Tag: Fossil Fuels

Invisible plastic: Why banning plastic bags will never be enough | Environment News

This week, the fourth round of treaty talks by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution concluded in Ottawa, Canada. A major bone of contention between negotiators from 175 countries is whether or not to limit the production of plastic, most of which is made from fossil fuels and chemicals and which causes pollution after use, as it does not fully or easily biodegrade.

Despite several rounds of talks, the pervasive plastic problem remains unresolved. A final round of talks is scheduled to be held in South Korea at the end of this year.

Amid global struggles to curb plastic pollution, the United Kingdom said last month that it would introduce legislation to ban wet wipes which contain plastic. Wet wipes made with plastic have been shown to leach harmful microplastics into the environment after they have been disposed of.

Everyone knows that plastic bags are a blight on the environment, but what other everyday items – also known as “invisible plastics – unexpectedly contain plastic or harmful “microplastics” and is there a solution?

What are invisible plastics and ‘microplastics’?

These are items which are seemingly not made of plastic – such as wet wipes – but which, once disposed of, release plastic into the environment.

“Invisible plastics are everywhere,” Tony Walker, a professor at the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University in Canada who also belongs to the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, said.

“In terms of global plastic production, which includes things like the table I’m sat at, the chair I’m sat on, my computer – you name it, it probably contains a plastic of some kind.”

Not all plastic needs to be eliminated, he said, particularly if it is used to make furniture which could last for several decades.

Single-use items containing plastic should be the focus, he added. These are adding to the “tonnes of plastic that are sitting in our landfills”, he said, often leaching harmful microplastics into the environment.

Microplastics are tiny particles of plastic which can even make their way into our food – for example by first being broken down and ingested by fish when they get into the sea. Walker added that even so-called “biodegradable plastic”, which is advertised as being able to break down naturally once disposed of, can contain microplastics.

Plastic can break down into microplastics in the sea, and enter the food chain [Shutterstock]

Which unexpected items could contain plastic?

Some other everyday items which surprisingly contain plastic are:

  • Chewing gum: A key ingredient used in making chewing gum – “gum base” – actually contains polyvinyl acetate, a plastic which does not biodegrade once the gum is disposed of.
  • Tea bags: To retain their shape while they are in hot water, most tea bags are lined with a plastic called polypropylene. The same applies to many coffee filters.
  • Sunscreen: Several brands of sunscreen use microplastics as an ingredient in their formula.
  • Aluminium cans: Many aluminium cans that contain soda have a lining of plastic to prevent the acid from the soda from reacting with the metal of the can.
  • Receipts: Many receipts are printed on thermal paper, which is coated with a layer of plastic to give it a shiny finish, making most paper receipts non-recyclable.
  • Toiletries and laundry products: Some toothpaste brands contain tiny beads or micro-beads of plastic which act as exfoliants. These do not degrade or dissolve in water. Micro-beads can also be found in facial scrubs, makeup products and laundry detergent powders.

What are countries doing about this problem?

During a session of the United Nations Environment Assembly in March 2022, a landmark resolution was adopted to draft an international legally binding treaty on plastic pollution.

Under the resolution, an intergovernmental negotiating committee (INC) including representatives from 175 countries, has been holding talks with the aim of drafting a treaty by the end of this year. Previous sessions have convened in Uruguay, France and Kenya. The fourth session wrapped up this week in Canada and the last one will be held between November and December in South Korea.

This time, major disagreements about limiting the amount of plastic manufactured globally arose.

Environmental experts say it is crucial that they reach an agreement on this issue. Plastic production continues to rise around the world and the annual production of fossil fuel-based plastic is projected by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to triple by 2060 if nothing changes.

The head of Greenpeace in Ottawa, Graham Forbes, said that it will be impossible to end plastic pollution without massively reducing plastic production.

