Who holds the cards at COP21?: Major players in Paris seem to agree carbon pricing is essential — so why isn’t it on the menu?

www.salon.com|Don Kraus

It’s a mystery.

President Obama called it the “most eloquent way” to reduce carbon emissions. The German environment minister thinks it’s the “the most tasty piece of the cake of transformative climate solutions.” French President François Hollande believesit is “an essential tool to…reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”  The prime minister of Ethiopia said it could be an “opportunity for financing technology” to support climate action. But despite rapidly growing support from major nations, corporations and international organizations, an agreement on the need to price fossil fuels to address the fundamental drives of climate change is off the menu at COP21 climate conference in Paris. 

Hold the Keystone XL bubbly: Our fossil fuel addiction is as strong as ever

www.salon.com|Alec Appelbaum

Did you hear that Keystone XL—the long-planned pipeline from the Canadian tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast—got canceled? That President Obama nixed it because it would contribute to climate change?

Did you, as a reader of sites like this, exhale? Did you grin? Did you even guffaw? You may well have done all this and danced a jig besides. But, while environmentalists cheer, let me play that guy who steps away from the Champagne-dunking to remind you that we face a series of much tougher challenges ahead.

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If we’re going to have any hope of preventing catastrophic climate change, the vast majority of our remaining fossil fuel reserves are going to have to remain where they are — in the ground. One thing that can make a huge difference toward that end: the U.S. government could stop leasing out federal land for fossil fuel production.

A blanket ban on this process could prevent an astonishing 450 billion tons of carbon dioxide from polluting the atmosphere, according to a new report. (For comparison, the world emitted about 38.2 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2014.)  The analysis, performed by EcoShift consulting on behalf of the environmental groups Friends of the Earth and the Center for Biological Diversity, found that nearly half of the total amount of the United States’ potential emissions are accounted for by fossil fuels located beneath federal lands.

The top three highest paid state employees in Texas are university football coaches. Each makes well over $2 million annually. This is because college athletics programs are extraordinarily lucrative, and can bring in massive sponsorship revenue. That’s especially true when sponsorships come from companies such as Koch Industries, which recently partnered with the marketing company that represents the massive athletics programs at Texas A&M and Oklahoma State Universities, as well as over a dozen other schools.

In just a three week period earlier this year, three oil trains careened off the tracks and burst into flames, burning for days in West Virginia, rural Illinois and Ontario. They caused no deaths and few injuries, but the West Virginia explosion occurred near enough to a town that one home was destroyed and hundreds were forced to evacuate; they were best characterized, perhaps, as disruptions. The same situation in Jersey City, federal officials say, could be an unprecedented disaster.

Coal has got to go. That much is undeniable. Climate change is presenting us with a tremendous, urgent threat, and coal is the dirtiest and largest single source of the fossil fuels still pouring into our atmosphere. But while that’s settled (among scientists, if not some particularly stubborn politicians), the conversation about how we’re actually going to transition away from coal is just getting started. And too often left out of that discussion, says journalist Richard Martin, is the human cost of the industry’s decline — how the people, and communities, built on Big Coal’s promises will be left to fare once it’s no longer in the picture.

Breaking news, via the National Petroleum Council: the United States’ vast reserves of oil and natural gas are going to run out. Nothing good can last, says the largely industry-based advisory group to the Department of Energy, not even something as good as fracking — which is why the council recommends we start drilling in the Arctic as soon as possible.

The fight to separate the science of climate change from industry and political interests has reached its next battleground: museums. A group of climate experts and other scientists is urging the nation’s science and natural history museums to stop accepting money from fossil fuel companies and climate deniers. Their open letter, which was signed by 36 scientists and delivered to more than 330 institutions, asks that the museums, as “trusted sources of scientific information,” make the decision to ”cut all ties with the fossil fuel industry and funders of climate science obfuscation.”

Bill McKibben has been a force in environmental politics for more than thirty years and authored fifteen books. In 2008, he helped found 350.org, an international organization dedicated to building a movement “that reflects the scale of the climate crisis.” In the years since, the scale of that crisis has only become more apparent — the rate of climate change is accelerating at a pace not seen for at least a millennium, and the inequalities of its impact, from the scramble for water in Brazil to the oil refinery strike over safety in the United States, are constantly display.

The Gulf States may have been built on oil, but their future is going to be in solar. The opportunity is enormous, the technology exists and, according to a new report from the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, “cost is no longer a reason not to proceed with renewables.” I’ll repeat that for emphasis: this report comes via the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, one of the biggest banks in the Middle East. And it couldn’t be more enthusiastic about the investment opportunities in renewable energy.

We’ve all heard the statistic that 97 percent of scientists agree that human activities are leading to the devastating impact of climate change. Who are the three percent of scientists, in the minority, but sticking to their conviction that climate change would happen no matter what we did, despite overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary? One of the scientists in the latter category is Wei-Hock Soon (known as Willie), of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.