Citizen Cartwright

Top issues at the U.N. climate summit starting Sunday in Scotland

Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, nations must revisit their previous pledges to curb carbon pollution every five years and then announce plans to cut even more and do it faster, says The Associated Press. After a year’s delay because of the pandemic, the two-week summit starting Sunday in Glasgow is the first to include the required ratcheting up of ambitions.

 

The main goal set in Paris was to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times. The world has warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since then.

Every analysis of current climate change pledges shows they'll lead to at least another degree or degree-and-a-half Celsius of warming (about 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit), according to AP.

All five emissions scenarios studied in a U.N. scientific assessment in August suggest that the world will cross that 1.5-degree-Celsius threshold in the 2030s, though some researchers say it's still technically possible to stay within that limit or to temporarily go over it and come back down.

 

Small island countries and other poor, vulnerable communities said in 2015 that 2 degrees would wipe them out, and they insisted on the 1.5-degree threshold.

 

The five top issues in Glasgow, according to AP:

 

— $100 billion a year for poor countries

 

Rich countries like the United States and European countries developed carbon-emitting energy and caused most of the problem historically, but now they're asking poor nations to cut or eliminate the use of fossil fuels. In return, they pledged in 2009 and reaffirmed in Paris to provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries switch to clean energy.

 

The Washington-based World Resources Institute calculates that only a few rich countries, including France, Japan, Norway, Germany and Sweden, have provided their fair share. The United States, Australia and Canada have fallen far short.

 

The funding for 2019 is estimated at slightly less than $80 billion.

One solution proposed this week is for the payments to average $100 billion a year from 2021 to 2025, with the shortfall in earlier years made up for by higher payments later on.

 

— Carbon trading

 

Some unfinished business from the Paris summit involves rules for international carbon trading, which is seen as a key instrument to harness market forces to combat climate change.

 

The rules are critical because for many countries and companies to achieve “net zero” emissions by midcentury, pollution will have to be balanced by an equal amount of carbon captured elsewhere, such as by forests or through technological fixes, says AP.

 

— Transparency, new targets

 

The voluntary nature of the Paris accord means countries closely watch how much progress others make before ratcheting up their targets another notch.

 

— Methane

 

As a greenhouse gas, methane is about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide but stays in the atmosphere for only about a decade. Cutting emissions by fixing leaks in gas pipelines and limiting flaring at drilling sites would provide a small but noticeable improvement, AP says.

 

— Cutting emissions 45 percent by 2030

 

The U.N. has set this as a goal for the talks to be considered a success, but emissions now are going up rather than down, says AP.

 

Cutting emissions in half in the next decade is considered a key step to net zero by 2050, which scientists say is the only way to achieve the Paris agreement's goal of capping global warming at 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) by the end of the century.

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The case for optimism on climate change

"Pleas for optimism are not new in the climate debate. The temptation to fall into a spiral of defeatism is clearly pointless,” says an article in the international business newspaper Financial Times.

 

The article discusses three new books that are making the case for hope:

 

— Jane Goodall, "the chimpanzee researcher who redefined the way we understand our fellow primates,” has written "The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times" in collaboration with Douglas Abrams. He was co-author of 2016’s "The Book of Joy" with the Dalai Lama and South African theologian and activist Desmond Tutu.

 

Goodall offers four reasons for hope: the human intellect, the indomitable human spirit, young people who are poised to address environmental problems and injustice in ways their parents haven’t, the ability of nature to bounce back. 

 

— “Earthshot: How to Save Our Planet” tells stories of efforts around the world to tackle environmental problems. Its publication coincides with the announcement this month of the inaugural winners of the Earthshot Prizes: five awards of 1 million British pounds ($1.375 million) to be made annually for the next 10 years to help improve life on our planet.

 

— Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has published “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.” Hayhoe is a Canadian and evangelical Christian who, among other things, is chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy environmental group and teaches at Texas Tech University.

 

The book grew out Hayhoe’s 2018 TED talk, in which she said the most important thing anybody can do to combat climate change is talk about it. 

 

“The best way to start a constructive, positive conversation that will leave us in a better place than where we began is by beginning with something we agree on and ending the conversation with discussing a positive and constructive solution that we can both get on board with,” Hayhoe says in a recent interview.

 

In 1970 as the U.S. environmental movement began, people wondered whether it was too late to save the air, the water, the species. It wasn’t. Now we wonder whether it’s too late to save the planet from climate change.

 

Most of my career has involved tracking climate change. Now that we’re seeing so clearly the unprecedented and extreme effects of our long-term burning of fossil fuels, I believe we humans will step up.   

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Note to readers

Nothing is calling to me for a summary this morning. Have a good day!

In the news

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Brazil senators back criminal charges against President Bolsonaro over handling of coronavirus pandemic

 

Biden nominates FCC chair, new commissioner to give Democrats a majority

 

Half its original size, Biden’s big domestic policy plan continues to be reconfigured in race to finish

ProPublica: Proposal to rein in huge IRAs gets lobbying resistance from retirement industry

 

Ars Technica: The basics of securing your digital life

 

AP: Facebook froze as anti-vaccine sentiment in posts' comments sections swarmed users

 

Stacey Abrams group donates $1.34 million to wipe out $212 million in medical debt owed by 108,000 people in South

 

FDA panel backs Pfizer’s low-dose coronavirus vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds

 

Moderna says it will supply Africa with up to 110 million COVID doses

More revelations from the 'Facebook Papers'

When I watched whistleblower Frances Haugen testifiy before a Senate subcommittee earlier this month, I was impressed by how skilled she is in explaining issues clearly.

