It’s hard to overstate the significance of the agreement announced today by Barack Obama and Xi Jinping to limit US and Chinese greenhouse gas emissions. The limits are significant in themselves: not enough to guarantee stabilization of greenhouse gas levels at the agreed target of 450 ppm, but enough that we can get there just by ratcheting up an existing agreement rather than by looking for something new.
I’ll write more later, but I wanted to note this event as soon as I could
John Quiggin 
The horse is bolting and they are trying to catch it. Some fools will continue to say let it run, we can’t do anything about it anyway. You can tell who they are, they have no brains.
Hard to get excited. Easy to see right through this BS.
This is a commitment to seeking a plan to hope to achieve, in terms of going forward, a framework for an ambitious goal toward reaching a final endpoint. One they take very seriously.
The last paragraph of the joint announcement:
So we’ve got MORE fossil fuel emissions, “clean coal”, nuclear, fracking and “sustainable development.
Sorry, we’re still as doomed as we were yesterday – BUT, someone is starting to get scared and therefore believes these sops are necessary. Now THAT is a promising sign, but that is all it is.
The first paragraph is promising:
Who could argue with that?
But it goes downhill after that. The last sentence of paragraph 3:
Woohooo! “What do we want? More ambition. When do want it? Over time.” And that’s not even a promise, it’s an intention.
Paragraph 4 continues the ambitious hope reduction:
My hope has been reduced already!
I think this is very good news. Australia’s leadership of the G20 is already showing great results! 😉
The targets are not sufficient but they show that both are willing to move further down that track than before, which is a step in the right direction at this point in time.
It is also good to start getting moves in this direction made before Paris next December, and Obama will still be President then.
Also something that prospectively enables peaceful relationship building between China and the U.S. at the moment is to be welcomed.
Thanks Megan for putting in that detail!
The City Summits are a good idea and the Demonstration Clean Energy too, since both are practical. Local government is stronger in climate change than state and federal here, so concentrating on cities is a good idea for policy as well as being site specific. And a lot of Chinese policy is city/province specific so it makes sense for China as well.
I’m with JQ on interpreting this. The targets are lowball, especially for China, but they are emissions caps – not simple reductions in carbon intensity, which is all China has been prepared to commit to up till now. The Chinese have a record of starting with soft targets, them ratcheting them tighter and more ambitious. The renewable energy targets have been raised more times than I can keep track of.
In fact it’s hard to see how the régime could survive increasing air pollution for 15 years, and it surely must start reducing it in the next few years. Since China’s coal consumption fell in the first half of 2014 – not as a cyclical glitch, but following longstanding trends – , and evs are making great progress, overall Chinese emissions will surely peak well before 2030 even on current policies.
Bloomberg thinks that China will install a staggering 8-9 GW of solar in the last quarter of this year. Apparently Chinese entrepreneurs had lined up huge numbers of screwdriver-ready distributed projects, waiting for new regulations which came out in early September. Then wham.
As stated on this blog by many, it makes Australia’s winding back of commitments look even more stupid!
But at least Testosterone Tone got to stare down Putin.
And already the MSM is claiming “Australia’s coal exports at risk” (Fairfax)
Meh … much too little, much too late … Likely to be ignored in the US by the post 2016 regime.
@Fran Barlow
You don’t have to wait until after 2016 for the US to ignore it: the US Congress can start ignoring it right now.
@J-D
I feel sure it will.
@Fran Barlow
In fact, the US Congress has very limited ability to stop this. The 2016 election is what matters.
@ZM
Yes, P.M. Tony Abbott must be very proud of his further achievements after his far-sighted action on the carbon tax. He seems to be definably establishing himself as a great environmentalist
I understand that his good friend P.M. Stephen Harper of Canada was ecstatic when he called Tony from his plane as he rushed back to Canada to
hustle votesshow his respects at the National War Memorial on Remembrance Day.Talk is cheap. I think worldwide coal has still got another 20 years as the main form of stationary energy. US emissions actually increased slightly last year after a few years of gas displacing coal, a trend that may now be reversed. As in Australia conservative opponents may make repeal of emissions policy a winning element of the next election. Also like Australia the US is exporting more coal.
