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Momentum matters on climate, and he won’t get another chance to make an urgent first impression

It lasted only three hours, but Joe Biden’s visit to Egypt on Friday afternoon underlined that it was a mistake for Anthony Albanese not to attend the annual UN climate conference known as Cop27.

Not a disastrous mistake, but an avoidable one, and a lost opportunity. The prime minister has turned down a chance to argue in front of more than 110 other leaders that his still-new government is serious about pushing for greater action – that, in the words of the climate change minister, Chris Bowen, “we’re back” after years as a global laggard. Momentum matters on climate, and Albanese won’t get another chance to make an urgent first impression.

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With voters increasingly fearful about fires, floods and extreme temperatures, can the Tories find a way back towards reality?

On 8 November 1989, Margaret Thatcher gave a 4,000-word address to the United Nations general assembly in New York. It was an eloquent, urgent speech, book-ended with references to Charles Darwin and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and full of portents of looming climate disaster that we now know all too well: the melting of polar ice, the shrinking of the Amazon rainforest, and the prospect of more frequent hurricanes, floods and water shortages.

In response, “squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay” was a self-evident path to catastrophe: what was needed, she told her audience, was “a vast international, co-operative effort”, with no refusers or deniers. “Every country will be affected,” she said, “and no one can opt out.”

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

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The Papua New Guinea government will entrust its carbon regulation framework to a UAE-based company launched less than a month ago, according to media reports, adding to campaigner concerns that the number of actors involved in the heavily-forested nation's climate policy was creating confusion.

Carbon market players have raised long-running concerns about the prospect of a grievance mechanism being designed under Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, as little progress was made by parties Saturday. 

The Met says Just Stop Oil are a tiny minority causing ‘disproportionate’ disruption. Isn’t environmental Armageddon enough justification?

Sometimes, a report of bad news makes me realise that the world circumstances I’d been living in weren’t as bleak as I’d been assuming. The death of Ella Fitzgerald did this for me. I’d thought she was long dead. It made me realise that I’d missed years of enjoying the fact of her still being alive. Perhaps, along with the “in memoriam” segment at the Baftas, there should also be a “surprisingly still alive” video to encourage us to appreciate some elderly stars while they’re still faintly twinkling.

I used to get the same sensation of retrospective positivity from reported job losses in the British car industry. I was always pleasantly surprised that there were still that many jobs left to lose. That’ll be it now though, I always thought, but then, a year or so later, another gargantuan layoff was announced and I was once again impressed by how many people in the UK had apparently still been making cars all this time.

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Rooftop solar PV switched off in South Australia after state cut off from rest of grid because of storm damage to transmission towers.

The post Rooftop solar switched off in South Australia, as state isolated after storm damage to network appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Network operators have provided very little evidence to substantiate the need for the sun tax - the export tariff for rooftop PV.

The post Here comes the sun tax for rooftop PV – and it’s not alright appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Negotiations over the contentious matter of loss and damage from the impacts of climate change appeared at loggerheads as the first week of COP27 drew to a close in Sharm el-Sheikh.

‘The wild west approach needs to end,’ says climate scientist Bill Hare, amid warning targets should be met by cuts in absolute emissions

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The Australian government risks becoming a “state sponsoring greenwashing” if it keeps allowing companies to use carbon offsets without much tighter regulations, according to a member of an expert panel advising the UN on net zero climate pledges.

The UN panel released recommendations at the Cop27 climate summit in Egypt for corporations, regions and policymakers around the world on credible net zero pledges.

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Russia's climate action remains amongst the worst in the world despite Moscow's recent pledge to double the size of the nation's vast carbon sink, according to analysis that defined the efforts as “critically insufficient”.

An energy firm announced Friday it will develop a framework for sourcing carbon credits from responsibly sourced gas processes to then be brought to the voluntary carbon market, according to a media release.

Project promises to create jobs and restore biodiversity, but locals say it is taking food-growing land out of production

The rolling fields south of Grantham are scenic, but these huge expanses of wheat and beans are almost bereft of insects in summer. In autumn, a few skylarks sing and the occasional buzzard soars, but there is precious little life in the landscape.

But soon a 1,525-acre swath of this productive Lincolnshire farmland will be brimming with wildlife, according to a new company that aims to restore biodiversity and make money by rewilding farmland.

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The heavy presence of lobbyists from Moscow suggests Russia is using the climate talks to drum up business

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Russian oligarchs and executives from multiple companies under international sanctions are among the lobbyists currently attending Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Among those at the pivotal climate talks are the billionaire and former aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska, who is under UK sanctions, and the billionaire Andrey Melnichenko, the former head of the Russian fertiliser company the EuroChem group, who has been targeted with individual sanctions by the European Union which he disputed, calling them “absurd and nonsensical”.

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Ghana and Switzerland have authorised the first-ever internationally transferred mitigation outcome (ITMO), a milestone transaction under the Paris Agreement's Article 6.2 provision a year since the two nations struck an overarching bilateral crediting agreement.

A South Korean government agency has unveiled a raft of strategic partnerships struck at the ongoing COP27, as it prepares to ramp up the East Asian nation’s engagement with the voluntary carbon market.

Saudi Arabia on Friday announced it will launch a domestic carbon credit scheme at the start of 2023, with baseline and MRV methodologies designed specifically according to the country's circumstances.

As the UN climate conference reaches the end of its first week, activists around the world are calling for stronger climate action

A report released early this morning by campaigners Reboot Food finds that enough protein to feed the world could be produced in an area smaller than London.

The report suggests that if animal protein was grown through fermentation in tanks, rather than livestock in fields or barns, it would be a 40,900 times more efficient use of land.

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Major producers of soya and beef accused of failing to deliver on pledges to stop deforestation

The world’s largest food companies, whose products have been linked to the widespread destruction of rainforests, have failed to come up with an adequate strategy to align their business practices with the 1.5C climate target, according to campaigners.

The leading producers of soya beans, palm oil, cocoa and cattle published their roadmap to align with 1.5C earlier this week, promising to develop and publish commodity-specific, time-bound targets on stopping deforestation which will be backed by science and checked each year. The companies include the Brazilian beef firm JBS, the American agricultural firm Cargill and the Singaporean food processing firm Wilmar International.

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Acknowledging that climate breakdown is unavoidable is key to making fossil-fuel companies and governments take action

In his Cop27 speech this week, our will-he-go, won’t-he-go prime minister said that stopping the planet dangerously overheating was still within our grasp, leaving many wondering just what planet he was on.

According to Rishi Sunak, last year’s Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow was all about keeping alive the possibility of preventing the global average temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution from climbing above 1.5C. That is “alive”, as in connected to a drip, in a coma and suffering cardiac arrest every few hours.

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL and the author of Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide

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Despite ‘loss and damage’ focus there have been more oil and gas lobbyists than delegates from the most vulnerable countries

Humanity is on a highway to hell, with our foot on the accelerator. The message from the UN secretary general to more than 110 world leaders at the Cop27 UN climate summit in Egypt could not have been clearer: change course now, or face “collective suicide”.

Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise this year, research published this week has shown, despite stark warnings from climate scientists in the past year. The prospects of sticking to the 1.5C limit above pre-industrial levels that scientists tell us is necessary have receded to a “narrow window”.

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