Author: sgarba1

So the conference of parties was supposed to end yesterday with the final plenary starting at 3pm local time. But, as usual, the last session has been drawn out past the initially scheduled time. It was postponed to 6pm then 12am then 4am and currently its 8pm on Saturday with no word of when the plenary will start. I have heard rumors that it may be postponed until tomorrow. In the meantime, the COP Presidency has convened bilaterals between parties to try to work out their differences. The main sticking point I have heard have to do with Article 6 which Brazil is blocking. Article 6 discusses how market-based mechanisms can be used to combat climate change and contribute to parties’ achieving their NDCs. It is now up to the ministers, who have arrived in the last two days, to work out these issues. Many delegates have already left the venue as this is out of their hands.

Unfortunately, if nothing happens within the hour, I may be forced to follow suit and depart the venue without a conclusion to COP24, at least not the best outcome hoped. There will still be a rulebook with some parts incomplete. These incomplete parts have to go through further committees and sessions before the can be incorporated into the rule book which will not be activated until 2020. A source following transparency and NDC implementation told me that they were happy with the outcome of Katowice. A lot has been achieved. But obviously, there is still work to be done before 2020. Chile you’re next!

Correction: According to some YUNGO sources, the Brazil issue has been resolved but now there is a Turkey issue which has yet to be clarified to me.

Yesterday, I went to an event on demystifying carbon capture technologies. They are here, but are they here to stay?

Sallie Greenberg, a geologist at the Illinois State Geological Survey talking about experiments they have conducted in Illinois to inject CO2 into saline aquifers. Her team has shown that it is a proven method that could be scaled up to provide storage of CO2 out of the atmosphere. There are obvious challenges with sighting and injecting but she believes this can contribute to fighting climate change.

The co-founder of the world’s first commercially available carbon capture technology gave a presentation about how his team’s product has a net 90% efficiency in pulling carbon directly out of the air. It pulls out carbon and liquifies it. Water is also a byproduct of the process. It has been rolled out across several European countries.

This is a scheme of how the first negative carbon plant in Iceland works. Its hooked up to a geothermal plant to provide the heat necessary to remove carbon. The chemistry to me is not clear but this seems promising.

The founder did recognize that this is not the solution to climate change. In fact, he stated that trees and nature-based solutions a better option. However, he cited that with the decline of the use of petroleum products, the world will still need a carbon source for industrial products.

What do you guys think about carbon capture? Will it be necessary if we overshoot the 1.5 mark?

Hey guys, this is Saadiq. I had a packed day at COP24 today running around to meetings about very interesting stuff. I had meetings about Gender and Climate, the role of business in helping countries reach their NDC (Nationally Determined Contributions) targets, ways to mitigate food waste, financing food projects, and a meeting about how to ensure equity in national actions to achieve NDCs. I’m going to briefly talk about two of the meetings, financing food projects and how to ensure equity in national actions to achieve NDCs because I found these really interesting.

The equity in NDCs talk focused on the research of academics who conducted case studies regarding the development of NDCs. It looked at how NDCs are developed by states and exposes what/who they choose privilege in these formulations. I had never thought of NDCs as being biased or problematic because these are supposed to be the ambitious goals of countries to ensure we stay under 1.5 C. What I learned is that certain countries could choose mitigation strategies that did not benefit their whole population. For example, dams could be built in one region while electrifying a whole other region would be ignored. There are no specific guidelines about ensuring equity from the UNFCCC (smh). I also learned that for some developing countries, the same consulting firms help formulate LDCs (Least Developed Countries) NDCs. Therefore, these firms, from the global north, could have great influence on what LDCs NDCs look like.

The second talk about food financing was hosted by the World Bank and focused on how to get financing to small farmers to support smart agriculture. This is supposed to be a bottom-up approach to greening the food system that takes into account and allegedly quantifies carbon offsets, gender equity and health impacts of projects before giving them money. (I would be interested to see how they quantify gender impacts.) They, however, failed to talk about efforts and policies to green big-agri which was suspicious even while saying that by  2050 agriculture will account for 70% of GHGs (Greenhouse gases). Yes, shocking right. On the somewhat bright side, they discussed how big banks are now taking climate change seriously by considering the environmental impacts of projects that want funding. They talked at length about case studies but again only related to small farmers who do not contribute as much to emissions as big-agri.

That’s all for today but stay tuned to see more rants. Pa!