I think is likely world emissions will peak before 2050 even with no abatement policies… IPCC’s scenario 2.6. Geriatric coal plants won’t be replaced, gas prices will escalate and oil production will go into severe decline. Shame the transition couldn’t have been done in an orderly fashion.
@John Quiggin
But they have the power to ignore it and generally farnarckle about in the meantime.
I think it’s definitely a good thing, but I don’t understand why it’s “in Brisbane”, since from what I can gather the announcement was made in Beijing?
Do you (JQ) mean because the announcement was related to the G20 summit in Brisbane, although not made there?
It’s a start anyway – certainly puts Abbott on the back foot, though no doubt he is thinking that his Republican friends in the US will stop this as soon as they can.
I had to check the category of this post by J.Q. I had suspected that it was in “Boneheaded Stupidity” and was thus ironic. No! Here it is in the “Environment” category.
Hmmm, wasn’t this announcement made at the APEC summit in Beijing? Point one, that is not Brisbane. Point two, the announcement is meaningless in every sense as Megan points out.
According to Megan it says in part:
“Advancing Major Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage Demonstrations: Establishment of a major new carbon storage project based in China through an international public-private consortium led by the United States and China to intensively study and monitor carbon storage using industrial CO2 and also work together on a new Enhanced Water Recovery (EWR) pilot project to produce fresh water from CO2 injection into deep saline aquifers.”
So these are “Demonstrations” and “pilot project(s)”. That means CCS has gone exactly NOWHERE: a decade or maybe two decades of ZERO effective progress on CCS. It’s because CCS is physically, technically and financial unviable. Always has been, always will be. The laws of physics don’t change, not in this man’s universe.
With apologies to the Beatles;
“Nowhere Men”
They are real nowhere men
Sitting in their nowhere land
Making all their nowhere plans for nobody
They don’t have a point of view
Know not where they’re going to
Aren’t they a bit like me and you?
Nowhere Men, please listen
Plain reality’s what you are missing
Nowhere Men, physic’s laws are not at your command.
You are as blind as you can be
Just see what you want to see
Nowhere Men can you see reality at all?
Nowhere Men, don’t worry
Take your time, don’t hurry
Leave it all till collapse destroys your land.
They are real Nowhere Men
Sitting in thier nowhere land
Making all their nowhere plans for nobody
Making all their nowhere plans for nobody
Because all that will be left is nobody.
Catallaxy’s response to this is to channel the Unabomber Manifesto – that that’s how Catallaxy responds to everything.
@Megan
Yes megan, the only significant positive I can cross my fingers on for the moment is that there is no mention of joint efforts to geo-engineer against global warming…you know sulphur dioxide (so2) into the atmosphere.. iron filings into the ocean…huge space mirrors… small mercies on large possibilities?
While it is much better news than the usual local news on the topic, you can bet that PM Tony Abbott’s troops will be in constant correspondence with Republicans on this subject, and they will hatch a plan to scotch any chance of an international agreement on such significant (and yet, too little) reduction targets. Colour me cynical when it comes to the LNP’s response to the announcement: Greg Hunt “Welcomed the news”, as did PM Abbott—only one side of their mouths moved when saying that though…
Still, the China-US announcement is better than a hit in the head with a 4×2.
Inability of China and the US to agree sank Copenhagen. This suggests that the two biggest polluters are not going to be blockers in Paris. I nearly choked on my cornflakes at Joe Hockey’s assertion that the Australian government is on the same page as the US on emissions reduction.
Further to my post above, I intended to mock the world leaders, not JQ’s optimism. I think there is cause for a little optimism but I would not place any confidence in our world leaders, our elites or our current system (corporate capitalism).
The cause for optimism lies in the natural laws of physics, biology and by extenstion tendencies in economics which we could almost call laws. These laws will soon limit us: limit our population, limit economic growth and limit the damage we do to the biosphere. The pain in the interim will be considerable but long term benefits will accrue from these limits and the new way of looking at things that this reality will enforce. When the masses perceive indubitably that our current leaders and elites have absolutely no idea how to run anything sustainably then the pressure for change from the masses (who will be feeling most of the pain) will be very great.
And Australia’s contribution to tackling climate change at the G20?
