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U.S. formally rejoins the Paris local weather accord.

U.S. formally rejoins the Paris climate accord.

The United States officially joined the Paris Agreement on Friday, the international treaty to avert catastrophic global warming.

President Biden said tackling the climate crisis was one of his top priorities and he signed an executive order re-committing the United States to the deal just hours after he took office last month.

“We can no longer delay the fight against climate change or do what is absolutely necessary,” said Biden on Friday. “This is a global existential crisis. And we will all face the consequences if we fail. “

It was a sharp rejection of the Trump administration, which had pulled the country out of the pact and appeared to be eager to undercut regulations to protect the environment.

“The Paris Agreement is an unprecedented framework for global action,” Foreign Minister Antony J. Blinken said in a statement on Friday. “We know because we helped design it and make it a reality.”

With around 189 countries joining the pact in 2016, it had broad international support, and Mr Biden’s move to rejoin the effort was welcomed by foreign leaders.

“Welcome back to the Paris Agreement!” Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, said in a Twitter message at the time.

The galvanizing idea of ​​the Paris Climate Agreement is that only global solidarity and collective action can prevent the ravages of climate change: hotter temperatures, rising sea levels, stronger storms or droughts that lead to food shortages.

President Biden has announced a plan to spend $ 2 trillion over four years to increase the use of clean energy in transportation, electricity and buildings while rapidly moving away from coal, oil and gas. His goal is to eliminate fossil fuel emissions from power generation by 2035 and has vowed to put the entire U.S. economy on the right track to become carbon neutral by mid-century.

Former President Trump announced in 2017 that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, but the withdrawal could not be made official until November 4th last year.

The United States was officially excluded from the agreement for 107 days.

On Friday, Blinken said the fight against climate change would once again be at the center of the US domestic and foreign policy priorities.

“Climate change and science diplomacy can never again be” add-ons “in our foreign policy discussions,” said Blinken.

But he added: “As significant as our accession to the agreement in 2016 was – and as significant as our re-entry is today – what we do in the weeks, months and years to come is even more important.”

Since the industrial age began, the United States has emitted more greenhouse gases than any other country. The way the United States uses its money and power has both a symbolic and a real impact on whether the world’s 7.6 billion people, and the poorest in particular, will be able to avert climate disasters.

There are two immediate signals to watch out for. First, how ambitious will the Biden government be with its emissions reduction targets? Stakeholders are under pressure to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030 compared to 2005.

Second, how much money will the United States spend to help poor countries adapt to global warming disasters and turn their economies away from fossil fuels?

The answers to both questions are expected in the next few weeks, just in time for the virtual climate summit on April 22nd, which President Biden has announced.

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Business

As Winter Sweeps the South, Fed Officers Deal with Local weather Change

As Winter Sweeps the South, Fed Officials Focus on Climate Change

A senior Federal Reserve official issued a sharp warning Thursday morning that banks and other lenders must prepare for the realities of a climate-changing world, and regulators must play a key role in ensuring this.

“Climate change is already causing significant economic costs and is expected to have profound effects on the domestic and international economies,” said Lael Brainard, one of the six governors of the Washington Central Bank, at an event hosted by the Institute of International Finance.

“Financial institutions that fail to create a framework to measure, monitor and manage climate-related risks could suffer excessive losses in climate-sensitive assets from environmental shifts, a disorderly transition to a low-carbon economy, or a combination of both,” she continued.

The grim backdrop for their comments is the unusually cold weather in Texas, which leaves millions of people without electricity and underscores the fact that state and local authorities in some locations are unprepared for severe weather, which is expected to occur more frequently.

Such disruptions are also important to the financial system. They pose risks to insurers, can disrupt the payment system and call into question otherwise sound financial betting. Therefore, it is important for the Fed to understand and plan for it, central bank officials have increasingly said.

Ms. Brainard pointed out on Thursday that financial companies are countering the risk by, among other things, “responding to investors’ demands for climate-friendly portfolios”. But she added that regulators like the Fed also have to adapt. She pointed out the possibility that bank regulators may need new supervisory tools given the challenges associated with climate surveillance, which include long time horizons and limited data due to the lack of precedents.

“Scenario analysis can be a useful tool to” assess the impact of climate-related risks under a variety of assumptions, “said Ms. Brainard, although she was careful to ensure that such scenarios would differ from full-fledged stress tests.

The public assessment of climate risks is uncharted territory for the Fed. Officials tiptoed around the issue, which is politically indicted in the United States, for years. The central bank only joined a global coalition at the end of last year dedicated to research into protecting the financial system against climate risks. The possibility of climate-related stress testing has been particularly controversial and has recently been criticized by Republican lawmakers.

