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IN THIS ISSUE – “Creative Ways to Adapt During a Difficult Year”
REVENUE & EMERGENCY POWERS
- California’s Tax Revenues Soar; Huge Budget Surplus Forecast
- Governor Again Extends Covid Emergency Powers…With “Profound Impacts”
WATER & ENERGY
- Few Californians Obeying Newsom’s Water Conservation Request
- State Water Regulators Tell 4 Irrigation Districts Groundwater Protection Plans “Missed the Mark”
- Water Infrastructure Funding Ballot Initiative Floated
- Energy Commission OKs $1.4 Billion for EVs & Hydrogen
CLIMATE
- New Hope for Monarch Butterfly Resurgence
- Global Climate Summit – 5 Take-Aways; Did It Bring Momentum or “Blah, Blah, Blah”?
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California policy, legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week. Please feel free to forward this unique service.
READ ALL ABOUT IT!
FOR THE WEEK ENDING NOV. 19, 2021
(CAPITOL NEWS & NOTES WILL NOT PUBLISH NEXT WEEK; HAPPY THANKSGIVING!)
California’s Tax Revenues Soar; Huge Budget Surplus Forecast
Associated Press & Legislative Analyst’s Office
California is on track to have so much money that state officials will likely have to give even more of it back to taxpayers to meet constitutional limits on state spending, according to a new forecast from the state’s independent Legislative Analyst’s Office.
The state’s annual “Fiscal Outlook,” released Wednesday, predicts a $31 billion surplus for the 2022 budget year that begins July 1. The analyst’s office says state is on pace to have so much money that it could exceed a constitutional limit on state spending by $26 billion over three years. That could require Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers to either cut taxes, spend more money on infrastructure or — perhaps the most popular choice in an election year — give rebates to taxpayers and spend more on public schools.
“We think it will … turn out to be a pretty significant issue for the Legislature to consider in this coming budget process,” Legislative Analyst Gabe Petek said.
Newsom won’t reveal his budget proposal until January. But on Wednesday, the governor indicated his favored giving some of the money back to taxpayers. That’s what he and the state Legislature did earlier this year, approving rebates totaling $12 billion for some taxpayers in a state budget that was also projected to exceed the spending limit.
“How we framed that historic surplus last year, similarly, we will frame our approach this year,” Newsom said during a news conference at the Port of Long Beach. “I’m very proud of the historic tax rebate last year, and I look forward to making the decision that I think is in the best interests of 40 million Californians.”
California’s tax collections have continued to soar despite the pandemic. From April through June of this year, California businesses reported a record high $216.8 billion in taxable sales — a 38.8% increase over the same period in 2020 and a 17.4% increase over those months in pre-pandemic 2019.
Nick Maduros, director of the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration, said it is “a sign that business owners found creative ways to adapt during a difficult year.”
In September, collections from taxes on income, sales and corporations were 40% higher than September of last year and almost 60% higher than September 2019. That’s because retail sales have seen double digit-growth this year and stock prices have doubled from their low point at the start of the pandemic last spring.
But the LAO said it’s impossible to know whether these gains are sustainable. Prices for goods and services are going up because of inflation. In October, the nationwide growth in retail sales of 1.7% was mostly because prices rose 0.9% during that same time period, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Gas prices grew even faster.
While most of the state’s wealthier workers kept their jobs and kept paying taxes during the pandemic, the state’s lower-wage workers were hit hard by government-ordered closures of restaurants and other public spaces. More than 18 months into the pandemic, California is tied for the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 7.5%.
“There’s something wrong when the state is flush with extra cash — $750 for every man, woman and child — while ordinary people have to choose between putting food on the table and filling their gas tank,” Assembly Republican Leader Marie Waldron said.
California’s budget year runs from July 1 to June 30. During the first three months of this budget year, California tax collections are more than $10 billion ahead of projections. The LAO predicts that by June 2022, California will have collected $28 billion more in taxes and transfers than officials had expected.
