The US government told stakeholders yesterday that, while demand side measures to reduce plastic production, consumption and waste can be part of the solution, Washington recognises that supporting goals to encourage and advance supply side measures will be critical tools, according to notes from a source at the briefing.

Three more sources at the briefing confirmed to Climate Home that the US government had shifted its position, as first reported by Reuters.

Up until now, the US has sided with Saudi Arabia in arguing for the new treaty to focus on recycling, while measures to curb production should be left up to individual countries.

The US is the only G7 member not to join the self-proclaimed “high ambition coalition against plastic pollution”.

The members of the self-described “high-ambition coalition” are in light blue

Their change of stance drew praise from environmental campaigners and anger from the plastic industry’s main trade association – the American Chemistry Council (ACC).

Industry anger

The ACC’s CEO Chris Jahn said the White House had “cave[d] to the wishes of extreme NGO groups” and was “willing to betray US manufacturing”. He warned that the Senate is likely to block the US’s entry to a plastics treaty which reflects this new position.

But environmental campaigners reacted positively. Tim Grabiel, a lawyer from the Environmental Investigation Agency NGO, said it “marks a decided shift in position” which “has the potential to salvage difficult negotiations”. But he called on the US to go further by committing to cutting virgin plastic production by 40% by 2040 – a target put forward by Rwanda and Peru at the latest rounds of negotiations last April.

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Dennis Clare, a plastics negotiator for the Pacific island nation of Micronesia, told Climate Home that the new US position was a “major development with the possibility of turning the tide towards a much more ambitious treaty”.

Years in the making

The journey towards a global plastics accord began at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi in 2022 when all governments agreed to set up a treaty “to promote sustainable production and consumption of plastics”.

Since then, negotiators have held four rounds of talks, with the fifth and supposedly final due to take place in the South Korean city of Busan from November 25 to December 1. Any agreement struck there would then be signed off at a diplomatic conference a few months later.

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Ahead of those talks, the European Union has warned that “delaying tactics” from some nations will make it “very difficult” to agree a treaty in Busan.

The European Commission blamed “mainly major oil producing countries” for slowing negotiations while a Latin American negotiator told Climate Home in June that these delaying tactics were coming from the Like-Minded Group, which includes Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Production or just pollution?

One key divisive issue is whether the treaty should be limited to halting plastic pollution or also set targets to reduce the rising plastic production that is causing the problem in the first place. Besides environmental contamination, plastic contributes to planet-heating emissions as its manufacture relies on fossil fuels.

Powerful governments like Russia, Saudi Arabia and India have opposed targets to limit plastic production, preferring to focus on promoting recycling and keeping plastic waste out of the sea. The US and Iran have also tried to water down the treaty’s ambition.

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On the other hand, a coalition of countries launched an initiative called “Bridge to Busan” aimed at reaching an agreement with targets to reduce plastic production. Plastics are made from oil and gas, and their production is a significant and growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Micronesia is one of the nations leading the Bridge to Busan coalition. Their negotiator Dennis Clare told Climate Home on Thursday that he hopes the US now signs up “and seeks to play a leadership role on addressing plastics production, which is the cornerstone of any effective treaty on plastic pollution”. The US has not indicated whether it would support this initiative.

There are also splits over the level of detail the treaty should include, how legally binding it should be, and what a financial mechanism to support government efforts to tackle plastic pollution should look like, according to an EU summary from June.

While some countries want a new dedicated fund, others including Gulf nations want to use an existing institution like the Global Environment Facility to channel finance. Additionally, Ghana has proposed a global fee on plastic production.

The post US turns against plastic producers, boosting hopes for ambitious treaty appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Biden administration has laid out for the first time a set of principles that attempt to define how “high-integrity” carbon credits can play “a meaningful role” in helping cut greenhouse gas emissions and channelling “a significant amount of private capital” to combat climate change.

A 12-page policy document released by the US government on Tuesday includes provisions to ensure that carbon credit projects deliver real emission reductions, avoid harming local communities and encourage companies to decarbonise their own operations before buying offsets.

But it also recommends that businesses should be allowed to use carbon credits to cancel out some of the emissions generated by their suppliers and customers, known as “Scope 3”. A similar move by the board of the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), a leading arbiter of corporate net zero plans, sparked a major backlash from staff last month.

The US government guidelines are neither binding nor enforceable. However, proponents hope they will reinforce a number of ongoing initiatives led by carbon credit developers, buyers and green groups to raise standards and boost the role of carbon markets in climate and nature protection.

Troubled market

Polluting companies, including major fossil fuel producers and airlines, spent an estimated $1.7 billion last year on voluntary carbon offsets meant to compensate their direct emissions by funding climate-friendly activities elsewhere, such as planting trees or rolling out renewable energy sources.  

But a series of revelations questioning the environmental and social benefits claimed by some developers and users of carbon credits have dented confidence in the market.

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Scientific studies and investigative reports – including by Climate Home – have found that a growing number of projects failed to deliver the emission reductions promised. NGOs have also denounced instances of human rights abuse and environmental damage caused by carbon-offsetting activities.

“Voluntary carbon markets are a huge distraction and a waste of time and resources,” said Mohamed Adow, the Nairobi-based founder of the Power Shift Africa think-tank. “It’s sad to see politicians in the Global North desperately trying to find any way they can to avoid actually just cutting their carbon emissions,” he added.

Every tool needed

In its announcement, the US government acknowledged the shortcomings in voluntary carbon markets (VCMs), saying that “in too many instances” credits do not live up to the high standards required.

“For good reasons a lot of folks outside this room are skeptical,” National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi told attendees at the policy launch in Washington. “[They are] scared off by news stories of things that went wrong and gloss of greenwash.”

US National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi speaks during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, U.S., January 26, 2024. REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson

But, he added, that should not be seen as “an excuse to slow down but as an occasion to speed up” and do things better.

The Biden administration wants to be a leader in guiding “the development of VCMs toward high-quality and high-efficacy decarbonization actions”, the White House said. Its principles closely align with those of industry-led governance bodies that are trying to revamp the carbon market.

The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) is currently assessing project methodologies as part of its efforts to establish the first independent global benchmark for “high-integrity” carbon offsets, known as the “Core Carbon Principles”.

“We are in a climate emergency and we need every tool in the box to meet the 1.5°C [global warming] target,” said ICVCM Council Chair Annette Nazareth. “High-integrity carbon credits can mobilise private finance at scale for projects to reduce and remove billions of tonnes of emissions that would not otherwise be viable.”

Substitute for government aid

As most of the world’s largest carbon offsetting projects are based in the Global South, many rich governments view the market favourably as a way of getting dollars to developing nations without tapping into public budgets.

That is the case in the US where climate funding has fallen victim to political polarisation. President Joe Biden promised to increase international climate finance to over $11.4 billion per year by 2024. But Congress approved only a fraction of that as part of this year’s government budget: $1 billion of a spending package totalling $1.59 trillion.

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The White House’s Zaidi said voluntary carbon markets can move “mountains of capital” if their integrity is improved. Better regulation could expand the market from its current size of around $1.7 billion to $1.1 trillion by 2050, according to predictions by BloombergNEF. 

Gilles Dufrasne, global policy lead at Carbon Market Watch, told Climate Home the US government will need to “walk the talk and ensure that its promises of transparency and integrity are followed up by actions”.

“There is currently no public data to measure how much finance is flowing to climate action through carbon credits and how much is staying in the pockets of Global North intermediaries and consultants,” he added.

International negotiations

The US government is also a strong proponent of private sector-led carbon credit initiatives in international climate circles.

In discussions at the COP28 climate summit last year on setting the rules for a new carbon market governed by the United Nations, Washington championed what observers described as a “light-touch, no-frills” approach that could hand a prominent role to private-sector players from the voluntary market.

The move was rejected by the European Union, causing a breakdown in the negotiations, which will resume at the mid-year UN climate talks in Bonn starting next week.

“By undermining the multilateral process … and placing more faith in private sector-governed voluntary carbon markets, the US appears to be shirking its responsibilities for financing climate action and offloading them onto the private sector,” said Trishant Dev, a carbon market expert at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini and Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post US government backs the carbon credit industry’s push to fix itself appeared first on Climate Home News.

Last Wednesday and Thursday, China’s new top climate diplomat Liu Zhenmin travelled to Washington DC for two days of talks with his US counterpart John Podesta, also fresh in the job.

They discussed co-operation on climate issues, including plans for both sides to ramp up renewables, and vowed to “intensify technical and policy exchanges”.

But the day after, with Liu still in the country, the US State Department briefed journalists that Podesta had told Liu that China was producing too many solar panels and lithium-ion EV batteries.

India wants its own solar industry but has to break reliance on China first

Then on Tuesday, the White House increased tariffs on Chinese EVs, lithium-ion batteries and solar panels, accusing the Chinese government of “unfair, non-market practices” and “flooding global markets with artificially low-priced exports”.

“Clear protectionism”

In response, the state-owned China Daily newspaper in an editorial described the tariffs as “a clear act of protectionism”.

The head of the China Automobile Association Fu Bingfeng agreed, adding that “the new energy industry is jointly created by mankind and can bring common benefits to mankind”, saying the tariffs were “very unreasonable”.

Asia Society analyst Li Shuo told Climate Home that, rather than thinking of over-supply of solar panels as a problem, “it is the world’s inability to deploy these products that is the problem”.

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The tariffs reflect “the new reality global climate politics needs to deal with” – that low-carbon products will not be made in the most cost-efficient way and distributed around the world, he explained. India also has trade barriers against Chinese solar panels, designed to boost its domestic solar manufacturing.

Research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies has found that such trade barriers can, in general, delay the competitiveness of low-carbon technologies against their market rivals – like solar against gas, or EVs against internal combustion engines.

Limited effect on solar, batteries bigger

The US-imposed measures are designed to increase the cost of Chinese goods needed for the energy transition – and could therefore slow down America’s shift away from fossil fuels.

But BloombergNEF solar analyst Jenny Chase told Climate Home that the increase in the tariff on solar cells and modules from 25% to 50% would “have little effect”.

She noted that tariffs of 25% have been in place “for ages – and as a result the US imports almost no cells or modules directly from China, instead importing from Southeast Asia”.

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The Biden administration is currently weighing whether to impose tariffs on solar imports from four Southeast Asian countries over concerns that China is routing its panels through these nations.

US solar panel manufacturers are lobbying the government in favour of those tariffs, while US solar panel installers are lobbying against them. A decision is needed by June 6, two years on from a pause on tariffs affecting the Southeast Asian nations.

Similarly, the US already imports relatively few electric vehicles from China, as it already has Trump-era tariffs on them. The US’s adoption of electric vehicles is far slower than in Europe or China.

But US car-makers do import lots of lithium-ion EV batteries for their vehicles despite existing 7.5% tariffs. China produces about three-quarters of all the world’s EV batteries, with the US producing less than a tenth.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Days after climate talks, US slaps tariffs on Chinese EVs and solar panels appeared first on Climate Home News.

He added those countries should be “leading from the front” through much deeper emissions cuts, and bigger and better climate finance.

A day later, the gathering of the most powerful industrialised democracies responded with a tepid outcome, serving up a new commitment on ending coal power generation – weakened by a loophole in the language – a rehash of previous pledges and nothing new on climate finance, this year’s top priority in climate diplomacy.

For the first time, G7 countries all agreed to end the use of coal power generation in their energy systems “during the first half of the 2030s”.

While most members of the bloc are already planning to phase out coal before 2035, the commitment marks a step forward for Japan, analysts said. The Asian nation generates over a quarter of its energy from coal and, alongside Germany and the United States, had previously blocked international efforts towards setting a target date to shut down coal power plants.

Germany has written into its legislation a final target to exit coal by 2038 at the latest, but the government now intends to pull that forward to 2030. The United States unveiled new regulations last week under which coal plants planning to stay open beyond 2039 will have to cut or capture 90 percent of their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2032.

Not enough

But the G7 coal-power agreement struck on Tuesday in Turin, Italy, comes with a caveat that gives countries an alternative choice to phase out coal “in a timeline consistent with keeping a limit of 1.5°C temperature rise within reach, in line with countries’ net-zero pathways”.

Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, Italy’s minister for environment and energy security, told journalists at the end of the summit that the text “for the very first time uses a deadline, wherever possible”.

“G7 countries undertake to phase out the use of coal without jeopardising the various countries’ economic and social equilibrium,” he added.

Researchers say that, even if countries do stick to the mid-2030s deadline, it will not be enough to limit global warming in line with the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

G7 countries need to phase out coal from power generation by 2030 at the latest, and gas by 2035, according to a recent analysis done by Berlin-based policy institute Climate Analytics.

G7 climate and energy ministers meet at the Reggia di Venaria Reale in Italy. Photo: G7 Italy

“It’s notable that gas has not been mentioned [in the G7 ministerial agreement],” said Jane Ellis, head of climate policy at Climate Analytics, pointing at increased investment in domestic gas facilities. “This is absolutely the wrong direction to be heading in – both economically and for the climate.”

In their final communique, ministers said that “publicly supported investments in the gas sector can be appropriate as a temporary response, subject to clearly defined national circumstances”, in their efforts to reduce dependency on imported Russian fossil fuels.

They also repeated a previous commitment to eliminate “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies by 2025 or sooner”, without providing a clearer definition of “inefficient” or details on how that goal would be achieved.

Fossil fuel subsidies across G7 countries hit an all-time high of $199.1 billion in 2022, according to analysis by IISD and the OECD. “It’s very clear they are not going to meet that target,” said Farooq Ullah, senior policy advisor at IISD.

No progress on climate finance

This week’s ministerial meeting in Italy also failed to significantly move the needle on climate finance, as UN negotiations on a new collective quantified goal (NCQG) at COP29 in November are starting to gather pace.

G7 countries said in their final text they “intend to be leading contributors to a fit-for-purpose goal” and acknowledged the need for “mobilising trillions”, but stopped short of making any new financial commitment or offering clear ways forward.

The existing goal is set at $100 billion a year, but developing countries – excluding China – need an estimated $2.4 trillion a year to meet their climate and development needs, leading economists have said in a report commissioned by the Cop26 and Cop27 presidencies.

In order to loosen the purse strings, it is crucial that every minister across government cabinets – and especially finance ministers and treasurers – “push climate action into high gear”, the UNFCCC’s Stiell said on Monday.

But, according to Luca Bergamaschi, director of Italian think-tank ECCO, they appear “not to be caring enough about climate finance”.

“Climate ministers are hitting a wall on climate finance. These decisions rest on finance ministers so they need to step up, and step in, because they have the power and responsibility to do so,” he told Climate Home.

Meetings of G7 finance ministers in mid-May and country leaders in June are seen as last-ditch opportunities to push things forward.

Experts believe an ambitious deal on climate finance at COP29 can play a crucial role in getting developing countries, especially the poorest ones, to commit to stronger action on curbing emissions and boosting adaptation as they draft their new national climate plans due early next year.

The G7 ministers in Italy made a firm pledge to submit their own such plans – called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – by the February 2025 deadline “with economy-wide, absolute reduction targets” that cover all greenhouses gases and sectors “in line with 1.5C”. They also called on other major economies to do the same.

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I was six when I started catching shrimp in the waterways of Louisiana. I inherited the livelihood that sustained my father, grandfather, and generations before them. My boat in the Gulf of Mexico is my second home. But I may lose it all – in part to Japan’s dangerous investments in fossil gas.

Eight years ago, fossil fuel companies and their government allies moved Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) projects into the region and turned our fishing community upside down. The Calcasieu Pass LNG export terminal was just 300 feet from my house, and promised “deep-water access, proximity to plentiful gas supplies and ease of transport for buyers”. Vibrations from its operations were so intense they knocked pictures off my wall. My wife suffered a heart attack, and my children were frequently ill. Facing dire health consequences and daily interruptions, my family was driven from our home.

Most people don’t realize that Japan is bankrolling LNG and the destruction along the US Gulf Coast. Japanese private banks MUFG, Mizuho, and SMBC are the first, second, and third biggest financiers of LNG export projects in the US. These banks have committed more than $13 million,  $11 million, and $10 million respectively to US-based LNG projects.

On April 10, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will meet with President Joe Biden in Washington, DC to discuss the US and Japan’s commitment to promoting stability in the world and the advancement of clean energy supply chains. Biden clearly understands the need to take a hard look at the impacts of future LNG development as indicated by the pause he announced recently.

His administration has called the climate crisis the “existential threat of our time,” and sees the US as a champion to support other world leaders’ transition to green energy. But my family, and so many around me, are still waiting for change.

Travis Dardar drives his boat on the water with the Calcasieu Pass LNG terminal shown in the background. (Photo: Susanne Wong / Oil Change International)

Massive LNG tankers now crowd the water and wildlife is disappearing. Before the Calcasieu Pass LNG terminal started operating last year, local fishermen caught about 700,000 pounds of shrimp annually. The shrimp catch is now down nearly 90%, with no compensation for losing our livelihoods.

The devastating impacts of LNG on communities like mine and our unwavering opposition is the reason why in January President Biden paused LNG export approvals. The US Department of Energy is supposed to consider how to determine whether these projects are in the public interest and to take into account impacts on communities, ecosystems, and climate. Unfortunately, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm recently indicated this pause could be lifted within the year, when what we really need is for President Biden to stop all new LNG export projects for good.

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Increasingly, the international community recognizes fossil fuels’ toxic effects on the environment and communities and the momentum is shifting towards clean energy.  Yet, Japan is still driving the expansion of gas and LNG in the US, across Asia and globally. In spite of Japan’s declining LNG demand at home, Japan is staking its economic growth on pushing governments across South and Southeast Asia to import LNG.

I invite Prime Minister Kishida to travel on my boat while he is in the US to see for himself the impact of Japan’s dirty energy projects on Gulf communities.

Air pollution hits health

Health deterioration in my community is unsurprising, given the plant’s pollution emissions. Long-term exposure to LNG chemicals can lead to heart disease and certain types of cancer, and living near a pollution center has been linked to increased stress, depression, and other mental health problems.

According to research by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, the Calcasieu Pass LNG export terminal violated its air pollution permits on 286 of the first 343 days it was in operation – 83% of its first year. Rather than working to clean up its operations, Venture Global, the gas company behind the LNG facility, petitioned the state air quality agency to increase its allowable pollution limits. If the gas project already built can’t even follow pollution regulations, how can we expect the two plants posed for construction upstream to do so?

Despite this, the Gulf area buzzes with Japanese LNG operations. The proposed Calcasieu Pass 2 terminal is part of a 20-year contract with JERA, Japan’s largest gas company and the world’s largest LNG buyer. JERA agreed to buy 1 million tons of LNG annually from the project. INPEX, Japan’s largest oil and gas producer, also signed a 20-year contract to buy 1 million tons of LNG annually. These corporate operations and their profits are behind Japan’s push to expand LNG markets around the world.

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Japan has developed a regional initiative, the Asia Zero Emissions Community, that will expand and prolong the use of fossil fuels by proposing to abate their emissions. This is a greenwashing effort to push governments in Asia to adopt dangerous distractions like hydrogen, ammonia, and carbon capture and storage. In reality, this will expand and prolong the harm of fossil fuels on communities like mine.