“We have seen banks make politically motivated and public relations decisions to limit credit availability to these industries,” said more than 40 Republican lawmakers in a December letter referring specifically to coal, oil and gas . They added that “climate change stress tests could continue this trend and allow regulated banks to use negative impacts on their regulatory testing as an excuse for defusing or divesting these crucial industries.”

In response, Jerome H. Powell, chairman of the Fed, and Randal K. Quarles, vice chairman of oversight – both named for their work by President Donald J. Trump – suggested that the Fed should be at an early stage of research into their Role in climate supervision.

“We would like to point out that it has long been the policy of the Federal Reserve not to dictate to banks which legitimate industries they can and cannot serve, as these business decisions should be made solely by each institution,” they wrote last month.

Mr Powell and Mr Quarles reiterated the legislature’s claim that the Fed’s bank stress tests measured banks’ capital needs over a much shorter period than climate change, despite saying the Fed was working to help banks manage their risks, including the associated climate.

The central bank is rapidly moving towards more activism in this area. The Monitoring Climate Committee, announced last month, will “work to develop an appropriate program” to monitor banks’ climate-related risks, Ms. Brainard said Thursday. The Fed also co-chairs a task force on climate-related financial risks in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a global regulatory group.

Although the central bank is politically independent, President Biden has placed climate at the center of his administration’s economic priorities. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen has pledged to “fight the climate crisis”.

Ms. Brainard, the last remaining Fed governor appointed solely by President Barack Obama, was a leading voice in calling for greater awareness of climate issues and spoke at a conference on the issue in 2019. Also Mary C. Daly, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, who hosted the conference. (Mr. Powell was originally appointed by Mr. Obama, but then named chairman under Mr. Trump.)

“It is a fact that severe weather events are on the rise,” Ms. Daly said during a webcast event this week, noting that “half the country is in a winter storm and then they will be in a heatwave in summer.” ”

She said the Fed needs to figure out how to deal with potentially disruptive risks as it is responsible for the country’s economic health, works with other regulators to protect the security of the financial system, and is the administrator of the payments system. the bowels of the financial system, where money is sent and checks are processed.

“We need to understand what the risks are and think about how these risks can be mitigated,” said Ms. Daly. “Our responsibility is to look ahead and not only ask what is happening today, but also what the risks are.”

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Health

Bioterrorism, local weather change are subsequent large threats after Covid

Bioterrorism, climate change are next big threats after Covid

Bill Gates at the Munich Security Conference on February 17, 2017 in Munich.

Michael Gottschalk | Getty

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates warned for years that a deadly pandemic could occur. Now he is creating the threat of bio-terrorism and climate change.

Gates appeared on Derek Muller’s YouTube channel Veritasium last week, asking what the next problem for humanity was.

“One is climate change. Every year this would be an even higher death toll than this pandemic,” said the Microsoft co-founder. “In the context of pandemics, people don’t like to talk much about what bioterrorism is, that someone who wants to cause harm could develop a virus. That means the chance of encountering it is more than just like naturally caused epidemics the actual. “

Years before the coronavirus hit the globe, Gates warned that governments were not prepared for a pandemic.

“The world as a whole is not prepared for epidemics, and we’ve had some flu scares that made us do some minor things, but not enough,” he said in a 2014 interview. “If this thing had been twice as permeable “We’d be in big trouble, and there are agents who have a real chance of coming in the next few decades who are far more porous than this. What can you stop?” Form of SARS shows up? “

In a 2015 TED talk titled “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready,” Gates said an infectious virus poses a greater risk to humanity than nuclear war.

In his interview with Müller, Gates said there will be more pandemics. In the future, however, governments could increase their willingness to reduce the death toll.

According to data from Johns Hopkins University, more than 107.44 million coronavirus cases were recorded worldwide as of Thursday morning, with at least 2.35 million people dying

“The number of deaths with the right system should be a tenth of what we see here,” said Gates.

You can find the full interview here.

Categories
Politics

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is true about local weather change disclosure

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is right about climate change disclosure

A firefighter moves a hose as he attempts to rescue homes on Mountain Hawk Drive while the shady fire burns in the Skyhawk area of ​​Santa Rosa, California, on September 28, 2020.

Scott Strazzante | San Francisco Chronicle | Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images

The recommendation that public corporations disclose their plans to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, as suggested in the recent letter from Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock and others, should be embraced by corporations and investors and pragmatic by regulators worldwide implemented.

We, a long-term investor and a seasoned market regulator, embrace this disclosure framework for what it will do – vastly improve the mix of decision-making information – and what it will not – direct corporate strategy or, worse, pick winners and losers. Based on the work we have done with FCLT Global and others, we believe it can be implemented quickly and effectively.

Based on the generally accepted thesis that environmental regulations will drive economic activity in the direction of CO2 neutrality in the next thirty years, this recommendation offers a focus for a meaningful engagement of investors and companies.

Past transformations show the wisdom of this approach. Imagine an important investment question that originated in the 1990s: How will your company deal with the transformation to a digital economy?

