manufacturing waste from landfills, making certain products with recycled plastic bottles, and reducing carbon emissions across its global supply chain by 30 percent by 2030.
Such commitments multiply daily, even as the Trump administration's rollbacks of the most important federal climate policies continue try to steer America in a different direction: backwards. Here are just a few of the reasons companies are opting to move forward instead.
Bottom Lines
Trump often says that the Paris Agreement "punishes" the U.S., particularly its businesses, but he outright ignores the far more destructive economic force of climate change. According to a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a business-as-usual high-emissions scenario (like the one Trump touts) could result in a 7.2 percent drop in GDP per capita worldwide by the end of the century. Disruptions to global supply chains are already upon us, and as carbon pollution continues to collect in our atmosphere, more will come. Experts predict far-reaching impacts to the infrastructure that supports nearly all businesses, such as extreme weather affecting the transportation of raw goods and rising sea levels swamping the fiber-optic cables essential to the internet.
Of course, climate change will also jeopardize specific industries, such as winter sports (see: decreases in snowfall), and products, like your morning cup of coffee. In fact, it's little wonder that Starbucks has also signed on to We Are Still In. Climate change may bring increasingly irregular growing seasons (and skyrocketing prices) for coffee beans on top of increased sick days for field workers exposed to extreme heat. Such concerns would apply to almost any business dependent on either agriculture or a global workforce, or both. According to a 2011 National Academy of Sciences report, for every additional degree Celsius that the planet warms, we can expect a 5 to 15 percent reduction in total crop yield.
Big Penance
While many corporations have spewed more than their fair share of carbon pollution, several are now taking the opportunity to have a supersize impact on emissions reductions. Look at the world's two biggest retailers: Amazon and Walmart. Amazon says it will go carbon neutral by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris goals, and recently made moves to start transitioning its fleet of delivery trucks to electric vehicles. Soon after Trump took office, Walmart announced its Project Gigaton initiative, which set the ambitious goal of lowering the company's global carbon emissions — by pressing for action on the part of its suppliers — by one billion metric tons before 2030. Walmart has since reported that it's on track to meet its goal, which is no small feat: the entire U.S. emitted 6.5 billion metric tons of carbon in 2017.
Market Trends
Climate action is no longer seen as the enemy of economic progress. While the clean energy industry has known this for a while, the notion is (finally) catching on in other corners of the economy — and most excitingly it's creating opportunities for market-disrupting innovation.
Take electric vehicles (EVs). While Trump fights the auto industry's progress in manufacturing cleaner cars and trucks, countries such as China are investing in zero-emission vehicle technology at warp speed. According to a recent report by JP Morgan Research, China is expected to account for nearly 60 percent of all global EV sales by next year, and many Chinese businesses (the ride-sharing company Didi Chuxing, for example) are eager to profit while they help the world progress. The same goes for the folks behind other innovations — like plant-based faux meats, and energy-efficient fabrics made from coffee grounds, and petroleum-free plastics, and delivery vans fueled by food waste and ... you get the idea. A poll by the data firm Nielsen showed that 81 percent of consumers feel strongly that companies should help improve the environment. The sustainability economy is booming — and climate-conscious Gen Z'ers and millennials are ready to buy accordingly.
Consumer Trust
At their best, corporate climate pledges open business practices up to public accountability and mark a first step toward real-life emissions cuts. At their worst, they provide a greenwashed shield behind which polluting companies can hide their status quo behaviors. Procter & Gamble, for one, boasts about the forest-friendly sourcing and certifications of its Charmin toilet paper (the company has no climate pledges to speak of). But in practice, P&G has been clear-cutting one of the world's most important carbon sinks, Canada's boreal forest, in the name of softer TP.
We are all in this climate crisis together, which is why it's crucial to make sure our leaders and retailers keep their promises. Presidents have power, but so do corporations. Corporations have power, but so do consumers.
Reposted with permission from onEarth.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/exxonmobil-is-still-bankrolling-climate-science-deniers/
no lnx
ExxonMobil is still bankrolling climate science deniers
Written by Elliott Negin / Independent Media Institute October 23, 2019
ExxonMobil says it believes “the risk of climate change is real,” and it is “committed to being part of the solution.” The largest investor-owned oil company in the world also says it supports a federal carbon tax and the Paris climate agreement.
Then why, after all these years, is the company still financing advocacy groups, think tanks, and business associations that reject the reality and seriousness of the climate crisis, as well as members of Congress who deny the science and oppose efforts to rein in carbon emissions?
According to the company’s latest grantmaking report, it gave $772,500 to 10 such groups in 2018, which does not include its annual dues to trade groups such as theAmerican Petroleum Institute, which opposes a carbon tax. In addition, ExxonMobil continued to promote gridlock directly on Capitol Hill. Two-thirds of the $1.65 million it spent on congressional election campaigns during the 2017-18 election cycle went to climate science deniers.
Nearly half of ExxonMobil’s 2018 donations to nonprofit denier groups went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Another 30 percent went to the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which have been ExxonMobil grantees for 20 years. All told, the company has spent some $37 million since 1998 on a network of denier organizations—a sorry record of support that ranks second only to Charles Koch and his brother, the late David Koch, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.
The shred of good news here is that ExxonMobil’s 2018 denier grant budget was half of what it spent in 2017 and the lowest amount since 2012. But if the company were truly serious about addressing climate change, it would cut off such funding completely. Likewise, it would support federal lawmakers who want to curb carbon emissions, not those standing in the way of government action.
So what did ExxonMobil get for its money in 2018?
Underwriting Climate Denial at the U.S. Chamber
In 2014, ExxonMobil pledged $5 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Capital Campaign over a five-year period on top of its annual dues, despite the lobby group’s history of misrepresenting climate science and the economics of transitioning to clean energy. Last year, the company kicked in $350,000 for the Capital Campaign and another $15,000 for the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total 2018 donation to $365,000.
Two years ago, the Chamber sponsored a widely debunked report that wildly inflated the cost of adhering to the Paris climate agreement to the U.S. economy. President Trump used that report as his primary rationale for refusing to honor the U.S. commitment to the accord.
Earlier this year, however, the Chamber posted a new statement on its website that suggested that the business lobby is softening its position. “We stand with every American seeking a cleaner, stronger environment—for today and tomorrow,” the Chamber now asserts. “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” The website also features the Chamber’s definition of an effective climate policy, which it says should include, among other things, “large-scale renewables, energy storage and batteries,” and should “encourage international cooperation.”
Does that mean the Chamber has finally come to its senses? Not quite. It opposed the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have reduced coal power plant carbon emissions, and supports the Trump administration’s move to repeal it. And although a Chamber spokesman told Politico in August that it is “absolutely important for the U.S. to remain in the Paris climate agreement,” he added that the “Obama administration’s pledge was unrealistic [and] was going to have a negative impact on our economy. And so we’d like to see that revisited.” In other words, the Chamber would like the United States to remain a party to the agreement so that it can try to weaken the U.S. commitment to it.
Backing Denial at the American Enterprise Institute
The American Enterprise Institute, an 80-year-old, free market think tank in Washington, D.C., has received more money from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier organization.In 2018, ExxonMobil gave the organization $160,000, bringing its total to $4.65 million since 1998.
Economist Benjamin Zycher, an Enterprise Institute staff member who writes regularly about climate issues, argues that a carbon tax would be “ineffective” and has called the Paris agreement an “absurdity.” He also routinely cites largely debunked papers by John Christy, Judith Curry and other outlier scientists to buttress his attacks on what he calls “climate alarmism.”
Last fall, for example, Zycher took aim at the second volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment—a periodic, congressionally mandated analysis of peer-reviewed climate science by 13 federal agencies. The report warned that by the end of this century, unchecked climate change could cause tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. The Trump administration issued it the day after Thanksgiving in the hope that it would receive limited attention.
Zycher took issue with the report’s conclusions in a blog post on the think tank’s website, citing “systematic evidence on climate phenomena” that he says the report ignored. His “evidence” included half-truths, cherry-picked facts and fabrications. Contrary to Zycher’s claims, human activity is responsible for more than half of the increase in average global temperatures since 1950; sea level rise has accelerated due to climate change; and although there has been little change in the frequency of hurricanes globally, research suggests there has been an increase in hurricane intensity over the past 40 years.
Zycher also posted a column belittling a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood that charges ExxonMobil with defrauding investors by publicly claiming to incorporate climate risks in its business decisions while downplaying or ignoring them for internal planning purposes. The lawsuit, which went to trial on October 22, alleges that ExxonMobil inflated its value, falsely assuring investors that its oil and gas reserves would not become “stranded assets” that would have to be left in the ground. Zycher accused Underwood of “picking an unpopular target and then trying to find a way to convict it of something,” and suggested that she filed the suit to advance her career.
Financing the Manhattan Institute’s Specious Case Against Renewables
The Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based think tank, received $75,000 from ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, the company has given the Libertarian policy shop more than $1.3 million.
Like the Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute opposes the Paris climate accord. Senior Fellow Oren Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration climate efforts, alleges the international agreement is “somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” The think tank is also an outspoken opponent of renewable energy, routinely calling for an end to federal subsidies for wind, solar and electric vehicles. At the same time, it is mum about the significantly bigger subsidies the oil and gas industry has been receiving over the last 100 years.
Cass’s colleague, Senior Fellow Robert Bryce, has been bashing wind power for years and, like President Trump, he wildly overstates its threat to birds. In fact, the top human-caused threats to birds are climate change, buildings, power lines, misapplied pesticides, communications towers, and oil and gas industry fluid waste pits. Bryce never mentions that. It would undermine his bogus argument.
Still another Manhattan Institute senior fellow, Mark P. Mills, wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal in May titled “What if Green Energy Isn’t the Future?” In it, he maintained that, “using wind, solar and batteries as the primary sources of a nation’s energy supply remains far too expensive.” In fact, renewables are now the cheapest type of new electricity generation for more than two-thirds of the world, according to a June report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. By 2030, Bloomberg researchers project, wind and solar will “undercut existing coal and [natural] gas almost everywhere.” Mills also failed to factor in the cost of doing nothing to curb carbon pollution. The top 10 largest climate change-related disasters in 2018 alone cost at least $85 billion in damages.
Aiding and Abetting Congressional Gridlock
On top of the hundreds of thousands of dollars ExxonMobil gave to climate science denier groups last year, the company continued to fund deniers on Capitol Hill. As noted above, 67 percent of the $1.65 million it spent during the 2017-18 election cycle—roughly $1.1 million—went to the campaigns of 189 climate science deniers. It then spent $11.15 million in 2018 to lobby lawmakers, more than any other oil and gas company.