This means there will likely be a significant increase in spending on public schools. The state Constitution requires lawmakers to spend about 40% of state tax collections on public education each year. The LAO said Wednesday that means public schools and community colleges could see an $11 billion increase.
“California’s strong fiscal health is not an accident. It is the direct result of a decade of responsible budgeting by Democratic legislators and governors that enabled the state to survive the pandemic downturn,” said state Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins, a Democrat from San Diego.
Despite California’s wealth, Atkins said “too many families struggle just to get by.” She said the Legislature will “work to craft transformative priorities that put California’s wealth to work building a more equitable economy and a stronger middle class.”
Newsom said he’d like to put most of the surplus either in the state’s savings account or spend it on one-time items that don’t require ongoing funding “so that we’re not caught flat-footed when the economy contracts, when the markets begin to adjust.”
“We are going to substantially increase our one-time investments in infrastructure,” Newsom said. “That’s one (budget) preview you can count on.”
The Legislative Analyst’s Office says most economic forecasters predict inflation will slow down by next year but conceded that prediction “comes with significant uncertainty.” While the LAO is predicting a $31 billion surplus, it could be as low as $10 billion or as high as $60 billion depending on how much money the state collects from taxes.
If the numbers hold, the LAO says California could have as much as $21 billion in its main savings account, or about 10% of all general fund revenues and transfers.
LAO FY22-23 Budget Outlook report:
https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2021/4472/fiscal-outlook-111721.pdf
Governor Again Extends Covid Emergency Powers, With “Profound Impacts”
CalMatters commentary from Dan Walters
Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom extended two of his pandemic decrees until March 31, indicating that he has no present intention of withdrawing the emergency declaration he issued 20 months ago.
It calls to mind David’s plaintive question in Psalm 13, “How long, O Lord?”
Under that emergency declaration, Newsom has suspended or altered more than 400 laws and regulations and, in effect, issued dozens of his own laws without going through the legislative process.
While many are relatively mundane, some have had profound impacts, particularly mandatory shutdowns of countless small businesses and vaccination and mask-wearing orders.
The closures triggered a severe recession as more than 2 million jobs were erased, quadrupling the state’s unemployment rate. Subsequently, Newsom repeatedly eased his shutdown orders, then reimposed them as COVID-19 waxed and waned.
Newsom has defended recent mandatory vaccination orders for teachers and state employees by citing a new uptick in infection rates, also the rationale for last week’s action affecting the employment of health care workers.
Newsom cited “the potential beginning of a new surge in COVID-19 cases” and “short-staffed and backlogged” health care facilities.
Erin Mellon, a Newsom spokesperson, told CalMatters’ reporter Emily Hoeven on Sunday: “The state of emergency ensures the state can continue to respond quickly to evolving conditions as the pandemic persists. As we have seen, this virus and variants are unpredictable. The state of emergency will be ended once conditions no longer warrant an emergency response.”
That’s the rub.
Public health officials have concluded that COVID-19 may never be fully or even almost fully eradicated, as polio was more than a half-century ago.
Rather, the virus will continue to mutate, much like influenza, and will require continuing evolution of vaccines and treatments to keep it at bay. We may manage it, but probably will not eliminate it.
Given that scientific consensus, Newsom could continue his March 4, 2020, emergency declaration indefinitely and thus continue to govern by decree, further eroding the American concept of checks and balances via three equal branches of government.
It is, as opined in this space earlier, an experiment in the system of parliamentary government used in much of the world, including in England and its former colonies, such as Canada and Australia.
In those countries, the party that wins a majority of legislative seats, or fashions a coalition majority, also controls the executive branch. The head of the majority party – the prime minister – is empowered to issue decrees with the force of law as long as he or she retains a legislative majority.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2021/11/how-long-will-newsom-govern-by-decree/
Few Californians Obeying Newsom’s Water Conservation Request
Associated Press
A severe drought prompted California Gov. Gavin Newsom last summer to ask the state’s nearly 40 million residents to voluntarily reduce water use by 15% this year. New data released Tuesday shows few people are doing that.