For the past thirty years, investors have used this forward-looking information to evaluate companies and to assess broader shifts in economic activity. Also note that the answers to this digital transformation question have changed dramatically from year to year due to the dynamics of the market, including innovation, globalization and the development of human capital.

A transition to a climate neutral economy will undoubtedly affect the performance and prospects of many companies and sectors. Some will benefit greatly, others will suffer or even fail.

A transition to a climate neutral economy will undoubtedly affect the performance and prospects of many companies and sectors. Some will benefit greatly, others will suffer or even fail. These outcomes will be the result of myriad strategic decisions and many changing economic and regulatory factors.

Investors are right to understand how these considerations will affect the future value of their investments. In addition, a wide variety of institutional money managers wish to demonstrate to their clients, including those who prefer “green” or “sustainable” investments, that they are allocating capital appropriately.

However, the quality of the transformational information available to investors, companies and governments is far from what it should be. Each constituency is responsible for this matter. Governments have been inconsistent in their approach to climate-related regulation. Companies were reluctant to make forward-looking statements; and investors have been adopting simplistic rules to classify companies as “green” or not.

Fortunately, this framework leverages an incredibly powerful tool: the information, insights, and perspectives from thousands of companies on their climate compliance plans.

For some companies, their transformation would require very few adjustments. For others, such as airlines and utilities, transformation may not be possible without fundamental changes in their business and the market in general, including, for example, developing a market for carbon credits.

Forward-looking information

This type of company-specific, forward-looking information, focused on a common future goal, is exactly what investors should want when allocating capital over the long term. It answers the key question: does the company have a credible strategy to adapt to and perform in the expected future commercial and regulatory environment?

Compare this approach to a rigid, metrics-based disclosure framework. In some industries in which climate effects have been taken into account for some time – think of property insurers – certain indicators can clearly lead to insights. However, finding universal metrics in our diverse economy is analogous to taking a long journey down the wrong end of the telescope.

Metrics are legitimate and can be included in the approach we advocate and should not be abandoned, but like financial statements, they provide limited forward-looking information.

For investors, it is more important how companies take on the costs, risks and opportunities of climate change and the associated regulation, just as the expected future profits are more important than past performance.

Access to this information also provides an informed, cross-sectoral basis for assessing whether and how the emerging global goal of 2050 can be achieved (and which countries, companies and individuals will bear the costs and benefit from the benefits) – questions from governments, Investors and companies should keep asking.

Adoption of this disclosure framework will, of course, raise questions of interpretation and implementation, including the extent to which companies would be legally responsible for their Strategy 2050 disclosures.

To address concerns about unjustified legal action in US courts, this disclosure should be kept in a safe haven that provides special protection for good faith estimates and assumptions and liability for willful fraud standards.

We should initiate a fundamental change in collective, predictive disclosure and not play with company-specific “gotcha”. With this in mind, and in order to minimize the potential for unfair competitive advantages and enforcement asymmetries that have undermined similar global regulatory efforts, these frameworks must be resolutely and simultaneously adopted and enforced.

The right framework

Regulating a global problem requires joint implementation to avoid regulatory arbitrage and corrosive industrial policy. It is important that this framework can be adopted promptly and consistently, as opposed to a metrics-specific framework, which would require extensive cross-border analysis and debate and could be out of date for a variety of reasons prior to implementation.

This framework not only reflects the fundamental characteristics of the underlying theme – a multi-year, dynamic, market-driven transition – but also provides fertile ground for virtuous dynamism.

With this information, investors are more likely to identify attractive investment opportunities more quickly, which in turn prompts companies to provide more information (to attract more capital) and encourage innovation (think carbon capture).

In a broader sense, this dynamic can lead to a better match between informed regulatory policy and company value. In other words, an improved convergence of values ​​and values.

Jay Clayton, a CNBC employee, served as the chairman of the SEC from 2017 to 2020. Prior to joining the Commission, Clayton was a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, where he served on the firm’s management committee and co-headed the firm’s Corporate Practice. From 2009 to 2017 he was a Lecturer in Law and Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Mark Wiseman is a Canadian investment manager and business executive, and an industry leading expert in alternative and active equity investing. Until last year, Wiseman was Senior Managing Director at BlackRock and Chairman of BlackRock’s Global Investment Committee. Prior to joining BlackRock in 2016, he was President and CEO of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).

Categories
Business

Systemic change and local weather motion are key to reaching inexperienced objectives

Systemic change and climate action are key to achieving green goals

From geopolitical tensions to the coronavirus pandemic to trade disputes, modern life can often feel confusing, unsafe, and disjointed.

One area where there seems to be a new sense of oneness is the environment. Just last week, US President Joe Biden signed an ordinance resuming the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, undoing the Trump administration’s decision to exit the agreement.