One of the most talked-about climate proposals in Congress today is a carbon tax, and despite ExxonMobil’s professed decade-long support for one, it has consistently funded senators and representatives who oppose the idea. Since 2013, there have been at least five nonbinding resolutions in Congress on such a tax. Each time, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded legislators, ranging from 75 percent to 93 percent, voted against it. The most recent example of the company’s upside-down funding priorities is the outcome of a July 2018 nonbinding resolution in the House stating such a tax would be “detrimental” to the U.S. economy. Once again, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded lawmakers favored the resolution, which passed by a 229-to-180 vote. This time, 78 percent of the 174 House members who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2013 voted for it.
ExxonMobil first announced its support for a carbon tax in 2009 in a cynical attempt to derail a cap-and-trade bill in Congress, and last year, the company announced it would give $1 million over two years to Americans for Carbon Dividends, a political action group created to promote a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The proposal—developed by the Climate Leadership Council, a coalition of corporations, environmental groups and former government officials—would levy a carbon fee starting at $40 a ton in exchange for dropping all “stationary source” (non-transportation) carbon pollution regulations and granting the fossil fuel industry immunity from climate lawsuits.
In a surprise move, however, the Climate Leadership Council and Americans for Carbon Dividends recently deleted the provision shielding the fossil fuel industry from liability, apparently abandoning coalition co-founders BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, which are facing more than a dozen lawsuits for billions of dollars in climate change-related damages. It remains to be seen what ExxonMobil will do now, but based on past experience, the company likely will continue to finance lawmakers who cite fraudulent reports by the groups it funds to make their bogus case that climate change is not a threat. In other words, ExxonMobil will keep bankrolling climate science denial to make sure nothing happens on Capitol Hill.
Author’s note: Besides the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($365,000), American Enterprise Institute ($160,000) and Manhattan Institute ($75,000), ExxonMobil gave grants in 2018 to the following seven climate science denier groups: American Council on Science and Health ($60,000), Center for American and International Law ($12,500), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000), National Black Chamber of Commerce ($30,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000).
Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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5/19 house bill pro paris
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https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/03/27/what-climate-leadership-looks-democrats-bill-would-stop-trump-ditching-paris-accord
House Democrats Wednesday introduced legislation to bar President Donald Trump from ditching the Paris climate accord and force the White House to submit a plan to slash carbon emissions, drawing praise from environmental groups.
"Donald Trump's attempt to withdraw the United States from this landmark agreement is one of his most egregious steps to weaken our country's international standing."
—Michael Brune, Sierra Club
"The Climate Action Now Act sends a powerful message to the rest of the world that when it comes to climate change and the Paris agreement, President Trump is out of step with the strong majority of Americans who want the U.S. to be a global leader, not a rogue nation," Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement.
The bill (pdf), also known as H.R. 9, comes nearly two years after Trump sparked global outrage by declaring his intent to withdraw from the Paris deal. Under the terms of the agreement, the earliest possible withdrawal date is November 4, 2020.
If passed, the Democrats' legislation would block Trump from using federal funds to pull the U.S. from the Paris deal and require the president to develop a plan to meet the accord's emissions targets.
The bill was unveiled at a press conference Wednesday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), and other House Democrats
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05022019/michigan-whitmer-office-climate-change-energy-filnt-water-policies-climate-alliance
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan signed orders on Monday to revamp the state's environmental policy apparatus, becoming the latest newly elected Democratic leader in an industrial swing state to pick up the reins of action on climate change.
Whitmer is creating a new office of climate and energy that will coordinate efforts across state government to address climate change and will ensure that climate change is a consideration in the vetting of new policies.
She also signed an order to join the U.S. Climate Alliance, a group of governors who commit to upholding the principles of the Paris climate agreement. Michigan is the 20th governor to join, following similar actions by others who came to power after running green campaigns and toppling Republican incumbents. In the past few weeks, the governors of Illinois and New Mexico have also joined.
Michigan stood out as a fulcrum of Donald Trump's narrow electoral victory. It's an economic monument to the internal combustion engine, but also a place where the urgency of confronting environmental challenges, including climate change, can't be ignored.
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Church of England to Divest From Companies That Neglect Paris Agreement Goals 7/18
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g7
trump wants russia back, bullies cda, tariffs
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10062018/g7-summit-climate-change-communique-trump-allies-estranged-germany-france-canada
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all pro climate trump admin gone!
Dobriansky
...The absence of U.S. leadership at Bonn may be keenly felt in the one-day session scheduled for May 8 dedicated to the so-called Talanoa Dialogue, the process to reexamine the commitments that individual nations have made so far. (Fiji, the current chair of the talks, chose the traditional word "Talanoa" to reflect a process of inclusive, participatory and transparent dialogue.)
So far, there are 48 submissions to the dialogue representing the views of 178 countries that are parties to the Paris Agreement, as well as hundreds of submissions by non-governmental organizations, addressing how nations might raise their ambitions. The United States is among about 20 nations that had offered no submission as of Wednesday. (Other large carbon emitters that have not made Talanoa Dialogue submissions include Canada and Brazil.)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is scheduled to contribute to the discussion this fall in the form of a special report on the science behind a tougher goal, keeping global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. But the national commitments that have been made under the Paris Agreement so far only get the world a third of the way to the goal of keeping the temperature increase below 2°C, as the United Nations Environment Program's "Emissions Gap" report showed last year.
"We don't have to wait for the IPCC report to know that we are way behind the curve," said Meyer.
Room for Hope?
Although few observers of the climate talks have illusions that the Trump administration—especially with its new foreign policy team—will offer to set stronger goals to cut carbon emissions, French President Emmanuel Macron's remarks before Congress last week demonstrated that some world leaders still hold out hope that the United States will return to the climate fight in the long run.
"I am sure, one day, the United States will come back and join the Paris Agreement," Macron told Congress. "Let us face it: There is no Planet B."
And when Pompeo, during his confirmation hearing, faced a question on climate change from Sen. Jeff Merkley, (D-Ore.), he replied: "I ... believe the climate is changing, that there's a warming taking place. I'm happy to concede that there's a human component to that. I'm equally prepared to tell you that as we find tools that are effective to prevent the risk to the United States ... the State Department ought to appropriately be involved in them." (In fact, human causes are behind most or all of the observed warming in recent decades, and the risks go beyond what affects the United States. International diplomacy also is needed to address the fact that the U.S. and other developed countries are largely to blame for the warming seen so far, which presents worse risks to nations like small island states that have contributed little to atmospheric carbon emissions.)
One avowed optimist is the Trump White House's former international climate adviser, George David Banks, who had supported staying in the Paris Agreement. He maintains that the hard-line U.S. stand puts the nation in a stronger negotiating position when it comes to the talks now underway. That's because the rest of the world knows the Trump administration is willing to walk away, he argues.
"The Trump administration could not have negotiated the Paris Agreement—it took the Obama administration to do that," argues Banks. "But now that the international community has invested so much political capital in the agreement, the Trump administration has much more leverage than a Hillary Clinton administration would have had in finalizing these points. It's an interesting situation."
But on top of the changes in Trump's top echelon of foreign policy advisers, recent staff turnover at the White House adds to uncertainty around the future U.S. role in the climate talks.
Banks, who served as a climate negotiator in President George W. Bush's administration, resigned from his Trump administration post earlier this year when he could not obtain a security clearance. Trump's top domestic energy adviser, Michael Catanzaro, has also resigned to return to his former lobbying practice. Banks and Catanzaro, both of whom have years of experience working on energy issues, have been replaced by two young newcomers to the field. GOP political operative Wells Griffith, whose only previous experience in energy was a one-year stint in Trump's Energy Department, has been appointed to lead international climate and energy strategy for the White House, while Francis Brooke, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence who moderated a panel on fossil fuels at last year's climate talks, will take Catanzaro's place as top domestic energy adviser.
Observers also are watching to see if the Trump administration follows through on a plan, first reported by Bloomberg, to nominate Paula Dobriansky, who was a lead climate negotiator under President George W. Bush, as undersecretary for political affairs at the State Department. Dobriansky's past statements indicate that she accepts the reality of manmade climate change, although she favors "collaboration, not coercion," and close partnerships with industry. (When Bush backed out of the Kyoto accord, she gave credit to the oil lobby.)
For the time being, Meyer sees the U.S. negotiating team as significantly hampered by its lack of high-level support and the power to deal. If his assessment is correct, even if the U.S. returns to the Paris Agreement in the future, it may be under rules that it was unable to influence.
"You basically have a loss of leadership," he said. "The [U.S.] team is doing the best they can on the technical rules, but obviously they don't have as much leverage on that issue when they are not playing on other issues. They are negotiating with one hand tied behind their back, and that creates a vacuum that others are trying to figure out how to fill."
PUBLISHED UNDER:
GLOBAL CLIMATE TREATY CLIMATE DENIAL
CLIMATE CHANGE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT DONALD TRUMP MIKE POMPEO
It's been a summer of catastrophic weather events: monsoons in India and Bangladesh, hurricanes in the Caribbean and the U.S. Southeast, and wildfires across the U.S. West. The impacts of climate change are killing people and destroying communities, and we need bold action on climate policy, now. But as delegates from around the world head to COP23, the annual meeting of the U.N. climate treaty, Corporate Accountability's new report exposes just how big a threat corporate capture poses to securing bold and visionary climate policy.
"Polluting Paris: How Big Polluters are Undermining Global Climate Policy" is a first-of-its-kind assessment of corporate capture in the history of the U.N. climate treaty (formally known as the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change). It finds that transnational corporations, and the governments in their pockets, are pushing a pro-industry, anti-regulation agenda. As a result, a menu of false solutions are front and center in the treaty negotiations where delegates hope to hammer out the details in implementing the Paris Agreement over the next weeks.
For example, corporate influence has tilted the negotiations toward market-oriented trading mechanisms that benefit the industry groups and corporations supporting them. Meanwhile, non-market solutions like direct finance and binding emissions reductions—solutions backed by evidence proving their effectiveness—have been pushed to the back burner.
The release of this report provides support for and bolsters the work of government delegates from across the Global South who are advocating for true, people-centered solutions to climate change. It was written in collaboration with the Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development, Corporate Europe Observatory, Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group) and ActionAid International.