Although Biden’s pause on LNG export authorizations is a step in the right direction, it’s hard to celebrate here in Cameron Parish. LNG tankers dominate the water, and fishers are left to collect the scraps of our communities and livelihoods. Even with the setbacks, our community hasn’t given up hope. I founded Fishermen Interested in Saving Our Heritage (FISH), a united front that will fight to protect our homes, the environment, and access to the Gulf waters. We are focused on saving our way of life.

As the largest LNG exporter in the world, the US holds major influence in this tainted market. During their upcoming meeting, I urge Prime Minister Kishida and President Biden to recognize our future in renewables and stop sacrificing frontline communities for profit.

The post Louisiana communities are suffering from Japan-funded LNG exports appeared first on Climate Home News.

But oil, gas and coal producers are still closing their ears. In 2023, they continued spewing near record-high amounts of methane into the atmosphere, according to the latest assessment by the International Energy Agency (IEA) released on Wednesday. That is despite a raft of promises to stop doing so.

Now, however, analysts believe the tide may finally be turning. The introduction of stronger regulations in key fossil fuel-producing and consuming countries, coupled with better monitoring and transparency of harmful leaks, gives them cause for optimism.

“While emissions are still very high, 2024 is going to be a watershed moment on action and transparency on methane,” said Christophe McGlade, head of the IEA’s energy supply unit.

Methane role in 1.5C goal

Methane is a major contributor to global warming. Although it remains in the atmosphere for a much shorter time than carbon dioxide, it is 84 times more potent over a 20-year time horizon.

The energy sector represents the second-largest source of methane emissions linked to human activity, after agriculture, and has the biggest potential for reduction, according to analysts.

“If we can’t make real progress in cutting down methane, it is going to be impossible to limit warming to 1.5C,” said McGlade, referring to the most ambitious warming goal in the Paris Agreement.

The IEA estimates that the fossil fuel industry needs to reduce methane emissions 75% by 2030 for the world to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in 2050.

But last year methane emissions from fossil fuels remained near a record high first reached in 2019, rising slightly from 2022 to 120 million tonnes, according to the watchdog. The United States and China are by far the largest emitters of the powerful gas from oil and gas operations and the coal sector respectively.

Leaks from old or poorly maintained infrastructure and the practice of flaring – burning of excess gas – at oil and gas wells are the main energy-sector culprits for putting methane in the atmosphere.

Easy-fix

Reining in those emissions does not require rocket science. The IEA says well-known technologies and measures, such as upgraded equipment and more efficient practices, can cut the bulk of methane generated from fossil fuels in a fast and cheap way.

Just less than half of last year’s emissions could have been avoided at no net cost to the producers, with measures paying for themselves thanks to revenues from the additional gas captured. “It was a massive missed opportunity,” McGlade said.

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If this is such a win-win, it begs the question of why fossil fuel producers are not stepping up to the plate. Lack of awareness over the scale of emissions and longer return on investment from plugging leaks are cited in the report as extenuating circumstances.

For Mark Brownstein, methane expert at the Environmental Defense Fund, up until very recently methane had simply been ignored by the global community as a serious threat.

“Aggressive action on methane is long overdue, but we are unfortunately still at a relatively early stage,” he told Climate Home. “Only now we’re starting to see some coordinated action from companies and countries to address this pollutant.”

Raft of pledges

More than 150 countries have signed up to a commitment first announced at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by the end of this decade.

Last year’s Cop28 in Dubai produced a host of new promises. The Global Stocktake assessment of national climate plans called for countries to substantially cut methane emissions. Meanwhile, more than 50 oil and gas companies pledged to speed up emission reduction efforts.

But for Romain Ioualalen from campaign group Oil Change International, the industry’s words only go so far. “The climate arsonists fuelling climate chaos cannot be trusted to put out the fire,” he said. “Government must take action to force the industry to clean up its mess on its way out the door.”

New regulations are now in the pipeline and provide experts with the biggest hope that things will finally move in the right direction.

Rules and satellites

In December 2023, the United States finalised new rules aimed at cracking down on U.S. oil and gas industry releases of methane. These include measures to eliminate routine flaring and force producers to better monitor leaks from equipment. Neighbouring Canada has also announced a new proposal for beefed-up methane-cutting standards.

Across the ocean, the European Union agreed at the end of last year on a new law that will require companies to report emissions, monitor and fix leaks, and limit flaring. Crucially, the rules will also apply to imports of oil, gas and coal into the bloc, effectively forcing overseas producers to improve their standards.

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Alongside policy developments, the ability to track methane emissions is continuously improving – mainly thanks to satellite technologies – leaving polluters with less room to hide.

Advances on this front are expected to continue in 2024. MethaneSAT, a new satellite developed by EDF, was launched into space in early March and will soon provide free, near-real-time access to methane emissions data from wide areas that have so far been overlooked.

“This data will not only assist in the implementation of regulatory requirements, but it will also underpin the commitments made by fossil fuel companies at Cop28,” said Brownstein. “All of this is finally pointing us in the right direction.”

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The US Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) – a federal export credit agency – is pushing ahead with plans to back the drilling of more than 450 new oil and gas wells in one of the oldest extraction fields across the Middle East.

Ex-Im’s board voted on Thursday to notify US Congress about the potential investment, a required step for projects over $100 million. Observers told Climate Home the Bahrain financing is nearly certain to be secured as early as next month.

At Cop26, the US joined 33 other countries in pledging to end direct public finance for overseas fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022. While most other signatories respected the commitment, the US approved over $2 billion in international fossil-fuel finance last year, according to an analysis by Oil Change International. Exim has been responsible for just under half of it.

“The United States is stalling momentum to end international public finance for fossil fuels globally”, said Nina Pušić, export finance climate strategist at Oil Change International. While the country can help “lead a shift of billions of dollars” from fossil fuels to renewables, approvals like this one “are a huge step backward”, she added.

Oil and gas expansion

Ex-Im’s financing in Bahrain would go towards a $4.2 billion programme to boost production in a nine-decades-old field where new reserves were discovered in 2018.

State-owned company Tatweep Petroleum plans to drill up to 34 new gas wells and more than 420 new oil wells, in addition to the construction of processing facilities and transport networks.

The programme is expected to free up reserves containing 5.2 trillion cubic feet of gas – nearly six times the amount of gas the Kingdom currently produces every year, according to company filings. Oil production should see a more modest uplift.

No new oil and gas extraction project should go ahead if the world wants to keep global warming below 1.5C, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Pumping oil and gas from the expanded Bahraini field is expected to spew over 1.4 million tonnes of CO2 a year in the atmosphere by 2026 – nearly double the emissions recorded there in 2022, according to an environmental assessment submitted by Tatweep.

That does not include emissions generated from end consumers burning the fuels (known as Scope 3), which generally account for up to 90% of the carbon footprint of fossil fuel companies.

Running tensions

Ex-Im’s continued support for fossil fuels overseas has been a source of ongoing tensions.

Two members of an advisory group set up by the Biden administration to bolster Ex-Im climate considerations resigned last week following discussions over the Bahrain project.

Last year former special envoy John Kerry reportedly phoned Ex-Im’s chair Reta Jo-Lewis urging her to delay a decision to fund a nearly $100 million oil refinery expansion in Indonesia, according to Politico. But the agency went ahead with the vote and greenlit the project.

As the US official export credit agency, Ex-Im is influential in directing investment towards specific sectors by offering exporters government-backed loans, guarantees or insurance. The agency acts independently, but its board members are appointed by the US president and confirmed by the Senate. Joe Biden picked the sitting chair Jo-Lewis.

No clear guidelines

When president Biden took office in January 2021, he issued an executive order calling on federal agencies, including Ex-Im, “to identify steps through which the United States can promote ending international financing of carbon-intensive fossil fuel-based energy”. Months later, the US government signed up for the UN pact in Glasgow.

However, the Biden administration stopped short of directly forcing Ex-Im to adopt a fossil fuel exclusion policy.

“A key issue is the lack of clear guidelines from the US government to Ex-Im and other US agencies to explicitly prohibit new public fossil fuel support”, said Sherri Ombuya, a researcher at Perspectives who wrote a report about Ex-Im policies.

In 2023, Ex-Im approved just under $1 billion worth of funding for projects including an oil refinery in Indonesia and a credit facility to help commodity trader Trafigura sell more US liquefied natural gas (LNG). Oil and gas investments account for nearly a quarter of the agency’s portfolio.

Ex-Im’s arguments

Ex-Im has repeatedly justified its fossil fuel financing by pointing to a “non-discrimination” clause in its charter. The provision prevents the agency from rejecting funding applications just because they concern specific industries, such as oil and gas.

But Ombuya said that “is not a fully valid argument”. She added that Ex-Im’s board could turn down applications “if they don’t align with the US climate commitments which would effectively lead to the rejection of oil and gas projects”.

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Campaigners also argue that the agency could expand the use of existing tools to screen projects against certain thresholds of greenhouse gas emissions without singling out specific sectors. Ex-Im already applies criteria to projects with “high carbon intensity”, effectively ruling out any funding for coal power plants.

Friends of the Earth filed last December a legal complaint against Ex-Im at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) arguing that the agency is breaching a requirement to draw up emission reduction plans and avoid causing environmental damage.

Win for American fossil fuel firms

Ex-Im says its mission is to support American jobs. It does so by helping US companies secure lucrative foreign contracts with its backing.

Last year Jo-Lewis met government officials and corporate executives in Bahrain to “expand ExIm’s footprint in the region and facilitate new opportunities for U.S. exporters in Bahrain.”

The Bahrain project will see the involvement of SLB (formerly known as Schlumberger), the world’s largest oilfield services provider.

The Houston-based company specializes in finding oil and gas deposits, drilling wells, and managing reservoirs to boost production. SLB was involved in the discovery of the new oil and gas reserves in central Bahrain and in March 2021 it won a $225 million contract for their development.

Ex-Im has been approached for comment.

The post US trade agency backs oil and gas drilling in Bahrain despite Biden pledge appeared first on Climate Home News.

He replaces John Kerry who stepped down last month to campaign for Biden’s presidential bid.

The appointment received a mostly positive reaction from climate diplomats and campaigners, with praise for Podesta’s experience, contacts and knowledge. But some concerns were raised about him combining this new role with his domestically-focussed climate job.

Whereas Kerry was a climate envoy, Podesta will only be an adviser to the President. Unlike envoys, advisers do not have to be approved by the US Senate.

Podesta will oversee the US’s diplomacy up to and at Cop29 in Azerbaijan, which will start six days after the US election. His key task will be to negotiate a new long-term climate finance goal with developing countries.

Old hand

Seventy-five-year-old Podesta has been a high-profile figure in Washington DC for decades. He was president Bill Clinton’s chief of staff from 1998 to 2001 and acted as Barack Obama’s climate advisor in 2014-15, while the Paris Agreement was being negotiated.

In 2016, Podesta led Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential bid against Donald Trump. During the campaign, thousands of personal emails allegedly from Podesta were posted online after his account had been hacked.

Rich nations miss loss and damage fund deadline

In September 2022, Biden appointed him to oversee the rollout of the $369 billion green spending bill – the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Podesta has been a strong defender of the IRA as it faced accusations of protectionism from Europe, the Far East and across the developing world. He told the Financial Times last year that the US makes “no apologies” for prioritising American jobs in its push for clean energy.

Steady pair of hands

Most big US green campaign groups like the National Resources Defence Council and Center for Climate and Energy Solutions welcomed his appointment.

E3G analyst Alden Meyer told Climate Home Podesta was “the ideal pick for this job” as “he has the experience, relationships and deep understanding of climate policy and politics needed to do an outstanding job”. “Most importantly”, he added, “he has the full confidence of president Biden”.

Abroad, Podesta’s announcement was broadly welcomed too although campaigners criticised the US’s climate record.

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As Brazil’s then environment minister, Izabella Teixeira worked with Podesta on the Paris Agreement. She told Climate Home he was a “good choice” and “a man that understands very well the power of the dialogue” and “a good player of the multilateral system”.

Peruvian diplomat Manuel Pulgar-Vidal worked with Podesta as president of Cop20 in Lima. Now with WWF, he told Climate Home he “warmly welcome[d]” the appointment”.

“His role in securing the Paris Agreement, and recently in implementing the IRA, is testament to his skill and dedication,” Pulgar-Vidal said.

Li Shuo, from the Asia Society, described him as a “steady pair of hands” who “has extensive experience working with China during the Obama years and knows his Chinese counterparts well”.

“I hope his appointment will ensure consistency as the US and China follow the engagement path outlined by the Sunnylands agreement reached last year”, Li added.

Skepticism

But Harjeet Singh, from the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said the appointment “casts a shadow of doubt over the US’s commitment to global climate leadership”.

He said that Podesta was likely to focus on domestic action and “tread even more cautiously on the international stage than Kerry did”, suggesting that “international negotiations will become a secondary priority”.

“It reflects a continuous disregard for the US’s historical duty to provide developing nations with financial and technological support,” he said, adding “the international community grows increasingly skeptical of the US’s readiness to fulfill its global responsibilities.”

For Cop29 to succeed, rich nations must get their parliaments to agree more finance now

Mohammed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, told Climate Home he hoped Podesta could bring the “urgency and purpose” of the IRA to his international climate diplomacy.

But, he added, the US “remains the world’s ultimate petro-state” as it is the biggest producer of oil and gas and has the largest historic emissions.

“Pairing this with the US offering a paltry amount in climate finance at the recent Cop28 talks and it’s clear that Podesta has a big job on his hands to get the US to be part of the solution to the climate crisis, rather than being part of the problem”, he said.

The post John Podesta replaces Kerry as top US climate diplomat appeared first on Climate Home News.

When garbage is taken to a landfill, bacteria decompose it and produce methane as a by-product. Unless this gas is captured, it heats up the planet.

Using satellites, scientists can now see how big these leaks are. Ilse Aben, who analyses satellite data at the SRON Netherlands institute for space research, told Climate Home she been “shocked” at the “huge” scale of the leaks.

Climate Trace, an NGO promoted led by former US vice-president Al Gore, estimates the US’s landfill emissions at 169 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year.

Climate Trace’s map of US landfill emissions with bigger circles for more emissions (Photos: Climate Trace)

That’s similar to the whole of Ethiopia’s emissions and a third higher than the 126 million tonnes the US government tells the United Nations its landfills emit, a figure worked out using a formula.

But, in its fourth year in power, campaigners say Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has missed its chance to  improve regulations on the sector.

Weak regulations

Kait Siegel campaigns against waste sector emissions at the Clean Air Task Force. She told Climate Home that US federal regulations on landfills are “weak”.

The companies which operate landfills are supposed to capture this gas but not for the landfill’s first five years and not if it’s a smaller landfill – broad exceptions which don’t apply in most European countries. 

US states can force operators to do more to clean up but so far only California, Maryland and Oregon have done so, she said.

The Environmental Protection Agency is legally required to assess whether new federal standards for landfills are necessary at least every eight years. The last time it did so was in August 2016 so it should do so again by August 2024.

But they are unlikely to set new standards. At this stage, campaigners don’t want them to either because they don’t want to risk a Trump administration taking over that process.

In the US, legislation called the Congressional Review Act means a new Congress can overturn measures taken by the previous Congress in its last 60 legislative days. With Presidential and Congressional elections in November, anything introduced after April could be challenged.

There’s not enough time to introduce new regulations before April, so any regulations introduced could be overturned by a Trump administration.

If overturned, any future EPA wouldn’t be legally allowed to submit similar regulations again. This could permanently stop the EPA from tackling landfill emissions.

On the other hand, if the presidency remains in the Democrats hands then they could focus on it in the second term.

The waste management lobby is powerful in the US as it works closely with local governments to manage trash. It argues that any cost increase in operating landfills will be passed on to local governments who will pass them on to ordinary citizens.

On the other side of the argument, with the scale of the problem only recently revealed, climate campaigners have yet to make landfills the big climate issue that fossil fuels are.

Satellite revelations

Until satellites started revealing these landfill leaks, policy-makers could only guess how much methane was coming from a landfill.

In its reporting to the UN, the EPA uses a complex formula to work out its best estimate. Basically, it estimated how much the average landfill emits, multiplied this by the number of landfills and took away the amount of gas they think was captured before it reaches the atmosphere. This is common way for countries to report emissions.

The US government’s formula for estimating landfill methane emissions. Biden misses chance to tackle “huge” US landfill emissions.

But satellites can see how much methane is actually emitted, rather than a best guess. With their cameras pointed at individual landfills, they show huge leaks.

American nonprofit CarbonMapper spotted a leak of 5,000 kg of methane an hour from the Fort Bend landfill on the outskirts of Houston. If this continued all year, it would cause the same damage as 270,000 cars or the nation of Antigua and Barbuda.

But scientists have yet to use satellites to come up with a better figure for the US’s total emissions. Their cameras have focussed on particular sites at particular times rather than non-stop monitoring of all the hundreds of American landiflls.

To get round these limitations, Climate Trace combine satellite imagery with their own assumptions, using Bayesian regression modelling, giving them their 169 million tonnes figure.

The solutions

There are many ways of reducing landfill emissions. The best, Siegel said, is to reduce waste we produce so as little goes to landfill as possible.

After that, she said people should seperate their organic waste (like food and garden waste) so that it can be more easily sent to treatment facilities.

Most food waste can be composted before it rots and releases methane. The compost can be put on new plants to help them grow. 

It can also be burned in incinerators to produce electricity. But campaigners have disputed the environmental benefits of this and scientists have linked incinerators, which are predominately located in poor communities, to health problems.

If the garbage does rot and release methane, that gas can be captured. It can be burned, turning it into less potent but still planet-warming carbon dioxide. This burning can produce electricity, potentially displacing other fossil fuels.

As an example of somewhere doing it well, definitely “better than the West”, Siegel points to Indore in India. There, according to the United Nations, residents dilligently seperate their waste and turn it into compost. 

A spokesperson for the EPA said that “regulating landfill gas is one of EPA’s many priorities to help combat climate change” and they would review the regulations and “if approriate” revise them.

The spokesperson said they were beginning to collect information on new technologies and strategies for emissions reduction, taking into account cost, health and environmental impacts and energy requirements.

They added that the EPA has an outreach programme which works with industry and government to cut methane emissions from landfills.

The post Biden misses chance to tackle “huge” US landfill emissions appeared first on Climate Home News.

Announcing the move on Friday morning, President Joe Biden said the pause on all pending export permits for liquified natural gas (LNG) “sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time”.

The decision comes after Biden faced mounting pressure from environmentalists and climate activists to apply the brakes on the US build-up of fossil fuel capacity. The groups represent an important voter base for Biden as he seeks reelection in November.

The US is the world’s largest exporter of LNG and shipments are expected to keep soaring as a result of projects already approved and under construction.

But the review will put on hold the planned development of at least four more gas export terminals on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

That includes the Calcasieu Pass 2 (or CP2), a facility in Louisiana described by campaigners as a “carbon bomb”. If built, it could ship up to 24 million tonnes of gas every year.

New climate tests

Biden said his administration “will take a hard look at the impacts of LNG exports on energy costs, America’s energy security and our environment”.

A White House statement said the pause would allow the White House to integrate “critical considerations” that have emerged since the last analysis of gas export approvals was carried out five years ago.