Californians reduced their water use by a measly 3.9% in September, down from 5.1% in August. Overall, California has reduced its water consumption by just 3.6% since July, when Newsom made the request.
“It’s not the news we want to see, for sure,” said E. Joaquin Esquivel, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board.
A megadrought fueled by climate change has enveloped much of the West. As California heads into what traditionally is its wettest time of the year, 80% of the state is classified as in extreme or exceptional drought, the two worst categories.
State officials had hoped Californians’ conservation would continue to improve each month as more people learn about the drought and water agencies promote their conservation efforts. Instead, data showed none of the state’s “hydrologic” regions met the 15% threshold and two in the Central Valley region that account for 10% of the state’s population actually used more water in September than a year ago.
Water agencies say California actually has reduced its consumption because of changes put in place during prior droughts. That means cutting more now is harder.
In Los Angeles, customer demand for water has dropped 30% since 2007. And during the drought that ended in 2017, customer demand fell by 20%, a reduction mostly maintained once that drought ended.
For example, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has imposed mandatory irrigation restrictions since 2009 and incentivized customers to replace their lawns with turf. The agency has been hiring more people to enforce water use rules, beefing up patrols that search for leaks and violations.
Beyond those efforts, it will take lots of time and money to see any real savings “given most of the immediate savings potentials have already been accomplished in our service area,” said Terrence McCarthy, the department’s water resources policy manager.
The biggest water savings in September came in two sparsely populated regions in Northern California, where conservation increased by 12.4% or more. The San Francisco Bay area reduced its water use by 7.6%, and it fell 4.2% in the South Coast, which includes Los Angeles and San Diego and accounts for more than half the state’s population.
California’s most recent “water year,” which runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, was the second-driest on record in terms of statewide precipitation. California had its warmest ever statewide average monthly temperatures in October 2020 and June and July 2021, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s national Centers for Environmental Information.
That combination of extremely warm, dry weather has made it much harder for California to collect and store the water it gets from rain and snow each winter, as most of it either evaporates or is absorbed into the dry soil.
That blunts the impact of large storms known as “atmospheric rivers.” One such storm late last month dumped record amounts of rain in Northern California, including 5.44 inches of rain in Sacramento — the most ever in that city over a 24-hour time period.
Homes and most businesses make up a small percentage of the state’s water use each year. Most water is used for agriculture and environmental purposes, such as to maintain habitats.. Farmers have already seen steep cutbacks to their water deliveries from the government this year because of the drought.
State regulators have temporarily lifted curtailments for farmers and other large water users after last month’s storms increased flows in the state’s major rivers and streams. It’s likely regulators will soon reinstate those restrictions for some areas of the delta formed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems.
Still, Esquivel said conservation is the state’s strongest tool “not just (for the) drought, but for the long term because of climate change.”
“We know that we will continue to face deeper and longer droughts,” he said. “And so now is the time to really continue to shift our usage here in the state.”
State Water Regulators Tell 4 Irrigation Districts Groundwater Protection Plans “Missed the Mark”
CalMatters
The state’s water agency yesterday lambasted groundwater plans drafted by some of California’s largest and most powerful agricultural water suppliers in the San Joaquin Valley, indicating that they fail to protect drinking water supplies from over-pumping.
The four large groundwater basins at stake underlie stretches of San Joaquin, Merced, Madera and Fresno counties that are home to nearly 800,000 people and more than a million acres of irrigated agriculture.
The letters sent by the state Department of Water Resources to the local districts that manage the basins have a common theme: a failure to address how pumping, largely for growers, will harm the drinking water supplies of local communities. “That, in some plans, missed the mark,” said Paul Gosselin, deputy director of sustainable groundwater management at the California Department of Water Resources.
“As we sit here in this drought, the need and the promise to make sustainable groundwater management fulfill its mission and promise couldn’t be more important,” Gosselin said.