U.S., EU and trade associations push fossil fuel agenda
In an unsurprising twist, the report also reveals that many global north governments—with Donald Trump and the U. S. front and center—are acting at the behest of the fossil fuel and other polluting industries to undermine progress. The Trump administration has unprecedented ties to the fossil fuel industry. Many of Trump's appointees used to work on behalf of oil, coal and gas industries, while many more are either deeply invested in the industry or claim to doubt the settled science of climate change.
Indeed, “Polluting Paris” is the latest report in a growing body of evidence that clearly shows corporate interference—often orchestrated by corporate lobbyists, industry groups, and Global North governments—is one of the primary obstacles to climate progress.
Additionally, the report exposes the influence of trade associations like the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA). IETA's members include oil giants BP and Chevron, and coal corporations BHP Biliton, Duke Energy and Rio Tinto. The trade group has insinuated itself so far into the talks, one of its own board members negotiates on behalf of Panama and is a co-coordinator on market mechanisms for the largest negotiating bloc at the U.N. climate treaty.
"If we don’t put an end to it now, lobbyists and delegates representing industry interests will ensure the Paris Agreement promotes—rather than protects against—the money-making schemes of the world’s biggest polluters," said Tamar Lawrence-Samuel, international policy director at Corporate Accountability.
Kicking big polluters out
Corporate Accountability is organizing to put an end to it. A team of organizers and experts from Corporate Accountability are at the negotiations to support governments committed to curbing corporate capture of global climate policy. People across the U.S. can also take action to support this call.
Corporate Accountability's climate campaign builds on a 40-year history of successfully moving transnational corporations to end their abuses. In the early 2000s, we supported governments and allies in the Global South to protect the World Health Organization’s global tobacco treaty from Big Tobacco’s influence and remove the industry from public health policymaking.
The initiative to kick Big Polluters out of climate policy builds on the precedence set by that treaty.
Download the full report. Read the executive summary.
And it's gaining great traction globally. In May 2017, the issue of corporate influence in the climate talks captured international attention at the treaty meetings. The meeting culminated in calls from governments for a conflict of interest policy. And just last month, the European Parliament called for its negotiators to prioritize addressing the harmful influence of polluting industry interests at COP23. While the European Council ultimately overlooked that call, we expect governments to take up the issue again at the next intersessional talks in May 2018.
Kelle Louaillier is the president of Corporate Accountability.
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Nicaragua to Sign Paris Agreement, Leaving Trump Alone With Syria
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/9/20/1700089/-27-companies-publicly-supporting-Paris-climate-accord-donated-millions-to-GOP-group-undermining-it
Twenty-seven companies that urged the Trump regime to stick with the Paris Climate Accord also contributed a total of $3.3 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) that has worked assiduously to dump President Obama’s signature Clean Power Plan. That plan was designed specifically to reduce greenhouse emissions from U.S. power plants in 2030 by 32 percent over 2005. It’s the key U.S. government effort to help meet the emissions goals of the nonbinding Paris accord. And it’s in limbo.
[table list]
companies supporting Republican Attorney Generals Association who also say they support Paris Climate Accord.
This is how the 27 companies that urged the Trump regime not to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord divided their donations to the Republican and Democratic attorney generals associations. The Republican group has been highly active in trying to dump the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan that would cut greenhouse emissions.
The excuse from the companies that responded to investigators from the Center for Public Integrity who revealed the contributions? It’s just politics. They said they had also contributed to the Democratic Attorneys General Association. In other words, all that cash was just pragmatism on their part. Uh-huh.
The center’s Rachel Leven and Jamie Smith Hopkins write:
But campaign finance experts countered that business officials can influence policy without writing a check to decision-makers like attorneys general—advocating their policy positions through lobbyists, for example. Because these businesses have said climate action is a priority, making political contributions that can work against that goal puts their reputations or even revenues at risk, these experts said.
"I don't doubt that their public statements about the Paris climate agreement are sincere but it matters that when it actually comes down to how they spend their money, they're giving to politicians that have almost the exact opposite goal," said Daniel Weiner, senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice's Democracy Program, which advocates for campaign finance reform. "It doesn't mean that they're actually lying, but it does lead one to wonder how strong their commitment to fight global warming actually is.
While RAGA has, of course, engaged in other activity, the center’s reporters note that the Clean Power Plan, which requires states to come up with methods of reducing emissions from fossil-fuel power plants within their boundaries, has gotten “an outsize share of energy” from Republican attorneys general.
Along with a handful of Democratic AGs, the Republicans have sued the Environmental Protection Agency over the plan in a case that is slowly winding its way toward the Supreme Court. The court itself ruled 5-4 in early 2016 that the plan should be on hold until a lower court ruling on it is decided. Indeed, on RAGA’s list of achievements on its website: convincing the court "to halt implementation of Obama's signature climate change initiative."
Levin and Hopkins found that only two of the 27 companies had openly challenged the Clean Power Plan. Several others have supported it strongly, with Google and Microsoft going so far as to file legal arguments against the lawsuit the Republican AGs had launched. And yet those two contributed nearly $400,000 to RAGA. Worst of all among the 27 was SolarCity, the nation’s largest provider of residential solar panels. The morning the Supreme Court stayed the Clean Power Plan, SolarCity’s stock plummeted. That ought to have delivered a clear message. Yet just three months later, the company contributed $20,000 to RAGA, giving nothing to the Democratic Attorney Generals Association. Perhaps that was just stupidity. But it sure wasn’t evidence of sincerity.
In response to the Center for Public Integrity’s reporters, Coca-Cola and Intel noted that they don’t expect their contributions to align perfectly with every group to which they give money.
But Bruce F. Freed, president of the watchdog Center for Political Accountability, points out how not paying attention to what’s being done with that money can backfire. In 2010, Target, which had developed a reputation for gay-friendly policies, was boycotted for contributing $150,000 to the super PAC of a candidate who opposed marriage equality. The company at first said this was just pragmatic politics, contributing to pro-business candidates in both parties. But the boycott eventually generated a Target apology. "There are real consequences," Freed said, "when there is a disconnect."
Real consequences. And big ones.
While Daniel Weiner at the Brennan Center may not doubt the companies’ sincerity in the matter of climate change, it should not be forgotten that long before the Clean Power Plan was around to be bashed by the group now getting their cash, many of these companies were not exactly on the cutting edge in dealing with climate change. In fact, as we have learned over the recent past, Exxon Mobil—which gave $210,000 to RAGA and none to its Democratic counterparts—donated a hell of a lot more money to help engineer decades of climate science denial when they full well knew that this disinformation was contributing to a global disaster.
But that stream of cash, just like their current contributions, was designed to protect their bottom line. Never mind the planet’s bottom line.
no linsk
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https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-united-nations-2486698351.html
trump eh post hurricane
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ceo open ltr (dow 180)
As CEOs of large American companies, or with significant operations in the United States, we are concerned about keeping the doors open for the global flow of American manufactured goods and products at this critical time when our Manufacturing sector is starting to grow from our competitive energy advantage.
Based on our vast experience doing business all over the world, we believe there is strong potential for negative trade implications if the United States exits from the Paris Agreement.
Our business interests are best served by a stable and practical framework facilitating an effective and balanced response to reducing global GHG emissions. The Paris Agreement gives us that flexible framework to manage climate change while providing a smooth transition for business. We believe that American companies…and our suppliers, customers, and communities… will benefit from U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement in several ways:
It strengthens our competitiveness in global markets.
It benefits American manufacturing as we modernize to new, more efficient technologies.
It supports investment by setting clear goals which enable long-term planning.
It expands global and domestic markets for clean, energy-efficient technologies which will generate jobs and economic growth.
It encourages market-based solutions and innovation to achieve emissions reductions at low cost.
We are committed to working with you to create jobs and boost U.S. competitiveness, and we believe this can be best achieved by remaining in the Paris Agreement. Let’s work together to maintain the United States’ status as the world’s biggest champion of economic growth and innovation.
We appreciate the opportunity to share our views and would welcome the opportunity to provide further input as the Administration continues to shape its policies.
Sincerely,
Inge Thulin, 3M Company
James K. Kamsickas, Dana Incorporated
Michael B. Polk, Newell Brands, Inc.
Oliver Bäte, Allianz SE
Andrew Liveris, The Dow Chemical Company
Geisha Williams, Pacific Gas & Electric
Brian Moynihan, Bank of America Corp.
Edward Breen, E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Company
David Taylor, Procter & Gamble Company
Zhang Yue, BROAD Group
Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric
Feike Sijbesma, Royal DSM
Denise Morrison, Campbell Soup Company
Lloyd C. Blankfein, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc
Marc Benioff, Salesforce
David W. MacLennan, Cargill Inc.
William Brown, Harris Corporation
Jean-Pierre Clamadieu, Solvay
Michael L. Corbat, Citigroup, Inc.
Alex Gorsky, Johnson & Johnson
Elon Musk, Tesla
James Quincey, The Coca Cola Company
Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase
Paul Polman, Unilever
Wendell Weeks, Corning Incorporated
François-Henri Pinault, Kering
Richard Branson, Virgin
Tom Linebarger, Cummins Inc.
James Gorman, Morgan Stanley
Robert A. Iger, The Walt Disney Group
==
https://www.ecowatch.com/koch-brothers-paris-agreement-2430226599.html
Paris Exit Was 'Victory Paid and Carried Out' by Republican Party for the Koch Brothers
nolink
The 22 Republican senators who sent a letter to President Donald Trump last week urging the United States' withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement received more than $10 million dollars in campaign funds from fossil fuel interests.
The two-page letter was signed by a number of Republican heavyweights from coal/gas/oil-rich states, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and Ted Cruz of Texas.
The Guardian calculated that the 22 senators received a total of $10,694,284 from oil, gas and coal money in just five years. (See the breakdown below.
However, that sum does not even come close to the amount of undisclosed funds coming from the deep pockets of Charles and David Koch's coal, oil and gas conglomerate, Koch Industries, and other outside groups.
As the Guardian explains:
"Visible donations to Republicans from those industries exceeded donations to Democrats in the 2016 election cycle by a ratio of 15-to-1, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And that does not include so-called dark money passed from oil interests such as Koch industries to general slush funds to re-elect Republicans such as the Senate leadership fund.
"At least $90m in untraceable money has been funneled to Republican candidates from oil, gas and coal interests in the past three election cycles, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures analyzed by the Center for Responsive Politics."
Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, shared recently his views on Trump's climate walkout.In an interview with Bloomberg Surveillance, Sachs referenced the senators' letter and specifically cast blame on the billionaire oil barons for pulling the strings of Republican party leaders such as McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, who both supported exiting the Paris accord.
"This is the victory paid and carried out for 20 years by two people, David and Charles Koch," Sachs said. "They have bought and purchased the top of the Republican party. Trump is a tool in this."
Notably, most of the Republican signatories of the letter do not support the belief that human activity contributes to climate change.
During an appearance on MSNBC, Democratic Sen. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts explained why he thinks his Republican colleagues do not believe in the science of climate change.
"This Conservative party in the United States is funded by the Koch brothers [and] it's funded by the coal industry," Markey said. "[They] insist that Scott Pruitt—the Attorney General of Oklahoma that actually sued the EPA 19 times on clean air, clean water, soot, mercury issues—becomes the head of the EPA in our country."
The 22 Republican signatories' funding from Big Oil, Gas and Coal in the past three election cycles (2012, 2014 and 2016):
James Inhofe, Oklahoma
Oil & gas: $465,950 + Coal: $63,600 = $529,550
John Barrasso, Wyoming
Oil & gas: $458,466 + Coal: $127,356 = $585,822
Mitch McConnell, Kentucky
Oil & gas: $1,180,384 + Coal: $361,700 = $1,542,084
John Cornyn, Texas
Oil & gas: $1,101,456 + Coal: $33,050 = $1,134,506
Roy Blunt, Missouri
Oil & gas: $353,864 + Coal: $96,000 = $449,864
Roger Wicker, Mississippi
Oil & gas: $198,816 + Coal: $25,376 = $224,192
Michael Enzi, Wyoming
Oil & gas: $211,083 + Coal: $63,300 = $274,383
Mike Crapo, Idaho
Oil & gas: $110,250 + Coal: $26,756 = $137,006
Jim Risch, Idaho
Oil & gas: $123,850 + Coal: $25,680 = $149,530
Thad Cochran, Mississippi
Oil & gas: $276,905 + Coal: $15,000 = $291,905
Mike Rounds, South Dakota
Oil & gas: $201,900 + Coal: none = $201,900
Rand Paul, Kentucky
Oil & gas: $170,215 + Coal: $82,571 = $252,786
John Boozman, Arkansas
Oil & gas: $147,930 + Coal: $2,000 = $149,930
Richard Shelby, Alabama
Oil & gas: $60,150 + $2,500 = $62,650
Luther Strange, Alabama (Appointed in 2017, running in 2017 special election)
Total: NA
Orrin Hatch, Utah
Oil & gas: $446,250 + Coal: $25,000 = $471,250
Mike Lee, Utah
Oil & gas: $231,520 + Coal: $21,895 = $253,415
Ted Cruz, Texas
Oil & gas: $2,465,910 + Coal: $103,900 = $2,569,810
David Perdue, Georgia
Oil & gas: $184,250 + Coal: $0 = $184,250
Thom Tillis, North Carolina
Oil & gas: $263,400 + Coal: $0 = $263,400
Tim Scott, South Carolina
Oil & gas: $490,076 + Coal: $58,200 = $548,276
Pat Roberts, Kansas
Oil & gas: $388,950 + Coal: $28,825 = $417,775
https://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/
http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=17-P13-00021&segmentID=1
bonn COP
...CURWOOD: Now, you're not telling me that all corporate lobbying at these events is designed to subvert the process, are you?
BRAGG: What I'm telling you is that there’s actually ... it would be very to difficult to discern who is and who isn't in the interest of climate policy, and frankly, that's not the role of an intergovernmental process to pick the winners and losers in the private sector. And so we need to be very careful about who is at the table and who isn't at the table and especially not rely on PR and advertisements from the likes of the fossil fuel industry to try to convince us that they have the interests of people and the planet in mind when their actions over the last two decades, at least, have proved otherwise.
CURWOOD: Now, as I understand it, the trade groups, of course, and other interest groups don't actually have a seat at the table. How are they able to court the diplomats and otherwise influence talks?
BRAGG: Well, you look at the example from COP 21. There were numerous examples of side events sponsored by the fossil fuel industry, by energy utilities where they wined and dined delegates and others, decision-makers, presumably toward their agenda. If you look at COP 19 in Warsaw, there was an entire parallel meeting hosted by the World Coal Association where delegates were invited, the head of the Secretariat of the Treaty actually spoke at that event.
CURWOOD: Which countries are championing limitations on corporate influence at the climate talks, and which made some kind of case for maintaining the kind of presence that companies have right now?
BRAGG: The champions of this issue were clearly Ecuador, and actually Uganda. Ecuador spoke representing the like-minded developing countries. Uganda spoke representing the least developed countries block. And actually, Senegal spoke representing the African negotiating group. Altogether, those groups represent far more than 70 percent of the world's population. And so, they were the leaders, but they were supported by Cuba. China spoke very, very strongly in support of these limitations, saying that the voices of the vulnerable are often drowned out by the voices of the rich and wealthy corporate interests. And those who were opposed to this were pretty easy to identify. You're looking at the US, Australia, Russia, and to some extent, the European Union, all places where the fossil fuel industry is based and representing countries that have the most at stake economically with the continuation of business as usual when it comes to extracting and burning fossil fuels.
CURWOOD: Jesse, talk to me about how these discussions in some ways parallel what happened at the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. This is back in 2003. What can we take away from how that treaty successfully put limitations on the tobacco industry's lobbying at those sessions?
...BRAGG: It's a great example and a fantastic precedent to look to when you’re trying to figure out how to address industry influence in any policymaking process. When parties, governments, got together to hash out the framework convention on tobacco control, they quickly realized that one of the primary obstacles to their progress was the tobacco industry. You know, it's very easy to understand why the tobacco industry has no incentive to advance public health policy. Every step forward we take in public health and tobacco control means one less dollar in the pockets of tobacco industry. And so, they brought forward a really bold proposal, it was one line of text initially that just said that parties need to take steps to reduce the influence of the tobacco industry over public health. And since then, the implementation of this treaty has taken off. And that's really the model we need to look at when we're talking about the fossil fuel industry and climate change. We need information from them. They have a role. But we also need to limit their influence and understand that they shouldn't be writing the policy by which they need to abide.
CURWOOD: What corporate associations are exercising the most undue influence on the climate talks in your opinion?
BRAGG: The two organizations that really stood out in terms of influence over these recent talks were the International Chamber of Commerce and the US Chamber of Commerce. The International Chamber of Commerce, their role is really to keep the door open for businesses around the world. They believe, and they're very proud of it, that corporations, including the fossil fuel industry, need to be at the table helping parties write the rules that we're going to implement the Paris Agreement under, and so in that way they take every opportunity to advance and expand the access of the private sector. The US chamber actually held a side event at the UNFCCC talks in which they said that US fossil fuel corporations are going to be central to this process as well. One of their representatives actually then went on to say that the US is going to need to revise down its commitments to the Paris agreement, and more or less said that, people need to get used to that, that that’s the way it was, really towing the line of the Trump administration that these commitments need to be reviewed.
CURWOOD: Now, under the Paris agreement, the fossil fuel industry will be selling their products perhaps as late as 2050. It will take a while to phase out what they do. If they are, in fact, going to be part of the energy mix going forward as they are right now, why shouldn't they have some input into these negotiation processes so that they can deal with their business in an orderly fashion?
BRAGG: I think there's a big difference between having input and being part of a process, and what governments have been saying and what the sort of broad campaign around this is calling for, is to draw that line. When are we gathering input from those industries we're seeking to regulate and when are we actually allowing them to be part of the policymaking process? And so, certainly there's going to be a great need to consult with the industry and gather information from the industry as needed as we’re developing the implementation of this agreement, but the question here is not whether or not we need input. It's whether or not they should have a role in writing the rules, and that's what this discussion was about.
BRAGG: Well, it's a long process. Decisions are made by consensus at the UNFCCC, which means you need more or less the vast majority, if not all governments to agree, and so while that is a great process because it's inclusive, it does mean that things take time. We know the next milestone for this movement is next meeting in Bonn in May next year, so 2018, where parties will refer to submissions that governments and civil society groups have made on this issue and chart a path forward.CURWOOD: When can we expect some sort of formal limitations to be agreed upon in terms of corporate lobbying at the UN climate meetings, if ever?
CURWOOD: Jesse Bragg is the Media Director of Corporate Accountability International.
==
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G7
...French President Emmanuel Macron spoke with Trump at length about the climate deal during a meeting Thursday in Brussels. At the Vatican earlier in the week, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin made his own pro-Paris pitch to Trump and his advisers. The matter was also a central focus of Trump’s two days of talks at the Group of 7 summit, which kicked off Friday on the picturesque Sicilian coast.
At the close of Friday’s talks, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said six of the G-7 nations — Italy, Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Japan — confirmed “our commitment and our determination” to the Paris agreement. The United States, meanwhile, confirmed “a period of reflection” on the issue, he said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said “we put forward very many arguments” for the U.S. sticking with the agreement.
The White House’s slow decision-making on the future of the landmark 2015 climate change agreement created the opening for the European leaders’ persuasion campaign. Multiple White House meetings on the matter were delayed in recent weeks, and Trump advisers ultimately said he would not make a decision until after he returns to Washington from a nine-day, five-stop international trip.
As a candidate, Trump vowed to withdraw the U.S. from the accord, which was negotiated during the Obama administration. But as the opening months of his presidency have shown, Trump can be moved to change his positions and can be heavily influenced by other world leaders. He backed away from his tough campaign talk about trade with China after a summit with President Xi Jinping and abandoned his criticism of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record following his warm welcome in the desert kingdom earlier this week...
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no link
22 GOP Senators vs. World Leaders on Paris Agreement
Twenty-two GOP senators sent a letter Thursday urging Donald Trump to pull out of the Paris agreement. They argued remaining in the deal could "upend" the administration's ability "to fulfill its goal of rescinding the Clean Power Plan."
Accounting for fewer than half of Senate Republicans, signers included coal-friendly politicians and prominent climate deniers, such as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and James Inhofe of Oklahoma.
Overseas, French president-elect Emmanuel Macron urged Trump not to make a "rushed decision" on the agreement at a Thursday meeting. White House economic adviser Gary Cohn predicts "fairly robust" talks on the Paris agreement at this weekend's G7 leadership summit in Sicily, and European leaders at the summit have indicated they will pressure Trump to remain in the deal.
As The Guardian reported:
"Some western powers are trying to frame the climate change discussion as a national security argument, pointing to the risk of war and terrorism if mass migration explodes out of drought-ridden Africa.
