It's Time to Face Global Climate Change

It's Time to Face Global Climate Change

7. Climate Change Challenges

By Dr. M.Bali

From The Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality and political corruption and More

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U.S. Greenhouse Gas Pollution Include:

The global annual average temperature has increased by more than 1.5 degrees F between 1880 and 2012. This interactive graph from the National Climate Assessment shows the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the same time period. Climate scientists say we need to avert an additional 2-degree temperature increase to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

In the run-up to United Nations Climate Change Conference that opens in Paris on November 30, yearly worldwide release of Carbon dioxide (CO2) will be around 32 billion metric tons. At the rate we’re going, the world’s air is set to rise 4 degrees Celsius before the century’s over, twofold what researchers say is a “acceptable” level of warming. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives preservationist benchmarks concerning what is required to balance out the normal worldwide temperature at its present level of around 60.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) over the pre-modern normal of 56.7 degrees. As indicated by the IPCC, worldwide CO2 outflows need to fall by around 40 percent underneath current levels inside of 20 years, to around 20 billion tons, and 80 percent by 2050, to seven billion tons. 

Indicating what will be the most drastic measure to be taken in avoiding  catastrophic environmental change, a recent study in the journal Nature found that 92 percent of US fossil fuels reserves must stay in the ground to keep worldwide temperature rise over 2 degrees Celsius, the threshold climate experts say would bring catastrophic floods, droughts, rising sea levels, and other extreme weather events. So, what to do now?

Implement low-carbon energy base that promotes conservation, conversion into renewal energy sources and fusion technology, providing a fair transition from fossil fuels and a “global treaty” to block the export of fossil fuels. How to do these?

(A) Implement the climate protection billby Sen. Barbara Boxer and Sen. Bernie Sanders that includes a carbon tax on the nearly 3000 of the largest fossil fuel polluters, covering about 85 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, even a little $10-per-ton national carbon tax would cut greenhouse gas outflows by around 28 percent of 2005 levels, save a huge number of lives and kick off the renewable energy industry by finally putting it on an equivalent playing field with Big Oil, Big Gas and Big Coal, as per a study by Think Progress. Putting a cost on carbon would flip the script. Compelling the fossil fuel industry to pay for even a little rate of the harm it does to our planet would, thus, give it a motivating force to keep carbon in the ground. Outflows would go down and everybody would be in an ideal situation.

In his bill, Sanders cautioned that the main researchers who study environmental changes now let us know that their projections in the past weren’t right. That, actually, the emergency confronting our planet is significantly more genuine than they had already believed.They now let us know that on the off chance that we proceed with our cheerful way, where 12 out of the most recent 15 years were the hottest on record, and make no definitive move in changing our vitality framework and cutting green-house gasses, this planet could be 8 degrees Fahrenheit or more hotter than is right now the case.

(B) Implement the modest Obama’s Clean Power Planthat pushed for 32 percent diminishes in carbon dioxide surges from power  plants by 2030 with the base year of 2005, and requiring a 28 percent of a power plant’s yield to be generated from renewable sources. Since 2011, already, the nine-state cap-and-trade system that covers Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states has cut carbon emissions by 15 percent and saved consumers $460 million off their electric bills.

In comparison, California’s ambitious Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) right now requires utilities to supply 33 percent of their power generation from renewable sources, for example, sun, wind, and geothermal force, by 2020. The new bill, The Clean Energy and Reduction Act, that goes more further than that would expand that objective to 50 percent by 2030. It would likewise require a 50 percent expansion in energy  efficiency in structures by that year. The state means to lessen the state’s green house gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 — a major stride to the larger 2050 objective of decreasing carbon dioxide by 80 percent under 1990 levels. 

(C) End tax breaks and subsidies for big oil, gas and coal companies. Representative Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced the End Polluter Welfare Act to stop taxpayer-funded $135 billion giveaways to oil, gas and coal companies.

