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How Saudi Arabia, China, and the U.S. tried to weaken language in the climate report.
Governments lobbied to weaken language in the political summary of a landmark climate report published Monday, according to four people present at its approval session in Switzerland who spoke to Heatmap News on the condition of anonymity.
Amid jockeying over edits to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Saudi Arabia added caveats to protect fossil fuels and blocked language that stressed the limits of sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The U.S. tried to delete a sentence about climate finance gaps and cut the word “equitable” from a line about access to international finance. China tried to cut the report’s most powerful finding from the text — that the world has 12 years to cut carbon pollution by two-thirds — but settled for putting the numbers in a table instead.
“There were things we gave in, but there was some support from progressive governments,” said one scientist who was at the meeting. “In the end it was not terrible.”
The report published Monday ties together the last three installments of the sixth assessment report of the IPCC and is meant to offer recommendations to policymakers. Every few years, the UN-backed body asks the world’s top scientists to pore through thousands of studies and sum up the state of the peer-reviewed research on global warming.
Though the reports are rigorous scientific studies, their political summaries must be signed off by 195 governments in fiercely contested approval processes. Delegates go through the document line-by-line, proposing changes that reflect their national agendas. The report’s authors push back against suggestions that do not line up with the underlying science. In doing so, the language often becomes weaker.
“Every country plays this game in a certain way,” said one scientist who was at the meeting. “But they’re all trying to different extents.”
Delegates should have had an easier time reaching consensus on the most recent summary, which drew from earlier texts that governments had accepted. But negotiations were fraught and ran into overtime. The next big IPCC assessment will not happen until the end of the decade — by which point the carbon budget for 1.5 degrees Celsius will likely be gone — making this document the body’s last chance to help world leaders honor their climate promises.
The summary for policymakers came out of the approval process “not as it went in, but not significantly altered,” said Anna Pirani, head of the IPCC’s Working Group One Technical Support Unit. “It’s not a simple, trivial process, even though the material has all been approved before.”
A summary of the session by the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, the only media allowed into the room, and confirmed by five people present, documents several instances of countries pushing to water down language. The Saudi Arabian negotiators were particularly skilled, three people at the meeting said, boasting a deep knowledge of the underlying report and using carefully crafted arguments.
In one example, Finland noted that fossil fuels were the root cause of climate change, but Saudi Arabia objected, and the line was not included in the final text. In a paragraph on carbon dioxide removal (CDR), several countries called for a line on its limits. Saudi Arabia said it would accept this only if the limits of renewable energy would also be included. The change was discarded from that paragraph, though the limits of CDR were raised later in the document.
In a sentence about the pollution from existing fossil fuel infrastructure — which is enough to blow through the remaining carbon budget — Saudi Arabia added a caveat to specify “without additional abatement.” The phrase refers to CCS: technology to capture carbon and store it before it reaches the atmosphere. Scientists expect CCS to play a big role in sectors that are hard to clean up, like cement-making, but see little role for it in generating electricity, where there are cheaper and more effective alternatives.
When Germany pushed to add a footnote on the limits of CCS at another point in the document, Saudi Arabia again agreed with a condition. It asked the authors to include a full paragraph from a previous report that was mostly neutral or favorable to the technology. The result was that the sentence on the limits of CCS was tucked away among several other sentences on its potential.
“If there’s any sport where you can shoot four own goals at once, that was the case here,” said one IPCC report author who was at the meeting.
Debates around how to pay for the world’s mitigation and adaptation efforts were also hotly contested. The U.S. tried to scrap a reference to “equity” in a line about access to capital and tried to delete a line about gaps between ambition and action in climate finance, according to the Earth Negotiation Bulletin summary. In both cases it failed. Still, it successfully pushed back on a suggestion from India, backed by China and Bolivia, to specify that a country’s ability to cut pollution depends on what other countries do with money, technology, and the remaining carbon budget.
In a separate paragraph, the U.S. also managed to caveat the fact that there is enough global capital to close the investment gaps, according to one scientist. It added that there are barriers to redirect capital to climate action.
“The U.S. was only blocking on finance — on other topics they were conceding,” the scientist said.
The approval process ran into overtime, forcing many delegates from poorer countries to leave. The IPCC Secretariat rebooked some flights, but by Sunday, according to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, there was nobody from Latin America or Africa left in the room.
That, two scientists said, led to a show of solidarity. Some countries fought against changes that affected peers who had left, and sacrificed their own interests to quickly push the process to the end. But it also weakened resistance to tougher negotiators who wouldn’t budge.
“Authors just wanted to get it behind them,” said one delegate from a European country. “In perhaps 50% of cases, they did not resist when adverse delegations tried to water down the text.”