The Paris Agreement marks a milestone at the COP21 summit in December 2015 and aims to keep global warming “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels and “make efforts” to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

In a statement on Biden’s decision, the European Commission stressed the need for future cooperation and consensus. “The climate crisis is the crucial challenge of our time,” said the EU executive, “and it can only be tackled by uniting all of our forces.”

The role of finance

Politicians aren’t the only ones focusing on the environment. A panel discussion moderated by CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick discussed at length the role of the financial sector in efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change.

“Compared to 2015, there is exactly this undeniable and accelerating dynamic in the financial sector,” said Rhian-Mari Thomas, Managing Director of the Green Finance Institute.

“We are seeing huge inflows into … environmental, social and governance funds,” she said, adding that the magnitude of change is widespread.

“Aside from the exciting innovation we’re seeing and the pledges and commitments of individual financial firms and providers, we’re really seeing change on a systemic level,” she said.

UK investment manager trading organization, the Investment Association (IA), invested £ 7.8 billion (US $ 10.72 billion) in so-called “responsible mutual funds” between January and October 2020.

This, according to the Impact Assessment, represented 47.5% of total net money poured into funds and was four times higher than in the same period in 2019.

In October 2020 alone, more than £ 1 billion was invested in these funds, a figure the Impact Assessment dubbed the “highest monthly total on record”. Still, work remains to be done: the IA said the “total share of responsible mutual funds in managed industrial funds” was only 3.0% at the end of October.

Thomas reaffirmed her position on systemic change and referred to the network of central banks and supervisory authorities for greening the financial system (NGFS). The NGFS, launched in 2017, consists of central banks and supervisory authorities.

It consists of 83 members and 13 observers. The latter include institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the OECD, while members range from the Bank of England and the European Central Bank to the US Federal Reserve.

Thomas does not lose the presence of such great thugs. “All systemically important banks in the world and many other financial institutions are now overseen by members of the NGFS who are committed to ensuring that the financial services system is in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement,” she said.

The business challenge

While the bigger picture can change thanks to global initiatives and collaborations, how individual companies approach issues related to sustainability and the environment is also important.

Another member of the CNBC board, Markus Steilemann, CEO of Covestro, wanted to highlight the challenge facing his company, a major player in polymers.

“We have to master two transitions,” he said. “Number one is that our massive energy intake needs to become carbon neutral and carbon emissions neutral,” he added.

“And secondly, we have to master the transition to raw materials, that is, completely away from raw materials that come from coal, oil and gas towards renewable sources.”

Steilemann also emphasized the importance of operating a circular economy rather than a linear one, an idea that has become increasingly important in recent years.

“The materials that we bring out there do not have to end up in landfills – nor may they end up in the oceans … they have to be recycled,” said Steilemann.

“Second, we have to ensure that the raw material we use does not come from a linear business model and is not extracted from the ground.”

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Business

Biden to signal govt orders on local weather change

Biden to sign executive orders on climate change

United States President Joe Biden holds up a face mask as he speaks about fighting the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic at the White House in Washington on January 26, 2021.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

President Joe Biden will sign several executive orders on Wednesday to combat climate change and move the country to a clean energy economy, the White House said.

Executive measures include setting climate change as a national security priority, preserving at least 30% of the state and oceans by 2030, and terminating new oil and gas leases for public land and bodies of water based on a review of administrative orders.

Biden’s executive agenda will also focus on creating green jobs and union opportunities, as well as environmental justice for communities disproportionately affected by climate change.

The government said the climate action would build modern and sustainable infrastructure while restoring scientific integrity in the federal government. The arrangement supports the president’s agenda to reduce CO2 emissions from the electricity sector by 2035 and achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

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Biden, who has staffed the White House with a historic number of climate experts, signed an order last week to reintroduce the US to the Paris Agreement, a landmark deal between nations to curb their emissions. He also canceled construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the United States

The president plans to leave remarks and sign the orders at 1:30 p.m. ET. Biden’s special climate officer John Kerry and national climate adviser Gina McCarthy will brief reporters on the government’s plans.

The Biden government will also convene the Climate Leaders’ Summit on April 22nd, which will bring together world leaders to discuss climate change issues. The summit will likely be remote during the coronavirus pandemic.

Categories
Business

U.S. rejoins Paris local weather settlement

U.S. rejoins Paris climate agreement

President Joe Biden signs Executive Orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington upon his inauguration as the 46th President of the United States on January 20, 2021.

Tom Brenner | Reuters

President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday to reintroduce the US to the Paris Agreement. This is his first major global warming move as it brings in the largest team of climate change experts to ever come to the White House.

The Biden administration also plans to revoke approval for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the United States and to sign additional contracts in the coming days to reverse several measures taken by former President Donald Trump to weaken the environment.

