Window for Climate Action Still Open
Latest Report Highlights Both Urgency and Opportunity
Mozambique and Malawi are already paying the price for climate changes driven by unchecked fossil-fuel emissions, both past and continuing. This AfricaFocus Notes contains excerpts from several related articles and links to PDFs for the full text in each case.
The first article, on the storm hitting the east coast of Southern Africa, comes from Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post. Next come two articles from the Washington Post and New York Times on the Biden administration’s decision to double down on fossil fuel production by approving the mammoth Willow project. Finally, three articles summarize the latest global report released by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), including one by New York Times climate columnist Somini Sengupta.
Tharoor’s Today´s WorldView and Sengupta’s Climate Forward columns are both consistently well-written and insightful. Even if you read nothing else from these papers, their newsletters are well worth the price of a digital subscription of $1 a week or less for either The Post or The Times.
Other relevant updates from Substack include additional post-election analyses recommended by AfricaFocus on the Nigerian election and Seymour Hersh’s devastating reply to the clumsy attempts by Western intelligence agencies to refute his story documenting U.S. responsibility for the September 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline.
Today's WorldView: The record-breaking storm that's not on your radar
A record-breaking storm wreaks havoc in southern Africa
Washington Post 3/20/23 By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall
PDF of full article available here.
A satellite image of Cyclone Freddy over Mozambique on Sunday. (NASA Worldview/EPA- EFE/Shutterstock/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Before this weekend, Cyclone Freddy was already the Earth’s longest-lived tropical storm. As Freddy made landfall on Sunday in central Mozambique for a second time in the space of a few weeks, lashing a stretch of southern Africa with heavy rains and winds, it also may have solidified its status as one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever observed in the southern hemisphere. …
Freddy emerged around Feb. 6 off the coasts of Indonesia and Western Australia, transited thousands of miles west across the Indian Ocean before striking the island of Madagascar on Feb. 19 and then making landfall in Mozambique on Feb. 24, where it flooded towns, devastated crops and plunged communities in darkness. It looped back over the Mozambique Channel and picked up energy again over its warm waters before returning to the African mainland.
…
This ferocity has had grim human impact. Death tolls are unclear,given the difficulty local authorities have had in reaching storm-hit areas,but dozens have died in Madagascar, Mozambique and Malawi due to the impact of Freddy. The Red Cross [in Malawi] said deaths were largely due to flash floods, landslides and the collapsing of flimsy mud homes. U.N. officials counted at least 27 dead so far in Mozambique and Madagascar, with at least 8,000 people displaced and close to 2 million people affected in Mozambique alone. … Mozambique has experienced a year’s worth of rainfall in the space of a few weeks as Freddy swirled between the African mainland and Madagascar, raising the risk of a worsening cholera outbreak in the region.
Arctic oil project was a conundrum for Biden. Will there be others?
There are no fossil fuel megaprojects on the horizon as big as Willow in Alaska, approved Monday. But more U.S. oil drilling decisions await.
Washington Post, March 13, 2023 By Timothy Puko and Steven Mufson
PDF of full article available here.
The giant Alaskan oil project that the Biden administration approved Monday won’t be its last contentious fossil fuel decision, but it might be the last megaproject of its kind for years. Approved Monday by the Interior Department, Willow is a behemoth, slated to produce a peak of 180,000 barrels of oil per day, roughly 40 percent of all current daily production in Alaska.
How big of a climate betrayal is the Willow oil project?
The world wants to have it both ways on fossil fuels
New York Times, 3/20/23 By David Wallace-Wells, Opinion Writer
PDF of full article available here.
On Monday, when President Biden approved ConocoPhillips’s $8 billion plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from federal lands in Alaska, the announcement landed simultaneously with the thud of betrayal and the air of inevitability. On the campaign trail, Biden had promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.” But for all the talk about the renewables boom and the green transition, and all the money pouring into them as well, there has been little concerted effort, in the United States at least, to really draw down our profligate use of the stuff that is actually poisoning the climate: fossil fuels.
The green transition is indeed rapidly underway — more rapidly than many advocates believed possible just a few years ago. But on its own, even infinite clean energy doesn’t change anything about emissions trajectories or global warming. For that, it has to replace the dirty kind. … You may recognize the principle from the old activist slogan “Keep it in the ground.”
Climate damage is worsening faster than expected, but there’s still reason for optimism – 4 essential reads on the IPCC report
The Conversation, March 20, 2023 By Stacy Morford, Alan Jenn, Edward R. Carr, Elisabeth Gilmore,
Mathew Barlow, Robert Lempert
PDF of full article available here.
Reading the latest international climate report can feel overwhelming. It describes how rising temperatures caused by increasing greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are having rapid, widespread effects on the weather, climate and ecosystems in every region of the planet, and it says the risks are escalating faster than scientists expected.
Global temperatures are now 1.1 degree Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than at the start of the industrial era. Heat waves, storms, fires and floods are harming humans and ecosystems. Hundreds of species have disappeared from regions as temperatures rise, and climate change is causing irreversible changes to sea ice, oceans and glaciers. In some areas, it’s becoming harder to adapt to the changes.
Still, there are reasons for optimism – falling renewable energy costs are starting to transform the power sector, for example, and the use of electric vehicles is expanding. But changes aren’t happening fast enough, and the window for a smooth transition is closing fast, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warns. To keep global warming below 1.5 C (2.7 F), it says global greenhouse gas emissions will have to drop 60% by 2035 compared with 2019 levels.
That’s 12 years from now.
Translating the IPCC Report Into Plain English
Covering Climate Now, Mar 20, 2023
PDF of full article available here.
The latest IPCC report is essential reading for all climate journalists, but its prose is difficult for on-specialists to decipher. Here are some highlights from the “Summary For Policymakers,” translated into plain English …
1. “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once.” Borrowing the title of this year’s “Best Picture” Oscar, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that countries must now do “everything, everywhere, all at once” to limit heat-trapping emissions. That means, per the International Energy Agency, zero new oil, gas, or coal development. This scientific imperative is being flouted by the world’s two leading climate superpowers, as the US just approved the massive Willow oil project in Alaska and China last year authorized construction of 106 gigawatts worth of new coal plants. Meanwhile, that movie title also applies to the impacts of climate change, which this report documents are also striking “everything, everywhere, all at Once.”
A Clear Message From Science
An international panel offers a warning about the dangers of fossil fuels, and also a blueprint to change course.
Climate Forward, New York Times, By Somini Sengupta, March 20, 2023
PDF of full article available here.
“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence).”
This is the most striking sentence in a 37-page summary, issued today, of the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It tells us what’s possible. It tells us the stakes. The report has been compiled by hundreds of scholars and approved by the representatives of 195 countries. The italicized phrase represents the authors’ degree of certainty. The italics are theirs, not mine.
The report is sobering, gut-wrenching and above all, practical. Its clearest takeaway: The continued use of fossil fuels is harming all of us, and harming some of us a lot more. It lays out the present impacts and imminent risks of climate change and it offers a number of options to both adapt to an inevitably hotter planet and prevent Earth from getting unmanageably hotter still. It calls for a swift, sharp reduction in fossil fuel use if the world is to stay within a relatively safe planetary boundary. …
The actions taken during this decade will “largely determine” what happens for centuries to come. The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, called it a “how to guide to defuse the climate time bomb.” …
We are not all the same. Among the world’s 8 billion people, 10 percent of households are responsible for 34 to 45 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. “Vulnerable communities who have historically contributed least to current climate change are disproportionately affected,” the report said.
Bill (William) Minter, Editor, AfricaFocus Notes
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