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Benjamin McKeown

Judging the COP21 outcome and what's next for climate action | E3G - 0 views

www.e3g.org/...-whats-next-for-climate-action

COP21 climate change

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • An enduring, legally binding treaty on climate action which contains emission reduction commitments from 187 countries starting in 2020. The Paris Agreement will enter into force once 55 countries covering 55% of global emissions have acceded to it.
  • commitments for additional action to reduce emissions and increase resilience were made by countries, regions, cities, investors, and companies.
  • signals the end of business as usual for the energy industries. Future investment will need to be compatible with a zero carbon world.
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  • all countries make commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and manage the impacts of climate change. It will shape climate action for decades into the future.
  • countries will need to review and increase their emission reduction commitments every 5 years in order to meet the long term goal of greenhouse gas neutrality by the second half of century.
  • ncluding the G20 and the Sustainable Development Goals.
  • renewables will make up 78% of new power generation investment to 2030
  • n major economies.
  • drive down the cost of renewable energy.
  • Paris Agreement beyond $100bn promised up to 2020 will provide support to emerging and developing countries
  • increasing emission cuts every 5 years to meet that goal.
  • ong term goal of greenhouse gas neutrality i
  • rapid phase out of fossil fuels.
  • multilateral diplomacy. I
  • manage an orderly transition away from a fossil fuel
  • G20 has established a taskforce on the implications of climate policy on financial stability
  • adaptation, resilience and response
  • Scenario 1: ‘Le Zombie’ – tactical deal with high potential for collapse. >        Scenario 2: ‘Comme ci, Comme ça’ – modest progress with guarantees on finance. >        Scenario 3: ‘Va Va Voom’ – cements a new enduring regime on climate change.
  • Climate action beyond Paris 2015
Benjamin McKeown

The effects of subsidies | Global Subsidies Initiative - 0 views

www.iisd.org/...effects-subsidies

subsidies resources

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 01 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • the benefits to society of that money, if it had been spent otherwise, or left in the pockets of taxpayers, might have been even greater.
  • heory shows that these depend on a number of factors, among which are the responsiveness of producers and consumers to changes in prices (what economists call the own-price elasticities of supply and demand), the form of the subsidy, the conditions attached to it, and how the subsidy interacts with other policies.
  • such subsidies tend to divert resources from more productive to less productive uses, thus reducing economic efficiency.
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  • Those who take a more benign view argue that subsidies can serve redistributive goals, or can help to correct market failures. But, as the public-finance economist Ronald Gerritse once warned, subsides defended on such grounds "may have externalities that we did not bargain for." Indeed it is such second-order effects that have come under attack by environmental economists in recent years.
  • any subsidies are defended as benefiting disadvantaged groups, or groups the politicians like to make us believe are disadvantaged.
  • tend to favour larger producing units. Recently, for example, the Environmental Working Group, an American non-profit organization, counted up all the direct payments made by the U.S. Government to farmers between 1994 and 2005 and found that ten percent of subsidy recipients collected 73 percent of all subsidies, amounting to $120.5 billion Analyses of agricultural support programmes in other countries appear to lend credence to the 80:20 rule - the impression that 80% of support goes to 20% of the beneficiaries.
  • environmentally harmful subsidies" they generally mean subsidies that support production, transport or consumption that ends up damaging the environment. The environmental consequences of subsidies to extractive industries are closely linked to the activity being subsidized, like fishing or logging.
  • Subsidies to promote offshore fishing are a commonly cited example of environmentally harmful subsidies, with support that increases fishing capacity (i.e., subsidies toward constructing new boats) linked to the depletion of important fishery stocks. In other industries, subsidies that promote consumption or production have led to higher volumes of waste or emissions. For example, irrigation subsidies often encourage crops that are farmed intensively, which in turn leads to higher levels of fertilizer use than would occur otherwise. Moreover, irrigation subsidies can lead to the under pricing of irrigated water, which in turn fosters the overuse and inefficient use of water. While many subsidies have unintended negative consequences on the environment, well designed subsidies can be beneficial when they work to mitigate an environmental problem. In the context of fisheries, for instance, these would include subsidies to management programs that help ensure that fisheries resources are appropriately managed and that regulations are enforced, or to research and development (R&D) designed to promote less environmentally destructive forms of fish catching and processing.    
Benjamin McKeown

