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Climate outcomes at the G7 meeting

Did the G7 meeting in Cardiff achieve anything of significance on the climate crisis? Some say yes, and some no. Let’s dig into it a little and see, shall we?

In this excerpt from the final communiqué we read:

Protect our planet by supporting a green revolution that creates jobs, cuts emissions and seeks to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees. We commit to net zero no later than 2050, halving our collective emissions over the two decades to 2030, increasing and improving climate finance to 2025; and to conserve or protect at least 30 percent of our land and oceans by 2030. We acknowledge our duty to safeguard the planet for future generations. 

CARBIS BAY G7 SUMMIT COMMUNIQUÉ, June 13, 2021

And then beginning at paragraph 37 of the communique, it provides more details.

  • Domestically, the member countries have committed to “overwhelmingly decarbonized power” by the mid-2030’s. Internationally, they commit to “phase out new direct government support for international carbon-intensive fossil fuel energy as soon as possible”. Note the use of “overwhelmingly” and “as soon as possible”, rather than hard commitments.
  • Recognizing that coal power generation is the single biggest cause of greenhouse gas emissions, they call for the immediate cessation of international investments in “unabated” coal, and commit to an end to new direct government support for unabated international thermal coal power generation by the end of 2021. This appears to be a hard commitment, but is their a difference between “unabated” coal and plain old coal?
  • In transport, they commit to decarbonizing the roads “throughout the 2020s, and beyond”. This includes accelerating the roll out of infrastructure, like charging stations.
  • In industry, the commitments are “to take action to decarbonize areas such as iron and steel, cement, chemicals, and petrochemicals” and to launch the “G7 Industrial Decarbonization Agenda”.
  • And in homes and building, and land use sectors like forestry and agriculture, the “commitments” were similar to industry. Soft.

Press coverage was mixed, as might be expected. In a relatively balanced piece, the NY Times wrote “G7 Nations Take Aggressive Climate Action but Hold Back on Coal“, and quoted energy experts saying that the leaders failure to set an end date for coal made negotiating with China to end its use of coal more difficult. The hard end date was the signal that activists had been hoping to see.

Personally, I would have liked to see harder commitments on decarbonizing power generation, including that hoped-for date to phase out coal. I found the statements on industry encouraging. Industrial use of energy is one of the toughest challenges to solve, and it was important for the G7 leaders to say that they would make it a focus.

All of this is a prelude to COP26 in November. When the global community meets, and not just the G7, there will be an opportunity to set global commitments. It begs the question “Should the G7 have led now, or waited until November?”. Time will tell.

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Your Carbon Footprint

Have you wondered how to reduce your household carbon footprint? It turns out that it’s not hard to do.

First, start by getting a baseline. What do you use today? There are any number of websites that make this easy for you to calculate. For this example, I’ve used the EPA’s carbon footprint calculator. You’ll need your monthly heat and electricity bills, plus the mileage on your car if you want to do this yourself.

The EPA calculator starts by asking about your household, and how you heat. We’re a two-person household, heat with electricity, and use an average of 1,465 kWh each month. According to the EPA calculator, that equates to 14,890 lbs of CO2e annually. That’s 36.4% higher than the average in our zip code, which is 10,910 lbs. Ouch! The calculator makes some suggestions, like switching to ENERGY STAR lighting and appliances, but we’ve already done many of those things.

Next the calculator ask about driving habits. We have two vehicles. I drive about 10,000 miles annually, and Joanne around 2,500. The calculator also wants to know what the fuel mileage for your vehicle is. If you don’t know it yourself, the Department of Energy maintains a handy site at fueleconomy.gov where you can look it up. The DOE rates my Tesla Model Y at 125 mpg, and Joanne’s Audi at 30 mpg, which equates to another 3,245 lbs of CO2e. That moves us to 18,135 lbs of CO2e annually, but now we’re ahead. The average household in our zip code clocks in at a whopping 31,878 lbs annually! Apparently, they drive big gas guzzling vehicles…

“Wait, wait”, I hear you saying. “Isn’t your Tesla an EV? Why is it rated in mpg?”. Yes, it is. However the DOE rates it at 125 mpg because there is a cost to generating the electricity that powers it. They use a fairly crude measure, which is the amount of gasoline required to deliver the same kWh of energy used by the Tesla to drive a specific distance. More on that in a minute.

The last part of the EPA calculator is to give you credit for recycling. The average two-person household in our area sends waste to the landfill equivalent to 1,383 lbs of CO2e annually. We recycle aluminum, glass and paper but not all plastic, so they give us a credit of 511 lbs, meaning our waste CO2e is reduced to 872 lbs. We’d like to recycle more plastic, but Recology restricts the types we can recycle.

The calculator produces us a report like the one below. It shows our emissions at 19,007 lbs of CO2e annually, primarily from household electricity consumption. Note that I haven’t taken any of the suggested “planned actions”. Most of them, like replacing old appliances and lightbulbs, we’ve already done.