Trump's aides insist he remains in listening mode on climate change, and no decision will be made for a few weeks. The British, eternal optimists, at least sense he is moving on the issue. Results may have to wait for the G20 summit, to be attended by China in Hamburg in June."
For a deeper dive:
GOP letter: AP, Axios, The Hill; Macron: Reuters, CNBC; G7: The Guardian, Reuters, BBC
https://www.ecowatch.com/paris-agreement-g7-2422835676.html
==
AP) — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and 21 other Republicans on Thursday urged President Donald Trump to follow through on his campaign pledge to pull out of the Paris climate accord.
The GOP senators sent a two-page letter to the White House saying that remaining in the international agreement signed by Trump’s predecessor pledging to reduce carbon emissions could fuel legal challenges to the administration’s push to roll back environmental regulations.
Most of the senators who signed are from states that depend on the continued burning of coal, oil and gas. That includes Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe and others who, like Trump, have suggested the scientific data showing the Earth is warming due to man-made carbon emissions is a hoax.
The letter signers account for fewer than half of Senate Republicans. A similar letter was also sent to Trump this week by attorneys general from 10 Republican-led states, including oil-rich Texas and coal-dependent West Virginia.
Trump pledged during the presidential campaign to “renegotiate” the accord, but he has wavered on the issue since winning the presidency. His top officials have appeared divided about what to do about the 2015 deal, which was signed by nearly 200 countries.
There are also influential voices urging Trump not to ditch the Paris accord. Forty Democratic Senators sent Trump a letter earlier this week urging him to stay in, saying a withdrawal would hurt America’s credibility and influence on the world stage.
Hundreds of high-profile businesses have spoken out in favor of the deal, including Apple, Google and Walmart. Even fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell say the United States should abide by the deal.
During Trump’s visit to Rome this week, Pope Francis also urged Trump to take climate change seriously.
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chomsky requiem says morocco abandoned (# on verbal promise Paris)
==
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18052017/paris-climate-talks-fossil-fuel-influence-conflict-interest
Participants in global climate negotiations will have at least another year to debate the role fossil fuel companies and other influential industries should play in the international talks, after negotiators at the latest round of United Nations talks kicked the can down the road.
After days of adamant debate, a murkily phrased compromise invited countries, businesses, activists and others to share their views by January 2018 on how to increase the "openness, transparency and inclusiveness" of outside observers at climate talks. It was approved as negotiators from around the world wrapped up the Bonn climate conference on Thursday evening.
The discussions of corporate conflicts of interest were among the most contentious at the mid-year talks, which largely focused on technical aspects of climate negotiations, such as building out rules for implementing the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Developing countries, led by Ecuador, repeatedly pressed the issue of conflict of interest.
"We need a set of rules and principles and procedures to avoid and manage a potential conflict of interest between certain actors and the purpose of the convention and the Paris Agreement," said Walter Schuldt, Ecuador's chief negotiator.
But the idea of clamping down met resistance from corporate lobbyists and from rich nations, including the United States.
The conference also offered an opportunity for Trigg Talley, the lead U.S. delegate, to make clear to the rest of the world that the Trump administration is actively reviewing many climate policies and does not currently plan on further contributing to the Green Climate Fund, which supports developing nations' efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
U.S. officials remained quiet about the Trump administration's plans for the U.S. role in the Paris Agreement; White House advisors have been arguing over whether to exit the accord or stay in but let the U.S. targets slide. Delegates from developing nations repeatedly criticized the notion of backsliding. "The Paris Agreement is our lifeline ... 2018 needs to trigger enhanced ambition for climate action if the Paris Agreement's goals are to remain achievable," an Ethiopian delegate, speaking on behalf of a group of nations that are highly vulnerable to climate change, said in a statement delivered in Bonn.
The influence-peddling discussions gained a little ground by publicizing efforts of developing countries and environmental groups that have long complained about the sway that companies that benefit from emitting carbon pollution have in policy talks to curb such pollution.
"We would have loved an explicit conflict-of-interest policy," Jesse Bragg, a spokesman for the advocacy group Corporate Accountability International, told InsideClimate News. But "the fact that we were able to hold on to this call for submissions [and] able to make sure that we could continue to have this discussion in this space, it's a huge win for the campaign, for people and for the future implementation of the Paris agreement."
Johanna Gusman offered a parallel perspective. She is involved in the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a campaign to reduce tobacco use worldwide. "From our experience in dealing with the tobacco industry, policymakers need not question the lengths that certain trans-national corporations will go in protecting financial interests over interests they may claim to support that are public goods," Gusman said in Bonn.
"Within the context of the UNFCCC ... perhaps this means considering limiting the role of certain corporations that themselves drive the very climate crisis that the convention aims to stop," she said.
Australia and other developed countries, however, passionately defended the inclusion of businesses in the climate talks, as they had done in similar conversations at last year's meeting.
"This idea of excluding groups such as the private sector I think fundamentally misunderstands the concept of conflict of interest," said Patrick Suckling, Australia's ambassador for the environment. "Business has a very important view. Business will drive and is driving the technology, the investment, the transformation in a very fundamental and very significant way."
Opening discussions on conflict of interest also raises questions: Should just fossil fuel companies be excluded from the policy talks? What about renewable energy companies and agriculture giants?
Corporate Accountability International's Bragg thinks the answer is clear: "The best way to do this is to make sure that industries that have an interest, a financial interest, in the outcomes of this process have no seat at the table. Period."
But others are not so sure.
"In general, it is a good idea to take into account the perspectives of all stakeholders while crafting a robust response to climate change—including all businesses, investors, cities and civil society," Paula Caballero, global director of the World Resource Institute's climate program, said in a statement. "If stakeholders were excluded from the UN climate talks, negotiators would be operating in a self-imposed bubble. The fact is that delegates will need to manage a wide range of interests when they return to their capitals where no such separation exists."
There's also concern among some advocacy groups that guidelines and rules on conflict of interest could possibly lead to some advocacy and research groups being excluded from the table.
...
==
http://www.alternet.org/environment/fortune-500-companies-tell-trump-dont-abandon-paris-climate-agreement
Fortune 500 Companies Tell Trump: Don't Abandon Paris Climate Agreement
The so-called "pro-business" president is isolating himself from a big segment of the corporate community due to his climate denial.
By Lauren Hepler / GreenBiz May 16, 2017
First, it was a full-page ad in The New York Times signed by companies such as Apple, Morgan Stanley and Unilever. Then came the letter from 214 institutional investors with a combined $15 trillion in assets. By May 9, Tiffany & Co. had tweeted a message of support, in its signature robin's egg blue.
"We're still in," began the famed jeweler's campaign to back the Paris climate agreement.
Tiffany strongly supports keeping the U.S. in the #ParisAgreement.
Brokered in its namesake city in 2015 to establish global emissions-reduction targets and limit rising average temperatures, the Paris Agreement is one of many Obama-era efforts in the crosshairs for U.S. President Donald Trump. It's a stance that's not going over well with some Fortune 500 companies, financiers, investors and others who say the U.S. should be doing more to expedite the growth of clean energy and other low-carbon technologies in order to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
On May 9, the groups got their wish— for now—when White House spokesman Sean Spicer announced that the president had postponed his decision until after the G7 summit, slated for May 26-27 in Italy.
"We hear reports coming from inside the White House about the division among the administration," said Edward Cameron, managing director at BSR, and head of policy for corporate climate advocacy consortium We Mean Business, which formed in the run-up to the COP21 United Nations climate talks that produced the Paris Agreement; BSR is a member of the coalition. "It's very, very difficult to gauge who has the upper hand."
Although many businesses vocally supporting the Paris Agreement have been buying renewable energy or backing environmental causes for years, the at-times confusing back and forth over the future of U.S. involvement in global climate goals is no routine matter. In addition to the U.S. being a key funder of the $100 billion-a-year global climate fund planned to mitigate impacts in developing countries, those urging Trump not to back out of the deal say that the administration risks undermining its broader credibility as a political and economic powerhouse.
"The sad fact is that the Trump administration is isolating itself from the mainstream," said Aron Cramer, president and CEO of BSR. "It's isolating itself from the national security community. It's isolating itself from the business community. It's isolating itself from investors, and it's isolating itself from scientific consensus."
How we got here, though, hasn't always been easy to follow. The administration's approach to the Paris deal has shifted several times in recent days—to say nothing of other simmering environmental concerns, such as protection for federal land or funding for climate data collection.
On May 8, it looked as if the U.S. was down to a final 24 hours as a signatory to the Paris Agreement. By early the following day, it seemed the White House and Trump would make their move on the climate pact before the G7 summit. The timeline had shifted again on May 9 to a decision after the convening of the global economic powers in a few weeks.
"Let’s just say it’s a dynamic environment," Cramer said. "It’s a little hard to predict when decisions will get made, how they’ll get made and, quite frankly, who the ultimate decision maker is."
Raising the stakes
For a brand built on adventures in exotic cold-weather destinations, a desire to "protect our outdoor playground" is only natural, according to The North Face Senior Sustainability Manager James Rogers.
Executives at the company have for years penned op-eds, signed off on group climate advocacy letters and backed in-house efforts such as outfitting the company's Bay Area headquarters with a 1-megawatt solar array. With the Paris Agreement on the chopping block, however, Rogers said leadership has stepped up calls and e-mails to lawmakers. North Face parent company VF Corp. also signed onto the six-figure newspaper ad campaign coordinated by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and Ceres.
And anxiety about political or consumer backlash?
"There’s always the potential for something like that, and it’s definitely a concern," Rogers said. "This is such a pressing issue that we realized, especially [last] week, that we needed to act, and we needed to act quickly."
Cameron said We Mean Business also has seen other companies strive to balance public calls for the agreement to remain in force with behind-the-scenes lobbying. Among the political battles playing out in Washington, he said, are divergent viewpoints on just how time-consuming, costly or legally complex withdrawing from the deal would be.
Across industries, he said companies have different rationales for getting more involved in policy advocacy that once might have been considered well outside the scope of day-to-day business.
"If you’re a food company, you know that climate change impacts your soil," Cameron said. "In some cases, it's reputational benefit or harm. In some cases, it's worker recruiting and retention."
For Cramer, the scale of companies involved in the discussion about the future of the Paris Agreement is also notable. Ultimately, he argued, what happens with the climate deal could affect U.S. global standing on other issues.
"This is not Ben and Jerry's," Cramer said. "This is not a fringe movement."