We put our police force on bikes for a week.
Planet saved … in Brisbane!
I’m on the positive side. The deal nullifies the argument the inactivists run to when the science is clear: that action is pointless because the largest industrial nations aren’t in on it. All we need is India to sign on, even symbolically.
Strangely I agree with Ikonoclast that biophysical limits will eventually solve the problem no matter what the movers and shakers do. Where I disagree is that I think nuclear power will soften the pain. It was the G20 or the finance ministers who were to confer on ensuring +2% world GDP growth. What if world GDP growth in 2020 is -2%?. Maybe they are not steering the bus after all but it comes down to factors outside their control.
It seems one of those pesky polar vortices is about to freeze the US. Maurice Newman this is the global cooling you’ve been telling us about. I’d guess those affected will think about turning up the heaters but refrain because of the new climate commitments, as if. If emissions go up a tad just make the same promises next year.
@Hermit
Strangely, we agree, even on nuclear power. Nuclear (fission) power is literally doing all it can to ameliortate global warming. Nuclear (fission) power cannot do any more due to the stalling of the nuclear renaissance which in turn is due to the relatively poor economics of fission power and due to peak uranium.
They are not “driving the bus”. The world economic system is a system out of control and it will only be brought back to reality by natural biophysical forces, so we agree on that.
The polar vortex is another phenomenon modified by global warming and now influencing the climate in new ways.
“The general assumption is that reduced snow cover and sea ice reflect less sunlight and therefore evaporation and transpiration increases, which in turn alters the pressure and temperature gradient of the polar vortex, causing it to weaken or collapse. This becomes apparent when the jet stream amplitude increases (meanders) over the northern hemisphere, causing Rossby waves to propagate farther to the south or north, which in turn transports warmer air to the north pole and polar air into lower latitudes. The jet stream amplitude increases with a weaker polar vortex, hence increases the chance for weather systems to become blocked. A recent blocking event emerged when a high-pressure over Greenland steered Hurricane Sandy into the northern Mid-Atlantic states.” – Wikipedia.
I was in Canada last winter and experienced the effects of the polar vortex first hand. An ice-storm around Toronto and environs added another 6 hours to a train journey we took. The news reports noted heavy blizzard snowfalls in southern US states hardly used to such events. But when we went to the Yukon it was uncommonly warm for winter in the Yukon. They still had plenty of snow cover from earlier falls but one day in Whitehorse mid-winter it got up to +8 degrees C maximum IIRC. Believe me that is a warm day mid-winter in Whitehorse. Of course, the polar vortex sent cold air down the eastern states and warm air up the western states of both Canada and the USA. What’s more this weather pattern becomes blocked and stationary for long periods and this has kept California and Rocky states in drought. All of this has enormous long-term ramifications for the sustainability (populations and agriculture) of some states in the US.
Ignoramuses like Maurice Newman have no idea what is really going on.
A fact check on Maurice Newman proves he is an ignoramus.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2014/aug/15/fact-check-how-maurice-newman-misrepresents-science-to-claim-future-global-cooling
I’ll just repeat what I’ve written elsewhere:
The big news here is not China has chosen a specific date by which they will cap emissions, the actual 2030 target is not at all ambitious and going by current trends China could peak much sooner with little difficulty. The big deal is that China has promised to cap its emissions at all. In the past the ruling party of China would not let themselves get pinned down. They wanted to keep their options wide open. But now they agreed to a hard cap it’s a huge change politically. While targets can always be improved they are definitely not going to want to make themselves look bad by going backwards. (That’s Australia’s job.)
But Mr Newmans is a very rich and powerful ignoramus. Surely that makes his veiws more compelling than some lowly scientific expert….@Ikonoclast
Isn’t this the subject that Abbott was determined to completely avoid at “his” G20?
I would call that yet another broken “promise”.
@Jim
Until biophysical reality trumps social power.
Conservatives in America including the new Senate majority leader have already ridiculed the agreement as meaningless, and vowed to redouble their fight against the “War on Coal”. While some agreement is better than none, I think John’s headline is more than a little hyperbolic.
@Ken_L
Its true the war is not over. But hopefully this is the beginning of the end of the Denialism battle that has been such a distraction these past 5 years.