One of the districts with a plan criticized by the state is the powerful Westlands Water District, the largest agricultural water agency in the nation. It provides water to more than 1,000 square miles of prime farmland in western Fresno and Kings Counties.
A main threat in the San Joaquin Valley’s Westside subbasin, managed by the Westlands Water District, is subsidence: the risk that land could continue to sink when groundwater is pumped.
In a 17-page letter to the Westlands district, state officials raised concerns about more subsidence in parts of the basin where the plan would allow groundwater to sink from 40 to more than 100 feet below 2015 levels. In addition, Gosselin said the plan doesn’t explain how ongoing water quality problems could affect communities.
Shelley Cartwright, a spokesperson for Westlands, said the water district looks forward to reviewing the department’s preliminary findings. She said the plan “ensures groundwater levels stay at or above 2015 levels” and “avoids undesirable results and ensures the beneficial users of groundwater, such as local communities, are not harmed.”
Groundwater is the primary source of drinking water for most of the state’s more than 7,400 public water systems, and 6 million people depend on it entirely. The biggest user is agriculture, which taps into about 80% of the groundwater pumped in the state.
The problem is especially acute in the San Joaquin and Central Valleys. According to one study, groundwater depletion poses the greatest threat to the San Joaquin Valley’s domestic wells. Another tallied up to 12,000 drinking water wells that could go partially or completely dry by 2040 under the groundwater plans drafted in the region.
In response to the thousands of wells going dry during the last drought, the California Legislature enacted a package of laws that became the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, aimed at slowing the race to deplete California’s aquifers.
Now, seven years later, drought has gripped California once again. Residents have reported more than 950 dry wells already this year — a 1,024% increase over last year.
Under the law, local groundwater districts in the most depleted basins were required by January 2020 to submit plans to reduce over-pumping to sustainable levels over the next 20 years. The state agency’s final assessment of the plans is due in January 2022, but agencies can start implementing them as soon as they’ve adopted them.
DWR Media Release: https://water.ca.gov/News/News-Releases/2021/Nov-21/DWR-Releases-Second-Round-of-Assessments-of-Groundwater-Sustainability-Plans
Water Infrastructure Funding Ballot Initiative Floated
San Jose Mercury
California has not built enough new reservoirs, desalination plants and other water projects because there are too many delays, too many lawsuits and too much red tape.
That’s the message from a growing coalition of Central Valley farmers and Southern California desalination supporters who have begun collecting signatures for a statewide ballot measure that would fast-track big water projects and provide billions of dollars to fund them — potentially setting up a major political showdown with environmentalists next year shaped by the state’s ongoing drought.
The measure, known as the “Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022” needs 997,132 signatures of registered voters by April 29 to qualify for the November 2022 statewide ballot.
If approved by a majority of voters, it would require that 2% of California’s general fund — about $4 billion a year — be set aside for projects to expand water supplies. Those could include new dams and reservoirs, desalination plants, recycled water plants, and other projects like upgrading canals and pipes.
The money would continue flowing each year until 5 million acre-feet of new water supply was created, an increase of about 13% in the roughly 39 million acre-feet used in an average year by all the state’s residents, farmers and businesses. That could take several decades and cost $100 billion, according to an analysis by the non-partisan State Legislative Analyst’s Office.
“We think conservation has an important role to play,” said Edward Ring, a spokesman for the campaign, known as More Water Now. “But you can’t get there any more just with conservation. If you want to be resilient against a prolonged drought, you have to have new supplies.”
Supporters say California hasn’t kept pace expanding its water supplies, leading to severe shortages for farmers in recent years and likely water rationing next year for many urban residents if the state’s two-year drought continues.
With climate change, they note, scientists say California’s droughts are becoming more severe. The state needs more reservoirs to save water in wet years, they say, particularly as hotter temperatures melt the Sierra Nevada snowpack.
“When we have big storm events, there is surplus water and we need to harvest it,” Ring said.