“Current global production [of plastic] is over 400 million metric tons [tonnes] annually,” said Walker. “However, we’re recycling on average as a planet, only 9 percent. That leaves 91 percent of 400 million metric tons as waste.”

Why don’t some countries want to reduce plastic production?

This is mainly down to economic factors, experts say.

Some “have vested interest in producing plastic products or petroleum products”, Walker explained. These countries believe that stopping the production of plastic would hurt their economies, he added.

Will governments find a solution?

Experts are calling on countries represented at the INC to work much harder to reach a consensus on the production of plastic before the end of this year.

Walker pointed out that plastic is a transboundary pollutant, crossing rivers and borders, meaning countries should have a vested interest in tackling this issue. “Plastics are now in the atmosphere, in the air we breathe, so they’re actually travelling between continents on air currents,” said Walker.

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What’s slowing down America’s clean energy transition? It’s not the cost | Renewable Energy News

For the first time, clean energy in the United States is at the same price as energy from burning fossil fuels thanks to policy measures, including President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). But a new report says non-cost barriers are now slowing the country’s transition to renewables.

The report, released in February by the Clean Investment Monitor, analysed different modelling scenarios and found that the IRA is expected to meet its goal of reducing GHG emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030.

Passed in 2022, the IRA is the largest investment to address the climate crisis ever passed in the US. The investment is significant in a country that is one of the world’s largest contributors to GHG emissions. (China, the US and India are the world’s top three emitters.)

The report found that electric vehicle sales were at the top of the projected range in 2023, and investment in utility-scale clean electricity reached record levels last year. However, factors like local opposition to renewables and long delays in grid connection are slowing the pace of the clean energy transition.

Trevor Houser, one of the lead authors of the report, said two decades of policy work, including the passing of the IRA, have reduced the cost of clean energy to the point that it is competitive with coal and fossil gas (called “natural gas” by the fossil fuel industry), and can be deployed without increasing prices for households and businesses.

“It’s exciting to see those two decades of work paying off and these new, cleaner technologies having achieved a level of cost reduction and a point of scale where they can be widely deployed,” Houser said.

Now, the only issue is the speed of the transition. In the last two years, high inflation and supply chain issues led to temporary price increases. “That appears to be correcting now,” Houser said.

The bigger obstacles, he said, are ramping up manufacturing, connecting transmission lines, and addressing growing opposition to renewables.

“The thing that’s more concerning to me is the ability to get local acceptance and to get projects permitted and built fast enough,” he added.

Opposition to renewables

The area of land needed to deliver solar and wind power is much larger than coal or fossil gas plants, leading to tension when homeowners and other groups hear of renewable projects proposed nearby.

Backlog in connecting clean energy to the grid is slowing down US transition [File: AP Photo]

“People are supportive of wind and solar, generally, but just don’t want it right next to them,” Houser explained. “The way that a lot of homeowners are very supportive of homeless shelters just as long as it’s not on their block.”

But this NIMBYism, an acronym for “not in my backyard” that reflects the opposition of residents to developments in the vicinity of their homes, is not isolated to a few corners of the country. A 2023 report by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School found organised opposition in 35 states, resulting in at least 228 significant local restrictions against wind, solar and other renewable energy facilities.

The report found that nearly 300 projects had encountered serious opposition, ranging from letter-writing campaigns to lawsuits.

“Delays from litigation alone can kill a project,” noted Matthew Eisenson, the report’s author and senior fellow at the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

While some concerns are rooted in impacts to tribal lands, resources and sacred sites, known as “green colonialism”, Eisenson said opposition from tribes affects only a small percentage of renewable energy projects.

Instead, he said, most complaints about clean energy projects are from non-Indigenous communities with concerns about visual impacts, community character, impacts on property values and loss of agricultural land. The most intense opposition can be found in the Midwest, especially Ohio and Michigan, and parts of the South, including Virginia, according to Eisenson’s research.