(D) Eliminate and inevitably boycott Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) gasses which are intense greenhouse gasses used as a part of fridges and ventilation systems and are discharged essentially amid repairing of or toward the end of the life-span of these items. The outcomes are the collection of substances in these applications which shapes a formerly unrecognized extra hazard for environmental change. These substances are utilized as a part of the spot of the ozone-layer-exhausting substances (CFCs en HCFCs) that were once in the past utilized and banned as a part of 1987. HFCs that supplanted CFCs, conversely, don’t influence the ozone layer however add to the greenhouse impact. In October 16, 2015, Obama organization has announced new efforts to diminish the use  of hydrofluorocarbons as a piece of worldwide treaty to confine their uses.

(E) Keep it in the Ground Act Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders, have introduced in Nov 2015 the bill Keep It In The Ground Act, that would bar new leases on coal, gas, oil, and tar sands extraction on federal lands in the U.S. The bill, would likewise preclude offshore drilling in the Arctic and the Atlantic Ocean and forbid the renewal of leases that haven’t yet produced fossil fills.

“This bill is about recognizing that the fossil fuel reserves that are on our public lands should be managed in the public interest, and the public interest is for us to help drive a transition from fossil fuels to a clean energy future,” Merkley said. “We don’t have a lot of time to do this, so there’s an urgency to it, and a place that’s readily available for us to act is on the fossil fuels that are on our public lands.”

Fossil fuels from public lands as of now make up a significant portion of the United States’ carbon emissions: according to a Center for American Progress and Wilderness Society report, oil, coal, and gas taken from public lands and waters are responsible for more than 20 percent of the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions. As indicated by one Bureau of Land Management report, 279 million acres of land of government lands in the U.S. contain an expected total of 31 billion barrels of oil and 231 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Republicans, famously, are to a great extent deniers of environmental changes, hating green energies of any kind. What explains their resistance to climate science? As indicated by new research distributed in Nature Climate Change, there’s no less than one factually demonstrated motivation behind why more than 56 percent of Congressional Republicans deny environmental change: echo chamber, which refers to circumstances where individuals surround themselves with data they want to listen to, and shut out the rest. We’ve known for some time that these present themselves in climate issues; A 2014 report postulated that the reason Americans haven’t completely accepted the scientific consensus on environmental changes is a result of echo chamber like Fox News, where traditionalist viewers are “exposed only to content consistent with their opinions, while shielded from dissenting views.” 

Republicans' open hostility to coping with climate change has been strident since President Obama took office. In 2009, White House's first-ever carbon pollution control, the Cap-and-trade bill was voted down by 168 House Republicans, where just eight sponsored it. (Adversaries killed it in the Senate, where it never got a vote.) This has made an odd circumstance that was as of late summed up by New York magazine’s  Jonathan Chait: “The entire world is, in essence, tiptoeing gingerly around the unhinged second-largest political party in the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, in hopes of saving the world behind its back.”

The Republican Party could be the single most noteworthy obstruction to worldwide campaign to moderate environmental change. But small cracks are appearing across this conservative wall of denial. For instance, ahead of time of Pope Francis' visit to the United States, a resolution distributed among House Republicans that recognized the evidence of a changing atmosphere and the risk it poses to human existence. The resolution required no solid solutions, just saying that Congress ought to focus on studying and tending to the issue at some vague point later on. Yet only 11 of 247 House Republicans were willing to sign it— a scanty 4.5 percent of the GOP caucus.

Yet a June 2014 ABC/Washington Post survey reports that 70 percent of Americans believe that the central government ought to require states to limit the measure of carbon dioxide gasses created inside of their borders. A 2015 Stanford University poll also found an overwhelming majority of the American public, including half of Republicans, support government action to curb global warming.  

It’s true that a Paris agreement probably will fall short, on its own, of the international community’s stated goal of halting warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), which is regarded as the benchmark for dangerous, unmanageable climate change. Although many people consider it unrealistic to  meeting the 2 degrees goal, these talks, which aptly, if ominously, have been called “our last hope” for climate action, must be met with bold optimism.