The measure has already been endorsed by 27 state lawmakers, including 18 Republicans, one independent and eight Democrats, including one from the Bay Area, Assemblyman Tim Grayson, D-Concord.
Environmentalists, however, say the measure goes too far, and are preparing to fight it.
“For next November’s ballot, this is the number 1 priority of environmental groups,” said Jonas Minton, a senior water adviser to the Planning and Conservation League, a Sacramento nonprofit. “That’s due to the destruction to California’s environment that would result from the unsupervised spending of billions of dollars each year without environmental oversight.”
Under the measure, the money would be spent each year by the California Water Commission, a nine-member panel appointed by the governor.
The measure would streamline environmental reviews. For water projects on the coast, the California Coastal Commission would be required to make a decision within 90 days, and could be overruled by the state’s Secretary for Natural Resources.
Jack Ainsworth, executive director of the coastal commission, said the measure would “significantly weaken” the state’s coastal protections.
“Drought in California is our new normal and the commission understands that responsibly designed desalination facilities will be an important part of California’s water portfolio going forward,” Ainsworth said. “We don’t need to gut the Coastal Act in order to provide safe, reliable, affordable drinking water.”
Environmental impact reports would still be required. But if opponents filed lawsuits, courts would be required to rule on them within 270 days.
Minton noted that many of the state’s political power players could oppose the measure because money guaranteed for water projects means less for other spending in the state budget.
“This is the largest scam in California history to take over $100 billion of taxpayer funds away from nurses, teachers and firefighters in order to pay for the sponsors’ special interest projects,” he said.
Political observers say the measure will have a challenge collecting enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. But if the drought continues and water restrictions are tightened statewide, as local and state water officials have predicted will occur, it could become a populist issue that might have a chance at passage.
“The drier it gets, the better the prospects for this measure,” said Jack Pitney, a professor of political science at Claremont McKenna College in Los Angeles County.
“If I were running the no campaign, I would frame it as a giveaway to agribusiness,” he said. “But for a lot of Californians, if we get to August and are in a severe drought, the attitude is going to be ‘to heck with the environment, I want my shower.’”
Supporters have so far raised about $100,000, mostly from Central Valley farm interests. The organizers include Wayne Western Jr., a board member of the California Farm Water Coalition; Geoffrey Vanden Heuvel, director of regulatory and economic affairs for the California Milk Producers Council; and several supporters of building a new desalination plant in Huntington Beach: Steve Sheldon, president of the Orange County Water District board of directors and Shawn Dewane, a member of the Mesa Water District board of directors in Costa Mesa.
California voters approved a major water bond, Proposition 1, in November 2014 during the last drought. That $7.45 billion measure has funded projects from upgrades to drinking water plants to recycled water efforts. It also included $2.7 billion for new storage projects.
But none have been built yet. In 2018, the California Water Commission approved spending $2.5 billon on eight storage projects — four new dams and four underground storage projects — including expanding Los Vaqueros Reservoir in Contra Costa County and building a new reservoir in Santa Clara County near Pacheco Pass.
But before the projects can receive the money, they need to obtain all permits, finish environmental studies and identify other funds to pay more than 50% of their costs.
Initiative Proponents’ website:
Energy Commission OKs $1.4 Billion for EV & Hydrogen
Reuters
The California Energy Commission (CEC) has approved a three-year $1.4 billion plan to help California achieve its electric vehicle charging and hydrogen refueling goals.
The CEC said the plan, approved on Monday, will support California Governor Gavin Newsom’s executive order phasing out the sale of new gasoline-powered passenger vehicles by 2035.
The 2021–2023 Investment Plan Update increases the budget of the Clean Transportation Program by six times, including $1.1 billion from the 2021–2022 state budget in addition to the remaining $238 million in program funds, the CEC said.
“These dollars close the 2025 infrastructure funding gap so that access to charging and hydrogen fueling isn’t a barrier for those exploring cleaner transportation options,” Lead Commissioner for Transportation Patty Monahan said in a statement.