 

Now I’m impressed by how organized and savvy she and her advisers are in making public the information she took with her when she left her Facebook job.

 

Haugen and her team chose 18 U.S. news organizations, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press, to report on anything in the documents. A separate consortium of European news organizations was given access to the same set of documents. Both groups began publishing their analyses of the materials at 7 a.m. EDT on Monday, Oct. 25.

 

That date and time were set by the partner news organizations to give everybody in the consortium a chance to fully analyze the documents, report out relevant details, and give Facebook’s public relations staff ample time to respond to questions and inquiries raised by that reporting, AP says.

 

Of course, all that reporting means I’m drinking out of a fire hose this morning as I try to summarize the top news.

 

So let’s focus on articles AP has published, since they tend to be balanced and we don’t need a password to access them.

 

— The overall problem for Facebook — and the rest of us:

The documents Haugen provided "depict an internally conflicted company where data on the harms it causes is abundant, but solutions, much less the will to act on them, are halting at best,” says AP.

"The crisis exposed by the documents shows how Facebook, despite its regularly avowed good intentions, appears to have slow-walked or sidelined efforts to address real harms the social network has magnified and sometimes created. They reveal numerous instances where researchers and rank-and-file workers uncovered deep-seated problems that the company then overlooked or ignored.

"Final responsibility for this state of affairs rests with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who holds what one former employee described as dictatorial power over a corporation that collects data on and provides free services to roughly 3 billion people around the world.”

The company says it “does not conduct research and then systematically and willfully ignore it if the findings are inconvenient for the company.” This claim, Facebook says in a statement, can “only be made by cherry-picking selective quotes from individual pieces of leaked material in a way that presents complex and nuanced issues as if there is only ever one right answer.”

 

— Facebook lacks knowledge of other languages:

In some of the world’s most volatile regions, terrorist content and hate speech proliferate because Facebook is short of moderators who speak local languages and understand cultural contexts, AP reports. And its platforms have failed to develop artificial-intelligence solutions that can catch harmful content in different languages.

 

“The root problem is that the platform was never built with the intention it would one day mediate the political speech of everyone in the world,” says Eliza Campbell, director of the Middle East Institute’s Cyber Program. “But for the amount of political importance and resources that Facebook has, moderation is a bafflingly under-resourced project.” 

 

In a statement to AP, a Facebook spokesperson says that over the last two years the company has invested in recruiting more staff with local dialect and topic expertise to bolster its review capacity around the world.

— Facebook and overseas labor abuses:

Two years ago, Apple threatened to remove Facebook and Instagram from its app store over concerns about the platform being used as a tool to trade and sell maids in the Mideast, AP reports.

After publicly promising to crack down, Facebook acknowledged in the internal documents obtained by AP that it was “under-enforcing on confirmed abusive activity” that saw Filipina maids complaining on the social media site of being abused. Apple relented and Facebook and Instagram stayed in the app store.

 

— Two articles that were published by AP over the weekend (in what seems to me to have broken the embargo on publishing before Oct. 25) and I ran in yesterday’s “Also in the news” section are "Facebook dithered in curbing divisive user content in India” and “Amid the Capitol riot, Facebook faced its own insurrection."

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Federal judge rejects bid to stop Washington state vaccine mandate

 

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Some federal advisers have misgivings over whether vaccine boosters are widely needed

 

Moderna says its low-dose coronavirus shot works for children 6 to 11

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Scientists in Africa working to replicate Moderna vaccine for the poor

By working to reverse engineer Moderna’s vaccine, scientists are effectively making an end run around an industry that's vastly prioritized rich countries over poor in both sales and manufacturing, says The Associated Press.

 

And they're doing it with "unusual backing" from the World Health Organization, which is coordinating a vaccine research, training and production hub in South Africa, along with a related supply chain for critical raw materials, AP says.

 

Some experts see reverse engineering — recreating vaccines from fragments of publicly available information — as one of the few remaining ways to address the power imbalances of the pandemic. Just 0.7 percent of vaccines have gone to low-income countries so far, while nearly half have gone to wealthy ones, according to an analysis by the People’s Vaccine Alliance.

That the WHO, which depends on the goodwill of wealthy countries and the pharmaceutical industry for its continued existence, is leading the attempt to reproduce a proprietary vaccine demonstrates the depths of the supply disparities, says AP.

 

“This is the first time we’re doing it to this level, because of the urgency and also because of the novelty of this technology,” says Martin Friede, a WHO vaccine research coordinator who is helping direct the production hub.

Dr. Tom Frieden, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has described the world as “being held hostage” by Moderna and Pfizer, whose vaccines are considered the most effective against the coronavirus. Their novel mRNA process uses the genetic code for the spike protein of the coronavirus and is thought to trigger a better immune response than traditional vaccines.

 

Saying that U.S. taxpayers largely funded Moderna’s vaccine development, the Biden administration has insisted that the company expand production to help supply developing nations. Moderna has pledged to build a vaccine factory in Africa at some point.

 

The South African company, Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, is aiming to have a version of the Moderna vaccine ready for testing in people within a year and scaled up for commercial production not long after that. Intellectual property rights could become an issue at the point of commercial production, AP says.

 

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., who's backing a bill that calls for the United States to invest more in making and distributing coronavirus vaccines in low- and middle-income countries, says reverse engineering isn’t going to happen fast enough to keep the virus from mutating and spreading further.

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Documents: During Capitol riot, Facebook faced its own insurrection

 

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