The United States Climate Assessment: The effects of climate change on the country, what we can do about it, and how we can get better at it
The United States today released the fifth National Climate Assessment after a summer of record heat, a savage wildfire, and hurricanes that rapidly intensified into monsters. The report lays out the effects that climate change is having on the country, how bad it is going to get in the coming decades, and what we can do about it. It is similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which gives a domestic version of their dire reports about global warming and how to slow it.
The ParisAgreement was designed to inspire, and part of this has been achieved by countries stepping up their efforts. It has a mechanism that will make countries increase their ambitions over time. And they’ve done this, not only setting more ambitious targets, but also putting more ambitious policies in place. If many countries meet their net zero targets, it is predicted that we could stay under 2 degrees Celsius of global warming.
The faster the nation can deploy solar panels and wind turbine, the less likely it is to get to that 6 percent. To that end, last year’s Inflation Reduction Act allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to accelerate decarbonization; for instance, tax breaks for home improvements like better insulation and switching to electric appliances and heat pumps. According to a study, it has created almost 75,000 jobs and resulted in 86 billion dollars in private investments.
The Biden sdministration also announced today that it’s providing more than $6 billion in investments for climate action, $3.9 billion of that going toward modernizing the grid. Zaidi says that clean electrons are the way that most of the economy will be decarbonized. “That’s going to require us to upgrade our local grid infrastructure, for example, for charging of heavy-duty vehicles.”
The nation’s creaky energy grid desperately needs an overhaul, both to cope with increasingly extreme weather and to accommodate more renewable energy. The report shows that the number of power outages affecting more than 50,000 customers went up by 64 percent in the period from 2011 to 2021. The US needs a grid that’s better able to ferry electricity from renewable-energy hot spots, like solar power generated in the sunny Southwest and wind power from the gusty Midwest. The Camp Fire in the west of the US, which destroyed the city of Paradise, is an example of why more powerlines should be underground.
The Paris Climate Conference concluded in a way that nobody wants to know about the Earth’s climate change, and what little they can do for the Small Island Developing States
Each year the United Nations has Conferences of the Parties where world leaders attempt to reach a deal to limit climate change. The Paris group had a goal to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius. While this was bold and aspirational, it hit on a very clear disconnect: Leaders can promise ambitious targets without the slightest intention of scaling up action to meet them.
The world was predicted to hit around 3.6 degrees Celsius of warming by the year 2200. The previously targeted limit of 2 degrees Celsius, set in Copenhagen in 2009, was already far out of reach, yet leaders promised to achieve even more. They should have put ambitious policies on the table. But they did not. And without such policies, this new target seemed like a cruel promise to those for whom the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius is their livelihoods—mostly the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) scattered across the world’s oceans. While those at Paris celebrated, I left more pessimistic than ever.