Opposition has been especially effective at the municipal level, where town and county boards are staffed by common citizens who aren’t experts in energy policy, he said. Often it only takes a small number of people to show up at meetings to block a project. “But that’s not to say that a majority of people in all these communities actually support stopping projects,” Eisenson said.

Opponents have successfully passed not only local bans but also state laws. Eisenson pointed to Ohio, where a state law enacted in 2021 allows counties to establish restricted areas where wind and solar projects are banned. At least 16 counties have since established restricted areas on solar farms.

Offshore wind, especially, has faced fierce opposition from non-environmental groups, and it is “the area where we see the highest correlation between misinformation and opposition,” Eisenson said. “There has been a concerted misinformation campaign to tie whale beachings to offshore wind development and exploration.”

Eisenson is concerned that all this pushback is having a significant impact on the rollout of renewables. “There’s still a big question mark about how much of this infrastructure actually gets built,” he said.

Referring to the NIMBYism, Houser said the question is when to put the collective interest of the climate over the interest of the individual. “The challenge now for policymakers is, can they prioritise rapid construction to clean energy for climate relative to some other issues when there are trade-offs?” he said.

Backlogged grid

Another major obstacle that’s slowing the renewable transition is a backlog in connecting clean energy to the grid.

The grid is the transmission system that moves power across long distances towards cities, where local distribution brings power to homes and businesses. But delays have emerged as new projects ask to be connected to the grid, explained Lori Bird, director of US Energy for the World Resources Institute, a global research organisation.

New projects must apply to connect to the grid. “They have to go through a study process to be able to get an interconnection agreement,” she said.

The process includes assessing impacts to the grid, and whether they can meet requirements and provide reliable power.

“There’s very large backlogs of projects in the queues,” Bird said. “One issue is that study processes have been taking longer than they have in the past, and larger projects are taking longer to interconnect. So it’s a volume issue, it’s a staffing issue.”

The good news, Bird said, is that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), recently issued an order to speed up the process. Instead of studying projects based on their order in the queue, they will now be studied in regional clusters, making it faster to assess them together. The order also imposes penalties on transmission providers that don’t complete studies on time and requires projects to be closer to completion in order to enter the queue.

She said it’s too soon to say whether the FERC rules will speed up connection, but she hopes it will “make the process go more smoothly.”

All these non-cost barriers are “a good problem to have”, pointed out Houser.

“For clean electricity, we have reached a tipping point where it’s not a question of whether we’ll decarbonise – it’s how fast. That is a huge victory. The amount of avoided global climate damage from reaching that tipping point is very large.”

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Global coal use to reach record high in 2023, energy agency says | Climate Crisis News

IEA report says demand is expected to grow in India, China but decline in United States, European Union.

Global coal use is expected to reach a record high in 2023 as demand in emerging and developing economies remains strong, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said.

The demand for coal is seen rising 1.4 percent in 2023, surpassing 8.5 billion tonnes for the first time as usage in India is expected to grow 8 percent and that in China up 5 percent due to rising electricity demand and weak hydropower output, IEA said in a report released on Friday.

Coal is the largest energy-related source of the CO2 emissions responsible along with other greenhouse gases for global warming.

Half of the world’s coal use comes from China, the agency said, so the outlook for coal will be significantly affected in the coming years by the pace of clean energy deployment, weather conditions, and structural shifts in the Chinese economy.

Coal use is set to drop by about 20 percent this year in both the European Union and the United States, the report said.

The agency said it was difficult to forecast demand in Russia, currently the fourth-largest coal consumer, because of the continuing conflict in Ukraine.

But the IEA noted that overall coal use is not expected to drop until 2026, when the major expansion of renewable capacity in the next three years should help lower usage by 2.3 percent compared with 2023 levels, even with the absence of stronger clean energy policies.

Global consumption is forecast to remain well over 8 billion tonnes in 2026, the report said. To reach goals set by the Paris climate agreement – reached in 2015 by governments who agreed to phase out fossil fuels in favour of renewable energy in the second half of the century – the use of unabated coal would need to fall significantly faster, it added.