The IPCC Secretariat keeps approval sessions secret to let delegates and scientists speak freely. By including governments in the approval process of the summaries for policymakers, but not letting them have control over the scientific report itself, it can tie policymakers to the science without compromising on facts.
“Governments come to the IPCC approval session with legitimate concerns — but also with vested interests,” said Lili Fuhr, deputy director of climate and energy at the Center for International Environmental Law, a non-profit legal organization with observer status at the approval session. “That is especially true for countries that have state-owned fossil fuel companies and representatives of those companies in their delegations to international climate meetings.”
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On the IEA’s World Energy Outlook, power plant emissions, and Honda’s surprise
Current conditions: Snow is falling in the mountains of North Carolina, where many are still without power • Severe weather warnings are in effect for nearly half of Australia • A coral bleaching alert has been issued for the eastern Caribbean, where the coral face a risk of “near complete mortality” due to high ocean temperatures.
The world is entering the “Age of Electricity,” with low-emission energy sources on track to generate more than half of the world’s electricity by the end of the decade, according to the International Energy Agency’s new World Energy Outlook. The report examines how the energy transition would look in three different scenarios: following current energy and climate policies, fulfilling all announced climate commitments, and achieving net zero emissions by 2050. “The energy outlook is complex, multifaceted and defies a single view on how the future might unfold,” the report says. Some facts and figures:
Global energy-related CO2 emissions in different scenarios.IEA
The IEA’s report says the world should certainly be concerned about rising electricity demand overall, but it also conveys that perhaps we should all just calm down when it comes to data center load growth driven by the rise of generative artificial intelligence, wrote Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. The report demonstrates that on a global scale, data centers are pretty trivial compared to, say, the uptick in electric vehicle adoption or increased demand for cooling. By 2030 in the base case scenario, the IEA projects that data centers will account for less than 10% of global electricity demand growth, which is roughly equal to demand growth from desalination technologies, which we see much less hand-wringing about. By comparison, the combination of rising temperatures and rising incomes could create over 1,200 terawatt-hours of additional cooling demand by 2035, more than the entire Middle East’s electricity use.
Ninety-two people are still missing in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, Gov. Roy Cooper, said yesterday. So far 95 storm-related deaths have been confirmed in the state, and thousands of people are still without power and other basic amenities. Nearly 600 roads are still closed, though this represents an improvement on the 1,200 that were closed immediately after the storm swept through the state three weeks ago. More than $99 million has been paid out in individual FEMA aid. Meanwhile, the U.S. Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program has been drained of funds after Helene. “Until Congress appropriates additional funds, the SBA is pausing new loan offers for its direct, low-interest, long-term loans to disaster survivors,” the SBA said. Congress is currently in recess, and won’t return until after the presidential election.
Emissions from America’s power plants fell 7% last year compared to 2022, according to the EPA’s annual Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. The analysis looks at reported emissions from more than 8,100 industrial facilities across the country. When compared to 2011 emissions from power plants, last year’s levels were 34% lower, “reflecting the long-term shifts in power sector fuel-stock from coal to natural gas.” On the flip side, emissions from oil and gas operations are rising. They were up 1.4% last year compared to 2022 and 16.4% on 2016 levels. For the ninth year in a row, Alabama Power’s James H. Miller Jr. Electric Generating Plant was the country’s largest single producer of greenhouse gas pollution in 2023.
Honda has surprised analysts with its remarkable Q3 EV sales. The Honda Prologue, which only entered the U.S. market this year, was the fifth best-selling EV in the country. More than 12,600 of the all-electric SUVs were sold in the last three months. “Honda has been seen as a huge EV laggard for several years,” wrote Zachary Shahan at CleanTechnica. But its “reputation as a leader in fuel efficiency and hybrids made it an easy sell to get customers into its first serious full electric vehicle.” Patrick George at Inside EVsagreed: “This is a nice outcome for Honda's first modern EV, but perhaps it's not too surprising. American car buyers still tend to equate Honda and Toyota with being ‘green’ car companies since both were such pioneers in the hybrid arena.”
Honda
Research suggests that simply exposing people to climate change conspiracy theories can make them significantly less likely to believe the scientific community agrees that humans are causing climate change, and less likely to engage in pro-environmental behavior.
Rob interviews Ali Zaidi at Yale.
What’s next for the Biden administration — and for climate policy in the United States? Should Democrats negotiate with Republicans over permitting reform, even if it means making concessions to fossil fuel interests? And how should the country’s trade policy handle the problem of carbon pollution?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob speaks with Ali Zaidi, the national climate advisor to President Joe Biden. Zaidi leads the White House Climate Policy Office, which coordinates domestic climate policy across federal agencies. Before joining the White House in 2021, Zaidi was the state of New York’s deputy secretary for energy and environment. This interview was recorded live on October 10 in New Haven, Connecticut, at the Yale Clean Energy Conference.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is out this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Ali Zaidi: The conversation in Congress right now makes it seem like transmission is a Democratic policy priority when it boosts reliability and lowers rates. I thought Republicans and Democrats both agreed we need to boost reliability and lower rates. So I don’t know why that needs to be offset by any measure.