Tiffany's campaign, for instance, aims "to reach decision makers directly with a message from Tiffany and from large U.S. businesses to voice our support for acting on climate change and remaining in the Paris Agreement," Anisa Kamadoli Costa, the company's chief sustainability officer, told GreenBiz.
Individual companies aside, Cramer said the White House risks snubbing national security agencies that have endorsed renewable energy as one strategy to bolster the resilience of the power grid, as well as investors and big banks attracted to financial opportunities embedded in the deal.
Merrill Lynch, for instance, estimates that it would take $900 billion a year to scale clean-energy infrastructure fast enough to limit global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, a common U.N. metric for averting catastrophic fallout from climate change. In 2016, global clean energy investments fell to $287 billion from the record investment of $348 billion invested in 2015, Bloomberg research shows.
While the future of the Paris Agreement hangs in the balance, Cramer said interested companies also would be wise to stay appraised of other environmental policy changes trickling out of the White House and Capitol Hill.
"Business is and should keep an eye on all of it," he said. "There is a very broad assault on a number of environmental steps that are actually very important to building a 21st-century economy."
This article was originally published by Greenbiz. Read the original.
Lauren Hepler is associate editor at GreenBiz Group. She has covered urban development, technology and public policy for Slate magazine, Congressional Quarterly, the Silicon Valley Business Journal and OpenSecrets.org.
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http://www.alternet.org/environment/trumps-bogus-reason-bailing-paris-agreement
Trump looks as if he is preparing to pull out of the Paris Agreement. After months of delayed and rescheduled meetings on the topic, the administration has suggested it will make its official decision this week about whether or not to stay in the global pact, which encourages almost 200 nations to cut their climate-change causing emissions. Reports indicate that things aren’t looking good for team “stay.”
Lead by Steve Bannon, White House counsel Don McGahn and EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, a faction of Trumpworld has successfully made the case to the president that the US should quit the deal, according to reports. If the US stays in the pact but pursues Trump’s agenda of fossil-fuel industry boosterism, the US could be in hot water legally, they argue.
President Barack Obama promised to cut US emissions by 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels. Because Trump is unwinding many of Obama’s climate change-related programs, emissions are likely to fall under Trump by only 14 percent, according to an analysis by the Rhodium Group. McGahn and other anti-Paris advisers argue that under the agreement, the US could somehow face legal action if it does not meet Obama’s promises.
But nearly all diplomats and legal scholars who worked on the deal believe that’s not correct. The Paris Agreement is not legally binding. Over the last week, lawyers and the architects of the deal have parsed its language once more and concluded that the US can revise its emissions-cutting promise at any time, upward or downward, and nothing will happen.
The debate is centered around one line in article 4.11 of the agreement. It states that “a party may at any time adjust its existing nationally determined contribution with a view to enhancing its level of ambition.”
The consensus is, resoundingly, that these words do not require emissions targets to increase. “It came up,” Todd Stern, Obama’s chief climate diplomat, told Vox’s David Roberts. “It was discussed and debated. There were countries that were saying they wanted a legal prohibition of any downward revision of an NDC. We thought that was a bad idea. It would cause any number of countries to lowball their target out of fear of getting stuck.”
The authors of the deal intentionally left out punishments for a nation that decided to be less ambitious. Indeed, this was one of scientists and activists’ chief criticisms of the agreement, which they denounced as toothless.
Other climate law scholars agree with Stern. “Withdrawal of the Clean Power Plan, adoption of an alternative domestic strategy or failure to achieve the US emissions reduction target would not violate the agreement,” wrote Susan Biniaz, a former State Department adviser, and Daniel Bodansky, a law professor at Arizona State University, in a recent analysis of legal issues related to the Paris Agreement. In other words, Columbia University Law Professor Michael Burger summarizes, “remaining in the Paris Agreement does not increase litigation risk for the Trump administration as it pursues its deregulatory agenda.” Trump and his deputies can do whatever they want with regard to the US’ climate change-causing emissions without facing legal ramifications.
Last Thursday, Laurence Tubiana, a French diplomat who worked on the agreement, provided what sounded like a dissenting voice to E&E News, arguing that under the deal a country is not allowed to decrease its commitment. “The sense of the direction is really progress; it’s not going backwards,” she said. But she later argued that her comments had been misinterpreted. “To be super clear: US gov CAN legally downsize NDC but politically they should not,” she tweeted. An “NDC” is a nationally determined contribution, that’s the Paris Agreement’s term for a nation’s promise under the agreement.
Foreign leaders, corporations, investors and activists have been pushing hard to keep the Trump administration in the pact by arguing that the US has nothing to lose by staying.
Its unclear, however, if the administration is willing to listen.
The president’s advisers will meet tomorrow afternoon to come to a final decision about the Paris Agreement. Someone close to Ivanka Trump leaked that the president’s daughter, a proponent of staying in the deal, would meet one-on-one with Scott Pruitt before the larger meeting. The implication in Axios reporter Jonathan Swan’s piece about the leak is that Ivanka hopes to change the EPA administrator’s mind. Her desire to keep the US in the agreement is shared by a number of Trump advisers, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn and military leaders including national security adviser H.R. MacMaster....
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https://cei.org/content/forty-four-free-market-groups-urge-trump-withdraw-paris-climate-agreement
We, the undersigned, write in enthusiastic support of your campaign commitments to withdraw fully from the Paris Climate Treaty and to stop all taxpayer funding of UN global warming programs. We were heartened by the comments you made at your 100-day rally in Harrisburg and agree that the treaty is not in the interest of the American people and the U. S. should therefore not be a party to it.
Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Treaty is an integral part of your energy agenda. The Obama administration’s Nationally Determined Contribution (or NDC) to the Paris Climate Treaty commits the United States to take actions that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 and by 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025. Paris then requires a more ambitious NDC every five years in perpetuity.
The NDC cites specific policies undertaken by the Obama administration as part of the NDC. These include: the greenhouse gas emissions rules for existing (the “Clean Power” Plan) and new power plants; Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for vehicles; methane emissions rules for the oil and gas sector and for landfills; and energy efficiency and conservation standards for buildings and appliances.
Environmental pressure groups and several state attorneys general have begun to prepare lawsuits in federal court to block withdrawal of the “Clean Power” Plan and other greenhouse gas rules. One argument that they have already put forward is that these rules cannot be withdrawn because they are part of our international commitment under the Paris Climate Treaty. Failing to withdraw from Paris thus exposes key parts of your deregulatory energy agenda to unnecessary legal risk. The AGs revealed in a recruiting letter that they also plan other lawsuits “ensuring that the promises made in Paris become reality.”
Some officials in your administration are relying on recent statements from former Obama administration officials that the U. S. can withdraw its NDC and submit a new NDC that makes far less ambitious commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The clear language of Article 4 of the Paris Climate Treaty contradicts that claim. Section 11 states: “A Party may at any time adjust its existing nationally determined contribution with a view to enhancing its level of ambition” (emphasis added).
Even if the U. S. were to be cleared by UN officials to submit a less ambitious NDC, this is not the end of the threats posed by the Paris Climate Treaty to your pro-energy agenda and to the economic future of our country. Article 4 requires each party to submit a more ambitious NDC at least every five years in perpetuity. This commitment to reduce fossil fuel use every five years cannot be wished away by those who argue that the U. S. should keep a seat at the negotiating table in order to advocate for fossil fuels.
In urging you to keep your campaign commitment, we recognize that there are several options for you to withdraw the U.S. from Paris. Of the three options listed below, we think the first two are preferable to the third.
First, you could submit the Paris Climate Treaty to the Senate for its advice and consent with a recommendation that the treaty not be ratified. Submitting the treaty to the Senate would return us to and restore the proper constitutional method for treaty-making and require a future administration to go through proper procedures if it were to attempt to rejoin the treaty.
Second, you could withdraw from the underlying UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This action would also achieve your commitment to “stop all payments of the United States tax dollars to UN global warming programs,” including the Green Climate Fund, which is a part of the UNFCCC.
Third, you could announce your intention to withdraw the U. S. from the Paris Climate Treaty according to the four-year schedule specified in the treaty and continue the process of repealing the regulations that the previous administration submitted as part of its NDC. This option is the least preferable because it runs the risk of legitimizing the Obama administration’s false claim that the treaty is merely an executive agreement.
The undersigned organizations believe that withdrawing completely from Paris is a key part of your plan to protect U.S. energy producers and manufacturers from regulatory warfare not just for the next four years but also for decades to come. We will strongly support your decision to keep your campaign commitment to withdraw from the Paris Climate Treaty.
Sincerely,
Myron Ebell, Director, Center for Energy and Environment, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Thomas J. Pyle, President, American Energy Alliance
Joseph Bast, President, The Heartland Institute
Grover G. Norquist, President, Americans for Tax Reform
Chrissy Harbin, Vice President of External Affairs, Americans for Prosperity
Michael Needham, CEO, Heritage Action for America
Michael Costigan, Senior Advisor, Strategic Outreach, The Heritage Foundation
James L. Martin, Founder and Chairman, 60 Plus Association
Craig Rucker, Executive Director, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow
David Ridenour, President, National Center for Public Policy Research
Thomas Schatz, President, Citizens Against Government Waste
Craig Richardson, President, Energy and Environment Legal Institute
Tom DeWeese, President, American Policy Center
Richard Manning, President, Americans for Limited Government
Phil Kerpen, President, American Commitment
David Williams, President, Taxpayers Protection Alliance
Mario H. Lopez, President, Hispanic Leadership Fund
David Bozell, President, For America
Steven J. Allen, Vice President and Chief Investigative Officer, Capital Research Center
Kenneth Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project
Craig D. Idso, Chairman, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
William Happer, President, The CO2 Coalition
E. Calvin Beisner, Founder and National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
John Droz, Jr., Founder, Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions
Timothy Lee, Senior Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs, Center for Individual Freedom
Peter J. Thomas, Chairman, Americans for Constitutional Liberty
Ed Martin, President, Eagle Forum Education and Legal Defense Fund
Amy Oliver Cooke, Executive Vice President, Independence Institute (CO)
David T. Stevenson, Director, Center for Energy Competitiveness, Caesar Rodney Institute (DE)
Paul Gessing, President, Rio Grande Foundation
Kory Swanson, President and CEO, John Locke Foundation
Francis De Luca, President, Civitas Institute
Forest Thigpen, President, Mississippi Center for Public Policy
Eldon Alexander, President, Faith and Freedom Foundation
Lynne Roberts, President, Americans United for Freedom
Rich Johns, President, Liberty Tree Alliance
Aileen Milton, President, The Villages Tea Party
Debbie Gunnoe, President, Navarre Patriots
Sam Mullins, Co-Founder, Santa Rosa Tea Party Patriots
Hon. Mike Hill, Founder, Northwest Florida Tea Party
Stephani Scruggs Bowen, COO, Coalition for a Strong America
Alan Moran, Director, Australian Environment Foundation
Eunie Smith, President, Eagle Forum
Norm Singleton, President, Campaign for Liberty
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/05/10/conservative-groups-pushing-trump-exit-paris-deal-have-taken-millions-koch-brothers-and-exxon
The “conservative groups” urging President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement have accepted tens of millions of dollars from groups linked to the billionaire petrochemical brothers Charles and David Koch, ExxonMobil, and the Mercer family.