That includes the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. Gas supporters have historically promoted it as a “cleaner” fossil fuel because of its reduced carbon dioxide emissions compared to coal.

But LNG is primarily made of methane, a much more potent earth-warming gas. While burning it turns it into carbon dioxide, methane leaks during transport can push its lifetime emissions higher than those of coal, according to a new study by methane expert Robert Howarth currently undergoing peer review.

Liquified natural gas (LNG) facilities in Texas. Photo: Tim Aubry / Greenpeace

Max Gruenig, senior policy advisor at E3G, said Biden’s decision is a “significant shift” because the Department of Energy, which is responsible for assessing the projects, has historically only taken economic benefits into account.

“They will have to come up with a new methodology to assess what is beneficial to the public that includes externalities like climate change”, he added. “But the problem is, of course, as soon as you publish the details of the methodology, you risk being litigated against and attacked in court. The pause allows the Biden administration to avoid this and buy itself more time until the election”.

Elections in sight

Campaigners hailed the White House announcement as a “bold step” and “a historic win”. Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, said the decisions “makes it clear that the Biden administration is listening to the calls to break America’s reliance on dirty fossil fuels and secure a livable future for us all”.

Sixty percent of US voters surveyed in a poll by Data for Progress, a progressive think tank last November supported limiting gas exports.

Gruenig said that the Biden administration had been “growing more careful” about climate considerations in energy infrastructure after approving the Willow oil project in Alaska. “I don’t think the White House expected that would cause such a massive backlash from the climate community”, he added.

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Biden’s statement attempts to draw a dividing line with his likely opponent Donald Trump. He criticised “MAGA [Make America Great Again] Republicans” who “willfully deny the urgency of the climate crisis, condemning the American people to a dangerous future”.

Gruenig believes the LNG expansion freeze will bolster US credibility on the international climate stage, where many developing countries and campaigners regularly point fingers at American hypocrisy over fossil fuel investments.

Lobbyists fan energy security fears

Industry groups have condemned the pause as a “win for Russia” and “a loss for American allies”. As rumors of Biden’s plans swirled around in previous days, the prevailing narrative from pro-gas lobbyists has been that the approvals freeze would put Europe’s future energy security at risk.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced the bloc to look for alternative gas sources, US LNG exports to Europe have increased rapidly.

But analysts believe this is going to change soon as a result of rapid renewables rollout and better energy efficiency. By 2026, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts European gas demand will be one-fifth below the pre-war level of 2021.

Cop29 host Azerbaijan launches green energy unit to sceptical response

Existing LNG installations should be able to satisfy that demand without any further expansion, according to IEEFA. Their analyst say that, just taking into account terminals already being built, US export capacity by the end of this decade will be three-quarters higher than European demand.

A group of 60 European lawmakers largely from Green parties made that point in a letter to the White House on Thursday, arguing that the fossil fuel industry is using Europe as “an excuse” to expand gas exports. “The demand for new gas from industry voices in Europe is a false one”, they said. 

While using pro-Europe rhetoric, gas producers could actually be looking to sell their products in other, more promising markets. Venture Global, the owner of the CP2 terminal in Lousiana, has signed purchase agreements with Japan and China, for example.

The post US government pauses new gas export terminals in ‘historic win’ for climate appeared first on Climate Home News.

In November 2023, pressure tests revealed several tiny holes in the 55 km pipeline, designed to bring gas from a new floating import terminal in Brunsbüttel to the gas distribution network in northern Germany.

The pipeline was supposed to start operating by the end of last year but it remains out of action. The company building the pipeline says it will open it next month.

While they did not claim responsibility for the holes, radical climate activists from Ende Gelände, meaning ‘here and no further’, have demonstrated against the pipeline.

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They posted a thread on X, saying that “those responsible are unknown” but “anyone who builds an LNG [gas] terminal, a highway or other fossil fuel infrastructure should know: we will not leave you alone.”

“Where appeals fail,” they said, “we resort to blockades. Since we cannot block everything, sabotage against the destruction of our climate is legitimate”.

In their thread, they referred to climate activists setting fire to a cement factory in Berlin and to demonstrations against coal mining in Lusatia.

The group’s spokesperson Jule Fink told Climate Home News this week: “We are not going to stop protesting against public infrastructure, and we don’t plan to just let new LNG terminals be built”.

Solidarity with the US

She added that gas imports were “extremely destructive” and that “German hunger for gas” was driving the expansion of gas export terminals in the USA.

She said this was particularly an issue in the South of the USA. “We can see that this is an issue of climate injustice because places where marginalised communities live become sacrifice zones,” she added. Gas export terminals release air pollutants, damaging local residents’ health.

Cop29 host Azerbaijan launches green energy unit to sceptical response

The US had planned to build dozens of new terminals, particularly in the southern states of Louisiana and Texas, attracting anger from US and international climate activists.

But today, US President Joe Biden announced he would halt decisions on new gas exports. “This pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time,” he said.

Not necessary

Franziska Holz is a gas expert at the German Institute for Economic Research. She said that Germany does not need new gas import terminals.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2021, Germany was getting more than half of its gas imports from Russia. Since the invasion, its government has been scrambling to find different sources of gas fast, announcing plans to build 12 new gas import terminals.

A spate of LNG terminals are either proposed (orange) or under construction (red) (Photos: Global Energy Monitor)

“In the short term, it was understandable that the German government and traditional importers wanted to replace Russian natural gas with natural gas from other sources,” Holz said.

“But it was not necessary to build massive LNG import capacity in Germany. Rather, the pipeline capacities from Norway and the LNG import capacities in the Netherlands and Belgium would have been sufficient”, she added.

Germany aims to be greenhouse gas neutral by 2045 and the European Union aims to reach net zero by 2050. To meet this, analysts expect gas demand, which is already falling, to reduce rapidly.

The post After gas pipeline sabotage, German activists claim solidarity against US gas export terminals appeared first on Climate Home News.

After suffering health problems, 74-year-old Xie Zhenhua Chinese climate envoy resigned earlier this month and will be replaced by foreign ministry diplomat Liu Zhenmin.

The same week this news broke, 80-year-old John Kerry told US President Joe Biden that he would step down as climate envoy in the next few months. He will campaign for Biden to win the presidential election in November. His replacement is unknown.

With the European Union appointing a new top climate diplomat last year and holding elections in June, all three of the world’s biggest polluters will be led by relatively new faces at Cop29 in November.

US-China ties

Xie has led China’s climate diplomacy for most of the period since 2007 while Kerry was heavily involved in climate talks as Barack Obama’s foreign minister and Biden’s climate envoy.

The two have a close personal relationship, shown most recently by Xie bringing his grandchildren to Cop28 in Dubai to sing happy birthday to Kerry. Xie’s return from retirement in 2021 was widely interpreted as a response to Kerry’s appointment.

Xie Zhenhua is a veteran of UN climate talks (Pic: UN Photos)

They have attempted to keep US-China climate talks going despite wider geopolitical tensions, particularly over China’s relationship with Taiwan.

The two sides are now talking about cooperation on issues like methane, clean electricity and urban climate action. But the outcome of US elections later this year could scupper talks.

China’s climate lead

Xie was appointed vice chair of China’s top economic planning body in 2007 and put in charge of climate talks. He was in the post until 2020 when he briefly retired before being re-appointed in 2021.

Former US negotiator Todd Stern described him in 2019 as a  steadfast defender of Chinese interests who was likable, cared about climate change and wanted to get things done.

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Over his tenure, China has become more proactive about wanting to tackle climate change. It has set a net zero goal, established a carbon market, become a renewable energy leader and pledged to stop financing new coal power overseas – although it still plans to build many new coal plants.

Xie oversaw secret work to model different pathways for China to reach net zero emissions – models that eventually informed President Xi Jinping’s aim to reach carbon neutrality by 2060.

He suffered what Kerry called “something of a stroke” in January 2023 which prevented him from working and travelling abroad for much of this year, although he did lead China at Cop28 in Dubai.

The new boss

His replacement Liu previously worked for the United Nations as one of its second-highest ranking officials, focussing on economic and social affairs.

Before that, he was an ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva and then China’s deputy foreign minister and worked on the Paris and Kyoto climate agreements.

Liu Zhenmin poses for his official United Nations portrait (Photos: United Nations)

One China climate watcher, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home that many experts wanted someone from the environment ministry appointed not someone like Liu from the foreign service.

“To oversimplify,” they said, the”[foreign ministry] approaches climate as a card in U.S.-China grand bargain” whereas the “environment [ministry] sees climate change as a real issue that needs to be solved”. The foreign ministry “is known to be conservative and inaccessible”, they added.

On the other hand, the source said that Liu was “probably the most familiar with climate issues in China’s foreign service”.

Chatham House analyst Bernice Lee said, “sure, he is not from the environment ministry but no doubt he will be a fast learner not just in substance but also the building of an international network”. She described him as a “diplomat”, adding “challenging times require someone with diplomatic skills”.

Big hitter gone

After rising up as a Vietnam war veteran, senator and failed presidential candidate, Kerry was appointed as Barack Obama’s secretary of state in 2013.

Kerry worked with Xie to agree on carbon-cutting deals between the two nations which helped land the Paris Agreement in 2015. He went on to sign it with his granddaughter on his lap the next year.

“A la carte menu”: Saudi minister claims Cop28 fossil fuel agreement is only optional

Kerry left office when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. He came back into the fold immediately after the election of Joe Biden, who chose him as a presidential envoy on climate change. Kerry led the US delegation at Cop26, Cop27 and Cop28.

Jake Schmidt, from the Natural Resources Defence Council, said Kerry “helped rally the world around a commitment to transition away from fossil fuels, speed the growth of clean energy, and begin to mobilise resources to help the world’s most vulnerable nations cope with the consequences of the climate crisis”.

Kerry’s successor is unknown. His two deputies are Rick Duke and Sue Biniaz. If Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November, he is unlikely to appoint a climate envoy.

The post Veteran US and Chinese climate envoys step down appeared first on Climate Home News.

US vice-president Kamala Harris made the promise at the Cop28 summit in Dubai on Saturday, claiming the US is “a leader in the effort to expand international climate finance”.

Together with pledges from Italy, Switzerland, Portugal and Estonia, it brings the total raised in the latest GCF replenishment round to $12.7 billion.

If delivered, it puts the GCF on course for what its secretariat describes in internal documents as a middling level of ambition.

But to deliver, Harris and Joe Biden ‘s administration will have to persuade Republicans in Congress to approve the money or take control of Congress by winning elections.

Mixed reaction

Reaction to the pledge was mixed. ActionAid USA’s Kelly Stone said it was a “far cry from what is needed”.

She pointed out that the US still owed the GCF $1 billion from a $3 billion Obama-era pledge in 2014. “In reality, they are only pledging $2 billion in new money,” she said.

Erika Lennon, a GCF-watcher from the Center for International Environmental Law, said that pledging less than the $3 billion Barack Obama pledged nine years ago is “unacceptable”.

“The climate crisis has worsened, the need for climate finance is greater and the US pledge has stagnated. The US can and must do better,” she said.

Liane Schalatek from the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung foundation said it was "well below a fair share" and E3G's Alden Meyer said the US was "punching well below its weight".

The US's $3 billion is the biggest pledge of the fundraising round but its economy is far bigger than the other big donors in Europe and Japan.

But the Sierra Club's head Eva Hernandez said she was "encouraged" and the NRDC's Manish Bapna said it was "a promising signal of the USA's commitment to spur clean energy and promote resilience in vulnerable countries".

Congress problems

The US failed to deliver all of Obama's $3 billion pledge because of opposition from Republicans in Congress and later from Donald Trump in the White House. The Biden administration faces the same political headwinds.

In Congress, the House of Representatives, is currently controlled by the Republican Party. The Senate has a slim majority for Biden's Democrats.

Alden Meyer said getting GCF spending through the House of Representatives was not possible "unless they change their stance on it".

"There's three things they don't like about the GCF," he joked, "that its green, that it's for the climate and that it's a fund - other than that, they're fine with it".

As it happened: World leaders at Cop28

The best hope for getting funding through Congress, Meyer said, is for the Democrats to win the Presidential election next year and the Congressional elections at the same time.

The Biden administration could also use more general funds approved by Congress to channel money to the GCF, Meyer said, although that risks Congressional support for those funds.

A Trump victory in next year's elections would dampen any hopes of delivering the money. It was Donald Trump who, in his first term, refused to honour the remaining $2 billion of Obama's $3 billion pledge. He said the fund was "costing the United States a vast fortune". In May, the Biden administration paid $1 billion of this $2 billion.

This record of under-delivery has angered developing countries. In January, African members of the GCF board tried to block the US from co-chairing the board but later backed down.

This article was corrected on 6/12/2023. It originally incorrectly said that the $1 billion the Biden Administration promised in April 2023 had yet to be paid to the GCF. It has now been corrected to say this money was paid in May 2023.

The post US tees up Congress battle with $3bn Green Climate Fund pledge appeared first on Climate Home News.

As President Biden said at this year’s United Nations General Assembly, progress on some issues hinges on their common efforts and “nowhere is that more critical than the accelerating climate crisis.”

Much ink has been spilled debating whether the US and China should cooperate or compete on addressing climate change.

These debates obscure a more important question: if revived, what could US-China cooperation on climate actually achieve?

As it turns out — a lot.

Forests, methane, finance: Where are the Cop26 pledges now?

On one hand, as all countries work to implement their emissions reduction targets under the Paris Agreement, global climate progress no longer hinges so heavily on US-China cooperation.

But a high-level US-China agreement could provide the much-needed “course correction” to keep world temperatures on track to remain below 1.5C.

And it could also set the stage for a successful outcome at the Cop28, the UN’s largest annual international climate conference taking place the first two weeks of December in Dubai.

Based on what both countries are already prioritising, there is room for significant partnership when it comes to keeping domestic emissions reductions on track, raising ambition in multilateral negotiations, and accelerating climate action in developing countries.

Methane controls

Leaders from both countries have an opportunity to show that climate cooperation between the world’s two largest emitters shouldn’t just mean searching for the lowest common denominator.

To start, China’s recent delivery on its 2021 pledge, made alongside the US, to develop a plan to control methane has helped to restore trust.

Integrating non-CO2 gases into China’s climate targets would further assuage concerns that methane leakage from coal mines and other sectors could undermine action elsewhere.

Likewise, a commitment to limit emissions from burning coal could provide assurance that new coal plants won’t compromise climate targets.

In these areas, the US could lend monitoring and mitigation expertise, including from the development of its updated Methane Emissions Reduction Action Plan this year.

Hedging against a Republican administration

From China’s view, the potential for a Republican administration threatens the stability of US action and engagement.

To hedge against this, leaders on both sides could jointly endorse subnational and non-governmental cooperation.

This could pave the way for more partnerships that embed climate cooperation at multiple levels and across sectors, building on California’s recent agreement with a slew of Chinese provinces.

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US climate envoy John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua are slated to co-host a local climate action summit during Cop28.

This could provide further opportunities to showcase and institutionalise multi-level cooperation on a global stage.

Unlocking higher global ambition

Finally, US-China cooperation could tackle thorny issues in the UN climate negotiations and unlock greater ambition.

Early, explicit communication of US-China consensus on the structure and ambition of NDC climate plans due in 2025 could lay the foundation for global consensus and position both countries as credible actors.

So too could joint communication of expectations for the new post-2025 goal on climate finance, known as the NCQG.

Doing so before Cop28 could inject important momentum ahead of a major milestone when countries will assess progress and gaps towards global climate goals – much like back in 2015, when the two countries helped lay the groundwork for the Paris Agreement by announcing their climate targets early, and together.

US raising climate finance

Perhaps US climate finance ambition could be the necessary show of goodwill to move talks forward.

This ambition was demonstrated by recent attempts to secure additional funding from Congress, supporting international financial reform at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in early October, and an unspecified commitment to the Green Climate Fund.

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For its part, China has expressed willingness to work with the US on green projects in developing countries.

Cooperation could address gaps by combining both countries’ respective strengths, such as China’s nimble construction capacity and US experience engaging with local stakeholders.

While joint projects may face hurdles, even conducting regular exchanges about shared challenges could improve investment outcomes for all sides – including, crucially, recipient countries – and create a multiplier effect.

None of this will be easy, but it is in both countries’ interests. Institutionalizing climate cooperation could weave a safety net for the US and China in light of other tensions.

New joint action could lend credence to their claims of being cooperative international players on climate – not to mention enabling substantive progress.

Kate Logan is associate director of climate at the Asia Society Policy Institute and a fellow at the institute’s Center for China Analysis.

The post The US and China’s resurgent climate cooperation is a big deal appeared first on Climate Home News.

Export credit and development agencies from six developed nations have approved $4.4 billion in funding for oil and gas projects overseas since the start of 2023, research from campaigning group Oil Change International shows.

More than half of the total financing has been provided by the United States ($1.5 billion) and Italy ($1.2 billion), followed by Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Claire O’Manique from Oil Change International said the countries are “going rogue by backtracking on their commitment to end international public finance for fossil fuels”.  “Public money that should be going to support a just transition to renewable energy is instead being pumped into more climate-wrecking fossil fuel projects”, she added.

One pledge, many interpretations

Twenty countries signed up to the Glasgow Statement at Cop26 pledging to end new direct public finance for overseas fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022.

However, the signatories have interpreted the promise in different ways.

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The United Kingdom and France have stopped all public subsidies going to international fossil fuel projects. Italy carved out a wide range of energy security exemptions for the continued support of fossil fuel projects. Germany published a draft policy for its export credit agency last July planning to support new gas projects overseas until 2025. The US has not made its guidelines public.

The Glasgow pledge allowed exceptions in “limited and clearly defined circumstances that are consistent with a 1.5C warming limit”. The International Energy Agency warned last year that investment in new coal, oil and gas production was incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C.

LNG and oil expansion

The US and Germany have backed projects aiming to boost the production and trade of liquified natural gas (LNG), which has been in heightened demand since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The expansion of an oil refining facility in Indonesia’s Borneo has received support from the Italian and US export credit agencies. The US Export-Import Bank justified its backing of the project by claiming it would allow Indonesia to reduce its reliance on imported fossil fuels.

African leaders skirt over fossil fuels in climate summit declaration

Analysts and campaigners told Climate Home News that expansion of oil refining falls within the scope of the Glasgow agreement.

The majority of the $4.4 billion greenlit in 2023 comes in the form of state-backed guarantees provided by export credit agencies. These products limit the risk taken by companies selling services and goods in other countries, influencing investment.

Climate Home News has contacted the export credit agencies of Germany, Italy and the US for comment.

The post Rich countries sink billions into oil and gas despite Cop26 pledge appeared first on Climate Home News.

Developing nations successfully demanded at last year’s Cop27 climate summit funding for loss and damage caused by climate change, including a dedicated fund, which countries will adopt this year.

In climate negotiations, “loss and damage” refers to existing costs incurred from climate-fueled weather impacts, such as last year’s devastating Pakistan flooding.

EU puts Maroš Šefčovič in charge of climate policy

The new Loss and Damage fund should target the most vulnerable countries and focus on areas not already covered by development banks or emergency relief funds, two U.S. State Department officials told Reuters.