The CEC said the plan focuses on zero-emissions vehicle infrastructure build-out, with nearly 80% of available funding going to charging stations or hydrogen refueling.
The plan includes $314 million for light-duty electric vehicle charging infrastructure, $690 million for medium- and heavy-duty zero-emission vehicle infrastructure (battery-electric and hydrogen) and $244 million for zero-emissions vehicle manufacturing.
On Nov. 19, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) will consider a complementary proposal for $1.5 billion in clean transportation incentives, including consumer vehicle rebates, and heavy-duty and off-road equipment investments, the CEC said.
New Hope for Monarch Butterfly Resurgence
Associated Press
There is a ray of hope for the vanishing orange-and-black Western monarch butterflies.
The number wintering along California’s central coast is bouncing back after the population, whose presence is often a good indicator of ecosystem health, reached an all-time low last year. Experts pin their decline on climate change, habitat destruction and lack of food due to drought.
An annual winter count last year by the Xerces Society recorded fewer than 2,000 butterflies, a massive decline from the tens of thousands tallied in recent years and the millions that clustered in trees from Northern California’s Mendocino County to Baja California, Mexico, in the south in the 1980s. Now, their roosting sites are concentrated mostly on California’s central coast.
This year’s official count started Saturday and will last three weeks but already an unofficial count by researchers and volunteers shows there are over 50,000 monarchs at overwintering sites, said Sarina Jepsen, director of Endangered Species at Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
“This is certainly not a recovery but we’re really optimistic and just really glad that there are monarchs here and that gives us a bit of time to work toward recovery of the Western monarch migration,” Jepsen said.
Western monarch butterflies head south from the Pacific Northwest to California each winter, returning to the same places and even the same trees, where they cluster. The monarchs generally arrive in California at the beginning of November and spread across the country once warmer weather arrives in March.
The Western monarch butterfly population has declined by more than 99% since the 1980s.
On the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, another monarch population travels from southern Canada and the northeastern United States across thousands of miles to spend the winter in western Mexico. Scientists estimate the monarch population in the eastern U.S. has fallen about 80% since the mid-1990s.
Whether the population of monarchs that fly to Mexico from the eastern side of the country has rebounded is not yet known. Results of an annual county by experts with the World Wildlife Fund in Mexico won’t be released until next year.
Monarchs from across the West migrate annually to about 100 wintering sites dotting central California’s Pacific coast. One of the best-known wintering places is the Monarch Grove Sanctuary, a city-owned site in the coastal city of Pacific Grove, where last year no monarch butterflies showed up.
The city 70 miles (112 kilometers) south of San Francisco has worked for years to help the declining population of monarch. Known as “Butterfly Town, USA,” the city celebrates the orange-and-black butterfly with windowpane patterns in its wings with a parade every October. Messing with a monarch is a crime that carries a $1,000 fine.
“I don’t recall having such a bad year before and I thought they were done. They were gone. They’re not going to ever come back and sure enough, this year, boom, they landed,” said Moe Ammar, president of Pacific Grove Chamber of Commerce.
This year a preliminary count showed more than 13,000 monarchs have arrived at the site in Monterey County, clustering together on pine, cypress and eucalyptus trees and sparking hope among the grove’s volunteers and visitors that the struggling insects can bounce back.
Scientists don’t know why the population increased this year but Jepsen said it is likely a combination of factors, including better conditions on their breeding grounds.
“Climatic factors could have influenced the population. We could have gotten an influx of monarchs from the eastern U.S., which occasionally can happen, but it’s not known for sure why the population is what it is this year,” Jepsen said.
Scientists say the monarch population had sharply dropped because of the destruction of their milkweed habitat along their migratory route as housing expands into their territory and use of pesticides and herbicides increases.
Along with farming, climate change is one of the main drivers of the monarch’s threatened extinction, disrupting an annual 3,000-mile (4,828-kilometer) migration synced to springtime and the blossoming of wildflowers.