Biden pledges to act swiftly on climate change, and his inclusion of scientists across the government marks the beginning of a major political reversal after four years of the Trump administration weakening climate rules in favor of fossil fuel producers.

Almost every country in the world is part of the Paris Agreement, the non-binding agreement between nations to reduce their CO2 emissions. Trump withdrew the US from the deal in 2017.

Mitchell Bernard, President of the Defense Council for Natural Resources, said Biden’s order to re-join the deal makes the US part of the global solution to climate change rather than part of the problem.

“This is a quick and determined action,” Bernard said in a statement. “It creates the conditions for comprehensive measures to deal with the climate crisis, as long as there is still time to act.”

With a slim Democratic majority in the Senate, Biden could potentially achieve large chunks of his ambitious climate change agenda, including a $ 2 trillion economic plan to drive a clean energy transition, cut electricity sector carbon emissions by 2035, and achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

During his first few months in office, Biden is expected to sign a wave of executive orders to combat climate change, including preserving 30% of American land and waters by 2030, protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from drilling, and restoring and enhancing the role of science in government decisions.

Some legal actions related to the climate will take longer, including the government’s plan to undo a number of Trump environmental setbacks related to clean air and water rules and emissions to warm the planet. The Trump administration reversed more than 100 environmental regulations in four years, according to research by Columbia Law School.

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“From Paris to Keystone to protecting gray wolves, these great first steps by President Biden show that he is serious about stopping the climate and extinction crises,” said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biodiversity, in a statement. “These strong steps must be the start of a furious race to avert disaster.”

The next major UN climate summit will take place in Glasgow, Scotland, in November. The countries in the agreement will set updated emissions targets for the next decade.

The aim of the agreement is to keep the global temperature increase well below 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit compared to pre-industrial values. The earth will warm by 1.5 ° C in the next two decades.

Robert Schuwerk, executive director for North America at Carbon Tracker, said the resumption of the deal signals to global markets that the US will give priority to tackling climate change, but added that this is only part of what the government is doing must to reduce their emissions.

The USA is the second largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world after China. It is expected that an updated climate target and a concrete plan for reducing emissions from the electricity and energy sectors will be available.

“Re-entry is just a table,” said John Morton, President Barack Obama’s director of energy and climate on the National Security Council. “The hard work to get the country on track to net zero emissions by the middle of the century begins now.”

Categories
World News

Keystone Rejection Exams Trudeau’s Balancing Act on Local weather and Vitality

Keystone Rejection Tests Trudeau’s Balancing Act on Climate and Energy

OTTAWA – One of President Biden’s first steps in taking office was to remove the approval for the Keystone XL pipeline, the long-debated project to move crude oil from Canada’s oil sands to the United States.

But Canadian officials, particularly in Alberta, the province where the pipeline originated, are not giving up anytime soon.

The nearly 1,200-mile long Keystone XL was to transport crude oil from Canada to Nebraska, where it would be connected to an existing network to deliver the crude oil to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.

With the pipeline cancellation, Mr Biden took some of his first steps to reverse the legacy of the Trump administration, which revived the project after it was rejected by President Barack Obama in 2015.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has long supported the pipeline to balance his priority in fighting climate change with his support for Canada’s energy industries in Alberta and other western provinces.

“We are disappointed but acknowledge the president’s decision to keep his campaign promise for Keystone XL,” Trudeau said in a statement late Wednesday commending other decisions by Mr Biden, including a move to re-join the Paris Climate Agreement . Mr. Trudeau and his officials had for weeks urged the incoming U.S. government not to revoke the Keystone XL permit.

Days before Mr Biden’s official announcement, the Alberta Prime Minister had issued a statement promising legal action. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Jason Kenney demanded that Mr Trudeau also impose trade sanctions on the United States if he fails to convince the American President to reverse course.

“This is a blow to the Canadian and Alberta economies,” Kenney said at a news conference. “It is an insult to the United States’ most important ally and trading partner on the first day of a new administration.”

Mr. Kenney also criticized the Biden transition team for refusing to meet with Alberta officials to discuss the issue. “That’s not how you treat a friend in my books,” he said.

Canada exports around 80 percent of its oil to the US, with most of it coming from the oil sands, which along with the energy industry is vital to Alberta’s economy. Even during the current drop in oil prices, the sector still provides around 140,000 jobs, and before the collapse in oil prices, oil and gas industry royalties represented around 20 percent of Alberta’s budget.

The oil industry had pushed the development of the pipeline in hopes that a direct route to the Gulf of Mexico, where refineries are equipped to process the heavy, low-quality oil found in Canada’s inland oil sands, would eliminate shipping bottlenecks and lower prices, Andrew Leach said , an energy and environmental economist from the University of Alberta at Edmonton.

However, the pipeline project has been fiercely rejected by environmentalists, American farmers and ranchers, and indigenous groups in the United States who feared it would change and potentially damage their land.

