Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. April 22, 2021 At a virtual climate summit he convened with other world leaders Thursday, US President Joe Biden pledged to halve US carbon emissions by 2030, compared with 2005 levels—a promise that comes as climate warnings grow increasingly dire and as global carbon emissions appear set to rebound toward pre-pandemic levels this year.
For a country that likes its SUVs and gobbles up electricity (the US ranks 11th globally in megawatt-hours per capita, according to 2018 data), Biden's goal may sound far fetched, but America has made progress. At The Conversation, a group of authors from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory write that the US electricity sector emits 52% less carbon than was projected in a 2005 US Energy Information Administration baseline scenario (and 40% less than in 2005, in real terms, according to the EIA's preliminary 2020 figures). The broad trajectory of CO2 from electricity has bent downward for 15 years.
Wind and solar sources "dramatically outperformed expectations, delivering 13 times more generation in 2020 than projected," the authors note. The World Resources Institute now counts "clean energy jobs" as outnumbering fossil-fuel-production jobs in America's rural counties, they point out.
America's boom in natural gas, which is cleaner than coal, also helped; while that's good news, some are wary of gas as a quick fix in the coming decades. Bill Gates, for instance, has argued against more-aggressive carbon-neutrality timelines, for fear of locking in a transition to gas at the expense of more durable, nuclear- or renewable-centered gains, The Economist noted in its review of Gates's recent book on averting a climate disaster. The US Pledge, in Context The US emits nearly 15% of the world's CO2 from fuel sources, per the International Energy Agency's 2018 statistics—more than any other country except China, which emits nearly twice as much—so an American pledge is a fraction of the picture.
"The hope is that [Biden's] commitment will help to encourage India, China, and other major emitters to sign up to similar targets" before a UN climate conference in Scotland this November, Charlotte Jee writes for the MIT Technology Review. China and India reiterated their previous commitments, in China's case a goal of carbon-neutrality by 2060, but did not make any new ones, Somini Sengupta notes at The New York Times. International cooperation may be climate change's most difficult, and defining, conundrum, MIT President L. Rafael Reif recently argued in The Boston Globe. "For more than a decade, sociologists have described global climate change as a 'super wicked problem,'" Reif writes, meaning "an enormously complex societal problem that has no single right answer and no clear finish line, multiple stakeholders with conflicting priorities, and no central authority empowered to solve it."
That makes solving climate change fundamentally more challenging than the space race. "Getting humans to the moon was difficult," Reif writes. "But it was a well-defined problem with a solution based on established science, with no opposing forces other than a few laws of nature. For the 'Earthshot' we need now, we cannot count on any single government, or even all of them. The new whole-of-government US strategy on climate is game-changing. But it is only a start. The problem requires sustained contributions from every corner of industry, every level of government, every academic institution, every foundation and philanthropist, and from all of us as individuals." So far, Covid-19 vaccines have been a raging success, John Burn-Murdoch declares in a Financial Times essay bearing the above headline. Burn-Murdoch compares cases and hospitalizations among older segments of the population, who are more likely to have been vaccinated, to their younger compatriots in the UK, France, the US, and Chile. The graphs are encouraging, showing notable improvements either among the older groups or overall.
"[I]n France, a third wave of the virus has hampered progress, but the same tell-tale signs are evident," Burn-Murdoch writes; that has also been true in Chile, "where a rapid rollout of China's Sinovac jab coincided with a substantial third wave of the virus." In those countries, the full picture may be unwelcome, but older citizens are faring better than younger ones on the whole, which Burn-Murdoch views as a sign of vaccine success.
In the UK, things are quite good. "As each age group became eligible for vaccination, its share of all cases has fallen away," Burn-Murdoch writes of Britain. "The share of cases among the over-80s has fallen by 80 per cent since vaccinations began." Russia Says It's Pulling Back Russia says it has ordered its troops to return to their permanent bases starting Friday, withdrawing its buildup on Ukraine's border by May 1, CNN's Zahra Ullah, Anna Chernova and Eliza Mackintosh report. Russia's defense minister announced the military had "fully achieved" the goals of a "snap inspection" to test capabilities. Still, concerns remain, as it's not clear how many troops will be called back.
In recent weeks, speculation has swirled about Russian President Vladimir Putin's options and objectives. At the Georgia-based Rondeli Foundation, Hannah Shelest speculated that Putin may have been seeking "to strengthen the Russian negotiating position, which has not been particularly stable or advantageous" in talks with Ukraine that have included Germany and France.
At The National Interest, Andreas Ulmand of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs wrote this week that an advance into territory around Crimea could link it to a fresh-water supply; with the popularity of Russia's ruling class slipping amid the pandemic, and with previous regional incursions working to Putin's advantage, Ulmand posed another one as a low-cost opportunity for the Russian leader. "Even if the Kremlin ultimately decides against a major war in Ukraine, the next few months are likely to remain tense," Ulmand predicted. |
