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Graphic Truth: Carbon in context
The US and Canada are both racing against the clock to lower their greenhouse gas emissions. As the effects of climate change become more apparent and deadly, countries are grappling with how to curb their emissions without curbing economic growth.
Canada, a resource-rich nation, is at a crossroads. Along with transportation and industry, the oil and gas sector dominates the country's emissions profile. Still, Canada has embarked on an ambitious journey to redefine its environmental legacy with one of the boldest climate commitments: pledging to reduce emissions by 40-45% below 2005 levels by 2030. Policies such as carbon pricing, identified as the top driver of emissions reductions, will prevent 226 megatonnes of carbon pollution from being released by 2030.
Meanwhile, the US energy sector, primarily powered by fossil fuels, is the largest source of emissions, contributing significantly to the nation's carbon footprint. Transportation, industry, and agriculture follow closely behind. But the US has made strides in addressing its emissions through a combination of federal mandates, state-level initiatives, and private-sector innovation. The Clean Power Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, are meant to incentivize the private sector to lead the way in renewable energy innovation and adoption.
Places where oil and gas are produced, however, may experience the most economic upheaval from the clean energy transition, while local communities near fossil fuel industries are more likely to experience environmental degradation and health impacts.Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies and developer of AlphaGO, attends the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, Britain, November 2, 2023.
Hard Numbers: Google’s spending spree, Going corporate, Let’s see a movie, Court-ordered AI ban, Energy demands
100 billion: AI is a priority for many of Silicon Valley’s top companies — and it’s a costly one. Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis said that the tech giant plans to spend more than $100 billion developing artificial intelligence. That’s the same amount that rival Microsoft is expected to spend in building an AI-powered supercomputer, nicknamed Stargate.
72.5: The free market is dominating the AI game: Of the foundation models released between 2019 and 2023, 72.5% of them originated from private industry, according to a new Staford report. 108 models were released by companies, as opposed to 28 from academia, nine from an industry-academia collaboration, and four from government. None at all were released through a collaboration between government and industry.
5: The A24 film Civil War has garnered considerable controversy for its content, but its promotion is under scrutiny as well. Five posters for the film were created using artificial intelligence and depict scenes that never occur in the narrative. That’s kicked off a debate about the ethics of using AI in film marketing as well as questions of whether this is false advertising for the movie itself.
1,000: A sex offender in the UK who was found to have created 1,000 indecent images of children was banned from using any “AI creating tools” for five years by a British court. It’s not clear if he was actually using AI to create the illegal images in question, or if the order is peremptory, but it could serve as a model for future punishment in UK cases in the future. Meanwhile, on April 23, a group of AI companies including Google, Meta, and OpenAI, pledged to better prevent their tools from creating sexualized images of children and other exploitative material.
4.5: Salesforce is calling on AI companies to disclose the energy efficiency and carbon footprint of their models, and asking legislators to pass new laws aimed at demanding transparency and reducing the total energy consumption of AI. Salesforce’s best estimates put the total power generation demands of global data centers at 1.5% but warn that that figure could increase to 4.5% in the coming years absent intervention.Podcast: Challenging the climate change narrative with Bjorn Lomborg
Listen: On the GZERO World Podcast, Ian Bremmer sits down with Danish author Bjorn Lomborg, a controversial figure in the world of climate change. Lomborg is unequivocal that climate change is a real problem and that humans are responsible for causing it. But where he differs from the global climate narrative is that the current focus on reducing carbon emissions is misguided and ineffective. Lomborg argues the world is too fixated on stopping climate change at the expense of… everything else.
He worries billions are being spent on incremental climate mitigation when that money could be spent more effectively on things like education or maternal mortality. Bremmer challenges Lomborg on a range of issues, from the exponential advancements in renewable technology to the disproportional impact of climate disasters in poor countries. While the two don’t agree on everything, their conversation affirms that climate change is a complex issue that requires nuanced thinking and effective solutions to avoid worst-case scenarios for future generations.
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Climate emergency: limited Biden executive power
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his analysis on US politics:
What is President Biden doing now that his legislative agenda is all but over?
Congress is getting ready to throw in the towel on 2022, racing to pass several pieces of legislation dealing with healthcare, drug prices and subsidies for the semiconductor industry before they go on their annual recess beginning in August. Some Democrats are holding out hope they can still pass a broader bill to finance green energy investments. But others are already writing the eulogy for the 117th Congress, recognizing how hard it is to legislate in a 50-50 Senate and a narrowly divided House and looking forward to Republicans taking control of at least one branch of government next year.