The European Union has taken a similar position. But the G77+China umbrella group of countries classified as developing by the United  Nations argues that they are all particularly vulnerable and should be eligible.

Need to specialise

US negotiator Christina Chan is part of a 24-country committee deciding how the fund will work before the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai can officially adopt it this year. The committee will meet again next week in the Dominican Republic.

“We don’t really want redundancy with existing funds, because that’s not an effective and efficient way to deal with the issue,” said Sue Biniaz, deputy special envoy for climate at the State Department.

Instead, she said, the new fund should develop an expertise “as opposed to covering everything in the universe.”

Germany set to miss net zero by 2045 target as climate efforts falter

The U.S. had wanted a two-year process to analyse funding gaps before launching a fund, but it went along with the Cop27 consensus for action this year, Biniaz said.

At the committee’s last meeting in July, the U.S. proposed focusing the fund on covering slow-onset events such as sea level rise and desertification, as such needs can fall through the funding cracks, said Chan. This would mean less focus on climate disasters like floods, heatwaves and storms.

She said the US also suggested the fund be used for post-disaster reconstruction if a country needs more beyond eligible development bank grants.

Reluctant evolution

The U.S. position on loss and damage has evolved in recent years, from a point at which Washington and the EU resisted even discussing the issue for fear of legal liability for historic emissions.

At Cop27, the EU agreed to a fund on the condition that China pays into it – although it later abandoned that insistence. The US did not block the Cop decision approving the fund.

Biniaz said she “violently opposes” arguments by some countries and environmental groups that developed countries have a legal obligation to pay into the fund.

Nonprofit Action Aid has said, for example, that the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change implies this obligation with the idea that industrialized nations responsible for emitting most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last century should do more to address climate change.

“That’s just completely inaccurate,” she said on whether developed countries are liable, adding that the 2015 Paris Agreement did not include such an obligation.

Other sources

Instead, both Washington and Brussels say the fund should be filled from myriad sources including industry taxes, philanthropic donations or other schemes. Biniaz said one example might be revenues from the U.S.-proposed carbon reduction accelerator.

The U.S. and EU have also said a big economy like China could contribute, despite its low per person income and relatively small historic contribution to climate change .

Biniaz said this came up during recent bilateral meetings with China, but she did not offer more details.

Other negotiators and officials have proposed ideas including creating new revenue streams through taxing environmental pollution, such as methane emissions or shipping pollution and windfall profits from oil and gas.

Ecuadorians reject Amazon oil drilling in historic referendum

“We need to have a global system with a broad contribution heavily weighted to the richest people to make the biggest contribution,” said Avinash Persaud, special finance envoy to Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados.

With many national budgets strained, Persaud said the idea of taxing emissions was gaining popularity in some countries.

Who benefits?

Another sticking point likely to emerge is who should benefit from a fund, with disagreement over which countries are most vulnerable

“It's very difficult to create a straight cut dividing eligible and noneligible,” said Dileimy Orzoco, senior policy advisor at climate advisory group E3G.

The world’s least developed nations and small island developing nations want to be prioritised for funding.

Others worry that limiting funds to these countries will leave out some of the worst hit by climate impacts, such as middle-income countries like Pakistan or the Philippines.

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The Department of Energy announced it would invest in two direct air capture facilities, which will suck the planet-warming gas out of the atmosphere and store it underground.

One of those facilities will be built by Occidental Petroleum, whose CEO Vicki Hollub said earlier this year that direct air capture will help “preserve our industry” and get more oil out of the ground.

The proper role

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists say the world needs to develop some direct air capture to compensate for the emissions of the hardest to clean up sectors.

But IPCC author Glen Peters told Climate Home that Occidental “do not really understand the role of carbon dioxide removal” and Hollub’s views are “not consistent with the science”.

Peters said that “in principle” the US government should not have given Occidental this money, although he questioned how such an exclusion could be justified.

JUST ANNOUNCED: We’re investing $1.2B to develop Direct Air Capture Hubs in Texas and Louisiana to remove CO2 directly from the air, create thousands of jobs, and kickstart an industry critical to addressing the climate crisis.https://t.co/9jRhP7cV5x

— Secretary Jennifer Granholm (@SecGranholm) August 11, 2023

The $1.2 billion handout

In November 2021, Congress members from the Democrats and Republicans agreed to a Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which included $1.2 billion for direct air capture hubs.

On Friday, they announced that up to $500 million each of this investment would go to Occidental’s hub in Texas and to another center run by air direct capture company Climeworks in Louisiana.

Amazon nations decry EU deforestation rules

The department said these investments would “kickstart a nationwide network of large-scale carbon removal sites to address legacy carbon dioxide pollution and complement rapid emissions reductions”.

Together, the department expects all these projects to remove more than two million tons of carbon dioxide a year, a similar amount to Fiji and its million islanders currently emit.

What is direct air capture?

Whereas carbon capture technology stops carbon dioxide gas from entering the atmosphere, forms of carbon dioxide removal like direct air capture suck it directly out of the atmosphere.

It currently barely exists as an industry. Twenty-seven direct air capture plants have been commissioned worldwide, capturing under 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). That’s about the emissions of 2,000 petrol-powered cars.

Indonesia falls short on peatland restoration, risking destructive fire season

The IPCC says that scaling up carbon removal is “unavoidable” in order to offset emissions from activities that are hard to clean up.

Peters said it is “is really to get rid of the emissions that are too expensive, like steel or cement after improving material use and adding [carbon capture and storage], then [carbon removal] might mop up the rest”.

Not oil’s saviour

But Hollub sees a much bigger role for carbon dioxide removal than scientists and independent energy experts do.

Last March, she told an oil conference that direct air capture “is going to be technology that helps to preserve our industry” and gives it “a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed”.

But Peters said that Hollub’s statement “is not consistent with the science”. He said that “scenarios show that even with mind-boggling amounts of carbon dioxide removal, coal, oil and gas drop rapidly”.

The IEA has said that, if the world is to limit global warming to 1.5C, there should be no new fossil fuel production facilities. Its forecast states fossil fuel use should fall from providing almost four-fifths of total energy supply today to slightly over one-fifth by 2050.

The IEA says oil production must fall if the world is to limit global warming to 1.5C (Photo credit: IEA)

Inflated figures

Occidental has previously been accused of inflating the role of carbon dioxide removal when it told investors that it could capture 10 gigatonnes by 2030.

IPCC author Zeke Hausfather thinks “carbon dioxide removal is an important part of getting to net zero”.

But he tweeted last year that Occidental’s projections are “deeply problematic and oversell the role of CDR” as “there is no world” in which they come true.

“CDR is not a replacement for deep emissions reductions, and anyone who says differently is selling something”, he said.

Carbon dioxide removal is an important part of getting to net-zero and stopping the world from warming. But it cannot be used as an alternative to deep emissions reductions.

Graphs like this from @1PointFiveCCUS are deeply problematic and oversell the role of CDR. pic.twitter.com/Rut7QsgCOs

— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) June 14, 2022

Easing workers consciences

As the climate crisis intensifies, fossil fuel companies are finding it harder to recruit, particularly among younger people.

Hollub told the Outrage and Optimism podcast that Occidental’s direct air capture business helps them keep staff happy.

“The employees love this, especially our earlier career employees who now had questions about whether or not they should be working for an oil company”, she said.

But the initial reason for their interest, she said, was Occidental saw sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as a cheaper long-term way of getting the gas. That makes it cheaper for them to get more oil out of the ground.

Mainstream economists accused of playing down climate threat

She explained to the podcast that carbon sucked from the atmosphere is “a long term source, a non-declining source of CO2 and it could be at lower cost if we could get the facilities designed correctly and optimise over time – so that’s what started us down the path”.

On top of the two projects already selected, the energy department announced 19 projects that it was talking to regarding funding.

Oil company Chevron were among those with projects chosen, as well as universities, engineering companies and green campaign groups like the Rocky Mountain Institute.

This article was updated on 16 August as it originally incorrectly said that a company called Fervo was an oil company. In fact, it is a geothermal company.

The post US sparks controversy by backing oil company’s carbon-sucking plans appeared first on Climate Home News.

There was no outcome document and no grand announcements. Nothing to impress the Republican congressmen who gave Kerry a grilling over China’s alleged climate failings last week.

But Xie was never going to get up and say that Kerry had talked him into abandoning new coal plants – any more than Kerry ever going to say Beijing had pressured him into giving more climate finance and removing American tariffs on Chinese solar panels.

The gains were more incremental. With expectations low, the meetings were cautiously hailed by experts as a “small win” and “an important step in what will be a complex rescue operation”.

US-China cooperation on climate had long withstood geopolitical tensions, but talks froze after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in 2022. Since then, they have slowly resumed.

Now, the “rescue operation” will continue with two more meetings planned before Cop28. In a press conference, Kerry said they’ll talk about two US priorities – coal and methane.

Success would be if China finally publishes its methane strategy. Or reforms of its electric grid to translate its booming number of solar panels and wind turbines into growth in renewables’ share of China’s electricity, a link that isn’t as automatic as you might think.

But, as China reiterated this week, the talks are still hostage to the wider relationship. Any high-profile US defence of Taiwan’s sovereignty could set them back to square one.

This week’s news:

• Biden’s union-friendly green jobs pitch meets sceptical response
• Frans Timmermans steps down from EU’s climate leadership
• Dozens of oil & industry lobbyists attended secretive shipping emissions talks
• Under record heatwave, US and China “unstick” climate talks
• EU and Argentina strike gas, hydrogen & renewables deal
• Australia will update the ‘fantasy’ net zero plan it inherited

…and comment:

• Open letter from 14 countries to G20: Safeguard a liveable future
• The EU-Mercosur trade deal will harm Brazil’s indigenous communities

While Kerry and Xie were dining in Beijing, another big hitter was preparing to leave the climate diplomacy stage.

Frans Timmermans has been the straight-talking, passionate face of the EU’s climate policy since 2019.

But now he’s leaving Brussels to try and become the next prime minister of his native Netherlands.

Who will lead the EU at Cop28 is unclear and, with Xie suffering health problems and Kerry considering retirement, it could be all change at the top by Cop29.

The post US-China talks thaw in heatwave – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

Biden is trying to reshape the U.S. economy by investing billions of taxpayer dollars in green technology, while forcing companies that want lucrative subsidies being offered to help the push do more of their manufacturing in the U.S.

Biden took a small tour of Philadelphia’s shipyard and praised the upcoming construction of the Acadia, a union-built vessel that will support hundreds of jobs and be used to help build offshore wind farms.

“When I think climate, I think jobs, union jobs,” Biden said, adding that the ships blades, hull and other parts – some the size of city skyscrapers – will be built by nine unions across the country.

Frans Timmermans steps down from EU’s climate leadership

Biden is betting that union workers whose jobs are threatened by the energy transition will eventually find a place in the green economy, but that’s a hard sell in union-friendly Philadelphia.

About a dozen union workers in the Philadelphia region Reuters spoke to questioned whether the new industries can produce a similar number of jobs at the same high wage scale.

They may have good reason to worry.

Roughly 80% of the more than 50 EV battery, solar panel and other factories announced since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in August are in states with laws that make it harder for workers to unionize, a Reuters analysis published this year found.

Dozens of oil & industry lobbyists attended secretive shipping emissions talks

Nancy Minor, 57, worked as a union operator at a Philadelphia’s largest and oldest refinery for nearly three decades before it shut after a 2019 explosion. Now a refinery safety consultant, she made enough money to buy a house, raise her kids as a single mother and send them to private school.

She worries clean energy projects like solar and wind farms, along with hydrogen pipelines, oversell and under deliver when it comes to long-term, full-time employment.

“The initial promise of jobs is spectacular but after the equipment is built they can run it with a fraction of the people,” Minor said.

Overall energy jobs in the U.S. grew 3.8% in 2022, to more than 8.1 million, led by fast growth in clean energy jobs, the Department of Energy said in June. Clean energy jobs, a wide category including wind and solar power, nuclear, and grid technologies and battery storage, made up 3.1 million of those.

Under record heatwave, US and China “unstick” climate talks

Ali Zaidi, Biden’s national climate adviser, says the president is pushing to make sure unions are part of the energy transition, and to get unions and companies working together.

Unions will benefit from an expanded power grid, a boom in manufacturing from clean energy supply chains and new industries like hydrogen, Zaidi said, noting Danish renewable energy group Ørsted’s recent partnership with North America’s Building Trades Unions.

Biden’s union push comes as business and labor are divided over who will benefit from the changing economy with the Auto Workers are bracing for a possible labor shortages unless there are new union protections for EV battery plants.

A potential economically-damaging strike by Teamster-represented UPS workers looms next month.

EU and Argentina strike gas, hydrogen & renewables deal

Pat Eiding, long-time president and current treasurer of Philadelphia AFL-CIO Council, said a rash of refinery closures in the region over the past two decades crushed some local unions. Many of those laid off workers struggled to find similar paying jobs and he fears the same for any worker hurt by the energy transition.

Eiding also believes the green economy will struggle to replicate the employment from refineries and power plants, which require 24-hour, 365-day staffing and significant annual maintenance.

“I believe Biden when he says that green energy jobs will be union, the question is just how many jobs will there be,” Eiding said.

Seth Harris, who previously served as Biden’s top labor policy adviser at the White House, said unions have made progress in some green industries, like agreeing contracts for wind farms, but are still struggling to get a foothold in a solar industry dominated by China.

Australia will update the ‘fantasy’ net zero plan it inherited

The Biden administration has pushed new funds to help workers like coal miners find new jobs, but more can be done, Harris said, including increased investment in community colleges and apprenticeship programs.

“The labor movement has legitimate cause for concern and they are aggressively in discussions with Congress and with the White House about how to make certain that current members have the opportunity to be represented by a union and to have good quality jobs as a result,” Harris said.

John Hirschfeld, 50, a shipyard security worker with the local electrician’s union who was in the audience, said Biden’s message Thursday made sense. The shipyard was down to just a handful of union employees not long ago, he said, but new wind farm and other projects have breathed life into the facility and made him hopeful.

“This is a big deal for me, as a father, as a husband,” Hirschfeld said. “It helps me sleep at night knowing I can take care of my family.”

The post Biden’s union-friendly green jobs pitch meets sceptical response appeared first on Climate Home News.

Kerry spoke late into the night with his counterpart Xie Zhenhua and, in a sign of warming relations, met with China’s second most-powerful man Premier Li Qiang and foreign minister Wang Yi.

With the broader US-China relationship hostile, expectations were low but experts cautiously hailed the visit as a success.

Greenpeace East Asia analyst Li Shuo called it “an important step in what will be a complex rescue operation” while the Asia Society’s Thom Woodroofe called it a “small win”.

Pleased to host a dinner for China Special Envoy for Climate Change Xie Zhenhua and Secretary John Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, as we seek to deepen our joint work on the climate crisis. @ClimateEnvoy pic.twitter.com/LUt0d3VNCz

— Ambassador Nicholas Burns (@USAmbChina) July 19, 2023

While officials met in Beijing, China was going through a record-breaking heatwave; one of several impacting the northern hemisphere at the moment. Some locations in the country’s arid Northwest recorded temperatures as high as 52C (125,96F).

Heatwaves have become more intense in recent decades as a result of the climate crisis, especially in cities, according to a report by the UN panel of climate scientists.

Now, both the US and China are planning two more meetings before Cop28 in November. They will talk about topics like better integrating China’s booming renewable sector into its coal-dominated electric grid and tackling methane emissions.

But the Chinese government warned that tensions over Taiwan could still scupper the talks. Chinese state media said that climate talks “cannot be separated from the overall environment of Sino-U.S. relations” and that the US should “properly handle the Taiwan issue”.

UAE’s Cop28 president plans “brutally honest” climate summit

Coal to renewables

After the first day of talks, Kerry highlighted “the challenges of coal and methane pollution” as the priorities for joint climate action.

In a press conference at the end of his visit, he praised China’s growth in renewable capacity but said that the US believes China has more coal power plants than it needs.

The two sides will discuss “scaling and integrating of renewable energy into the power sector in order to be able to reduce coal emissions”, he said.

China is rolling out renewables rapidly. This year, China will install more solar power than the US has installed in its history.

But the share of China’s electricity which is provided by these renewables is growing much slower because of unfinished paperwork and bureaucracy.

Since US president Joe Biden’s election, the US has prioritised measures to tackle methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas which is emitted from fossil fuel infrastructure, farms and landfills.

China has not joined US and EU-led schemes to reduce methane emission. The government has long been drafting its own methane reduction strategy but it has yet to be released.

Kerry said that including methane in climate efforts would be a subject of further discussions.

US ban on Chinese panels

For the Chinese side, a priority is for the US to overturn its tariffs on Chinese solar panels, which have harmed the roll-out of solar energy in the USA.

Kerry rejects “climate reparations” but praises loss and damage fund

Kerry told a reporter from state-owned China Central Television that the subject “was raised with me” and that he would pass that concern on to the relevant ministers.

A state media report of Kerry’s meeting with Li Qiang said that developed countries like the US “should take the lead in reducing emissions and fulfill their financial commitments as soon as possible”.

Rich nations have collectively failed to honour their promise to give developing countries $100 billion a year to fund climate projects by 2020, with the US largely responsible for that failure.

Rocky few years

US president Joe Biden appointed Kerry as his climate envoy shortly after he was elected in November 2020. Three months later, China’s president Xi Jinping brought Zhenhua out of retirement to be his climate envoy.

The appointments were seen as a boost to the chances that the two sides could work together on climate change, as they did under the Obama administration to bring about the Paris agreement in 2015, due to the two men’s long and friendly relationship.

After dozens of virtual and several in-person meetings, these hopes were further boosted at the end of 2021 when the two sides announced a joint agreement on climate at the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow. Both sides committed to discuss measures to reduce methane emissions.

Powerful officials and experts from both countries were supposed to begin discussions on issues such as clean electricity, the circular economy and city climate action, as well as methane, in September 2022.

But in August 2022, the head of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi went on an official visit to Taiwan, an island nation off China’s east coast that the Chinese government considers part of China.

Nancy Pelosi walks with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen (Photo: Makoto Lin/Taiwan President’s office)

China reacted by cancelling the climate talks, a move Kerry called “both disappointing and misguided”. Instead of cooperating, official from both sides engaged in public Twitter spats over their climate records.

A few months later in November, tensions cooled after Biden and Xi had a productive meeting on the sidelines of the G20 in Indonesia. They agreed to work together on climate change and their climate teams, both of which were at Cop27 in Egypt at the time, were allowed to talk formally again.

After that meeting, the US announced that its top foreign affairs official Anthony Blinken would visit China. That trip was cancelled when the US military shot down a Chinese balloon in US airspace in February but was eventually held in June, paving the way for Kerry’s visit.

EU to push for fossil fuel phaseout ‘well ahead of 2050’ at Cop28

Tension lingers

But Kerry’s visit wasn’t free from conflict. On Sunday, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that China is not a developing nation and the world should “pressure China to take far more dramatic action to reduce its emissions”.

Today China’s president Xi Jinping told a conference that, while China has an “unsweving” commitment to its climate targets “the path towards the goals as well as the manner, pace and intensity of efforts to achieve them should and must be determined by the country itself, rather than swayed by others”.