At the United Nations COP28 climate talks in Dubai this week, world leaders agreed to a deal that would, for the first time, push nations to transition away from fossil fuels to avert the worst effects of climate change.

However, the agreement did not go so far as to seek a “phase-out” of fossil fuels, for which more than 100 nations had pleaded. Rather, it called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade”.

“The absence of explicit ‘phase-out’ language in the draft is significant, as it is a more measurable and definitive term, sending a strong message globally about a total shift away from fossil fuels,” Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network International, told Al Jazeera.

“The current terminology – ‘transitioning away’ – is somewhat ambiguous and allows for varying interpretations.”

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New UN climate deal calls for ‘transitioning away’ from fossil fuels | Climate Crisis News

While latest COP28 draft text avoids phrase ‘phase out’, campaigners say it is an improvement on the last one.

A new draft text calling on the world to wean itself off planet-warming fossil fuels has been floated at the United Nations COP28 climate talks in Dubai after an outcry over an earlier proposal forced the summit to be extended.

After the previous draft drew fire for offering a list of options that “could” be taken to combat the dangerous heating of the planet, the new draft explicitly “calls on” all nations to contribute through a series of actions.

The actions include “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science,” it said.

“It is the first time that the world unites around such a clear text on the need to transition away from fossil fuels,” said Norway’s minister for climate and the environment, Espen Barth Eide. “It has been the elephant in the room – at last,  we address it head-on. This is the outcome of extremely many conversations and intense diplomacy.”

Although the text did not include the words “phase out”, campaigners said the latest draft was better than the previous version.

“This draft is a sorely needed improvement from the last version, which rightly caused outrage,” said Stephen Cornelius, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)’s deputy global climate and energy lead. “The language on fossil fuels is much improved but still falls short of calling for the full phase-out of coal, oil and gas.”

Intensive negotiations continued well into the small hours of Wednesday morning after the conference presidency’s initial document angered many countries by avoiding decisive calls for action on fossil fuels, the major driver of global heating.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE)-led presidency presented delegates from nearly 200 nations with a new central document – called the global stocktake – just after sunrise.

It is the third version of the document to be presented in about two weeks and the word “oil” does not appear anywhere in the 21-page document. It mentions “fossil fuels” twice, but Alden Meyer, a veteran climate negotiations analyst at the European think tank E3G, said that if approved, it would be somewhat of a first mention of fossil fuels in the context of getting rid of them.

The conference in UAE, one of the world’s major oil producers, has faced criticism for close ties with fossil fuel interests from the start, especially after Sultan al-Jaber, who runs a state oil company, was appointed to preside over the negotiations.

The aim of the global stocktake is to help nations align their national climate plans with the 2015 Paris Agreement, which calls to limit warming to 1.5C (2.7F).

The world is already on its way to smashing the record for the hottest year, endangering human health and leading to ever more costly and deadly extreme weather.

Nations are expected to meet again after they have had a few hours to digest the new text. That meeting could either adopt the text or send it back to negotiators for more revisions.

Other documents presented early on Wednesday addressed, somewhat, the issues of money to help poorer nations adapt to global warming and emit less carbon, as well as how countries should adapt to a warming climate.

Many financial issues are supposed to be hammered out over the next two years at upcoming climate conferences in Azerbaijan and Brazil.

The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that developing nations need $194-366bn per year to help adapt to a warmer and wilder world.

“Overall, I think this is a stronger text than the prior versions we have seen,” said the UN Foundation’s senior adaptation adviser, Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio. “But it falls short in mobilising the financing needed to meet those targets.”

COP28 was supposed to end on Tuesday.

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Australia is preparing to burn – more fossil fuels | Climate Crisis News

Australians are used to seeing messages with advice on preparing for bushfires and other extreme weather at this time of year.

