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On Sat, Feb 1, 2025 at 12:29 PM T Manus <trmanus@comcast.net> wrote:
Was this discussed in today’s gathering?
A bill introduced in Washington by Senator Saldaña, Senate Bill 5377, attempts to force Tesla to discontinue our sales activities across the state. As a result, Washington residents could need to travel out-of-state to complete their new Tesla electric vehicle (EV) purchase. There could also be impacts to Tesla’s warranty and other service activities in Washington.
Washington should focus on increasing EV adoption in the state, not stepping backward to reduce competition and consumer choice.
Let your state representatives know that you oppose SB 5377 and that Washington residents should be able to purchase EVs from Tesla and other EV manufacturers in their home state.
Hi Jorgen - The below article appeared in the NY Times today and it addresses how the world has now passed the 1.5 degree C increase in greenhouse gas emissions. It is something I believe other members of our group should be aware of. The article included some graphs showing the greenhouse gas increases over a period of time and are impressively alarming - however I was unable to copy and share them.
Thanks, Del.
Global temperatures last year crept past a key goal, raising questions bout how much nations can stop the planet from heating up further.
Global temperatures compared with late-19th-century average Monthly temperature 2024 average +1.6°C Source: Copernicus/ECMWF
Note: Temperature anomalies relative to 1850-1900 averages.
By Raymond Zhong () and Brad Plumer (https://www.nytimes.com/by/brad-plumer (https://www.nytimes.com/by/raymond-zhong)). Graphics by Mira Rojanasakul (https://www.nytimes.com/by/mira-rojanasakul).
Jan. 9, 2025
At the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, Earth finished up its hottest year in recorded history, scientists said on Friday. The previous hottest year was 2023. And the next one will be upon us before long: By continuing to burn huge amounts of coal, oil and gas, humankind has all but guaranteed it.
The planet’s record-high average temperature last year reflected the weekslong, 104-degree-Fahrenheit spring heat waves that shuttered schools in Bangladesh and India. It reflected the effects of the bathtub-warm ocean waters that supercharged hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and cyclones in the Philippines. And it reflected the roasting summer and fall conditions that primed Los Angeles this week (https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/10/us/fires-los-angeles-california) for the most destructive wildfires in its history.
“We are facing a very new climate and new challenges, challenges that our society is not prepared for,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union monitoring agency.
But even within this progression of warmer years and ever-intensifying risks to homes, communities and the environment, 2024 stood out in another unwelcome way. According to the World Meteorological Organization, it was the first year in which global temperatures averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above those the planet experienced at the start of the industrial age.
For the past decade, the world has sought to avoid crossing this dangerous threshold. Nations enshrined the goal in the 2015 Paris agreement to fight climate change. “Keep 1.5 alive” was the mantra at United Nations summits.
Yet here we are. Global temperatures will fluctuate somewhat, as they always do, which is why scientists often look at warming averaged over longer periods, not just a single year.
But even by that standard, staying below 1.5 degrees looks increasingly unattainable, according to ()researchers who have run the numbers (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/30/climate/carbon-budget-paris-agreement.html (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/30/climate/carbon-budget-paris-agreement.html)). Globally, despite hundreds of billions of dollars invested in clean-energy technologies, carbon dioxide emissions hit a record in 2024 and show no signs of dropping.
One recent study () published in the journal Nature concluded that the absolute best humanity can now hope for is around 1.6 degrees of warming. To achieve it, nations would need to start slashing emissions (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/climate/climate-change-ipcc-un.html (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-02073-4)) at a pace that would strain political, social and economic feasibility.
But what if we’d started earlier?
“It was guaranteed we’d get to this point where the gap between reality and the trajectory we needed for 1.5 degrees was so big it was ridiculous,” said David Victor, a professor of public policy at the University of California, San Diego.
The question now is what, if anything, should replace 1.5 as a lodestar for nations’ climate aspirations.
“These top-level goals are at best a compass,” Dr. Victor said. “They’re a reminder that if we don’t do more, we’re in for significant climate impacts.”
(Because of variations in data sources and calculation methods, different scientific agencies independently arrived at slightly different estimates of last year’s warming. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it was just under 1.5 degrees Celsius; Copernicus and the U.K. Met Office said it was just above. By combining these and other estimates, the World Meteorological Organization concluded that warming was 1.55 degrees. All of the agencies are in firm agreement about the long-term rise in temperature, and the fact that no year on record has been warmer than 2024.)