Chatham House researcher Bernice Lee told Climate Home that the US and China are both keen not to be seen to concede anything to the other side.

But Lee added that Xi’s speech is a positive signal to local governments and officials in China that the central government is committed to the targets.

“Given domestic political conditions on both sides,” she said, “moving or leading ‘together but separately’ is the only way for the two powers to move forward on the climate action agenda.”

The post Under record heatwave, US and China “unstick” climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

When asked about the tax during a press conference in Paris on Friday, US treasury secretary Janet Yellen said it was a “very constructive suggestion” and “something the United States will look at”.

But the US was not among the 22 countries who put their names to a statement backing the idea at the Paris summit.

A State Department spokesperson told Climate Home by email that “the United States has supported a greenhouse gas fuel standard, although an economic measure such as a maritime emissions pricing mechanism could complement this standard.”

They added: “The United States is open to consideration of a maritime pricing mechanism, although it would be necessary to work through a number of important design and policy issues that would not be resolved this year.”

Pacific push

A group of Pacific islands and others have been pushing for a levy for several years at the UN shipping agency, known as the International Maritime Organization (IMO).

Public banks agree to check investments against countries’ climate plans

Over the next two weeks, government negotiators are meeting at the IMO’s London headquarters to decide whether to include a levy on shipping emissions in their list of measures to respond to climate change.

Most of the world’s products are moved abroad by ship, often using very polluting bunker fuels. The sector is responsible for around 3% of the world’s emissions, roughly the same as Germany.

The group of nations signing up to support a levy in Paris includes the European Union, several small island states, Vietnam, Kenya and major shipbuilder South Korea. More countries have indicated support in the IMO but were not at the meeting in Paris.

The US government has not explained its stance, either in public or at the behind-closed-door IMO talks this week. The State Department did not reply to Climate Home’s request for comment.

Unfinished paperwork is kneecapping solar’s potential in China

One delegate to the IMO talks, from a nation that supports the levy, told Climate Home the US was “still on the fence”.

Political reasons

E3G analyst Ronan Palmer said the US was not opposed to a tax but, with presidential elections next November, it “is just not going to move for it’s own political reasons”.

“If Biden gets up and says we need this tax for climate, imagine what [leading Republican presidential candidate Ron] De Santis is going to say,” Palmer said.

Aoife O’Leary, head of the shipping think tank Opportunity Green, said US concerns that a tax would have to be put to Congress were unfounded. The US’s domestic law to prevent pollution from ships, signed in 1980, allows amendments to the international convention which governs shipping emissions without approval from Congress, she said.

World Bank to suspend debt repayments for disaster-hit countries

As a major polluter, O’Leary added, “the US has a large moral responsibility to support this levy”.

Delaine McCullough, shipping lead at US-based campaign group Ocean Conservancy, said she thought the US would only support a levy if it was combined with a fuel standard, which tells shipping companies they have to make their fuel cleaner each year.

She said her understanding was that the US government felt that shipping companies would just pay the levy and not change to cleaner ways of operating.

But a levy high enough to change their behaviour would be difficult to get agreement on for “political” reasons, she said.

Rich nations pledge $2.7 billion for Senegal’s renewable rollout

Different options

Last year, governments agreed that they would put a price on shipping emissions. But they have not agreed what form this would take or how much should be paid.

Alternatives to a levy include a system where emissions are capped and anything above that cap is traded or a reward system for reducing emissions.

A group of Pacific islands are calling for a levy with a carbon price of $100 a tonne on bunker fuels, while the world’s biggest container shipping company Maersk has called for a $150 a tonne levy.

But the shipping industry’s trade association has previously supported a levy of just $2 a tonne of fuel to fund research and development of clean shipping technology.

Some nations, particularly in the developing world, are calling for the money to be spent not just on cleaning up the industry but on other climate projects.

This article was updated on 30 June to include the State Department’s comment

The post US ‘still on the fence’ as nations debate global shipping emission tax appeared first on Climate Home News.

The latest targets have been global insurance companies, and their responses offer some insight.

Under pressure, several major insurers, including AXA, Allianz, Lloyd’s and Swiss Re, have pulled out of a United Nations-organized alliance committed to a global goal of net-zero emissions by mid-century. There’s a word for companies going quiet in the face of orchestrated attacks: “greenhushing.”

But while the insurers’ departures from the alliance might look like a victory for politicians and political donors who want to delay action on climate change, the companies say leaving doesn’t change their business decisions.

I have worked with businesses globally on sustainable development for over 20 years and follow both what they say and what they do. The insurance industry has obvious reasons to care about climate change and efforts to slow it, starting with the fact that disasters cost them money and the risks are rising.

Assault on climate protection

Republicans began targeting ESG investors – those who incorporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance standards in making investment decisions – a few years ago as ESG-managed assets grew into the tens of trillions of dollars. Texas led the way in 2021 with a law prohibiting state entities from investing with firms that cut their investments in fossil fuel industries.

In 2022, Republican state attorneys general began to go after the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, or Gfanz, an umbrella body for insurers, banks, asset owners and asset managers. The influential group had a starting membership of over 400 financial institutions representing over US$130 trillion of assets under management.

One line of attack accuses Gfanz members of breaking antitrust rules, claiming that when companies participate in groups committed to lowering greenhouse gas emissions, competitors are cooperating in ways that affect prices in violation of U.S. law.

“Net-zero” is shorthand for taking steps to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, an international goal to prevent increasingly severe climate damage that is fueling severe storms, heat and wildfires. Clubs have formed across the financial value chain to find solutions. Among them is the U.N.-convened Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA), a group of some of the world’s leading insurers and reinsurers. Members commit to transitioning their insurance and reinsurance underwriting portfolios to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

In a letter on May 15, 2023, 23 Republican attorneys general took their criticism further and attempted to blame the insurance alliance – rather than the rising cost of disasters like wildfires and hurricanes – for economic ills from rising insurance premiums, fuel prices and inflation.

Facing the threat of lawsuits, whether viable or not, and the potential for reputational harm, several mainly European-based insurers and reinsurers with substantial investments in the U.S. left the group.

The attacks have dampened the public discussion on evolving practices in net-zero pathways and ESG investing, even for those who stay. Fewer firms are keen to draw attention to their progress because, in a global market, the backlash from the U.S. threatens any of them.

Gfanz has stated that the “political attacks are now interfering with insurers’ independent efforts to price climate risk, which will harm policyholders, main street investors and local economies.”

Silent but active

However, while the insurers might not be speaking out, their assessment of climate trends hasn’t changed, nor has the impact of those trends on their businesses.

When Lloyd’s pulled out of the alliance in late May 2023, the London-based insurance and reinsurance company made clear that it remains “committed to delivering our sustainability strategy including supporting the global economy’s transition.” It said it continues to support the U.N.’s Principles for Sustainable Insurance and Sustainable Development Goals.

Swiss Re also stressed that it has kept its sustainability strategy the same and that its pullout doesn’t reflect a lesser commitment to climate policies. It remains a member of the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance.

Swiss Re Group’s data clearly shows the reason why. In 2021, some $270 billion in losses were attributable to natural catastrophes worldwide. The $111 billion of those losses that were insured represented the fourth highest payout since Swiss Re Institute, the insurer’s research arm, began keeping records in 1970.

The World Meteorological Organization reports that weather and climate disasters such as floods, heat waves and forest fires have increased fivefold in the past 50 years. These disasters have caused environmental harm, the loss of more than 2 million lives and more than $3.64 trillion in economic damage.

Not talking about these risks doesn’t help homeowners and businesses that rely on insurance, and doing nothing to stop climate change worsens the threats. Some consultants and auditors have started sounding the alarm that increasing natural catastrophes could collapse the insurance market model we know today.

Broad problem

The insurance industry plays a crucial role in the overall functioning of economies. It promotes resilience by providing a safety net against unexpected events, helping individuals and businesses to recover more quickly. It facilitates commerce and trade; for instance, marine insurance covers the risks of shipping goods, ensuring that trade flows smoothly. It also encourages risk-management practices.

Without insurance, disaster costs would fall heavily on individuals and businesses, hindering economic growth and stability.

Already, as climate risks increase, some regions are becoming increasingly uninsurable. State Farm and Allstate cited wildfire risks when they recently announced they would stop selling new home insurance policies in California, putting pressure on outdated regulation of the insurance industry.

The future

As the United States heads into its long election season, the ESG backlash risks pushing more companies’ transition pathways into the quiet zone and slowing much-needed regulation.

The world is at an inflection point in its climate transition efforts. Capital is shifting to low-emissions technologies and, in some cases, reshaping industries faster than imagined.

Insurers have the ability to accelerate the transition through their underwriting practices and promoting risk mitigation through their substantial investment portfolios. They also recognize that, to protect their balance sheets and for the sake of the planet, society needs to pick up the pace in the transition to net zero.

Rachel Kyte is the dean of the Fletcher School at Tuft’s University in the USA. She is a former CEO of the United Nations Sustainable Energy for All campaign.

This article was first published in The Conversation

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Financial support from the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) will help a state-controlled plant on the island of Borneo turn 40% more oil into products like jet fuel and diesel.

In a closed door meeting last Thursday, Ex-Im’s board approved $99.7 million in support for the Balikpapan oil refinery run by Indonesia’s national oil company Pertamina. Ex-Im said the loan would enable an expansion of the facility, alongside fuel efficiency and safety upgrades.

‘Untenable’ decision

But the plan has been criticised for seeming to contradict a climate finance commitment.

At Cop26, the US and 19 other countries signed the Glasgow Statement pledging to end new direct public finance for overseas fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022.

Since then the US has been accused of backsliding on its promise. Unlike other signatories, the White House has not released publicly any policy explaining how the pledge would be implemented.

Shruti Shukla from advocacy group the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) said the lack of transparency is allowing for “untenable” decisions to slip through.

“To spend the limited public finance available on the upgrade of an oil refinery is not the best use of those resources which should go towards clean energy alternatives,” she said.

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Adam McGibbon, a campaigner at Oil Change International, said president Joe Biden risks not being trusted to keep climate promises by “breaking” the Glasgow pledge.

A senior Ex-Im official told Climate Home News that the agency is trying to align with the Biden administration’s climate agenda while still respecting its statutory limitations, including the prohibition against discrimination based solely on industry, sector or business.

Biden’s appointees

Ex-Im is the official export credit agency of the US. It operates as an independent authority but its board members are appointed by the US president and confirmed by the Senate.

The sitting president, Reta Jo-Lewis, was picked by Biden in February 2022. The current government selected three of the board’s members, while the other two were appointed by Donald Trump.

Local business group tries to keep South Africa’s coal plants alive

Like other countries’ export credit agencies, Ex-Im is influential in directing investment towards specific sectors by offering exporters government-backed loans, guarantees or insurance. This limits the risk taken by companies selling services and goods in countries or industries considered high risk.

Production boost

The new loan will allow the Balikpapan refinery to increase its capacity by nearly 40%, with the production of up to 360 million barrels of oil per day.

According to Ex-Im, the project will unleash 2.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year. That is as much as the annual carbon footprint of Iceland or Guyana.

A petrol station operated by oil and gas company Pertamina in Indonesia. Photo: tian yake/Flickr

Pertamina claims the project “not only aims to increase the refinery capacity but also realises a green refinery”. This is because the facility plans to switch to the production of a more energy-efficient type of gasoline.

Indonesia relies mostly on oil and coal for its energy supply. In November 2022, the US and Japan led a group of rich nations and banks in pledging $20 billion to speed up the country’s transition from coal to clean energy. But the plan has no provisions for phasing out other fossil fuels.

Support for US jobs

Ex-Im justified its backing of the project by claiming it would allow Indonesia to reduce its reliance on imported fossil fuels and said it would support hundreds of jobs for US manufacturers.

The project previously received much greater support from the South Korean export credit agency, which committed $1.19 billion to finance the oil refinery expansion in December 2022. Korea Eximbank said its support helped Korean engineering giant Hyundai win a construction contract on the project.

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Unlike the US, however, South Korea did not sign the public finance pledge at Cop26 in Glasgow.

Analysts and campaigners told Climate Home News that the Indonesian oil refinery expansion falls within the scope of the Glasgow agreement to end public subsidies for fossil fuels projects overseas.

The UK stopped direct government support for the fossil fuel energy sector overseas in March 2021. Its guidance explicitly includes oil refining within its scope. France also put an end to providing public finance to international fossil fuel projects, including oil refining, last November.

Pledge backsliding

The US – together with Germany – has not yet published its public finance policies to meet the Glasgow agreement, according to a recent report by Oil Change International.

Ex-Im’s support for the oil refinery appears to contradict a claim made last month by G7 climate ministers that public support for unabated fossil fuel energy overseas had ended in 2022.

The NRDC’s Shukla said any more financing of fossil fuel projects would send the wrong message ahead of Cop28. “We hope there are no more similar projects that slip through.”

Oil and gas projects accounted for around 27% of Ex-Im’s portfolio in the fiscal year ending in September 2022, rising by one percentage point compared to the previous period. The agency is currently considering financing other fossil fuel projects, including an oil and gas field in Bahrain.

The post US backs Indonesian oil refinery despite pledge to end fossil fuel finance appeared first on Climate Home News.

The proposal would limit the amount of carbon dioxide that power plants, which are the source of more than a quarter of U.S. emissions, can send into the atmosphere, putting the industry on a years-long course to install billions of dollars of new equipment or shut down.

Environmental groups and scientists have long argued that such steps are crucial to curb global warming, but fossil-fuel-producing states argue that they represent government overreach and threaten to destabilise the electric grid.

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The Environmental Protection Agency projects the plan would cut carbon emissions from coal plants and new gas plants by 617 million tonnes between 2028 and 2042. That’s around 44m tonnes a year, about the same as the nation of Denmark pumps out.

CCS or hydrogen

The proposal sets standards that would push companies to install carbon capture equipment that can siphon the carbon dioxide from a power plant’s smokestack before it reaches the atmosphere, or use super-low-emissions hydrogen as a fuel.

“EPA’s proposal relies on proven, readily available technologies to limit carbon pollution and seizes the momentum already underway in the power sector to move toward a cleaner future,” Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement.

Nations split over fossil fuels and carbon capture

Regan is to announce more details of the proposal in a youth-focused speech at the University of Maryland later on Thursday.

White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi told reporters the proposal will keep the U.S. on track to meet its goal to achieve net-zero power sector emissions by 2035.

“When you look at what is in the rule and what is proposed we are absolutely in line with the president’s goal,” he said.

Plan B

The proposal, more than 18 months in the making, reflects constraints imposed on the EPA by the Supreme Court, which ruled last year that the agency cannot impose a system-wide shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, but can regulate plants by setting technology-based standards applied on-site.

Europe’s push for global renewables target gains support

An effort by the administration of Democratic former President Barack Obama in 2015 to broadly slash power industry emissions was hung up by legal challenges and eventually repealed in 2019 under the administration of Republican President Donald Trump.

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who led the legal challenge against the previous EPA carbon rule, said in a statement that his state will “be ready once again to lead the charge in the fight against federal overreach.”

Industry push back

Investor-owned utility group Edison Electric Institute said it has been in close consultation with the EPA to ensure that the agency is flexible with compliance deadlines and recognizes the role of natural gas in cleaning up the sector.

Gas is a fossil fuel and the International Energy Agency has said that, if global warming is to be held to 1.5C, the amount of electricity produced with gas should peak around 2030 and fall dramatically by 2040. No new gas production projects are compatible with the strongest target of the Paris Agreement, it says.

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“We will assess EPA’s proposed new regulations through the lens of whether they align with our priorities and support our ability to provide customers with the reliable clean energy they need at an affordable cost,” EEI President Tom Kuhn said.

The proposal is subject to the regulatory rule-making process, including a public comment period. The final rule will have to reflect the public comments, although Congress has already authorized the EPA to craft the rule. It will likely take about a year for the rule to be finalized.

Better air

The EPA anticipates the proposal will cost the power industry over $10 billion, while yielding health and climate benefits of around $85 billion.

It said the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, will offer billions of dollars in tax incentives and credits that will bring down costs for deployment of CCS and green hydrogen, justifying its decision to base new standards on those technologies.

According to the proposal, new and existing large natural gas plants will be expected to install CCS that removes 90% of their carbon emissions by 2035, or alternatively to co-fire with 30% hydrogen by 2032 and 96% hydrogen by 2038.

Verra’s revamped forest offset programme comes under fire

New gas-fired “peaker plants,” used as backup generation, would face less stringent standards.

For existing coal plants – whose numbers have been declining in recent years – the EPA will take into account their planned lifespan. Coal plants that run past 2040, for example, will be required to install CCS technology starting in 2030, while those shutting between 2035 and 2040 would be required to co-fire with 40% gas by 2030.

Regan said the EPA is planning to see some early retirements of older plants as a result of the proposals, but said the impact on electricity prices will be “negligible.”

Environmental groups welcomed the proposal, saying it has been crafted carefully to weather legal fights.

“After two failed attempts to regulate the power sector’s tremendous carbon pollution load, EPA finally gets it just right with this proposal,” said Jay Duffy, litigation director for the Clean Air Task Force.

The post After court blocks renewables push, US promotes carbon capture & hydrogen appeared first on Climate Home News.

But since then, it’s all gone quiet. We looked into why and the answers are personal and geopolitical.

The two sides’ climate relationship is heavily reliant on the personal relationship of their climate envoys, John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua.

They’re both in their seventies and climate diplomacy is hard work.

A month after Kerry caught Covid at Cop27, Xie suffered what Kerry described as  “something of a stroke”, leaving him incapacitated for weeks and unable to travel abroad ever since.

Then there was the Chinese spy balloon scandal and the visit of Taiwan’s president to California to meet Congressional leader Kevin McCarthy.

But the relationship seems to have survived as Kerry has been invited to China for climate talks. Formal cooperation on methane emissions, the energy transition and saving forests could follow.

This week’s news: 

• Exxon scrambles to save investments before Colombia bans fracking
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• Mitsubishi bets on carbon removal while keeping coal plants
• Comment: Reporting on climate adaptation is a mess – here’s how to fix it
• Despite Taiwan and spy balloon tensions, China invites US for climate talks
• US solar boom on hold as industry awaits subsidy rules

Kerry and an unconfirmed Chinese representative will join 38 other ministers in Berlin on Tuesday, as the climate circus comes to town for the annual Petersberg climate dialogue.

After the opening speeches, in which the UAE’s Sultan Al-Jaber will lay out his vision for Cop28, the government officials will sit in circles around flip charts to talk.

That health-check on progress since the Paris Agreement was signed will dominate climate talks to Cop28 and beyond so we’ve published a handy explainer.

You can watch all the public parts here with opening speeches at 10.30am German time on Tuesday and a closing press conference at 1.45pm on Wednesday followed by words from German leader Olaf Scholz.

The post Climate Weekly – US-China talks stall but survive appeared first on Climate Home News.

The two veteran diplomats spoke virtually last week as the US hosted the Major Economies Forum on climate. During this talk,  Xie issued an invitation to Kerry, the former US secretary of state told Foreign Policy magazine.