“President Biden’s decision to reject Keystone XL on its first day heralded a new era,” said Anthony Swift, director of the Canada Project at the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that has long criticized the oil sands.

“New fossil fuel development projects are put through a kind of climate test that assesses whether these projects are in line with our international climate goals,” added Swift.

Faith Spotted Eagle, an elder of the Yankton Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and an early opponent of the pipeline, said Mr. Biden’s decision was important to Native Americans.

“I am pleased that our contract rights have been recognized,” she said. “This is a justification.”

American environmentalists had targeted the Keystone Pipeline to shut down the oil sands, which they believe is a particularly dirty source of energy. But even with Keystone’s demise, that effort seems unattainable.

In addition to the railways, there are numerous pipelines between the two countries through which Canada sends oil to American refineries. Two more Canadian pipelines for the US are currently being expanded, so production in the oil sands is likely to continue.

The question, however, said Mr Leach, is whether these other pipelines are also targets of the new US administration: is Mr Biden saying we basically don’t want cross-border pipelines, or we just don’t want this pipeline? “

One of the pipelines currently being expanded is in the American Midwest. Another connects the oil sands with a port in British Columbia that can ship refineries on the Pacific coast of the United States and that also has a branch line to Washington State. Both were attacked by protests.

There is another pipeline running from western Canada through the American Midwest that Michigan has proposed to withdraw for environmental reasons. This move could clog much of the pipeline route.

Mr Biden’s announcement to cancel the Keystone XL fulfilled a promise he had repeatedly made on the campaign trail as part of his climate change agenda, even though the president did not announce plans for the other pipelines shared by Canada and the United States.

In a statement released Wednesday prior to Mr Biden’s intervention, TC Energy, the company that owns Keystone, said it was disappointed with Mr Biden’s decision and would cease work on the pipeline pending its options check.

The termination will “result in the layoff of thousands of union workers and negatively impact industry’s pioneering commitments to use new renewable energies as well as historic equity partnerships with indigenous communities,” the company said.

Chris Bloomer, president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, said Keystone XL’s demise had more to do with opposition to the oil sands than with the project itself.

“It seems that regardless of the industry there is no basis for a middle ground or compromise,” he said from Calgary. “The environmentalists’ appetite to turn things off is insatiable.”

The likelihood of Mr. Kenney or TC Energy getting through litigation against Mr. Biden is slim, said Kristen van de Biezenbos, a law professor at the University of Calgary in Alberta.

Resolving challenges in American courts or through investor provisions on trade deals could take years, likely fail, and ultimately fail to restore the presidential approval required for the pipeline, she said.

And a Canadian win in court wouldn’t remove the Keystone Project’s other hurdles – legal challenges from environmental groups, regulatory barriers within states, and the adverse economic climate that has deterred investors and stalled construction.

“I am really amazed at the wisdom to pursue this further,” she said. “It would be faster to build a pipeline in Canada.”

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Categories
Health

Trump’s risk to veto $900 billion Covid reduction invoice places main local weather laws in danger

Trump's threat to veto $900 billion Covid relief bill puts major climate legislation at risk

Patrick Pleul / Image Alliance via Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s opposition to a $ 900 billion coronavirus bailout package, largely passed by U.S. lawmakers late Monday, jeopardizes the first major climate change piece of legislation to have received Congress approval in about a decade.

Trump has threatened a veto of the stimulus package, which includes $ 600 direct checks for individuals and $ 35 billion to fund clean energy projects, and plans to reduce the use of chemicals to warm the planet.

The climate regulations included in the deal come after the Trump administration slashed more than 80 key environmental regulations in four years and just before President-elect Joe Biden took office.

Biden plans to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement and use executive orders to expose many of Trump’s environmental setbacks. He’s also pushing for a $ 2 trillion plan, which needs Congressional approval, to move the country from fossil fuels to clean energy and green jobs. Trump officially withdrew the country from the Paris Agreement in November.

Although Biden’s legislation is likely to face immense hurdles if the GOP controls the Senate, which will be decided with two crucial runoff elections in Georgia in January, policy experts and environmental groups say the bipartite-backed climate action in the stimulus package signals that Biden can achieve this could make significant strides in combating global warming. It is also a sign that the US will join a wider global effort to reduce fossil fuel emissions to warm the planet.

“The spending bill just passed by Congress, with support from both Democrats and Republicans, points the way ahead,” said Michael Mann, climatologist and professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University. “It’s a positive sign that 2020 could be the year we turned around the corner on climate action in the US.”

The stimulus plan will cut the production and consumption of fluorocarbons (HFCs), which warm the planet, by 85% in the US over a 15 year period.

The ozone-depleting chemicals are often found in air conditioners and refrigerators. While they make up a smaller percentage of greenhouse gas emissions, fluorocarbons pack 1000 times the heat storage capacity of carbon dioxide.