“Amid the Christmas promotions, [we’re] seeing increased warnings about extreme heat and fires and how to cope and stay safe,” Belinda Noble, the founder of climate advocacy organisation Comms Declare, told Al Jazeera.

While there is nothing new about these kinds of public service announcements, the messages have taken on added meaning as the weather becomes more unpredictable and memories of severe bushfires three years ago linger.

“Australia desperately needs national public information campaigns to keep people safe,” Noble told Al Jazeera, stressing that similar campaigns were also needed on how to “reduce emissions and to combat lies about fossil fuels, renewables and climate science”.

Australia passed breakthrough climate laws in March this year, 10 months after a new centre-left Labor government under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took office.

“In contrast to our last government,” the new government now “acknowledges that climate change is very real, is with us now and is worsening extreme weather and disasters,” Greg Mullins, the former commissioner of fire and rescue for the state of New South Wales told Al Jazeera.

But, Mullins added, it is “inexplicable that as they strive to reduce emissions, they undo all of their good work by continuing to approve new fossil fuel projects.”

Even as the Albanese government passed its new legislation in March, its annual Resource & Energy Major Project list included 116 new fossil fuel projects, “two more than at the end of 2021”, according to Canberra-based think tank the Australia Institute.

Combined, Australia’s oil and gas expansion plans are the eighth largest of any country, the advocacy organisation Oil Change International said recently.

Many of the planned fuel projects – on land and sea – are facing opposition from Indigenous people, who are seeing the effects of fossil fuel extraction and climate change first-hand.

“My community is facing not just fracking, but mining [and] overgrazing” said Rikki Dank, the director of Gudanji For Country, an Indigenous charity. “On top of that, we are feeling the effects of climate change. The weather patterns are all over the place,” she said.

“There’s not as much rain as there used to be and the heat is becoming almost unbearable,” said Dank, who spoke to Al Jazeera from COP28 in Dubai where she was bringing attention to Australia’s plans to frack her traditional lands.

Fracking or hydraulic fracturing involves the high-pressure injection of liquid into shale rock to release gas.

“We’re seeing a lot of people in Australia lose their homes because it’s becoming too hot or because we can’t live there any more because of the mining or fracking,” she added.

But at a special COP28 meeting where leaders were encouraged to speak off-script on Sunday, Australia’s Climate Minister Chris Bowen backed calls for the global phasing out of fossil fuels.

The comments sparked confusion given Australia’s fossil fuel expansion at home.

“We don’t think of ourselves as a petrostate, but Australia is a bigger fossil fuel exporter than the United Arab Emirates, by far,” Ebony Bennett, the deputy director of the Australia Institute wrote last week, comparing Australia with the host of COP28.

Australia is “the third-largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world,” Bennett added. The country is one of the world’s top exporters of coal with Russia and Indonesia.

‘Your whole world’

While Australia’s messages on the world stage may seem mixed, at home, the messages, at least on the dangers of fire, are much clearer.

A Queensland Fire and Emergency Services advertisement shows images like a warped dog’s bowl and a children’s bike in a burned landscape while a narrator says “your best friend” and “your whole world”.

A fire preparation sign at the Rural Fire Service (RFS) station in Shannons Flat, Australia says, ‘Sorry guys, you are all too late now!’ in January 2020 [Tracey Nearmy/Reuters]

While more disaster preparedness is welcome, Mullins says recently-announced funding is “still just a drop in the bucket and climate change is causing that bucket to leak.”

The former fire chief who is also the founder of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action says greater efforts are needed to address the growing climate crisis. 

“It doesn’t matter how many helicopters, how many planes, or many trucks you have,” Mullins told Al Jazeera. “We cannot just deal with the damage once it has been done, we need to tackle it at its root cause – which is the continued extraction and burning of coal, oil and gas.

“We must take urgent action now to get emissions plummeting during this crucial decade”, he added, “to give some hope to future generations”.