“My hope is that out of these discussions we get back to where we were two years ago because we must be able too cooperate together on this issue”, Kerry said.

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While US president Joe Biden’s government has tried to keep climate talks separate to the broader US-China relationship, issues such as the independence of Taiwan and the recent Chinese spy balloon scandal have prevented the two sides from engaging meaningfully on climate change.

Health issues have also hindered progress, with Kerry telling Foreign Policy magazine that Xie suffered “something of a stroke” in January which prevented him from working for “a month and a half or so”. Xie has not made any foreign trips since and his participation in November’s Cop28 climate talks is in doubt.

Early promise

Biden appointed Kerry as his climate envoy shortly after he was elected in November 2020. Three months later, China’s president Xi Jinping brought Zhenhua out of retirement to be his climate envoy.

The appointments were seen as a boost to the chances that the two sides could work together on climate change, as they did under the Obama administration to bring about the Paris agreement in 2015, due to the two men’s long and friendly relationship.

UN: World set to blow through 1.5C carbon budget in 10 years

After dozens of virtual and several in-person meetings, these hopes were further boosted at the end of 2021 when the two sides announced a joint agreement on climate at the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow. Both sides committed to discuss measures to reduce methane emissions.

Powerful officials and experts from both countries were supposed to begin discussions on issues such as clean electricity, the circular economy and city climate action, as well as methane, in September 2022.

Pelosi triggers breakdown

But in August 2022, the head of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi went on an official visit to Taiwan, an island nation off China’s east coast that the Chinese government considers part of China.

China reacted by cancelling the climate talks, a move Kerry called “both disappointing and misguided”. Instead of cooperating, official from both sides engaged in public Twitter spats over their climate records.

Nancy Pelosi walks with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen (Photo: Makoto Lin/Taiwan President’s office)

A few months later in November, tensions cooled after Biden and Xi had a productive meeting on the sidelines of the G20 in Indonesia. They agreed to work together on climate change and their climate teams, both of which were at Cop27 in Egypt at the time, were allowed to talk formally again.

After that meeting, the US announced that its top foreign affairs official Anthony Blinken would visit China. But that trip was cancelled when the US military shot down a Chinese balloon in US airspace in February.

McCarthy compromises

Then in April, Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-Wen visited the US and met with Pelosi’s successor as leader of the US House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy.

According to Thom Woodroofe, senior fellow of the Asia Society Policy Institute and a former climate diplomat, the meeting was made less provocative to China because it was held in McCarthy’s home state of California rather than in the US Congress or in Taiwan.

The US government downplayed this trip by calling it a mere “transit stop” on Tsai’s way to the Caribbean.

Despite these setbacks, Kerry told Foreign Policy last week that the two sides are “back in the place where we are hopefully able to move forward”. But, he added, “it’s purely speculative at this point”.

If they did meet, Kerry said they would work together on reducing methane emissions, the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and stopping forests from being destroyed.

US solar boom on hold as industry awaits subsidy rules

Compared to geopolitics, intellectual property and other controversies, climate is considered a relatively easy issue for the two sides to discuss.

Greenpeace East Asia advisor Li Shuo told Climate Home: “If both countries can’t talk on such an issue with shared interest then I don’t know what else is there for the bilateral relationship.”

Woodroofe said that, if the US and China are going to cooperate, it has to be now. Kerry has talked about retiring soon, Xie is unwell and there may be a Republican in the White House next year, he noted.

“Diplomacy is all about personalities and people,” said Woodroofe. “The fact is we have the two elder statesmen – who both have the cache to achieve outcomes – it’s a really rare and significant situation that can achieve progress”.

“If not them now, then who?” he asked.

The post Despite Taiwan and spy balloon tensions, China invites US for climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act is offering billions of dollars in tax incentives for facilities using American equipment to accelerate decarbonization of the U.S. power sector while creating domestic jobs.

But the subsidies, signed into law last year, have yet to trigger a boom in U.S. solar manufacturing as investors await guidance on those perks. Their main question: will solar panels qualify if they are assembled in the United States using components made overseas?

As soon as this month, the U.S. Treasury Department is expected to release those details, the latest in a series of advisories on how companies can take advantage of the landmark law.

US pledges $1 billion to Green Climate Fund amid call to keep 1.5C in reach

The IRA contains a 30% tax credit for renewable energy facilities, with the domestic content bonus worth an additional 10% of the project cost. The IRA contains a number of such bonuses, including for building projects in disadvantaged communities and for adhering to certain labor standards.

“The average project size that we do is $300 (million) or $400 million. So you’re talking about a lot of money,” George Hershman, CEO of solar contractor SOLV Energy, said in an interview.

Array Technologies Inc of Albuquerque, New Mexico, which makes solar trackers, said its business has not yet experienced an expected IRA-related boom.

“The main feedback we get is that there needs to be clarification from the Department of Treasury on what qualifies as domestic content under the IRA,” CEO Kevin Hostetler said on a call with investors last month.

A Treasury Department spokesperson said the agency was “focused on providing clarity and certainty for taxpayers and ensuring the bonus as written in the statute is workable for taxpayers.”

Trade groups divided

The top U.S. solar trade group, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), has proposed that panels assembled in the United States should qualify for the credit regardless of where the cells inside them are produced.

There are no cells being made in the United States currently, the group argues, so the credit would be useless if panels were required to have American-made cells.

“Requiring U.S. cells, which currently don’t exist, would hold back solar deployment,” SEIA CEO Abigail Ross Hopper said in an emailed statement.

But manufacturers hoping to set up or expand domestic factories for solar components want stricter rules, saying requiring solar wafers and cells to be made in America is key to producing goods that today are almost exclusively made in China.

UN: World set to blow through 1.5C carbon budget in 10 years

In February, top U.S. solar manufacturer First Solar Inc said it would delay further expansion decisions until Treasury releases its guidelines.

A manufacturing group, Solar Energy Manufacturers for America (SEMA), said both manufacturers and developers want clear rules that will fuel growth.

A potential approach could be to allow the bonus credit to apply to domestically available goods, with that standard changing over a set timeline.

“There’s a lot of money that is ready to invest in this, and it is just waiting for this last tidbit of information to secure those investments,” Mike Carr, SEMA’s executive director, said in an interview. “Then everybody can march forward in lockstep.

The roll-out of solar power in the US was previously placed on hold after the US government ordered an investigation into whether Chinese solar panel exporters were getting around US tariffs by routing their exports through third countries in south-east Asia.

These tariffs could have resulted in retrospective tariffs being applied so many solar installers paused projects while the investigation took place. But last June, President Biden suspended tariffs on these south-east Asian nations for two years, to the relief of solar installers.

Green protectionism

As well as solar panels, the IRA offers more subsidies to electric vehicles which are assembled in North America, angering other car-making countries.

The head of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, has warned against “a slide into protectionism” through climate measures.

In March, she said that policies should stay focused on [the energy] transition—rather than providing a competitive advantage to domestic firms”, adding that policies should be “carefully designed” to avoid “trade tensions”.

The post US solar boom on hold as industry awaits subsidy rules appeared first on Climate Home News.

Leading the charge, the U.S. government has offered $3.5 billion in grants to build the factories that will capture and permanently store the gas – the largest such effort globally to help halt climate change through Direct Air Capture (DAC) and expanded a tax credit to $180/tonne to bolster the burgeoning technology.

The sums involved dwarf funding available in other regions, such as Britain which has pledged up to 100 million pounds ($124 million) for DAC research and development. That compares with $12 billion in federal spending to drive demand for personal and commercial electric vehicles, Boston Consulting Group estimated.

While bids for the U.S. DAC hub funding were due on March 13, the government and some companies have yet to fully disclose details about the applications, many of which Reuters is reporting for the first time. The US Energy Department expects to announce winning bids this summer.

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Worsening climate change and inadequate efforts to cut emissions have thrust the issue known as carbon removal to the top of the agenda, and U.N. scientists now estimate billions of tonnes of carbon will need to be sucked out of the atmosphere annually to reach a goal of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

While much of that will come from natural solutions such as planting more trees or increasing the ability of soil to sequester carbon, permanent carbon removal like DAC will also be needed.

Big barriers

Yet the list of hurdles is long.

The biggest plant to-date is capturing only 4,000 tonnes a year and costs are high, the talent pool is fledgling and corporate buyers for the credits largely remain on the sidelines. The role of oil companies in the space has also raised eyebrows and developers must muster support for hubs from communities that have often been damaged by big energy projects.

Plus, the CO2 must be stored permanently.

The U.S. government has said it wants to back four hubs, and interviews with more than 20 state, federal, company and investor sources show at least nine applications have been filed in a first round, with two major Occidental Petroleum projects also seen as strong contenders.

Among the most active firms so far has been Swiss start-up Climeworks, which has raised more than $800 million to date and is backed by Singaporean sovereign investor GIC.

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In his first major interview since taking part in applications for three hubs – in Louisiana, California and North Dakota – Chief Executive Christoph Gebald said all had the potential to be scaled to the U.S. government’s target of a million tonnes, known as a megatonne, a year.

The company planned to boost headcount from the low double-digits to more than 100 over the next 18 months, and by 2030, the three hubs could create 3,500 direct jobs and tens of thousands of indirect jobs, if given the green light, he said.

The real challenge, though, was access to talent, Gebald said. “Where are you getting those people in the next 30 years?… there’s no university programme on DAC.”

Gebald said it would cost “easily in the billions” of dollars to create a megatonne facility and the firm could look to raise funds depending on the success of its three bids, although it would likely wait until 2024 to return to the market.

“The lion’s share of the capital is for assets, so it really depends on the build out programme.”

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Another bidding for funding is start-up Carbon Capture, in partnership with Frontier Carbon Solutions and a new company called Twelve, which will use captured carbon to make sustainable aviation fuel in Wyoming, Jonas Lee, chief commercial officer for Carbon Capture, told Reuters.

“This industry is fragile right now, but all the arrows are lined up in the right direction. Now, we have to do our job which is to put iron in the ground and start taking out meaningful amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere,” Lee said.

“Hopefully that will help in a virtuous cycle that galvanizes even more support from corporations buying carbon credits, and maybe from state and local governments.”

Oil involvement

The sites being bid for stretch across the breadth of the country, yet all have several things in common: they are near cheap, renewable energy and plenty of space to store the gas.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, that has drawn the attention of some of the large, incumbent energy giants keen to position themselves for what could be a multi-trillion-dollar industry as demand for fossil fuels subsides.

Occidental Petroleum has said it is well positioned for federal grants for what could be the biggest Direct Air Capture plants in the world. It declined to say whether it had applied for support for two DAC projects it is developing in Texas.

Oil companies are also far ahead in getting permitted, sequestration wells, guaranteed to keep the CO2 in the ground.

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“We have the pore space to begin with, from the reservoirs that are depleted or depleting, that we’ve operated that now can be repurposed into sequestration by the engineers who know how that reservoir reacts,” said Chris Gould, chief sustainability officer, at California Resources Corp, an oil company that aims for net zero emissions and is working with Climeworks on a California project.

But the oil companies are still looked at with scepticism by some in the carbon removal community.

“It’s really essential for the success of direct air capture that this be about removing legacy emissions and not be about continued fossil fuel use,” said Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon 180, a DAC consultancy. “We’re hoping to see hubs that don’t have ties to fossil fuel production.”

Energy intensive

Most DAC processes use a liquid or solid that is engineered to naturally soak up carbon dioxide, then heated or treated to extract the carbon to be put underground.

But the energy to run the process, the factories, pipelines and storage is expensive. The jury is still out on whether it can be deployed at a scale big enough to affect the climate, at a cost the world can bear.

Across a range of technical processes, it can cost more than $1,000 to capture and lock away a ton of planet-warming carbon dioxide, yet the U.S. government has targeted a $100 a ton price tag.

Heirloom Carbon, a California company which with Climeworks is part of an application for a Louisiana hub, sees that as a realistic goal, while Carbon Capture told Reuters it expects to hit $250 a ton by 2030 and $150 a ton within a decade.

To get to a cost and scale that can affect the planet will mean designing an easily duplicated plant that does the same thing over and over again, like a franchised fast-food restaurant, said Dan Friedmann, chief executive of DAC firm Carbon Engineering, which is supplying technology to Occidental.

“It’s a McDonald’s kind of thing,” he said.

The post US bets big on carbon-sucking machines appeared first on Climate Home News.

The resolution passed today, led by Costa Rica, the Maldives, Morocco, Slovenia, and Switzerland, reaffirms the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment and called on states to protect environmental defenders trying to uphold it. It also calls on UN treaty bodies to promote its implementation.

John Knox, professor of international law at Wake Forest University School of Law and the UN’s former special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, said it marks a turning point from recognising the right “to actually starting to take steps to implement it”.

“It identifies concrete steps to make this right a reality, beginning with protecting environmental defenders and communities facing the deadly impacts of the ongoing triple planetary crisis,” agreed Sébastien Duyck, human rights and climate campaign manager at the Center for International Environmental Law.

International Court of Justice to advise states on climate duties: ‘A turning point for climate justice’

The US had been expected to withdraw its support for the resolution at the last hurdle and to call on others to join it, which would have resulted in a vote. However, it changed its mind following late-night negotiations.

Duyck said the US likely realised that isolating itself on “such an important resolution” would be diplomatically and publicly untenable. “Perhaps they had underestimated previously the resolve of other states but also civil society to see progress on the issue.”

Disassociating from consensus

In a statement to the council today, US ambassador Michèle Taylor, said her nation had “long recognised” the relationship between human rights and environmental protection and continued to support development of a right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment “in a manner that is consistent with international law”.

But she said it would “disassociate from consensus” on the subject because it has “significant concerns” about the resolution getting “ahead of the proper development of such a right”.

The Human Rights Council, made up of 47 member states elected by the General Assembly, has long acknowledged a link between climate change and human rights, with frontline nations carefully building a broad coalition of support on the subject.

The US is currently a member, but has not always been and has accused the institution of bias on a number of previous occasions.

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In 2017, it agreed to support a resolution calling for the protection of human rights from the impacts of climate change following intensive but constructive negotiations over the wording led by Bangladesh, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Four years later the council recognised access to a healthy and sustainable environment as a universal right, followed in July 2022 by a similar landmark resolution by the whole UN General Assembly.

The US was one of several states – alongside the UK – to initially oppose this. But, unlike China, India, Japan and Russia all of which abstained, it ultimately supported the decision – a move described by academics as a “striking exception” to its long-standing resistance to recognise ‘new’ human rights.

However, the US caveated its approval by stating that there is “no legal relationship between a right as recognised under this resolution and existing international law” and said it “does not recognise any change in the current state of conventional or customary international law”.

Last week, the US also joined the whole UN in asking the International Court of Justice to advise on states’ legal obligations to tackle climate change.

But US delegate Nicholas Hill warned the general assembly that “launching a judicial process, especially given the broad scope of the questions, will likely accentuate disagreements and not be conducive to advancing our ongoing diplomatic and other processes”.

‘No legal relationship’

In its latest statement to the Human Rights Council, the US appeared to be trying to head off any suggestion of legal obligations at all.

“Unless and until there is a transparent process through which governments have consented to be bound by such a right, a right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment has not yet been established as a matter of customary international law,” said Taylor.

She added that treaty law “does not yet provide for such a right” and “there is no legal relationship between such a right and existing international law”.

The US has suggested creating an intergovernmental working group to discuss this, but has had little support from other nations.

“I think the United States is out of step with the other countries of the world in suggesting that the right to a healthy environment is not binding as a matter of treaty law or related to other rights that are binding as a general matter,” said Knox.

“That doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily binding on the United States, but it is binding on states that have accepted it; most countries in the world have done so.”

The US was not the only country with concerns about the latest resolution, with the UK, Australia, China and India also voicing some degree of doubt. Russia tried to table a number of amendments, but is no longer a member of the Human Rights Council so was not successful.

Work to be done

Lucy McKernan, deputy director for the UN at Human Rights Watch’s office in Geneva, pointed out that these are all countries that do not recognise the right to a healthy environment in domestic law.

“They’re worried about the idea that… if there is a sort of a recognition at the international level, these rights might then be justiciable at the national level and national courts,” said McKernan.

The resolution, in particular, suggests the right to a healthy environment should be part of the universal periodic review of all UN nations’ human rights records.

McKernan said there was a tension between countries that insist these statements are simply political declarations and those that are trying to evolve the law via UN-level resolutions.

“Even though we have the recognition of the right by two significant bodies there’s still work to be done to ensure all states are moving forward together on this.”

David R Boyd, current UN special rapporteur on human rights and environment, said the last-minute change of heart by the US “avoided a colossal embarrassment”.

“Going forward I really hope that the US will join the overwhelming majority of states that not only support the recognition of this right but are willing to make the transformative changes needed to ensure it is enjoyed by billions of people currently suffering the adverse impacts of the planetary environmental crisis.”

This article was amended to add additional comments from David R Boyd

The post Moves to crystallise right to a healthy environment spark tension at UN appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will fund organisations, which could include large non-profit groups, tribal nations and universities, that will serve as grantmakers for its new Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking program that will invest in community-led projects in areas that have been historically overburdened by air and water pollution.

The money is part of $3 billion included for environmental justice block grants authorized by Congress in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Biden administration’s signature legislation that will drive investment of nearly $369 billion in clean energy and climate priorities.

“The money that we have been entrusted with is more than triage. It is more than fixing a small problem. The scale and the vision of this investment that Congress has given us will change these communities,” Robin Morris Collin, senior advisor for environmental justice at the EPA, told Reuters in an interview.

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Last September, the EPA launched a new office focused on the needs of low-income and minority communities that have been overburdened by pollution. It will oversee the deployment of the $3 billion in environmental justice grants.

The programme will help the Biden administration meet its goal of delivering 40% of the overall benefits of federal climate investments to disadvantaged communities and under-invested communities, which have had trouble accessing federal support.

“We are stepping our processes up to expand what has traditionally not been a very welcoming environment for low income and disadvantaged communities to access financial resources,” Collin told Reuters.

US backs Ajay Banga to lead World Bank in climate fight

The block grant program is one of several investments the IRA made focused on environmental and climate justice.

This month, the EPA outlined how states and non profit groups can apply for up to $27 billion from “green banks” that will offer low-cost financing for clean energy and emission reducing projects.

The deadline for organizations to apply is May 31, 2023. EPA expects the grant makers to start awarding subgrants no later than early 2024.

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Malpass received strong criticism over the bank’s commitment to climate action and over his personal views on climate change.

He had been under increasing pressure since last September, when he refused to publicly accept that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet.

Malpass was asked during an event on the sidelines of the UN general assembly whether he agreed with the scientific consensus on climate change.

The World Bank chief repeatedly dodged the question, to heckling from the audience, before eventually responding “I’m not a scientist”.

Malpass’ departure comes as the World Bank signalled its intention to make climate action more central to its mission.

In its “evolution roadmap” published in January, the World Bank said it “must evolve its mission” to address the crisis facing development and “support climate action”.

This followed calls on the World Bank from US, Germany and other government to launch “fundamental reform” on its climate agenda.

“Reached new records in climate financing”

Malpass did not say why he was leaving, only publishing in a statement that “after a good deal of thought, I’ve decided to pursue new challenges”.