A complete guide to carbon offsetting | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...fset-projects-carbon-emissions

climate change consequences management carbon offsetting

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 28 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Carbon offset schemes allow individuals and companies to invest in environmental projects around the world in order to balance out their own carbon footprints.
  • designed to reduce future emissions
  • energy technologies or purchasing and ripping up carbon credits from an emissions trading scheme.
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  • oaking up CO2 directly from the air through the planting of trees.
  • Some people and organisations offset their entire carbon footprint while others aim to neutralise the impact of a specific activity, such as taking a flight
  • visits an offset website, uses the online tools to calculate the emissions of their trip, and then pays the offset company to reduce emissions elsewhere in the world by the same amount – thus making the flight "carbon neutral".
  • £8/$12 for each tonne of CO2 offset
  • carbon neutrality included as part of the price.
  • most of the best-known carbon offset schemes have long-since switched from tree planting to clean-energy projects – anything from distributing efficient cooking stoves through to capturing methane gas at landfill sites.
  • many people argue that offsetting is unhelpful – or even counterproductive – in the fight against climate change
  • Just as indulgences allowed the rich to feel better about sinful behaviour without actually changing their ways, carbon offsets allow us to "buy complacency, political apathy and self-satisfaction"
  • "Our guilty consciences appeased, we continue to fill up our SUVs and fly round the world without the least concern about our impact on the planet … it's like pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression that you have eaten it."
  • "a positive approach to offsetting could have public resonance well beyond the CO2 offset, and would help to build awareness of the need for other measures."
  • This boils down not just to the effectiveness of the project at soaking up CO2 or avoiding future emissions. Effectiveness is important but not enough. You also need to be sure that the carbon savings are additional to any savings which might have happened anyway.
  • The carbon savings would only be classified as additional if the project managers could demonstrate that, for the period in which the carbon savings of the new lightbulbs were being counted, the recipients wouldn't have acquired low-energy bulbs by some other means.
  • The problem is that it's almost impossible to prove additionality with absolute certainly, as no one can be sure what will happen in the future,
  • If that happened, the bulbs distributed by the offset company would cease to be additional, since the energy savings would have happened even if the offset project had never happened.
  • To try and answer these questions, the voluntary offset market has developed various standards, which are a bit like the certification systems used for fairly traded or organic food
  • Voluntary Gold Standard (VGS) and the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS).
  • One VGS-certified biomass power plant refused to allow her around, though staff there reported a number of concerns such as trees being chopped down and sold to the plant, which was designed to run on agricultural wastes.
  • f we're to tackle climate change, they argue, the projects being rolled out by offset companies should be happening anyway, funded by governments around the world, while companies and individuals reduce their carbon footprints directly.
  • Only in this way – by doing everything possible to make reductions everywhere, rather than polluting in one place and offsetting in another – does the world have a good chance of avoiding runaway climate change, such critics claim.
  • some carbon-neutrality advocates suggest offsetting carbon-intensive activities such as flights two or three or even ten times ove
  • The point is simply that the world is full of inexpensive ways to reduce emissions. In theory, if enough people started offsetting, or if governments started acting seriously to tackle global warming, then the price of offsets would gradually rise, as the low-hanging fruit of emissions savings – the easiest and cheapest "quick wins" – would get used up.
Benjamin McKeown

'China's Worst Policy Mistake'? by Nicholas D. Kristof | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...chinas-worst-policy-mistake

population one child policy

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 10 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • n China and abroad, that those adopted babies, mostly girls, were unwanted in a male chauvinist society and abandoned by their parents. Many of those children, some of them now young adults, should know that it’s far more complicated than that. They are the products not of unloving parents, not so much of a misogynist tradition, but of a government policy that sundered families.
  • All fertile married women in their region were obliged to pee into a cup for a pregnancy test every three months; a positive result could lead to a mandatory abortion. Any couple that somehow evaded the controls risked a fine, the demolition of the family home, and forced sterilization.
  • Officials now had their salaries docked if there were babies born without permission in their localities, and the village leader had lost half his salary for that reason.
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  • The local official in charge of family planning promised a $380 reward, presented anonymously, to anyone who informed on an unauthorized baby. Someone reported on Victory,
  • The one-child policy, unlike many Chinese missteps, was not a product of Chairman Mao’s zeal or ideology; in fact, China was extricating itself from Maoism when it adopted the one-child policy.
  • “One child isn’t too few, two are just fine, three are too many.” And within about a decade it managed without coercion to reduce the average number of births per woman from six to three, a remarkable achievement. It’s rarely acknowledged that the biggest drop in Chinese fertility came not from the one-child policy, but earlier during this voluntary birth control campaign.
  • If it had continued, China’s birth rates would have continued to drop, as they have for the rest of the region (Malaysia today averages just under two births per woman; Bangladesh averages 2.2).
  • In retrospect, Western sympathizers were right about the need to curb population growth in China—and blind to the brutality of China’s policy. Partly that’s because China covered up the abuses and pretended that the policy was essentially voluntary, backed by fines but not by force.
  • Internationally, the most visible legacy of the one-child policy is the large number of Chinese-born children who have been adopted in the West
  • because an unauthorized birth would lead her husband to be fired from his job as well as to a large fine and her forced sterilization.
Benjamin McKeown