The change in the polls around 2010 showed the general population only noticed the issue (yet again when you remember Rio 1992, limits to growth etc) at surficial levels and had retreated into a state of mind where they thought climate change would likely disappear into the background along with all those other boring distractions from real news like what how big is a Kardashian bum or whats the best cooking/dance show ….like electronic surveillance, the collapse of journalism, continued war in the Middle East/Palestine, drugs etc..
But the issue hasnt gone away despite the inability of Labor and the Greens in pushing the underlying message and the rampaging power of the Fin, Murdoch and other dark forces.
And here we are with all lies of Abbot and co shown for what they are – out of touch products of corruption and narrow commercial vested interest.
Usefully the dark times of the last 5 years have served to force these ignorant powerful elites typified by Maurice Newman to expose themselves and place their poisonous views on record.
So hopefully this is step along the way to the destruction of neoliberalism as a coherent philosophy and maybe the saving of the planet as an afterthought.
Solutions will come in very innovative ways:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-13/dutch-unveil-world-first-solar-power-bicycle-path/5888440
If only we can toss out the fossil “dinosaurs” and neocon “luddites”.
@Ikonoclast
I’m not sure I’d call that particular folly a “solution”. You only need to look at the dirt and grime that’s already accumulated on the brand-new pathway (visible in the photo) to realise the silliness of the idea. Perhaps if there had been a little less ‘innovation’ and a little more common sense they would have put the solar panels above the roadway instread of under it.
But aside from that, I agree. 😉
Let me add that while this is a fairly trivial matter in terms of its substantive direct impact on abatement on the relevant timeline, and likely on current polling to be vitiated in the US by 2017, it is subversive of the aims of the denier and pollution apologist communities, and to that extent, to be welcomed.
It’s even possible that the momentum this move lends the Paris negotiations will lead to more ambitious cuts and programs in Europe than have already been agreed, and that in that context, effective sanctions can be imposed on putatively free-riding states like Canada and Australia.
If that occurs denier groups in the English-speaking countries will suffer a blow from which it will be quite difficult to recover, and those holding out will have no choice but to fall into line.
So from a purely political perspective this agreement leaves some room for optimism, as unambitious as are its terms. If it achieved nothing more than to cramp people like Inhofe, who will likely be chair of the US Senate’s environmental policy committee, there might yet be something positive to come out of Obama’s presidency beyond finally breaching the colour bar.
@Tim Macknay
Yes, there will be folly ideas as well as good ones. Sometimes a folly idea needs a new twist and then it becomes a good idea. But the biggest folly idea and one that is not savable by any twist is burning coal. CCS is also an unsavable folly idea due to the energy economics and financial economics of it.
@Ikonoclast
I don’t know about putting PV in them, but footpaths and some roadways around here have definitely gone modular. Given that the price of asphalt is increasing as more and more of it get reclassified as oil and that lower emission concrete takes a long time to cure, then we may end up seeing a lot of modular roadways in Australia, if we had a reasonable carbon price. The PV angle is not really relevant. Of course if one was going to wire up transparent road surface modules with LEDs and heating elements inside them then throwing in some PV as well would probably be a trivial extra cost. After all, it’s not the PV that’s expensive, it’s the wiring and installation. That said, I still recommend putting it on the roof instead.
@Fran Barlow
Yes, probably it is a “foot in each camp” agreement, allowing the politicians the option of side-stepping either way when they see which way reality is breaking. I mean both political reality and bio-physical reality. Eventually, political reality has to come back to more or less match bio-physical reality or the disconnect will become plain to everyone over about 11 years of age.
@Fran Barlow
I’m a little puzzled by your reference to the implications of current polling for the US in 2017. Are you aware of polls that suggest a Republican Presidential victory in 2016? If the 2016 elections produce a Democratic Presidency and a Republican Congress, that won’t change things politically, it will leave them just where they are now (or, to be precise, as they will be from January when the new Congress commences).
I don’t think the next US election is critical – what is critical is the COP21 in Paris in 2015.
Previous attempts at an agreement were scuttled by China and the US – now they are in agreement.