“California has been in a drought for several years now, and they need nectar sources in order to be able to fill their bellies and be active and survive,” said Stephanie Turcotte Edenholm, a Pacific Grove Natural History Museum docent who offers guided tours of the sanctuary. “If we don’t have nectar sources and we don’t have the water that’s providing that, then that is an issue.”
Monarch butterflies lack state and federal legal protection to keep their habitat from being destroyed or degraded. Last year, they were denied federal protection but the insects are now among the candidates for listing under the federal Endangered Species Act.
Global Climate Summit – 5 Take-Aways; Did It Bring Momentum or “Blah, Blah, Blah”?
NY Times
5 Takeaways From the COP26 Climate Summit:
- Time for action is running out. The major agreement struck by diplomats established a clear consensus that all nations need to do much more, immediately, to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures.
- How much each nation needs to cut remains unresolved. Rich countries are disproportionately responsible for global warming, but some leaders have insisted that it’s the poorer nations who need to accelerate their shift away from fossil fuels.
- The call for disaster aid increased. One of the biggest fights at the summit revolved around whether — and how — the world’s wealthiest nations should compensate poorer nations for the damage caused by rising temperatures.
- A surprising emissions-cutting agreement. Among the other notable deals to come out of the summit was a U.S.-China agreement to do more to cut emissions this decade, and China committed for the first time to develop a plan to reduce methane.
- There was a clear gender and generation gap.Those with the power to make decisions about how much the world warms were mostly old and male. Those who were most fiercely protesting the pace of action were mostly young and female.
Before it started, the United Nations global climate summit in Glasgow known as COP26 was billed by its chief organizer as the “last, best hope” to save the planet.
Halfway through, optimistic reviews of its progress noted that heads of state and titans of industry showed up in force to start the gathering with splashy new climate promises, a sign that momentum was building in the right direction.
The pessimistic outlook? Gauzy promises mean little without concrete plans to follow through. The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg accused the conference of consisting of a lot of “blah, blah, blah.”
On Saturday, diplomats from nearly 200 countries struck a major agreement aimed at intensifying efforts to fight climate change, by calling on governments to return next year with stronger plans to curb their planet-warming emissions and urging wealthy nations to “at least double” funding by 2025 to protect the most vulnerable nations from the hazards of a hotter planet.
The agreement established a clear consensus that all nations need to do much more, immediately, to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures.
When the conference opened the U.N. Secretary General, António Guterres, said the top priority must be to limit the rise in global temperatures to just 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold, scientists have warned, beyond which the risk of calamities like deadly heat waves, water shortages and ecosystem collapse grows immensely. (The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius.)
“The reality is you’ve got two different truths going on,” Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute, said last week. “We’ve made much more progress than we ever could’ve imagined a couple years ago. But it’s still nowhere near enough.”
Other international agreements came out of the summit
- S. and China: The two countries announced a joint agreement to do more to cut emissions this decade, and China committed for the first time to develop a plan to reduce methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The pact between the rivals, which are the world’s two biggest polluters, surprised delegates to the summit. The agreement was short on specifics and while China agreed to “phase down” coal starting in 2026, it did not specify by how much or over what period of time.
- Deforestation: Leaders of more than 100 countries, including Brazil, China, Russia and the United States vowed to end deforestation by 2030. The agreement covers about 85 percent of the world’s forests, which are crucial to absorbing carbon dioxide and slowing the pace of global warming. Some advocacy groups criticized the agreement as lacking teeth, noting that similar efforts have failed in the past.
- Methane: More than 100 countries agreed to cut emissions of methane, a potent planet-warming gas, 30 percent by the end of this decade. The pledge was part of a push by the Biden administration, which also announced that the Environmental Protection Agency would limit the methane coming from about one million oil and gas rigs across the United States.
- India: India joined the growing chorus of nations pledging to reach “net zero” emissions, setting a 2070 deadline to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. One of the world’s largest consumers of coal, India also said that it would significantly expand the portion of its total energy mix that comes from renewable sources, and that half of its energy would come from sources other than fossil fuels by 2030.
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