Last of the Amazon - National Geographic Magazine - 0 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...wallace-text

HL uncontacted amazon

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 22 Mar 16 - Cached
  • Brazil’s dilemma: Allow widespread—and profitable—destruction of the rain forest to continue, or intensify conservation efforts.
  • The market forces of globalization are invading the Amazon, hastening the demise of the forest and thwarting its most committed stewards.
  • n the past three decades, hundreds of people have died in land wars; countless others endure fear and uncertainty, their lives threatened by those who profit from the theft of timber and land. In this Wild West frontier of guns, chain saws, and bulldozers, government agents are often corrupt and ineffective—or ill-equipped and outmatched. Now, industrial-scale soybean producers are joining loggers and cattle ranchers in the land grab, speeding up destruction and further fragmenting the great Brazilian wilderness.
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  • All of it starts with a road. Except
  • nearly every road in the Amazon is unauthorized. There are more than 105,000 miles of these roads, most made illegally by loggers to reach mahogany and other hardwoods for the lucrative export market.
  • In Brazil, the events set in motion by logging are almost always more destructive than the logging itself.
  • squatters, speculators, ranchers, farmers, and, invariably, hired gunmen.
  • . Land thievery is committed through corruption, strong-arm tactics, and fraudulent titles and is so widespread that Brazilians have a name for it: grilagem,
  • landless squatters moved in from adjacent lots, working plots whose ownership the government failed to resolve. That has fueled a bloody showdown pitting the powerful absentee elites who raze forest for agribusiness against family farmers who clear small patches for crops but still depend on intact forest around them for survival.
  • The first model was implanted during the military dictatorship, based on timber extraction and cattle. It’s predatory because it causes death, it’s not renewable, and it devastates the forest.” The alternative model, preached by Stang, is what Pontes calls social environmentalism. The first concentrates wealth, the second calls for its dispersion in small-scale agroforestry collectives.
  • Stang saw human rights and environmental conservation in the Amazon as inextricably intertwined
  • To Maggi, deforestation is an overblown issue, a “phobia” that plagues people who can’t grasp the enormity of the Amazon. “All of Europe could fit inside the Amazon,” he says, “and we’d still have room for two Englands.”
  • “Look around,” he said, “you won’t find a single scrap of plastic here.” Motioning to a barnlike structure that stored herbicides and pesticides, he said, “We keep all our agrotoxins properly ventilated until use.” In a steady rain, our vehicle fishtailing in the mud, we approached a denuded gully straddling a narrow stream; a closer look revealed hundreds of saplings. “When we bought this property,” Maggi said, “this riverbank was totally stripped. Now we’re regenerating the area.”
  • The land here is very poor. If you don’t take the right corrective measures, you couldn’t produce anything. It’s not true that soy degrades the soil. On the contrary, it puts into the soil what naturally isn’t there. Afterward, you can grow anything you want.” R
  • searchers agree that proper management of soy fields can increase soil productivity. But in reality, no one knows for sure how long the thin, highly acidic Amazon soils can be propped up, raising the possibility of an eventual two-headed catastrophe:
  • shiny new silos belonging to ADM, Bunge, and Cargill—all American multinationals.
  • azilians are not the only people profiting from soybeans. Along the 500-mile paved stretch of BR-16
  • between Cuiabá and Guarantã do Norte, there are no fewer than five John Deere dealerships. And at harvest time, fleets of the trademark green-and-yellow combines rumble across the fields flanking the highway, pouring rivers of golden soy into open-bed trucks bound f
  • The new district adds to an expanded mosaic of parks, reserves, and conservation units that, together with indigenous territories, forms the bulwark of defense against the expansion of the frontier in the central Amazon. These measures may be paying off. Deforestation rates fell more than 30 percent in 2005, and preliminary numbers for 2006 are also down. Indian lands in the Xingu watershed are proving an especially effective barrier. There, militant Kayapó and Panará warriors armed with clubs and shotguns patrol their borders using satellite images furnished by international NGOs to pinpoint illegal clearing. As Stephan Schwartzman puts it: “Where Indian land begins is where deforestation ends.” But Brazil’s measures to protect the Amazon must be weighed ag
  • These include plans to build seven dams on the environmentally sensitive Xingu and Madeira Rivers,
  • he dams will power aluminum smelters, and shipping channels will facilitate river transport of exports to Chinese markets.
  • s well as roads, power lines, oil and gas pipelines, and large-scale mining and industrial projects.
  • The dams will also flood millions of acres of forest, releasing methane and other greenhouse gases, destroying biodiversity, and forcing indigenous communities to flee ancestral lands.
  • Water cycling
  • carbon sequestering
  • maintenance of an unmatched panoply of life.
  • It’s far more profitable to cut it down for grazing and farming than to leave it standing. “Tropical deforestation is a classic example of market failure,”
  • “It’s urgent to find mechanisms to compensate forest peoples, and their governments, for the ecosystem services their forests provide.”
  • Last summer, Cargill and Brazil’s other big soy traders agreed to a two-year moratorium on buying soy grown on newly deforested land in the Amazon. The agreement is sending a signal to soy producers that the environmental impact of their operations is increasingly important in the world marketplace.
Benjamin McKeown