This agreement sets the tone for the next agreement. The Repugs can rant and rave all they want..
@J-D
I’m assuming that given the low standing of Obama in the polls, the Repug will stand a better than even chance of getting in front of any likely contender from the Dems. Also, 2/3 of congress can overrule a President, if I recall correctly.
@Megan
Exactly, right down the line. Well said.
@Ikonoclast
I don’t agree because your argument derives from the idea that the greater the immiseration of the masses then the greater the likelihood of rebellion. I wish it were so. We have a small ‘window’
of opportunity in which the trained intellectuals of the professional bourgeoisie can sow the seeds of rebelliousness in younger people. If we fail then their future is slavery.
To me China’s declaration seems the important element here as they are the superpower on the rise ,and they arent a democracy so the perception is that they will just do it.
@Ikonoclast
“Nowhere Man, the world is at your command”
The change from singular to plural in the title; the line above changed to yours and we have the perfect serenade for every politician, particularly our glorious leader.
However, we don’t have the tolerance of, say, even the Chinese recently in Hong Kong when a peaceful protest was allowed to run to exhaustion.
Under the new “Brisbane G20 democracy” laws (gee, I hope there’s a sunset clause) it would be illegal for me to organise fifty fellow septuagenarian grandparents, concerned for our grandchildren, to form a choir outside the hotels of twenty of the most important humans on the planet we are told with a straight face, and serenade them with the relevant “Nowhere Men”, a song that suggests to hopefully more than half of them, if they have to wit, that unless they do something, they are men of straw like their predecessors.
As an acknowledgement to the incredibly tight security measures necessary to protect said VIP’s from the, possibly, millions of outraged world citizens who perceive this gab/gob/grabfest for what it is: going nowhere; my fellow choristers would be prepared to sing naked, thus ensuring no MSM coverage.
Ikonoclast, Lennon would have approved of your improvements.
Ah the men who come behind…
http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/lawson-henry/the-men-who-come-behind-0022057
“And the grandest themes are hackneyed by the pens that come behind”.
@Fran Barlow
Two thirds of the senate is required to overturn a presidential veto. and from what I understand, and have read elsewhere, Obama does not need congress at all to implement changes over the next two years, The Clean Air Act is enough. So 2016 is very important. if you can stand wading through the comments, Prof Quiggin has an article at the Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/13/the-us-china-deal-on-climate-change-is-this-centurys-most-significant-agreement-it-puts-g20-goals-to-shame
It’s going to be interesting to see where the Republican’s go with this. If they repudiate the entire agreement, it’s not out of the question that China might hit them where it hurts by selling down some of the $ trillion or so of US bonds they have.
@Fran Barlow
Even if the Republicans were to obtain a two-thirds majority in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate, that would not give them a general power to overrule all decisions made by a Democratic President. It would give them the power to override a Presidential veto of legislation, but that’s not the same thing. In any case, there are no polls suggesting the Republicans will win a two-thirds majority of the House in 2016, and even if they did it’s mathematically impossible for the Republicans to win a two-thirds majority of the Senate in 2016, given the current composition of the three classes of Senators.
Obama is one person we know will not be a Presidential candidate in 2016. There have already been several polls comparing possible Democratic candidates with possible Republican candidates for 2016, and most of them favour the Democrats (admittedly, the pollsters’ guesses at who might be candidates could be way off, which is one reason to place limited credit in these polls, but they are the only ones we have). I’m not saying a Democrat will be elected President in 2016, and I’m also not saying I expect anything particularly good if one is; but you seemed to be suggesting that there are polls pointing to a Republican electoral victory in 2016, and I don’t think that’s accurate.
The key parts of the “Joint Announcement” are in paragraph 3.
This is what everyone is getting excited about (emphasis added):
The US:
They intend to achieve a target of reducing emissions in 2025.
And China:
They intend to achieve a peak in emissions and intend to increase non-fossil fuels.
You can be held to a promise or a guarantee or an undertaking, but as Murdoch with his ‘poison pill’ and James Hardie with its ‘fully funded’ asbestos fund have shown – an “intention” is worth nothing.
An intention is the ultimate fairy dust.
They could at least have lied to us. Sadly they’ve told us the truth.