For Dank, the solutions include drawing on the experience of Indigenous people in caring for their land as a nature-based solution.

“Unfortunately”, there is a “current culture” of “band-aid solutions for how we can fix something that’s making us uncomfortable now as opposed to actually looking at and addressing the problem,” she said.

Meanwhile, Noble says public awareness campaigns are also needed to dispel the fossil fuel industry’s influence.

“Communities need more consistent, accurate and reliable climate information to manage the massive challenges ahead,” said Noble, whose organisation is also campaigning to see misleading fossil fuel advertising banned in Australia.

“There’s no doubt people are anxious,” she added, but it is possible to turn “anxiety into action against the fossil fuel companies causing the extreme heat, fires and storms”.

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COP28 climate talks go into overtime amid standoff over fossil fuels | Climate Crisis News

A flurry of shuttle diplomacy is under way at the UN-led negotiations in the UAE as countries fight over the wording of a potential deal.

The COP28 climate talks have gone into overtime as countries grapple over the wording of a potential agreement on the issue of fossil fuels.

There was a flurry of shuttle diplomacy as the UN-led conference extended past midday on Tuesday after nearly two weeks of speeches, demonstrations and negotiations with many countries criticising a draft text released on Monday for failing to call for the total phase-out of oil, gas and coal.

The COP28 director general for the United Arab Emirates, Majid Al Suwaidi, said the aim of the draft text was to “spark conversations”.

“The text we released was a starting point for discussions,” Al Suwaidi said at a news conference on Tuesday. “When we released it, we knew opinions were polarised, but what we didn’t know was where each country’s red lines were.”

Monday’s draft prompted negotiations that ran overnight into early Tuesday at the talks in Dubai.

German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan said the talks were in a “critical, critical phase”.

“There is a lot of shuttle diplomacy going on,” she said on X, formerly Twitter.

The draft text mentioned eight nonbinding options countries could take in cutting emissions, including reducing “both consumption and production of fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner so as to achieve net zero by, before, or around 2050″.

This is the first time a UN summit has mentioned reducing the use of all fossil fuels.

Too weak?

The draft text was criticised as too weak by countries that included Australia, Canada, Chile, Norway and the United States. They are among nearly 100 nations that want a complete phase-out of coal, oil and natural gas use.

Scientists say greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change. However, such fuels still produce nearly 80 percent of the world’s energy.

A new draft was supposed to be completed on Tuesday, but ongoing negotiations have prevented that from happening.

Deals at UN climate summits must be passed by consensus, and countries are then responsible for implementing them through their own national policies.

Different timeframes?

Countries in the Global South charge that richer countries should quit fossil fuels first because they have been using and producing them far longer.

“The transition should be premised on differentiated pathways to net zero and fossil fuel phase-down,” said Collins Nzovu, green economy minister for Zambia, which chairs the African group of countries in UN climate talks.

“We should also recognise the full right of Africa to exploit its natural resources sustainably,” he added.

Brazil is on board with forgoing fossil fuels but wants a deal that makes clear that rich and poor nations should do so on different timeframes, Environment Minister Marina Silva said.

OPEC countries, meanwhile, are the strongest resistors of a fossil fuel phase-out.

Sources told the Reuters news agency that the UAE’s COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber faced pressure from Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of OPEC, to drop any mention of fossil fuels in the final agreement.

‘Death sentence’

Meanwhile, participants from small island nations, which are among the countries hit hardest by rising sea levels, said they would not approve a deal akin to a “death warrant”.

“How do we go home and tell them the result? That the world has sold us out? ” Briana Fuean, a climate activist from Samoa, asked. “I can’t answer that. We are sitting in rooms being asked to negotiate our death sentence.”

Joseph Sikulu of Pacific Climate Warriors shed tears while talking about the draft text.

“We didn’t come here to sign our death sentence,” he said.

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