More than 40 groups have co-signed an open letter urging Trump to keep his campaign promise and “withdraw fully from the Paris Climate Treaty.”
The groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), The Heartland Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, claim failing to withdraw from the treaty could put Trump’s policy agenda of promoting fossil fuels at risk.
The Wall Street Journal has quoted a White House spokesperson saying the president will not make a decision on the Paris agreement until after meeting G-7 leaders later this month.
Analysis carried out by DeSmog and the Climate Investigations Center (CIC) shows many of the groups signing the letter have taken multi-million dollar donations from groups tied to the Koch brothers, who own Koch Industries. Several of the groups have accepted cash from oil giant ExxonMobil while many also deny the basic science linking fossil fuel burning to dangerous climate change.
In the letter, the groups say Trump should withdraw from the Paris deal and “stop all taxpayer funding of UN global warming programs” — two promises made by Trump during his campaign.
Paris Deal
As part of the Paris deal, agreed to by almost 200 countries as part of the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change, the U.S. pledged in a document known as a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025, based on their levels in 2005.
“Paris then requires a more ambitious NDC every five years in perpetuity,” the groups write.
The letter says environment groups and some attorneys general are using court action to try and protect the Obama era’s Clean Power Plan that sought to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The U.S. participation in the Paris deal is being cited in these lawsuits, the groups claim.
“Failing to withdraw from Paris thus exposes key parts of your deregulatory energy agenda to unnecessary legal risk,” the letter claims.
Right-wing media outlets including Breitbart and The Daily Caller have been reporting the letter from conservative groups without mentioning the known links to the Koch brothers and to their denial of the science of climate change.
Koch Cash
The DeSmog and CIC analysis, using publicly available IRS disclosures, shows the Koch brothers have donated at least $6.9 million to the groups, much of which went to the Heritage Foundation. Exxon donated about $5.9 million to the groups since the late 1990s.
Several of the letter signers had roles in Trump’s various transition teams, including the CEI’s Myron Ebell and Thomas Pyle of the American Energy Alliance.
In 2014, Freedom Partners (FP) — a group once described as the Koch brothers secret bank — gave some $16 million to Americans for Prosperity, another of the letter’s signatories. FP also gave $2.3 miilion to the American Energy Alliance.
Denial Dollars
But as well as accepting millions of dollars from vested interests such as the Kochs and Exxon over the years, another thing the groups have in common is their denial of the clear science linking fossil fuel burning to dangerous climate change — an issue backed by all the major scientific academies around the world.
The analysis shows groups have also accepted about $80 million through two linked funding organisations — Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust — that academics have confirmed is a key financial source for many U.S. climate science denial groups.
The Koch brothers, through a funding group known as the Knowledge and Progress Fund (KPF), gave more than $7.6 million to the Donors Trust since 2010. The only grants made by the KPF over that period were to Donors Trust.
The Heartland Institute, which has been given more than $5 million in recent years by major Trump financier Robert Mercer, is known for organizing regular conferences where climate science denialists gather.
In the run-up to one conference in May 2012, Heartland said in a statement: “The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren't scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”
Another signer to the letter is Professor William Happer, the president of the CO2 Coalition — a group that emerged from the disbanded George C. Marshall Institute.
The CO2 Coalition denies the evidence that humans are causing dangerous climate change and runs with the tag line “CO2 — Essential for Life.”
Happer, thought to be in the running as Trump’s science adviser, has compared what he called the “demonization” of CO2, to the “demonization of poor Jews under Hitler.”
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20032017/paris-climate-agreement-donald-trump-global-warming-clean-power-plan
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President-elect Donald Trump is seeking quick ways to withdraw the United States from a global accord to combat climate change, a source on his transition team said, defying broad global backing for the plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Since Trump's election victory on Tuesday, governments ranging from China to small island states have reaffirmed support for the 2015 Paris agreement during climate talks involving 200 nations set to run until Friday in Marrakesh, Morocco.
Trump has called global warming a hoax and has promised to quit the Paris Agreement, which was strongly supported by outgoing Democratic U.S. President Barack Obama.
Trump's advisers are considering ways to bypass a theoretical four-year procedure for leaving the accord, according to the source, who works on Trump's transition team for international energy and climate policy.
"It was reckless for the Paris agreement to enter into force before the election" on Tuesday, the source told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Paris accord won enough backing for entry into force on Nov. 4, four days before the election.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday in New Zealand the Obama administration would do everything it could to implement the Paris accord before Trump takes office.
The accord says in its Article 28 that any country wanting to pull out after signing on has to wait four years. In theory, the earliest date for withdrawal would be Nov. 4, 2020, around the time of the next U.S. presidential election.
The source said the future Trump administration is weighing alternatives to accelerate the pull-out: sending a letter withdrawing from the 1992 international framework accord that is the parent treaty of the Paris Agreement; voiding U.S. involvement in both in a year's time; or issuing a presidential order simply deleting the U.S. signature from the Paris accord.
Withdrawing from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) would be controversial, partly because it was signed by former Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1992 and approved by the U.S. Senate. The action also could antagonize many other countries. [L8N1DB41L]
The UNFCCC sets a goal of avoiding "dangerous" man-made damage to the climate to avert more heat waves, downpours, floods, extinctions of animals and plants and rising sea levels.
The 2015 Paris Agreement is much more explicit, seeking to phase out net greenhouse gas emissions by the second half of the century and limit global warming to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.
Many nations have expressed hope that the United States will stay. But the host of the current round of climate negotiations, Morocco, said the pact that seeks to phase out greenhouse gases in the second half of the century was strong enough to survive a pullout.
One party deciding to withdraw would not call the agreement into question, Foreign Minister Salaheddine Mezouar told a news conference.
In Beijing on Monday, the foreign ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, told a regular news briefing that China would like to continue working with all countries, including the United States, in the global fight against climate change.
The agreement was reached by almost 200 nations in December and, as of Saturday, has been formally ratified by 109 representing 76 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, including the United States with 18 percent.
The accord seeks to limit rising temperatures that have been linked to increasing economic damage from desertification, extinctions of animals and plants, heat waves, floods and rising sea levels.
U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa declined to comment on the Trump source's remarks to Reuters.
"The Paris Agreement carries an enormous amount of weight and credibility," Espinosa told a news conference.
She said the United Nations hoped for a strong and constructive relationship with Trump.
The Trump source said the president-elect's transition team is aware of the likely international backlash but said Republicans in the U.S. Congress have given ample warning that a Republican administration would take action to reverse course.
"The Republican Party on multiple occasions has sent signals to the international community signaling that it doesn't agree with the pact. We've gone out of our way to give notice," the source said.
The source blamed Obama for joining up by an executive order, without getting approval from the U.S. Senate.
"There wouldn't be this diplomatic fallout on the broader international agenda if Obama hadn't rushed the adoption," the source said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-climatechange-accord-idUSKBN1370JX
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ebell: A former top aide to Donald Trump says the president will "definitely" pull out of the Paris climate deal. Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s transition efforts for the Environmental Protection Agency, also said Monday that climate and environmental activists are "the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world."
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60 Countries Representing 48% of Emissions Have Officially Joined Paris Climate Agreement
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon hosted a special event at which 31 countries officially joined the...
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http://www.climaterealityproject.org/press/statement-ken-berlin-president-ceo-climate-reality-project-us-china-paris-agreement
“Nearly two years ago, the United States and China stood shoulder to shoulder to proclaim their commitment to solving climate change, kickstarting the process that culminated in a worldwide climate agreement in Paris. Now, the world’s two largest emitters and two largest economies have taken the next step by formally joining the Paris Agreement. This continued cooperation and leadership on the eve of the gathering of the G20 sets a bold precedent for the rest of the world’s major economies to follow and highlights the interrelationship between expanding economic prosperity and solving the climate crisis. Now it’s time for the rest of the world to follow the US and China, formally accept the Paris Agreement, and get to the hard work of implementing and increasing their commitments to solving climate change.”
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http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/05/trump-wants-renegotiate-paris-climate-deal
I
f elected president, Donald Trump would pull the United States out of the commitments it made recently in Paris to fight climate change, according to a new interview with Reuters—a move that could deal a fatal blow to the landmark agreement.
"I will be looking at that very, very seriously, and at a minimum I will be renegotiating those agreements, at a minimum. And at a maximum I may do something else," the New York real estate mogul said in an interview with Reuters.
"But those agreements are one-sided agreements and they are bad for the United States."
Trump said he did not believe China, the world's top emitter of the carbon dioxide gas that many scientists believe is contributing to global climate change, would adhere to its pledge under the Paris deal.
The deal, which the Obama administration plans to formally join by the end of the year, aims to limit global warming to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Needless to say, the plan would crumble if the US—the world's second-biggest carbon dioxide emitter after China—were to back out.
Trump's criticism of China, although commonplace among Republican climate change deniers, is debatable. Chinese diplomats worked closely with White House officials in developing the Paris Agreement. Chinese investment in clean energy technology vastly outpaces that of the US, and some energy analysts think China could actually be on track to outperform the climate targets it agreed to in Paris.
Still, it could be a noteworthy concession from Trump that he wants to "renegotiate," rather than abandon the plan completely. He's previously said global warming "was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
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trexler climate web
http://climatographer.com/paris-agreement/
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http://ecowatch.com/2016/01/26/investment-renewables-cleantech/
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sim widget/
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/04/paris-agreement-signing-earth-day
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terror attack? march cancelled by gov
http://www.desmog.ca/2015/12/10/canada-intervenes-keep-human-and-indigenous-rights-climate-treaty-during-final-hours-paris-negotiations
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http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/12/08/climate-denialists-paris-claim-they-are-being-shut-out-while-shutting-out-journalists
Professional climate science deniers and delayers have been busy playing the victim card here at the Paris climate change talks.