Malpass said he was proud of what was achieved during his term. “We’ve worked hard to reduce poverty, increase economic growth, reduce government debt burdens, and improve living standards across the full range of human development”, he said.

He also added that under his tenureship the World Bank “reached major new records in financing levels, including climate financing”.

Study: IPCC asks emerging countries to drop coal faster than rich nations did

The World Bank said it delivered $31.7 billion in the fiscal year 2022 to help countries address climate change – a 19% increase on the previous period.

The bank, however, has come under fire for how it counts its climate spending.

Research by Oxfam – based on the World Bank’s climate funding in 2020 – claimed up to 40% of its spending could not be independently verified.

A Trump-appointee

A former investment-bank economist and Treasury official, Malpass was appointed by then US President Donald Trump in 2019.

The United States is the World Bank’s biggest shareholder and a long-standing tradition gives the US government the right to select the head of the World Bank.

However, Nadia Daar, the head of the Washington office of Oxfam International, said the process should be opened to more candidates to improve the credibility of the institution.

“If shareholders really want to ‘evolve’ the WorldBank, Malpass’ successor must be hired based on an open and merit-based selection process,” she said on Twitter.

UN budget cuts hindered response to Pakistan’s extreme floods

Sonia Dunlop, public banks lead at the E3G think tank said the next leader “must be a visionary with deep understanding of the food, energy and development crises gripping the world, have climate change as the one of the top priorities, be profoundly committed to multilateralism and have the full backing of developed and developing countries.”

She added: “It is of course high time that the world’s development bank had a woman at the helm.”

All the bank’s 12 presidents have been American men and all but Korean-American Jim Yong Kim have been white.

The post World Bank chief to step down early after climate controversy appeared first on Climate Home News.

On Friday, Lula visited Washington DC to meet with Biden at the White House. The US government’s summary of the meeting says “the United States announced its intent to work with [the US] Congress to provide funds for programs to protect and conserve the Brazilian Amazon, including initial support for the Amazon Fund, and to leverage investments in this critical region”.

The Amazon Fund is a pot of money administered by the Brazilian Development Bank which is spent on forest protection projects like small-scale farming and management of forests by indigenous people.

The $1.2 billion fund was suspended under Bolsonaro but revived on Lula’s first day in office. It is funded by Norway and Germany and the UK is considering a donation too. The US has never financially backed it before.

“Significant change”

When running to become president in 2020, Biden promised that if elected he would mobilise “the hemisphere and the world” to provide $20bn in public and private money to protect the world’s biggest rainforest.

When he came to power, his administration tried unsuccesfully to negotiate with far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who oversaw a spike in rainforest destruction and was hostile to what he claimed was foreign interference in Brazil’s affairs.

In January 2023, left-wing president Lula took power on a promise to end deforestation by giving more power to the environmental protection agencies gutted by Bolsonaro.

Missed deadline raises risk of delays to loss and damage fund

Natalie Unterstell, president of Brazilian think-tank Talanoa Institute, told Climate Home that a US donation to the Amazon Fund would be “a significant change in the way the US deals with climate finance for Brazil as it shifts the resources to Brazilian governance instead of acting through a cooperation agency.”

“It’s quite positive. This is an important gesture and a first step from the perspective of rebuilding the bilateral relationship between the countries. But we will need a billion-dollar strategy, not a million-dollar one, to achieve zero deforestation in this decade,” she added.

Limited budget

But the US has a poor record of delivering public climate finance, consistently giving less than much smaller European economies. The president has to negotiate with Congress over how to spend their budget, gaining the support of 60 of the 100 US Senators and a majority in the House of Representatives.

For the September 2022 to October 2023 fiscal year, Biden asked Congress for $11.4 billion for international climate finance but received only $1bn.

Biden was criticised for not fighting hard enough against Republicans in Congress for that finance. Diana Movius, forest lead at Climate Advisers, told a press briefing last week: “In those last minute budget negotiations with high level folks from both parties and from the administration that finance was likely not prioritised”.

UN budget cuts hindered response to Pakistan’s extreme floods

Since then, Biden’s Democrats have lost control of one part of Congress – the House of Representatives – while having just a slim majority in the Senate.

Joe Thwaites, an international climate finance advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said this will make it harder for Biden to get more climate finance when he makes his next budget request in the coming months.

In the October 2022 to September 2023 fiscal year, the Biden administration could give money to the Amazon Fund by drawing upon money earmarked for international development but, Meyer said, there was a lot of competition for this “fairly limited pool of funds”.

Renewed talks

E3G analyst Alden Meyer said that environmentalists would need to “work to block likely efforts to cut international climate funding”.

But both Meyer and Thwaites said that Republicans have tended to support tree-planting and tropical forest conservation more than other climate measures.

Denmark to put CO2 in seabed in step towards carbon negativity

Biden and Lula agreed to re-instate a joint working group on climate change which was set up in 2015 before being disbanded at the end of the year.

The working group will discuss cooperation on topics which include fighting deforestation, supporting clean energy deployment, adapting to climate change, making farming more climate-friendly and enhancing the bioeconomy.

Izabella Teixera was involved in the working group as Brazil’s environment minister between 2010 and 2016. She told Climate Home it had worked well, as then presidents Barack Obama and Dilma Rousseff were involved and influenced the talks at the highest level.

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The bi-annual Trade and Technology Council has become an exchange forum for trade issues between the EU and the US since its launch in June 2021. Relations between the partners are at a low following EU outrage in the face of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – a $369 billion clean industrial policy package – going into the meeting on 5 December.

“The Inflation Reduction Act is also raising concerns here in Europe, against a very particular backdrop for our industry and economy,” von der Leyen told students at the College of Europe on Sunday (4 December).

She singled out three aspects of the IRA: the “Buy American” logic that underpins parts of the subsidy scheme, tax breaks for companies producing in America, and “production subsidies that could lead to a subsidies race.”

This would have real effects on companies’ choice of production location. “We have all heard the stories of producers that are considering to relocate future investment from Europe to the US,” she added.

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So drastic appears the challenge that the Commission may again relent on keeping a lid on state aid. “We have to adjust our own rules to make it easier for public investments to power the transition,” she stressed.

Relaxing state aid rules has long been a priority for both business interests and countries with deep pockets. At Berlin’s behest, Brussels quadrupled the limit for no-questions-asked state aid via the “Temporary Crisis Framework” from €500,000 to €2 million not too long ago.

Coincidentally, this matched a demand by BusinessEurope in October. For clean technologies, the European business association last asked for a “clean technology” relaxation of state aid rules in late 2021.

“State aid is a tried and tested tool here in Europe,” von der Leyen affirmed.

However, while von der Leyen recognised the need for more state aid, she also warned of the distortions that even more state aid by individual member states would cause to the level playing field within the EU’s single market.

New EU funds?

“The goal of our European industrial policy is for European industry to be the leaders in the clean transition,” the Commission President added. This would mean boosting research and development, but also “new and additional funding at the EU level.”

In an interview with Journal du Dimanche, published on 3 December, the EU Commissioner for Single Market, Frenchman Thierry Breton, insisted that the EU “must also move forward in designing a massive support plan for industry”.

Breton has long advocated for another round of joint EU debt. “Since not all European states have the same debt capacity, we must ensure that they can borrow on the same terms,” he added. The figure he suggested is €350 billion, 2% of the EU GDP, to match the IRA.

“We have no choice. The United States has passed the IRA. China is helping its companies massively and trying to attract ours. It is up to us, and no one else, to devise our response,” Breton stressed.

In her speech, von der Leyen argued for the idea of a “Sovereignty Fund”, but she did not go into details, omitting the amount of money such a fund would need and how it should be financed.

“The new assertive industrial policy of our competitors needs a structural answer from the European Union,” she argued, saying that the EU needed a “common European industrial policy, and this common European industrial policy requires common European funding.”

Von der Leyen also referred to short-term measures via REPowerEU, the bloc’s plan to rid itself of Russian fossil fuels. “We are now working on boosting REPowerEU.”

Cordial approach

In her speech, Von der Leyen decided not to mention WTO, the global trading body. This presents a departure from the language used by Berlin and Paris. In his interview, Breton insisted that the IRA violates WTO rules, Habeck denounced “local content” rules as in violation of WTO rules in late November.

“Cooperation instead of confrontation,” she stressed.

The EU has been engaged in talks with the US both at the level of working groups and at a higher level, with Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovkis taking point. Breton has largely bowed out, opting not to take part in the 5 December meeting.

The “EU will respond in an adequate and well-calibrated manner to the IRA,” the President stressed, but ruled out a “costly trade war.” Whether a cheap trade war is on the cards is as yet unclear.

Instead, she highlighted all the achievements of transatlantic cooperation in the past year.

These include “additional deliveries of 15 bcm of LNG this year,” ending “long-standing” disputes on steel tariffs – a policy put in place by the Trump administration, the Airbus-Boeing dispute, and on securing data flows – for now.

On climate, von der Leyen lauded the effectiveness of joint action on the climate, citing the Global Methane Pledge, an agreement to cut 30% of the super-greenhouse gas methane by the decade.

Yet, the EU’s carbon border tax (CBAM), which will penalise countries with less ambitious climate action than the bloc, is already looming – set to start in the second half of the 2020s – which has business groups concerned.

All carrots, no stick, von der Leyen’s final offer to the US is to jointly dominate global standard setting.

“Take, for example, the charging infrastructure for EVs: if Europe and the United States agree on common standards, we will shape global standards and not leave it to others,” she stressed.

This article was produced by Euractiv and republished under a content sharing agreement.

The post EU chief flags concerns about Biden’s ‘buy American’ climate plans appeared first on Climate Home News.

Major oil and gas producers like the USA and Saudi Arabia, along with most of Asia, want the proposed treaty to be “bottom-up” like the Paris Agreement on climate change. This means countries can make their own plans and set their own targets.

A “high ambition coalition” covering roughly a quarter of UN member states including several European countries is calling for a top-down treaty that binds all to certain measures. This could include bans on certain types of plastics.

Nations are split on whether to emphasise recycling and waste management or whether to reduce the production of plastic. A key tactical debate concerns how much voting power the EU should get.

Neil Tangri, from the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, said: “The US is calling for a treaty with no binding obligations and no requirements to achieve its goal, such as bans on toxic polymers or a reduction in overall production. Every country just does what it wants to. I think that’s a terrible idea.”

He added: “It’s not going to get us where we need to go. It’s not going to restrain plastic production. It’s not going to get the toxics out of plastic. It’s not going to arrange a just transition for workers especially waste pickers. It’s going to be a lot of fancy words with no substance.”

The US is not one of the members (light blue) of the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution (Photo credit: High Ambition Coalition/Screenshot)

Big Oil’s plan B

As well as polluting land and sea, plastics are responsible for an estimated 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions through their lifecycle. They are made from oil and gas, potentially offering a lifeline to the sector as climate action cuts demand for hydrocarbons as a fuel source.

But awareness of plastic pollution is rising and in March, governments agreed to negotiate a legally binding UN treaty on the issue. They aim to land a deal by 2024 and, in Uruguay this week, held their first official committee meeting on the scope of the talks and the rules of procedure.

Cop27: Late-night fossil fuel fight leaves bitter aftertaste

At the start of the week, Saudi Arabia launched an impassioned defence of plastic in the plenary hall in Punta del Este. Its negotiator said: “We cannot deny the importance of plastics for humanity. Plastics have contributed to development and global commercial and economic prosperity, promoting the achievement of the [sustainable development goals].”

He added: “Plastic products are part of every part of our lives. They are present in manufacturing as well as renewable energy and food security. Plastics also play an important role in socioeconomic development in several countries and therefore the instrument must ensure that no-one is left behind by focusing on the priorities of developing countries”.

Bahrain’s negotiator said “plastics play an important role in our society” and are important for “sustainable development” while the Asia-Pacific group argued “our task is ending plastic pollution, not necessarily plastics themselves”.

The high ambition coalition, which counts the EU, Australia, Canada, small islands and a handful of African and Latin American states among its members, argued for an agreement which covers the whole lifecycle of plastics. That includes their production.

Antigua and Barbuda’s negotiator Asha Challenger, speaking on behalf of small islands, said that old models of international agreement are “not up to the task”.

EU mandate

In UN climate talks, the EU negotiates as a bloc on behalf of its 27 member states. Under the rules of procedure drafted by the UN Environment Programme (Unep), they would do the same in the plastics treaty talks.

While UN climate talks work on consensus, meaning any country can block an agreement, Unep proposed a voting system, under which numbers matter.

At a preliminary meeting in Dakar, Senegal, in June, the EU’s mandate to vote on behalf of all its members was questioned. In one alternative proposal, each member state would need to have a representative in the room for their vote to count.

On Friday in Punta del Esta, that question had not been settled. In the absence of an agreed voting procedure, decisions require consensus, which campaigners warned could lead to weaker outcomes.

At the Cop27 climate talks last month, a call by more than 80 countries to phase out fossil fuels was not put to open debate because a handful of oil and gas producers objected. At Cop26 the year before, the US denied developing countries – the overwhelming majority of parties – a steady flow of income to adapt to climate change impacts.

Carroll Muffett, CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law, told Climate Home: “Thirty years of experience with the [UN climate change talks] demonstrates the critical importance of parties to these negotiations having the ability to vote on complex issues, take a decision and move forward.”

The post Battle lines drawn in talks on new plastics treaty appeared first on Climate Home News.

President Joe Biden promised $11.4 billion a year by 2024 to support climate action in developing countries, including an overdue $2bn to the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

But he got little through Congress in his first two years of office. A rightward swing in midterm elections, while smaller than predicted, will make it harder to appropriate funds for the climate agenda.

Following a closely fought campaign, the Republicans flipped the House with a narrow margin, enabling them to block new climate legislation. Democrats retain control of the Senate after winning contested seats in Arizona and Nevada.

Broken promise

The US has yet to deliver on a pledge to the GCF made eight years ago. In 2014, then-president Barack Obama promised the GCF $3bn but he handed over just $1bn before leaving office. His successor Donald Trump did not give any money to the fund and to date neither has Biden.

Biden said he would double US climate finance to developing countries from Obama-era levels to $11.4bn a year by 2024. With Republicans in control of the House, it is now looking unlikely he will meet that target.

Republicans generally favour a small state and don’t see climate as a priority for public spending. Wyoming Senator John Barrasso described Biden’s 2022 budget proposal as “another pipe dream of liberal activism and climate extremism. It spends too much, borrows too much, and taxes too much.”

With the Republicans in control of the House, “I don’t anticipate any sort of interest or support in international climate finance,” said Clarence Edwards, an environmental advocate with the non-profit Friends Committee on National Legislation.

John Kerry’s offsets plan sets early test for UN net zero standards

“It was a difficult road for climate finance, even with a Democratically controlled Congress,” he said. In March, US Congress approved a mere $1 billion in international climate finance for 2022, only $387 million more than the funding allocated during Trump’s presidency. 

The US should be providing $45-50bn of finance every year under a “fair share” calculation factoring in the size of its economy and historical emissions, according to the Overseas Development Institute. Campaigners described the 2022 budget as a “betrayal”.

But all hope is not lost.

Democrats have other avenues to channel climate funds. Of the $11.4bn pledge, Biden has requested that Congress appropriates half ($5.3bn). The remainder is to come through various development agencies, such as the Development Finance Corporation and the Trade and Development Authority.

While Congress still appropriates funds to these agencies, this budget is not climate-specific. The individual organisations can set their own priorities.

“The administration needs to fight for as much dedicated climate finance as possible in the appropriations bill, but also pursue other avenues, including getting agencies such as the Development Finance Corporation and Export-Import Bank to invest more in climate,” Joe Thwaites, an international climate finance advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), told Climate Home News.

International signals

A Republican controlled House could signal to other big emitters that they can stall climate progress, experts told Climate Home News. 

“Laggards are going to feel little to no pressure to actually take action,” said Kate DeAngelis, international finance programme manager at Friends of the Earth Action. South Korea, for example, recently elected a Conservative government, and Japan has been pushing the expansion of LNG at home and abroad, she said.

“The elections are very interesting for Japan,” said Hanna Hakko, senior analyst at E3G. The US is Japan’s “most important ally”, therefore the Asian country strives to keep a similar ambition level, Hakko said. She added that Japan will be watching closely what kind of positions the US will take at the G7 next year, which Tokyo is hosting.

European governments may also “continue to delay or release policies with giant loopholes for gas,” said DeAngelis. The Netherlands, for example, said last week that it will continue to provide international finance for fossil fuel projects in 2023, deferring a promise made at Cop26.

Secured wins

Biden’s landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), is expected to survive Republicans flipping the House, however.  

The biggest federal climate spending package in US history, $370bn in total, will reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 42% between 2005 and 2030, according to analysis by Princeton University’s Repeat project.

“I’m not concerned about the unwinding of any recent policy wins that have happened in the US,” said Lindsey Baxter Griffith, federal policy officer for the Clean Air Task Force (CATF).

“Policymaking is difficult and undoing it is just as difficult,” she said. “We’re likely to see a lot of oversight, but with President Biden still in the White House, he’s not going to sign off on any legislation to undo those programmes.”

“There might have been an initial desire to try to roll back parts of the IRA, but the majority of the funds [in the IRA] will go to Republican controlled states,” agreed Edwards. “Once you pass something and people start seeing the benefits of the bill, it’s hard to [repeal it],” he said, adding that Republicans spent years trying to repeal Obamacare but weren’t able to.

Common ground

Although a Republican House is likely to push back on climate finance, there’s broad consensus on other climate issues, such as nuclear, carbon markets and drought resilience, said Edwards.

Climate and clean energy is one of the legislative areas that has received the most bipartisan support over the past two years, according to a report by CATF.

“There’s actually quite a lot to build on and there’s an opportunity next year for the Senate and House to cooperate on further energy legislation and industrial decarbonisation,” said Baxter Griffith.

By passing the IRA in his first term as president, Biden has secured his climate legacy, experts said. 

“He’s done a tremendous amount,” said Edwards. “This administration has done much more than any other administrations and really laid the foundations to accelerate a low-carbon economy.”

“One of the major criticisms of Obama was that he didn’t do what he could when he had control and tried to get things done in the last hour,” said DeAngelis. “Biden learned from that. He was pushing his climate agenda, every chance he got.” 

“The last two years have been monumental… there have been some incredible policy wins,” said Griffith Baxter. “But there’s still quite a lot of work this administration has to do” on clean air, methane and public health regulations, she said.

The post Republican gains quash hopes of US delivering on climate finance appeared first on Climate Home News.

But if hurricanes don’t discriminate, people do. How easy it is to rebuild your life when your home has been destroyed depends on your wealth, your gender, your level of education and the colour of your passport.

For the hurricane-hit corn farmers of El Cubulero in Honduras, options are limited. Without insurance, staying put and rebuilding their life and livelihood from scratch is tough. Many look to the US for new opportunities.

Without an easy route to a visa, moving north often means a difficult and dangerous journey, particularly for women. Despite early promises of support for resettling climate migrants, Joe Biden has done little to help.

In Florida, more people have access to insurance to help them rebuild. But intensifying storms and projected sea level rise mean insurance companies increasingly won’t touch the state’s property market with a barge pole. Or at least they won’t without a huge premium.