That’s thing number one. Thing number two is …
Robinson Meyer: This is the challenge of talking about things, is that if Democrats say, oh, we really value this, then suddenly it’s a Democratic priority.
Zaidi: Yeah. And then the second is, how do we accelerate the siting and permitting of things and then there is a how do we shift more power to the oil and gas industry. The conversation around leasing, happening against a backdrop where the industry itself is moving away from long-cycle investment to short-cycle investment, it’s tough. So I would hope that more of the permitting conversation were a permitting conversation.
Meyer: Well, one way this sometimes gets reflected is that you’ll hear environmentalists say, any policy that makes the oil and gas industry happy or bigger, we should not take. And that makes making a compromise …
Zaidi: And I reject that. Yeah, look, if ExxonMobil wants to pay for a pipeline that will help us deliver what was once solar and wind, as a fuel, to help us decarbonize a steel plant, they can be for it and I can be for it. If there is a — Blackstone, for example, has a Project Tallgrass that has converted a pipeline that used to pull hydrocarbons out of the ground. It’s now flipped the pipeline around, and is putting CO2 into the ground.
They can be for that. I can be for that — not speaking to the specific project, but conceptually. So I don’t think … It’s not the actor. It’s the question of whether this is directionally consistent with trying to chase down a 1.5 degree future or not.
We are behind as a world, and we need to run faster in that direction. If it’s not directionally consistent, that’s a problem.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
The organization’s annual World Energy Outlook is pretty sanguine on the subject.
Early this morning, the International Energy Agency released its annual World Energy Outlook. And while the Paris-based agency says the world should certainly be concerned about rising electricity demand overall, it also conveys (not quite in so many words) that perhaps we should all just calm down when it comes to data center load growth driven by the rise of generative artificial intelligence.
The report demonstrates that on a global scale, data centers are pretty trivial compared to, say, the uptick in electric vehicle adoption or increased demand for cooling. By 2030 in the base case scenario, the IEA projects that data centers will account for less than 10% of global electricity demand growth, which is roughly equal to demand growth from desalination technologies, which we see much less hand-wringing about. By comparison, the combination of rising temperatures and rising incomes could create over 1,200 terawatt-hours of additional cooling demand by 2035, more than the entire Middle East’s electricity use.
IEA
The IEA emphasized that when it comes to data centers, “plausible high and low sensitivities do not change the outlook fundamentally,” meaning that regardless of factors such as how quickly renewables and other low-emission energy sources are able to ramp up or the rate at which computing efficiency improves, data centers are poised to be a small piece of the overall pie.
The authors even sound an optimistic note as they urge readers to consider the positive impacts that artificial intelligence could have on the energy sector at large, writing that “the potential implications of AI for energy are broader [than just their data center electricity use] and include improved systems coordination in the power sector and shorter innovation cycles.” As of now, folks can only guess as to whether the net benefits of AI will be positive or negative from an emissions standpoint. But the report again sounded relatively cheery as it noted that there is “a set of low-emissions options available to meet this [data center] demand,” as cleaner electricity sources are growing much faster than data center electricity use.
The unbothered tone might seem surprising, given the general freakout over demand growth as well as dueling perspectives over how to meet it. But while it’s important to put these numbers in perspective, that task shouldn’t be an excuse not to act. After all, even “a small percent of the pie” still leads to some pretty big figures. For example, say data centers comprise a conservative 5% of global electricity demand growth between now and 2030. That would mean an additional 338 terawatt-hours of electricity demand by the end of the decade, an estimate the IEA says could vary by as much as 170 terawatt-hours. So on the high end, global growth in data center electricity demand could reach around 500 terawatt-hours by 2030, nearly a quarter of total U.S. electricity generation last year.
So while this might not level up to a crisis on a global scale, it’s still very much a problem worth mitigating — all the more so because data centers are heavily geographically concentrated, meaning local grid impacts will be felt acutely. Back in April, Jonathan Koomey, an independent researcher, lecturer, and entrepreneur who studies the energy and environmental impacts of information technology, discussed this very issue with Heatmap’s own Shift Key co-hosts, Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins. As Koomey put it, “A place like Ireland that has, I think at last count 17%, 18% of its load from data centers, if that grows, that could give them real challenges. Same thing with Loudoun County in Virginia.”
The IEA also acknowledges this reality, noting that even if, globally, there’s enough clean energy to go around, local constraints on generation and grid capacity could be severe. But as Koomey told Heatmap — and as, perhaps, the IEA is trying to tell us all — “it is not a national story. It is a local story.”