Next, try to reduce your footprint. You could use the EPA calculator suggestions, but as I mentioned above, we’ve already done most of them. Given that the bulk of our CO2e footprint comes from electricity consumption, it makes sense to try and focus on making the electricity we use cleaner. The answer is renewable energy. Alas, we live in a condo and it would require other owners to all agree in order to install solar panels on the roof of our complex. Plus, we live in the Pacific Northwest which has prolonged periods of cloud cover in the winter, which might make solar less efficient. However, it turns out that Puget Sound Energy provides us the option, for an extra $.01/kWh, to buy “Green” energy. This is 95% generated by wind and solar, and 5% from biogas.

So we did this, with dramatic results. It costs us less than $15/mo on the electricity bill, and basically eliminates the CO2e footprint for our home, and for the Tesla. Returning to the EPA calculator, I calculate that we have now reduced our annual household CO2e footprint to just 3,352 lbs. That’s 10% of the average CO2e footprint of similar households in our neighborhood. Sweet!

This method is imperfect. The EPA calculator only calculates household impacts. It doesn’t take into account things like food or air travel, and it uses assumptions about average households that probably will vary somewhat for most individuals. But it’s a good start.

So what’s your household carbon footprint? Grab your utility bills, head over to the EPA website to find out. Can you reduce it? Tell us how you did, below.

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Another Day… Another Corporate Call for Action

Yesterday, we saw The Investor Agenda call on government to step up with more comprehensive commitments to meeting Paris Accord climate change targets. The World Economic Forum’s CEO Alliance for Climate Change also issued a similar call for action. The CEO Alliance represents roughly 400 of the top 2000 publicly traded global companies. The letter, signed by 78 of the CEOs participating in this group, called on governments to deliver policy changes including:

  • Publish new NDCs, aligned to a 1.5C target, and halving emissions by 2030.
  • Commit to net-zero by 2050, with roadmaps to get there.
  • Ensure that developed countries meet and exceed their $100B commitment to support developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change.
  • Develop broadly accepted carbon pricing mechanisms, with escalating carbon prices to drive the transition.
  • Compel all business to establish credible decarbonization targets, and fully disclose all emissions.
  • Eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, and cut tariffs on green goods.
  • Boost R&D spending.
  • Invest in climate adaptation. This means resilient cities and infrastructure.
  • Create and implement sector-specific incentives for power, transport, buildings and cities, industry, land and agriculture, and finance.

It encompasses the same policy actions as the Investor Agenda open letter, and then takes them a step further asking government to provide incentives and R&D as well.

Both the Investor Agenda letter, and the CEO group letter ask for the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies, and for synchronized carbon pricing mechanisms to be introduced. What would this do?

  • Direct fossil fuel consumption subsidies are substantial, according to the IEA, at about $320B annually. The incentives and R&D asked for could be funded by the elimination of these subsidies.
  • Similarly, carbon pricing mechanisms send a signal to markets that low-carbon investments will be valuable and also create incentives for companies to be more efficient. Carbon pricing has momentum. According to the World Bank’s 2020 State of Carbon Pricing report, there are now 61 carbon pricing initiatives scheduled or implemented, and to-date some 14,500 projects registered. One challenge for business is the diversity of models. 30 of these initiatives are carbon taxes and 31 are carbon exchange trading systems.

Taken together, these two open letters are a strong endorsement by business. Rather than fight climate change efforts and regulation by government, they are calling for public/private partnerships to make progress more quickly.

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Investors Group Asks Governments to Step Up

The Investor Agenda is a policy advocacy organization with the mission of accelerating a net-zero emissions economy. Today 457 of their members with a combined $41 trillion in assets asked governments to do more than meet their Paris Agreement commitments. Specifically, they are asking government to:

  1. Strengthen their NDCs to align with a 1.5 C target for 2030. NDCs are simply the commitments that governments made at the Paris conference.
  2. Commit to mid-century (2050, presumably) net-zero emissions targets, and outline the interim steps to get there.
  3. Implement policies to deliver these targets, including phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, carbon trading systems and more.
  4. Use COVID-19 recovery plans to double down on the transition to net-zero.
  5. Commit to mandatory climate risk disclosure requirements.

One of the misunderstood stories of the climate transition is the opportunity in it. The capital and operation costs of both solar and wind power are now well below corresponding fossil fuel generation, creating massive opportunities for investment. You can see this in the financial performance of renewable assets as a class. These investors are saying “we have the capital to make help make this transition”. They’re asking governments to commit with them, to require disclosure of climate risk by business, and to remove the subsidies that artificially support the fossil fuel industry.

Transforming the global economy will be a hugely expensive, but hugely profitable opportunity. This is a relatively small, entirely understandable, and fair ask on the part of the investment community.