As we head into the guts of week two, negotiators at the vast Le Bourget venue are heading into the business end of agreeing a global deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions and stave off the worst impacts of climate change.
In The Australian, environment editor Graham Lloyd wrote under the headline “Greens want muzzle on ‘climate deniers’” how environment groups wanted “alternative views on climate science silenced in Paris.”
That’s an interesting choice of phrase - alternative view. Try, wrong. There are some people in the world with an “alternative view” on the age and the shape of the planet, or the theory of evolution and the safety of vaccines.
But you wouldn’t expect them to be taken seriously at a major medical conference or the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Reuters also had a story where Heartland Institute communications director Jim Lakely complained that they had to “make their own space and time” to be heard in Paris. Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow's Marc Morano complained to Politico that the UN saw the denialists as the “turd in the punch bowl”.
The Heartland Institute, which received $736,000 from Exxon between 1998 and 2006, is ever keen to promote climate science denial, holding annual conferences in the US and abroad, launching “alternative” climate reports and comparing anyone who accepts climate science to tyrants and murderers.
So are climate science denialists and “sceptics” really excluded from the United Nations climate process?
The Committee for Constructive Tomorrow has been granted official press conference time and space at previous climate talks in Lima, Warsaw, Durban, Doha and Bonn.
CFACT communications director Marc Morano, who launched his Climate Hustle denialist documentary in Paris on Tuesday evening, told me they have a press conference planned within the Paris talks, in an official room, for later this week. CFACT has also had an official booth at the Paris talks.
The United Nations has also granted official delegate status to representatives from CFACT and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, another US conservative think tank that refuses to accept the evidence of the severe implications of fossil fuel emissions.
Yet while the likes of CFACT and Heartland cry wolf over their victim status, there’s an apparent hypocrisy in their claims.
When CFACT joined other groups in a room at the aptly-titled Hotel California (as the Eagles sang, ‘what a nice surprise, bring your alibis’) for a day of denialist speeches, the event was initially advertised as being public.
But when journalists from DeSmog turned up, the event suddenly became private and the journalists were excluded.
I had initially been granted a seat for the premiere of the Climate Hustle documentary, but was later declined. At the screening event last night (more information about that quite bizarre experience to come), I asked again to be allowed in, but was told it was full.
Dr John Cook, a climate communication fellow at the University of Queensland and founder of the SkepticalScience website, was also told he wouldn’t be allowed to actually watch the film, after initially expecting to be allowed in.
The ideologically-motivated climate science denial that Heartland and CFACT promotes cuts no ice here inside the Paris talks. But that’s not to say it has no impact.
Writing in the New Republic, Jonathan Katz points out how the Republican party’s denial of the science in the US could impact on the negotiations. Negotiators, Katz argues, “know better than anyone that the Republican Congress will not approve any climate change deal President Barack Obama puts in front of them.”
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House Speaker Paul Ryan, and other congressional Republicans, are signalling a lack of support for the climate talks.
Don’t trust the United States: as the international climate summit in Paris grinds along, this is the message Republicans in Congress are trying to send the delegates. The logic, such as it is, of the claim is that merely by making it the House G.O.P. goes a long way toward proving its validity.
On Tuesday, at a news conference in Paris, President Barack Obama exhorted negotiators to keep in mind what is at stake at the summit. “This one trend—climate change—affects all trends,” Obama said. “This is an economic and security imperative that we have to tackle now.”
Even as he spoke, congressional Republicans were doing their best to undermine him. That same day, the House approved two resolutions aimed at blocking regulations to curb U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. The first would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing rules aimed at cutting emissions from new power plants; the second would prevent the agency from enforcing rules targeted at existing power plants. Together, these rules are known as the Clean Power Plan, and they are crucial to the Americans’ negotiating position in Paris. (The Clean Power Plan is central to the United States’ pledge, made in advance of the summit, to cut its emissions by twenty-six per cent.) The House votes, which followed Senate approval of similar resolutions back in November, were, at least according to some members, explicitly aimed at subverting the talks. Lawmakers want to “send a message to the climate conference in Paris that in America, there’s serious disagreement with the policies of this president,” Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican, explained.
As a practical matter, the importance of the votes is probably minimal. Obama has already threatened to veto the resolutions if they reach his desk, and there isn’t enough support for them for an override. But the resolutions are not the only trick congressional Republicans have up their collective sleeves. President Obama has pledged three billion dollars to what’s known as the Green Climate Fund. The fund is intended to help developing countries cope with climate change and also to adopt clean-energy systems. In a just world, three billion dollars is far less than the U.S. should be contributing; Republicans are threatening to block even that contribution. Leaving the fund under-financed increases the chance that poorer countries will walk away from any proposed accord.
Meanwhile, the impossibility of getting an agreement ratified by the U.S. Senate puts yet another constraint on negotiations. While many countries are pushing for a legally binding treaty, the Obama Administration is insisting on a sort of legal chimera—partly binding, partly not—so that, if there is a pact, it won’t require Senate approval. (The Washington Post has a good rundown on this particular problem.)
That Republicans would try to undercut the Administration’s efforts to do something—anything—to reduce carbon emissions is no surprise. Willful ignorance about climate change has become a point of pride among elected officials in the G.O.P. Recently, the Associated Press asked a panel of eight scientists to assess the accuracy of Presidential candidates’ tweets on climate change using a scale of zero to a hundred. (The tweets were shown to the scientists without the candidates’ names, to guard against bias.) All nine of the Republican candidates graded got failing scores. Donald Trump, for instance, received a fifteen, while Ben Carson got a thirteen and Ted Cruz a six. “This individual understands less about science (and climate change) than the average kindergartner,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, who served as one of the judges, wrote of Cruz’s statements. “That sort of ignorance would be dangerous in a doorman, let alone a president.”
But if the recent votes aren’t surprising, they’re still discouraging. They demonstrate, once again, the power of defeatist thinking. Congressional Republicans rail against the federal government; then, with their own antics, confirm their worst criticisms. (Who, nowadays, would make the case that Americans should have faith in Washington?) The G.O.P. says that America can’t be depended on to live up to its commitments, and, by saying so, achieves its objective, which is sowing mistrust. The best that can be hoped for during the next week in Paris is that the rest of the world ignores the U.S.’s Republican leaders. Would that we had that luxury here at home.
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With less than one week before the Paris climate talks (COP21), Corporate Accountability International (CAI) released a report
exposing the “filthy” track record of some of the corporations sponsoring the talks.
The report, Fueling the Fire: The corporate sponsors bankrolling COP21, uncovers “the green veil of four of the meeting’s dirtiest
sponsors,” including fossil fuel conglomerates Engie (formerly GDF Suez), Suez Environment, BNP Paribas and French utility
Électricité de France (EDF).
The organization argues that there is an inherent conflict of interest between the stated aims of the UN climate process and many
of COP21’s corporate sponsors given their roles as global carbon polluters.
Together, these four corporate sponsors represent direct ownership of and/or investments in more than 46 coalfired power
plants, exploration of tar sands in Canada, fracking in the UK and India, over €30 billion invested in the French coal industry and
more than 200 megatons of CO2equivalent emissions.
CAI argues that “by detailing the corporations’ abuses to the environment and aggressive lobbying to undermine environmental
policy, the report lays bare the conflict of interest inherent in allowing such sponsorship to exist.”
“Inviting some of the world’s biggest polluters to pay for the COP is akin to hiring a fox to guard a hen house. We must eliminate
this conflict of interest before the COP become corporate trade shows for false marketbased solutions,” CAI Executive Director
Patti Lynn said.
The report details how the four sponsors have long track records of “policy interference that contradict the green public relations”
they advance. Whilst energy giant EDF claims to be “committed to a decarbonized world,” it is an active member—alongside
ExxonMobil and Shell—of the European business lobby group, BusinessEurope.
Indeed, BusinessEurope has a long history of being opposed to climate action. In 2010, it came second in the EU’s Worst Lobby
Awards. It was nominated “for its aggressive lobbying to block effective climate action in the EU while claiming to support action
to protect the climate.” On behalf of its members, BusinessEurope openly opposes the “market deployment of energy produced
from renewable sources.”
The report also outlines the greenwashing covering pollution. CAI reveals that Engie “is a polluter with few rivals,” responsible for
more than 131 megatons of greenhouse gas emissions. This is the equivalent to pollution emitted from driving around the globe 12
million times.
“Despite recent announcements to stop new coal projects, Engie still owns 30 dirty coal power plants worldwide,” argues Célia
Gautier, policy advisor at Climate Action Network France. “The French state is directly responsible for Engie’s greenwashing
activities as it owns 33 percent of its shares and accepted to put them in their list of COP21 sponsors.”
BNP Paribas is one of the largest coal financiers in France. Between 2005 and 2014 the corporation provided half of the total
financial support (€30 billion) for the French coal industry.
The momentum is growing to have large polluting companies excluded from the talks. In May, more than 60 organizations
launched a global campaign to kick big polluters out of climate policy.
Using the UN legal precedent, Article 5.3 of the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, they say the same should
happen with Big Oil and COP21.
So far more than 400,000 people
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http://www.alternet.org/environment/why-isis-wants-paris-climate-talks-fail
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http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/13/climate-deal-legally-binding-kerry/
http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/11/12/marc-morano-s-climate-hustle-documentary-ready-paris-premiere-same-old-denial-myths
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http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/11/agri-corporations-hijack-cop21/
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http://www.globalpossibilities.org/the-plan-to-save-the-world/
Big polluter nations give fossil fuel companies 10 million dollars a minute, but claim they don't have funds to aid the most vulnerable countries dealing with floods, drought and storms.
Now poorer nations say if they can't count on the aid, they can't sign up to a global climate deal. It is a deadly deadlock, but if enough of us demand they stop giving public funds to dirty energy right now, we could shift the finance to help those most in need.
Next week, 80 ministers from across the world meet to try and find a solution. Let's get one million of us behind this push -- Avaaz staff will deliver our call directly to the UK, US, Canada, Australia and others to expose the lie and shame them into action:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/finance_100_clean_sls/?botEzdb&v=67464
Industrialised governments have made commitments to switch to 100% clean energy, to stop funding fossil fuels, and to provide $100 billion in climate funding per year by 2020. But if these promises aren’t tied down now, there will be no global climate deal in Paris.
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