The 1.5-degree threshold was never the difference between safety and ruin, between hope and despair. It was a number negotiated by governments trying to answer a big question: What’s the highest global temperature increase — and the associated level of dangers, whether heat waves or wildfires or melting glaciers — that our societies should strive to avoid?
The result, as codified in the Paris agreement, was that nations would aspire to hold warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius while “pursuing efforts” to limit it to 1.5 degrees.
Even at the time, some experts called the latter goal unrealistic, because it required such deep and rapid emissions cuts. Still, the United States, the European Union and other governments adopted it as a guidepost for climate policy.
Christoph Bertram, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability, said the urgency of the 1.5 target spurred companies of all kinds — automakers, cement manufacturers, electric utilities — to start thinking hard about what it would mean to zero out their emissions by midcentury. “I do think that has led to some serious action,” Dr. Bertram said.
But the high aspiration of the 1.5 target also exposed deep fault lines among nations.
China and India never backed the goal, since it required them to curb their use of coal, gas and oil at a pace they said would hamstring their development. Rich countries that were struggling to cut their own emissions began choking off funding (https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/14/europe-africa-energy-crisis-gas-oil-fossil-fuels-development-finance-hypocrisy-climate-summit-world-bank/) in the developing world for fossil-fuel projects that were economically beneficial. Some low-income countries felt it was deeply unfair to ask them to sacrifice for the climate given that it was wealthy nations — and not them — that had produced most of the greenhouse gases now warming the world.
“The 1.5-degree target has created a lot of tension between rich and poor countries,” said Vijaya Ramachandran, director for energy and development at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research organization.
Costa Samaras, an environmental-engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, compared the warming goals to health officials’ guidelines on, say, cholesterol. “We don’t set health targets on what’s realistic or what’s possible,” Dr. Samaras said. “We say, ‘This is what’s good for you. This is how you’re going to not get sick.’”
“If we were going to say, ‘Well, 1.5 is likely out of the question, let’s put it to 1.75,’ it gives people a false sense of assurance that 1.5 was not that important,” said Dr. Samaras, who helped shape U.S. climate policy from 2021 to 2024 in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “It’s hugely important.”
Scientists convened by the United Nations (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-report-half-degree.html) have concluded that restricting warming to 1.5 degrees instead of 2 would spare tens of millions of people from being exposed to life-threatening heat waves, water shortages and coastal flooding. It might mean the difference between a world that has coral reefs and Arctic sea ice in the summer, and one that doesn’t.
Each tiny increment of additional warming, whether it’s 1.6 degrees versus 1.5, or 1.7 versus 1.6, increases the risks. “Even if the world overshoots 1.5 degrees, and the chances of this happening are increasing every day, we must keep striving” to bring emissions to zero as soon as possible, said Inger Andersen, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program.
Officially, the sun has not yet set on the 1.5 target. The Paris agreement remains in force, even as President-elect Donald J. Trump vows to withdraw the United States from it for a second time. At U.N. climate negotiations, talk of 1.5 has become more muted compared with years past. But it has hardly gone away.
“With appropriate measures, 1.5 Celsius is still achievable,” Cedric Schuster, the minister of natural resources and environment for the Pacific island nation of Samoa, said at last year’s summit in Azerbaijan. Countries should “rise to the occasion with new, highly ambitious” policies, he said.
To Dr. Victor of U.C. San Diego, it is strange but all too predictable that governments keep speaking this way about what appears to be an unachievable aim. “No major political leader who wants to be taken seriously on climate wants to stick their neck out and say, ‘1.5 degrees isn’t feasible. Let’s talk about more realistic goals,’” he said.
Still, the world will eventually need to have that discussion (https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/10/climate-emissions-goals-blinking/), Dr. Victor said. And it’s unclear how it will go.
“It could be constructive, where we start asking, ‘How much warming are we really in for? And how do we deal with that?’” he said. “Or it could look very toxic, with a bunch of political finger pointing.”
August 2022. Detailed modeling by Princeton University of the impact of the new federal landmark climate change legislation.
June 3, 2022. The article discusses the latest government data shows current CO2 levels more than 50% pre-industrial levels and rising.
June 4, 2022. Good article on how local communities are being forced to adapt to climate change.
https://www.happinesswithout.com/plastic-pollution-statistics/
This article describes the environmental damage caused by plastics. It offers convincing facts and statistics.
https://www.pledgeagainstplastic.org/take-the-pledge
Something we can all do to fight plastic pollution.
The article is published by Ceres, an organization that helps businesses develop climate mitigation plans. This article pertains to companies in the US food sector and includes a report on recommendations for these companies.
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