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HFCs are used by nations around the world in a targeted manner to curb global warming. In October 2016 in Kigali, Rwanda, a landmark agreement was reached by delegates from 197 nations around the world to phase out HFCs.

So far 72 countries have ratified the Kigali Agreement. Despite the support of US manufacturers and chemical companies, the Trump administration did not accept the pact and instead proposed to reset the Obama-era standards to reduce the use of HFCs.

The stimulus package also includes bipartisan renewable energy legislation, which will provide approximately $ 35 billion in government funding for clean energy projects.

“This bill is the most important step we have taken to improve the climate of this Congress, and its passage is strong evidence that both parties support cooperation in creating climate solutions and investing in advanced energy technologies, while at the same time the our country’s most vulnerable citizens are cared for, “Senator Chris Coons, D-Del. said in a statement earlier this week.

The legislation includes tax credits for solar and wind power that would fuel Biden’s plan to have a carbon-free electricity sector by 2035. The broader bill also includes investments for more sustainable transport and re-approves a program that provides funding for low-income homeowners to upgrade equipment, heat pumps and other household items to clean energy products.

The stimulus package also includes measures to capture and store carbon from production and power plants, reduce diesel emissions from some vehicles, and finance oil exploration projects.

“Congress has made an unprecedented downside to tackling climate change in this legislation by agreeing to phase out effective HFCs, invest in renewables and extend much-needed tax incentives for wind and solar,” said Grant Carlisle, senior Policy Advisor at Natural Resource Defense Council.

“But that’s just a start,” said Carlisle. “In order to cope with the climate crisis, the federal government must accelerate its efforts to convert our economy to clean energy and away from dirty fossil fuels.”

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DeepMind A.I. lab shifts focus from local weather change

DeepMind A.I. lab shifts focus from climate change

Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google’s startup DeepMind for artificial intelligence (AI).

Jeon Heon-Kyun | Getty Images

LONDON – Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory DeepMind has shifted its focus from climate change to other areas of science, pursuing its original mission of creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) widely regarded as the holy grail of emerging technology to several people who are familiar with the matter.

While DeepMind, which was acquired by Google for $ 600 million in 2014, denies having shifted its focus, several key climate change researchers who were part of the company’s energy unit have left the company in the past two years and few have Applied some changes. related announcements.

The unit of energy, which has received a fair amount of attention over the years, has gone and none of the company’s employees mention it on their LinkedIn profiles based on CNBC analysis. When asked, a DeepMind spokesperson said, “Over time we’ve moved away from a narrower focus on domains and cross-functional teams in DeepMind are now contributing to our growing climate and sustainability projects.”

They added, “In addition to ongoing partnerships with Google to take advantage of our energy-saving technology, new projects are ongoing in several areas, including more efficient approaches to machine learning.”

One of DeepMind’s early, and perhaps most successful, projects was to cut Google’s huge electricity bill and immediately reduce the company’s carbon footprint. The search giant, technically a sister company of DeepMind as both are operated by Alphabet, announced in July 2016 that it had succeeded in reducing the energy consumption of its data center cooling devices, which are designed to protect Google’s servers from overheating 40 % with the help of a DeepMind AI system.

DeepMind didn’t stop there. It has been working with the Google Cloud department on a new platform that will enable AI control of cooling systems in commercial and industrial facilities.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, said in a blog post in September that DeepMind and Google Cloud are making the platform available to airports, shopping malls, hospitals, data centers and other commercial buildings and industrial facilities worldwide. However, DeepMind and Google Cloud have yet to provide specific examples of where and how the platform is being used.

The DeepMind Energy unit

In 2017, DeepMind began recruiting more experts to Google’s new campus in King’s Cross, London, to investigate how AI can be used to slow the effects of global warming. It formed a new team called “DeepMind Energy” led by Jim Gao, a former Google technical director who co-led the data center project with DeepMind. Gao declined to comment on this story.

DeepMind Energy grew to around 14 people and was commissioned to come up with new AI technologies to combat climate change.

In 2019, DeepMind Energy announced its first big win. It had increased Google’s revenue from its wind farms in the US by around 20%. The wind farms are part of the Google network for projects in the renewable energy sector.

DeepMind’s AI was used to predict the energy output of the wind farms up to 36 hours in advance of actual generation – useful, since energy sources that can be scheduled to deliver a certain amount of energy at a specified time are often larger for the grid Are worth.

While the company’s achievements matter, it has yet to be publicly confirmed where and how the energy-efficient AI has been applied outside of Google’s data centers and wind farms.

National Grid Nightmare?

At one point, DeepMind wanted to use its AI technology to optimize National Grid, which owns and operates the infrastructure that powers homes and businesses across the UK.