So poorer Floridians are on the move too, although without the dangers most Hondurans must endure.

In the jargon-filled world of UN Climate Change, this is known as “loss and damage”. Funding to address it will be a key demand of developing countries at Cop27.

The Alliance of Small Island States has been refining its demands. Its lead negotiator told Climate Home this week that the group will call for a ‘response fund’ based on regular, voluntary, fundraising rounds. Read about how the fund might work here.

But, as South Africa is finding out, relying on rich countries’ generosity will often lead to disappointment.

While president Cyril Ramaphosa said last year that the much-trumpeted $8.5bn “just energy transition partnership” would be mostly grants, insiders told Chloé Farand grants made up only around 3% of the package.

This week’s stories…

• Hurricane Ian could push insurers out of Florida
• Joe Biden’s abandoned climate migrant reforms leave hurricane victims stranded
• South Africa approves $8.5bn energy transition investment plan
• Small island states to propose ‘response fund’ for climate victims at Cop27
• Thanks to fossil fuel crisis, wind and solar payback time drops to one year

The post Storms don’t discriminate, people do – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

Analysts say the excessive costs from the storm could lead to insurers either avoiding Florida property altogether or charging sky-high premiums to homeowners.  

The category four hurricane, which was one of the most powerful to ever make landfall in Florida, was also the US’ second-largest hurricane loss event on record, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  

Privately insured losses in Florida are estimated at $46-67bn, not including flood insurance. Besides damaging homes and infrastructure, the hurricane also ruined orange farms in the largest producing state.

US media reports that Ian destroyed the financial security of many pensioners who invested their life savings in Florida properties that were lost to the hurricane. 

Floridians already pay the highest home insurance premiums in the US, an average $4,321 per year – three times higher than the national average. 

This is due to the high hurricane risk as well as “a manmade crisis generated by rampant roof replacement claim fraud schemes and runaway litigation,” Mark Friedlander, communications director of the Insurance Information Institute, told Climate Home News.  

This year, Florida’s insurance premium renewals increased by a third on average, said Friedlander. Ian’s destruction is expected to hike these premiums again next year, by up to a half.

Joe Biden’s abandoned climate migrant reforms leave hurricane victims stranded

Flood damage is not covered under standard homeowners’ policies. The vast majority is covered by the federal government’s flood insurance programme. Homeowners could be hit with $10-$17bn in flooding losses that aren’t covered by their insurance policies, according to research firm CoreLogic. That’s $500-800 per Florida resident.

Ian has delivered a major blow to Florida’s insurance market which was already unstable and embroiled in financial difficulties. 

Many of Florida’s insurers rely heavily on reinsurers, companies that insure insurance companies against claims exceeding their cash reserves.

Several property insurers have said they expect reinsurers to carry the majority of the burden. Allstate said it expects to recover 45% of its $671m losses from reinsurance and Progressive said that $1.2bn of its $1.4bn losses will be absorbed by reinsurers. 

A report by credit ratings agency Moody’s warned that reinsurers will face heavy losses arising from Ian. Reinsurer Swiss Re has said it expects $1.3bn in insurance claims and forecast a third quarter net loss of $500m because of the damage caused by Ian.

Another reinsurer, Everest Re, said on Wednesday that it expects to report $600m in pre-tax losses from Ian in the third quarter.

Given the scale of the losses, primary insurers will share a significant part of the loss burden with reinsurers, the Moody’s report said.

In addition to covering the claims from Hurricane Ian, Friedlander said the insurance industry is expected to face “an excessive level of litigation”, with legal costs, including lawyers’ fees, reaching between $10-20bn.  

“Many reinsurers have indicated they may no longer provide coverage to Florida insurers or will charge extremely high renewal rates, because of the state’s litigious environment,” he said. Bankers Insurance Group and Lexington Insurance Company,  two regional firms, said before the hurricane that they are withdrawing from the market and six Florida property insurers have declared insolvency this year. 

South Africa approves $8.5bn energy transition investment plan

The US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen referred to Ian’s impact this week when she launched an assessment into how worsening extreme weather is impacting the cost of insurance. “The recent impacts in Florida from Hurricane Ian demonstrate the critical nature of this work and the need for an increased understanding of insurance market vulnerabilities in the United States,” Yellen said. 

The treasury department announced it would request data at postcode level from US insurance companies regarding their prices and policies.

The data would provide the insurance office with “consistent, granular, and comparable insurance data needed to help assess the potential for major disruptions of private insurance coverage in regions of the country that are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change,” the treasury said in a statement. 

The post Hurricane Ian could push insurers out of Florida appeared first on Climate Home News.

Shortly after coming to power, Joe Biden ordered his national security adviser Jake Sullivan to put together a report on “options for protection and resettlement” for those displaced by climate change.

But eight months later, the report was released. Its most concrete recommendation was to form an interagency working group on climate and migration. This group has yet to meet.

In September 2022, the leaders of 14 US NGOs called on Biden to give a priority status, known as P2, to hurricane and drought victims from Honduras and Guatemala. But his administration has so far ignored these calls.

Two weeks ago, the urgency of providing climate migration routes was reinforced when tropical storm Julia hit Central America.

It killed at least 54 people and affected nearly a million. With their homes destroyed, many of these people are looking for a new life. While most move within their country, some have headed north towards the US.

Helder López is a lawyer from the Honduran village of El Cubulero in a poor, usually dry part of the country. He told Climate Home that about a quarter of the village had flooded.

A flooded home in El Cubulero (Photo: Helder López )

When the storm hit, he and his family sheltered on the top floor of their house along with neighbours who didn’t have a second floor.

Downstairs, everything flooded. The night felt long and darker than usual, he says, as a result of the electricity blackouts, which are still ongoing in several places.

Not everyone was as lucky as him, he says. Hundreds fled to shelters as their homes flooded. At least 200 of the village’s cows were killed. Entire fields of corn, which would have been turned into tortillas, were destroyed. 

Fields of corn were destroyed by the storm. (Photo: Helder Lopez)

“These losses are huge”, López said, “getting back up again will have to happen slowly, the impact on the local economy is high. Frankly, it’s worrying. Now that [the villagers] capital was reduced, they’ll have to adapt and find how they can get back up again”.

Many times, getting back up means leaving, he says. In El Cubulero, job opportunities are scarce and, with their crops ruined, many residents leave for the US and send back money to help their families.

In Central America, this is common. In Honduras, about 26% of the GDP is from Hondurans sending money from abroad. The figures are similar for El Salvador and Guatemala.

But both getting to and staying in the US is difficult and dangerous. Without high levels of wealth or education or family in the US, the main legal route is through temporary work visas.

Small island states to propose ‘response fund’ for climate victims at Cop27

This year, the US opened 65,000 new temporary work visas for “unskilled workers” -with 20,000 reserved for Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

But Lopez said it’s difficult for people in his village to access these visas. “How are they asking for a person in a rural village, where there’s high illiteracy, to speak English? It’s incongruent”, he said.

Without (and sometimes with) visas, many Central American migrants, particularly women, face a dangerous journey to the US. Human rights organizations estimate that between 60 to 80% of women face sexual violence as they migrate.

If caught at the US border, they face detention by US authorities. Ricardo Pineda, director of the climate NGO Sustena Honduras, told Climate Home that “even now” these detention facilities are “similar to concentration camps”.

South Africa approves $8.5bn energy transition investment plan

Pineda said that Biden’s promise to resettle migrants affected by extreme weather was “very valuable”, but added “it’s getting late” to attend the needs of Central American climate refugees.

The Biden administration “is falling behind with this urgent matter,” Pineda said. “Attending to climate migration will require larger compromises and larger investments to increase resilience among countries. That will require more cooperation,” he added. 

Kayly Ober, from the US-based NGO Refugees International, told Climate Home: “Our team was just in Guatemala this past week and people that had family abroad to send remittances after [hurricanes] Eta and Iota faired better than those that didn’t.”

She added: “We’re hoping that the Biden administration will make good on their promise to explore pathways in the context of climate change, although we have yet to see much movement on that front. ”

The Biden administration is about to make a decision on whether to extend “temporary protected status” to Hondurans in the US.

If they don’t, around 60,000 Hondurans who have lived in the US for more than 20 years will have to leave the US or be deported, Ober said.

The post Joe Biden’s abandoned climate migrant reforms leave hurricane victims stranded appeared first on Climate Home News.

The emails are between the US-based employees of companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell and lobbyists working on their behalf.

After decades of delaying climate action, these companies now present themselves as part of the solution to climate change. Some 503 fossil fuel representatives attended last year’s Cop26 climate talks, touting the potential of technologies like biofuels, hydrogen and carbon capture to prolong the industry’s relevance.

But these released emails show that what they say in private is different to what they say in public.

Ro Khanna, a Democrat representing California, told the hearing that the documents were “explosive” and he was “appalled” on reading them. Here are five things we learned.

1.Shell will not sacrifice profits for the climate

Under outgoing CEO Ben Van Beurden, Shell has been keen to differentiate itself from other fossil fuel companies.

Sitting alongside climate activists at a TED talk in December 2021, Van Beurden said: “I share, my company shares the anxiety of what is going on at the moment. We get it and we want to be on the right side of history.”

But in January 2020, six years into Van Beurden’s tenure, a Shell lobbyist in Washington DC called Patricia Tamez sent colleagues a series of slides on what they should and should not say publicly.

It says that Shell will not sacrifice profits for the climate. “Please do not give the impression that Shell is willing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to levels that do not make business sense”, the memo says.

The same briefing says “please do not imply, suggest, or leave it open for possible misinterpretation that [net zero emissions] is a Shell goal or target”. Shell has energy intensity targets but “no immediate plans to move to a net-zero emissions portfolio over our investment horizon of 10-20 years,” it adds.

This was only three months before the company changed tack and announced a target of net zero emissions by 2050.

2.Shell is scared of lawsuits…

The same briefing shows Shell’s fear of the growing number of climate lawsuits brought by campaigners around the world.

In 2019, Dutch campaigners took Shell to court in an attempt to force it to align its business model with the goals of the Paris agreement. In 2021, they won. Shell is appealing against the ruling.

“We are seeing a rising number of legal cases including active litigation specifically against Shell and other oil companies related to climate change and its impacts,” the memo warns.

It continues: “Discipline, consistency and heightened awareness of the sensitivities in our communications regarding energy transitions is therefore paramount, as what we are saying has the potential to either expose or insulate Shell to/from the legitimacy of further claims – from greenwashing to misleading investors”.

…and campaigners

In May 2021, a Shell lobbyist on the US West Coast called Steve Lesher told a colleague that Shell’s sell-off of the Deer Park oil refinery is “further evidence that the company is divesting of most of the really energy intensive carbon emitters”.

He continues: “You can throw in our sale of the Canadian oil sands operation from a few years back (a big greenhouse gas headache with a lot of NGO opposition) and see this trend pretty clearly.”

He finishes: “No one has said this, mind you but the pattern is pretty clear: If you’re a major greenhouse gas emitter, and particularly if you operate in a [greenhouse gas] sensitive area like [California], [Washington state] or [Canada], your days in the Shell Family are probably numbered.”

Asked by colleague Gavin McHugh if there’s a similar trend outside the US, he says the Pernis oil refinery in the Netherlands “will be an interesting one to watch” as “it’s right there in the motherland where we are most sensitive and our reputation is mixed”.

“The other pattern to notice,” Lesher says, “is where we DO own high [greenhouse gas] intensive things, it’s in areas where they aren’t that politically sensitive about such matters: China, Singapore, Malaysia, Louisiana…”.

Since Lesher’s email, Shell has continued to sell off assets in places like Scotland’s Cambo oil field after political opposition. But developments in Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Oman, Malaysia, Brunei and Brazil continue.

3. Shell sees climate activists and scientists as enemies

In 2019, Shell invited a climate scientist called Peter Kalmus to speak at a conference. But after he provided his slides ahead of the event, Kalmus was disinvited.

US website The Intercept reported on the incident. Shell’s climate change adviser David Hone shared the article with colleagues, commenting that it was “not a very flattering account”.

He added: “Looks like the organisers didn’t do their due diligence before reaching out to a climate scientist.”

Sharing official lines to take on the incident for Shell staff, press officer Curtis Smith remarked “the clean up on [a]isle 5 because of this shit show continues”.

A few months earlier, an external lobbyist called John Mulligan emailed Shell’s in-house lobbyists “flagging that the Sunrise Movement recently announced that they’re organizing a ‘Road to the Green New Deal’ tour”.

Shell’s chief lobbyist Krista Johnson said “I wish them the very best”. Shell’s press officer Curtis Smith replied “and bedbugs”.

4. Exxon and Chevron didn’t want to commit to the Paris Agreement

The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) is a group of 12 oil and gas companies chaired by the former chief executive of BP Bob Dudley. Its stated mission is to “accelerate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions”.

US companies ExxonMobil, Chevron and Occidental Petroleum joined the group in 2018. These emails reveal that Exxon and Chevron immediately tried to water down the group’s climate commitments.

ExxonMobil’s policy manager Peter Trelenberg sent a memo to his CEO Darren Woods before Woods jetted off to Geneva for the OGCI CEOs meeting. The memo said Exxon and Chevron were trying to remove language in support of the Paris Agreement because “creating a tie between our advocacy/engagements and the Paris Agreement could create a potential commitment to advocate on the Paris Agreement goals”.

Trelenberg added: “Need to remove language that potentially commits members to enhanced climate-related governance, strategy, risk management and performance metrics and targets.”

Last year, Trelenberg wrote publicly that Exxon has supported the Paris Agreement “framework” since 2015 and commended the new president Joe Biden for re-joining it.

“Chevron has expressed that they are generally aligned with” Exxon’s edits, Trelenberg said. An annotated document shows Chevron trying to change a commitment to “net zero emissions” to a commitment to the vaguer “emissions reduction”.

OGCI responses suggest exasperation at the attempts by the two new American members to change language that had long been agreed. “Net zero emissions is the goal and our support for it is historical,” OGCI says.

5. Exxon researchers don’t buy the company’s hype on biofuels

A recent report by Influence Map found that 65% of ExxonMobil’s messaging contains green claims while just 8% of its investment is in low-carbon technology.

One of the most common green claims is that Exxon is pioneering the development of sustainable biofuels like algae. But, while algae is green, it’s very difficult to produce it on a scale big enough to be useful for decarbonisation.

The leaked emails show Exxon’s researchers know this, even if its advertising team doesn’t. In 2016, an Exxon marketer suggested a TV advert mentioned Exxon is “researching ways to turn abundant algae into biofuels”.

Neely Nelson from Exxon’s research team pushed back. “The concern on abundant is that, even though they are abundant, it will take a ton of them to make biofuels so that might create some angst with the research folks who know that.”

Notes alongside a 2018 set of powerpoint slides created by Exxon researchers say that “scale has been a challenge” for biofuels. It says algae- based fuels are “still decades away from the scale we need”.

Exxon continues to promote its algae research in adverts. For example, an advert from 2021 says “we want something that will grow really fast, so we can make a lot of fuel”.

The post Bedbugs, sh*t shows and algae hype: 5 reveals from Big Oil emails appeared first on Climate Home News.

Earlier this month, China cancelled a climate working group with the US after congressional leader Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. Beijing regards the island state as part of China, despite its independent democracy, and enforces its diplomatic isolation from the rest of the world.

As the US passed $370bn of climate measures in its Inflation Reduction Act, the US’s ambassador to China Nicholas Burns tweeted “the US is acting on climate change… [China] should follow and reconsider its suspension of climate cooperation with the US”.

The U.S. is acting on Climate Change. The recent bill passed by Congress is the largest climate investment in our history and could lead to a roughly 40% reduction in U.S. emissions by 2030. The PRC should follow+reconsider its suspension of climate cooperation with the U.S. https://t.co/BmvnaIkiib

— Ambassador Nicholas Burns (@USAmbChina) August 14, 2022

China’s foreign ministry account responded coolly. It quote-tweeted Burns saying: “Good to hear. But what matters is, can the US deliver?”

The anonymous official added: “Our suggestion: Start by lifting sanctions on Xinjiang’s photovoltaic [solar power] industry +fulfilling its pledge under the Green Climate Fund+ contributing the US’s fair share of an annual $100 billion​​ climate​ finance committed​ by developed countries to [developing] countries.”

Our suggestion: Start by lifting sanctions on Xinjiang’s photovoltaic industry +fulfilling its pledge under the Green Climate Fund+ contributing the US’s fair share of an annual $100 billion​​ climate​ finance committed​ by developed countries to deleveping countries.

— Spokesperson发言人办公室 (@MFA_China) August 16, 2022

The public sparring continued, with Burns replying: “Combatting climate change is a shared responsibility. [China] accounts for 27% of global emissions, the US 11% so why doesn’t [China] resume our climate dialogue? We’re ready.”

The Inflation Reduction Act is now law, you can bet will meet our commitments. But combatting climate change is a shared responsibility: PRC accounts for 27% of global emissions, the U.S. 11%, so why doesn’t the PRC resume our climate dialogue? We’re ready. https://t.co/Z3XOaYIUWb

— Ambassador Nicholas Burns (@USAmbChina) August 17, 2022

The cancelled working group would have brought together experts and politicians from both countries to collaborate on issues like methane emission reductions, clean electricity, the circular economy and climate action from cities.

US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns called on Beijing to “follow” Washington (Pic: Flickr/Brookings Institution)

The Inflation Reduction Act is the US’ largest ever climate spending package. Princeton University’s Repeat project estimates the bill will cut US emissions by 42% between 2005 and 2030. Previously, it was on course for a 27% reduction and it’s target is 50-52%.

The Biden Administration has seized the moment to call on other big emitters to raise their game. But negotiators from emerging economies told Climate Home that while US action could help bring down clean technology costs for everyone, they needed direct support to increase their ambition.

The US lags other developed countries in providing climate finance, including through the UN’s flagship Green Climate Fund. President Joe Biden promised more, but has yet to deliver, and his chances of getting funds through Congress are expected to shrink after November’s midterm elections.

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China’s call to end sanctions on the solar industry of the Chinese region of Xinjiang is unlikely to be heeded. The US and independent experts say that quartz, a key ingredient in  polysilicon and therefore solar panels, is mined in Xinjiang by forced labourers from the Uyghur ethnic minority.

The US has banned imports of all goods made in Xinjiang and customs official have seized shipments of solar panels suspected to contain quartz and polysilicon from Xinjiang at the US border.

A 2021 report by Sheffield Hallam University researchers found that Uyghur people were forced to produce quartz and polysilicon under China’s “labour transfer” and “surplus labour” programmes. The Chinese government claims these work programmes are voluntary.

Around 95% of the world’s solar modules rely on solar-grade polysilicon, the report says, and 45% of this is produced in Xinjiang. This polysilicon can be found in solar panels produced and used anywhere in the world.

Burns’s claim that China’s emissions are far higher than the US’s is true but only part of the story. China has over four times as many people, so the average Chinese resident is responsible for half the emissions of an American.

According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, China spent around $300bn a year on the energy transition last year while the US spent $120bn, counting public and private investments.

The post China responds coolly to US climate bill, rejecting a call to resume cooperation appeared first on Climate Home News.