Judge approves BP plea agreement, record $4 billion fine - CNN.com - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...louisiana-bp-deal

BP oil hazards

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 20 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • "We -- and by that I mean the men and the women of the management of BP, its board of directors, and its many employees -- are deeply sorry for the tragic loss of the 11 men who died and the others who were injured that day," said Keller. "Our guilty plea makes clear, BP understands and acknowledges its role in that tragedy, and we apologize -- BP apologizes -- to all those injured and especially to the families of the lost loved ones. BP is also sorry for the harm to the environment that resulted from the spill, and we apologize to the individuals and communities who were injured."
Benjamin McKeown

Does it really take 20,000L of water to produce 1kg of beef? - Beef Central - 0 views

www.beefcentral.com/...f-water-to-produce-1kg-of-beef

water food energy Nexus water water footprint

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 13 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • These were his calculations: “Say a two year old grassfed steer dresses 300kg and Lean Meat Yield is 60 percent. Therefore 180kg of beef is produced. Say the animal drinks 40 litres /day (generous) for 730 days. That equals 29,200 litres divided by 180kg = 162 litres per kilogram.
  • However, while that statement was referenced in the report, the specific reference was missing from the list of references at the end of the report.
  • In the article Professor Hoekstra actually wrote that producing one kilogram of boneless beef required about 155 litres of water, taking into account only the water used for drinking and servicing that animal. However, when you added in 1300kg of grain, 7200kg of roughages (pasture, dry hay, silage and other roughages), and the water required to grow those feed sources, he said the water footprint of 1 kg of beef would add up to 15,500 litres of water.
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  • Professor Hoekstra, from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, is the inventor of the Water Footprint concept, a method used to account for the total amount of water used to produce something.
  • Dr Perry said calculation procedures adopted in most estimates of water footprints are flawed, and that water footprints are incorrectly assessed on an absolute rather than a relative bas
  • A key concern was that ‘Water Footprints’ made no allowance for whether a producing area is water- plentiful or water-short.
  • “One must consider the scarcity or abundance of water and land, as well as downstream water uses to evaluate the significance of any environmental impact when compared to the status of these variables in the absence of grain or meat production. Simply comparing the water footprints of grain and meat does not provide helpful environmental information.
  • “It is overly simplistic and misleading to suggest that water footprints should be reduced without considering the context and purpose of water use.” “…Generalised water footprints are neither accurate nor helpful indicators for gaining a better understanding of water resource management.”
  • Previous media articles have reported claims that it takes between 50,000 and 100,000 litres to produce a kilogram of red meat. But these reported measures count every single drop of water that falls on an area of land grazed by cattle over the space of a year. And they do not take into account the fact that most of the water ends up in waterways, is used by trees and plants and in pastures, not grazed by cattle. “These calculations therefore attribute all rain that falls on a property to beef production, whereby the water is clearly being used for other purposes, such as supporting ecosystems” MLA explains in its Target 100 page.
Benjamin McKeown

This Is China's Plan to Overtake America as the Next Superpower | The National Interest - 0 views

nationalinterest.org/...-america-next-superpower-28502

china superpowers

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 18 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • the “balance, dimension and expansion of our strategic goal will be strengthened.” The result will be to "more effectively create a situation, manage a crisis, contain a conflict, win a war, defend the expansion of our country’s strategic interests in an all-round fashion and realize the goals set by the party and Chairman Xi.”
  • U.S., Russia, Japan and other nations became strong nations because they had a strong military.
  • “The lessons of history teach us that strong military might is important for a country to grow from being big to being strong,”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • ‘Thucydides Trap’ and escape the obsession that war is unavoidable between an emerging power and a ruling hegemony.”
  • suggesting that the United States is in its decline.
  • one chapter said that it is important to control the military in a bid to ensure the Chinese Communist Party’s long-term ruling status,"
  • he party keeps a tight grip on the military, it can withstand rigorous challenges both at home and abroad, it said."
  • In other words, China's government is so worried about losing its grip on power that it must emphasize that the military is the servant of the Communist Party. Perhaps it's fear that the population can't be controlled without the backing of the military. Perhaps it's fear that the military itself could take over.
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