So what is President Biden going to do without Congress? He doesn't have great options. Democrats are looking to President Biden to drive action on abortion access, voting rights, and now climate change. All issues that Congress could not find big enough majorities to legislate on this year. This week, the Biden administration is attempting to claim progress on their very ambitious environmental agenda. Biden came into office with the goal of getting to a carbon pollution free power sector by 2035 and net zero emissions in the economy by 2050, and he had a plan to get there. An analysis from a team of Princeton University found that the Build Back Better plan passed by the House would've cut greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 billion tons by 2030, well on the way towards Biden's goal of cutting carbon emissions in half by that point. But unfortunately the Senate couldn't pass that bill. And this week, the White House floated an idea supported by environmental groups, which is declaring a climate change emergency that would give him extraordinary powers to regulate fossil fuel emissions and regulate the carbon footprint of the federal government. But, these powers would likely still be incredibly limited.
The Supreme Court has indicated they would look skeptically on any expansive use of authorities under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions. And short of sweeping new regulations, Biden's powers are limited to things like redirecting federal funds towards research and development, establishing renewable energy purchase targets for the entire federal government, limiting the expansion of US oil and gas drilling and halting court mandated onshore lease sales. He's politically limited here as well. Anything that hurts domestic energy production is a political risk given high gas prices. The cumulative effect of these policies would fall far short of what would be needed to achieve his emission reductions target. Without congressional support there's only so much Biden can do, and these actions will fall far short of what Senator Sheldon Whitehouse called "executive Beast Mode", surely leaving climate activists disappointed and concerned as the incoming Republican majority in the House is not likely to do anything to reduce emissions.
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West Virginia v. EPA ruling hampers climate change action
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his analysis on US politics:
This week's question, what are the implications of the Supreme Court's decision in the case of West Virginia v. EPA?
It's been a busy term for the Supreme Court, topped off this week with a ruling on the EPA's ability to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act.
The Supreme Court ruled that the EPA did not have the properly congressionally delegated authority to regulate carbon emissions. This will hamper the ability of the Biden administration to act on climate change in the absence of congressional action, which we do not expect. And more broadly could have implications for other agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.
At issue is the agency's ability to regulate in cases where Congress has not specifically laid out that they should. This is known as delegation from Congress to the agencies. And in the past, the courts have given the agencies wide latitude to pass new rules in cases where congressional statutes were ambiguous.
However, under the more conservative courts that were appointed by President Donald Trump, the courts are turning back these abilities. And a concurring opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch laid out a series of tests that limit the ability of agencies to act.
The conservatives think that courts have allowed agencies to have too much power and would prefer to see those powers concentrated in the hands of the elected representatives in Congress. Liberals argue that the administrative state requires specialized expertise to create complex rules to regulate industries that cannot be administered properly by the more political branches of government.
This will affect not only regulations dealing with climate change, but also future workplace safety regulations, such as the vaccine mandate that President Biden tried to force on large employers earlier this year, the SEC's ability to force disclosures of climate risk by publicly traded companies, and rulemaking that the Federal Trade Commission hopes to do. They're pushing data privacy standards and break up highly concentrated industries.
More broadly, with this decision and the decision to overturning Roe v. Wade, the court has indicated that it is willing to overturn years of precedent and set US policy making on a fundamentally different and more limited path.
Nations don’t need carbon to grow their economies, says John Kerry
If John Kerry were only able to accomplish one thing as US climate change czar, he'd focus on changing the minds of the one-third of countries in the world that say they're "entitled" to pollute because they didn't before.
For Kerry, it's a fallacy that heavy carbon use is the only way to develop an economy because these nations can leapfrog from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
If we are able to cut by half the amount of carbon we're now releasing into the atmosphere by the end of the decade, he says, we may be able to meet the Paris Climate Agreement goal of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
"Currently, we're on a track to blow through 2 degrees, let alone 1.5. This is the urgency that people need to understand," he says. "Promises are fine, but they don't get the job done. It's the implementation that gets the job done. So, we're working on something called implementation plus."
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"What's it worth to save everything we have?" asks climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe
Why do governments and corporations set Net Zero goals when the science just says to just cut emissions ASAP? For atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy and Director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University., it's too easy for humans to procrastinate on doing stuff 30 or 40 years from now. That's why she says we need more near-term goals with "everything on the table," given what's really at risk is not the planet — but rather us. "So the question is not, 'Could we possibly spend too much trying to fix climate change?' No. The question is, 'What's it worth to save everything we have?'"
Companies moving from climate pledges to judging performance, says Microsoft’s Lucas Joppa
As governments haggle climate deals to curb emissions way into the future at COP26, Microsoft chief environmental officer Lucas Joppa says the private sector is moving beyond lofty pledges to talk about performance. Instead of what your commitments are, he explains, corporations are asking each other how they're scoring on what they promised to do. "How are you measuring carbon? How are you accounting for carbon? What are the systems that need to be put in place to actually make this whole Net Zero thing work?"
Joppa spoke during a live Global Stage event, Climate Crisis: Is net zero really possible? Watch the full event here.