“We’re at the early stages of talking to National Grid and other major vendors about how we can investigate the kind of problems they’re having,” said Demis Hassabis, chief executive of DeepMind, in an interview with the Financial Times in March 2017. “It would be amazing if you could save 10% of the country’s energy consumption without new infrastructure, just by optimizing it. That’s pretty exciting.”

In March last year, it emerged that talks between DeepMind and National Grid had collapsed. The organizations spent much of their time working together, sometimes at a National Grid facility near Reading, Berkshire, England. However, there were many hurdles to overcome if anything was ever to be implemented.

Humayun Sheikh, an early investor who backed DeepMind’s launch, told CNBC that commercializing the company’s AI software was difficult, adding that without Google, the company would “likely have failed”.

Sheikh, who claims to have spent five years discussing the idea behind DeepMind with Hassabis before it was recorded, said, “The concern, the question marks, have always been in commercialization. How do you do it?”

Sheikh said National Grid may have had concerns about getting involved in a deal with a large company like Google.

He added, “I don’t think the model that DeepMind or any of those big machine learning and AI companies are using will work … unless it’s delivered as a service. But then the problem is with the data , the GDPR problems. ” The GDPR is a set of data protection and data protection provisions introduced by the European Union in May 2018.

Talks between DeepMind and National Grid eventually failed because they could not agree on the financial details, according to a source familiar with the matter who chose to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the discussion. “The money DeepMind was asking was outrageous,” the source said. “Most of their work is in-house and is billed by Google,” added the source. “They sell the work of their AI engineers at inflated prices and not at the price that the market estimates for their production.”

When asked, a DeepMind spokesperson said, “We looked at the application of AI to optimize the UK’s electricity grid early on. These mutual efforts have been very collaborative and have resulted in many shared ideas on how technology can improve grid efficiency and resilience. These Exploration is now complete and we have no further work planned at this time. “

Gary Marcus, CEO of Robust AI robotics company and co-author of Rebooting AI, which takes a critical look at the industry and suggests how it should evolve, told CNBC that the technology may not have worked well enough for National Grid to do this justify costs.

“Their primary technique, in-depth learning, works best in well-controlled environments like board games and can grapple with the complexities and unpredictability of the real world,” Marcus told CNBC.

Sheikh added, “The technology may not have worked because it wasn’t really that mature.”

National Grid declined to comment.

In a podcast interview published in October, Hassabis reiterated that DeepMind’s AI software “could be applied on a grid scale,” suggesting that he has not given up. “We’d like to try that at some point and save energy on a national level,” he said.

While things did not go according to plan with National Grid in the UK, DeepMind may be looking to hold talks with other governments.

Leave driving forces

With around 1,000 employees, DeepMind’s workforce is divided into those who focus on research and those who focus on applying DeepMind’s AI. Research and publications do not reveal real world problems, which is why the applied branch was established. Like the DeepMind Health division, which was acquired by Google last year, DeepMind Energy is aligned with the applied unit of the company.

The applied unit was headed by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman but left in December 2019 and shocked many colleagues and supporters of the company. Known by friends and colleagues as the “Elk”, the entrepreneur, who has been described by colleagues and the media as an activist and visionary, now has a political role at Google. Suleyman declined to comment.

Several members of the DeepMind Energy team left the company shortly before or after Suleyman left. Gao left the company a few months before Suleyman to found his own start-up with colleague DeepMinder Vedavyas Panneershelvam, while DeepMind Energy’s research engineer Jack Kelly also left to start his own start-up.

The driving forces behind DeepMind’s focus on climate change were Gao and Suleyman, two people with knowledge of the company who preferred to remain anonymous to CNBC due to the sensitivity of the issue. It may be inevitable that DeepMind’s work in this area would slow down after their exits. The DeepMind Energy team that worked on some of DeepMind’s largest climate projects is almost non-existent today.

DeepMind said it had not scaled back its climate change efforts, saying CNBC could not disclose related financial details.

A CNBC source claims Hassabis decided to draw some of the company’s climate protection funds and reassign them to other areas.

Last month, the company announced that it had developed AI software called “AlphaFold” that can accurately predict the structure that proteins will fold into in a few days to solve a 50-year-old “big challenge.” to solve that could solve the problem way to better understanding of diseases and drug discovery. However, some scientists have questioned whether DeepMind “solved” protein folding.

On a call to journalists, Hassabis said, “The ultimate vision behind DeepMind has always been to build general AI and then use it to better understand the world around us by significantly accelerating the pace of scientific discovery.”

A DeepMind spokesperson added, “We’ve made some huge strides and made an impact, including increasing the projected value of Google’s wind power by about 20% and reducing the amount of energy used to cool Google data centers by up to 40% as well overall energy efficiency by 15%. “

“Now Google Cloud is offering this to commercial and industrial customers as a platform solution, helping companies around the world to make their facilities more sustainable.”