Big Banks Call For 'Strong' Climate Deal

[Lakhota]

Without government action, they say, private investment won't be enough.

NEW YORK -- Six big U.S. banks called for a "strong global climate agreement" in a statement Monday, with Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo arguing in a joint release that government action, in addition to private business investment, is needed to address climate change.

The banks said that putting a price on carbon emissions is crucial to increasing investments in clean energy. The right policy frameworks, they wrote, "can help unlock the incremental public and private capital needed to ensure" that the estimated $90 trillion in new infrastructure investments projected over the next 15 years will help reduce, not increase, carbon emissions.

The next round of United Nations climate talks will take place from Nov. 30 through Dec. 11 in Paris. This series of talks has dragged on for years without yielding a significant deal, but as Reuters' David Stanway reports, the 2014 agreement between the U.S. and China means that "a global deal in Paris has become much more likely" -- although Stanway also notes that the individual country targets that have been laid out so far are not as ambitious as many countries would like to see.

The banks' statement adds four major financial institutions to the list of U.S. businesses that support a deal in Paris.

"As U.S. negotiators enter climate talks in Paris, they can say with confidence that the business and financial community in this country is ready for government leadership to address climate change," said Mindy Lubber, president of the nonprofit Ceres, in a statement Monday.

Big Banks Call For 'Strong' Climate Deal

Will Tea Party Republicans step up to the plate?

 

[Manonthestreet]

gee wonder what their angle would be...............big banks are manipulating every market there is with impunity ...........funny how libs talk as if no progress has been made at all.......

 

[Old Rocks]

Why they certainly will. With bills to shut down the EPA and go back to the days when we had air in our cities like China does today. The present lot of GOP Representatives would probably be in favor of awarding VW a medal for finding a way to allow their diesels to pollute our air.

 

[Lakhota]

According to the Red Cross, environmental disasters displace more people than war. The London-based Christian Aid estimates that by 2050, floods, droughts and famine caused by climate change will have driven 250 million people from their homes--more than the 163 million people currently displaced by wars, famine or ecological disasters. Nearly all of these climate refugees will come from the world's poorest countries, where governments and citizens lack the resources to adapt to the perils of a warming world. "There's no question that, in many parts of the world, climate change--rises in sea level, desertification, deforestation--are having an impact on migration flows," says Brunson McKinley, director general of the International Organization for Migration in Geneva.

In richer countries the impact will more likely be political. Increased population flows are giving anti-immigrant groups an opportunity to couch their arguments in the language of the environment. The Sierra Club has undergone repeated takeover attempts by a close-the-borders wing, which has tried to add immigration reduction into the environmental group's purview. The Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., argues that people moving into the U.S. from the developing world are impeding the fight against climate change by producing four times as much carbon dioxide in their new homes as they would have in their native countries. "Already, a large volume of south to north migration in the Americas is straining some states and is the subject of national debate," 11 retired U.S. admirals and generals wrote in a 2007 report for the Center for Naval Analyses, a national security think tank. "The migration is now largely driven by economics and political instability," the report says. "The rate of immigration from Mexico to the United States is likely to rise because the water situation in Mexico is already marginal and could worsen with less rainfall and more droughts. Increases in weather disasters, such as hurricanes elsewhere, will also stimulate migrations to the United States."

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[Lakhota]

Last summer, the tiny Pacific island nation of Kiribati became the first country to declare that global warming is rendering its lands uninhabitable, asking for help in evacuating its population. The IPCC estimates that melting land ice and thermal expansion will raise the levels of the seas by one to three feet (up to a meter) before the end of the century. Such a rise would be enough to put large portions of the country's 33 coral atolls under the level of the waves. Saltwater intrusion into the water table would leave many with nothing to drink.

While Kiribati awaits word if any countries will open their doors for its 100,000 residents, the Maldives--similarly threatened, but richer in tourist dollars--is shopping for a new homeland. In November, the country's first democratically elected president announced he was establishing an investment fund in hopes of buying new land for the country's 300,000 citizens. "We do not want to leave the Maldives," he told the Guardian, "but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades." Although Sri Lanka and India are said to be preferred for their similar cultures and climates, Australia, with its vast, unoccupied lands, is another possibility.

Island nations aren't the only ones watching the waves. A three-foot rise in sea level would flood one seventh of Bangladesh's territory, force the Netherlands to beef up its flood control, and threaten coastal cities around the world. And even before the top tourist destinations disappear underwater, they will have lost their luster: Higher and wilder waves mean increased erosion, fewer white, sandy beaches, and more rocky coves.

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[Lakhota]

Not all the carbon dioxide we emit contributes to atmospheric warming. More than a third of what we have produced since the industrial revolution has been absorbed by the oceans, where it reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid. So far, we've added enough carbon to shift the pH of the world's waters from 8.2 to 8.1.

The first to feel the impact are the creatures of the sea that use calcium carbonate to form their shells and exoskeletons. The acidic (or actually less alkaline) water wears away at crabs, mollusks and sea snails. Coral reefs face a double whammy as the changing ocean chemistry adds to the stress of unusually warm water. Australia's Great Barrier Reef lost an estimated 10 percent of its coral to mass bleaching in 1998 and 2002. Overstressed colonies expelled the symbiotic algae that give them their color, leaving them bone white and weakened. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that by 2050, 97 percent of the Great Barrier Reef will be bleaching yearly. Whereas the coral sometimes recovers, reabsorbing the algae, more often bleaching is the first step toward death.

The oceanic kaleidoscope may be among the first victims of the changing waters, but the devastation can be expected to work its way up the food chain. In Australia the seabird population has begun to drop steeply. The seafood industry could be next. As the reefs vanish, the fish will surely follow.

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[Old Rocks]

This year, two thousand or more families in the West have lost their homes to wild fires. Even with the super tanker fire planes, we have lost over 9 million acres to fire so far this year.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/24/wildfires-acres-burned-9-million/72738140/

The amount of land burned by wildfires in the U.S. this year has surpassed 9 million acres, according to data released Thursday by theNational Interagency Fire Center.

 

[Lakhota]

Climate scientists may still be debating to what extent climate change is going to translate into stronger and more frequent hurricanes, but insurance companies aren't waiting for the final answer. The 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, which included Hurricane Katrina and multiple landfalls in Florida, sent the industry reeling. More than 5.6 million claims paid out $81 billion.

Swiss Re, an insurer to insurance companies, keeps three climatologists on staff to try to predict such future damages. In a report released just before the 2004 season, the reinsurer predicted that another decade of global warming would cost insurers more than $30 billion in weather-related claims every year. With Katrina, the industry was facing that from one hurricane alone. "The whole underpinning of what insurance is about is that the past is an accurate predictor of the future," says Chris Walker, North American director of the Climate Group, a coalition of businesses and government that lobbies for action on global warming. "And if it's not—because climate has changed—then you're in trouble…. If climate change changes the data that you're relying on as an insurer, then how do you price? How do you model? And if you don't price and model, are you only gambling?"

From the Texas docklands to the beaches of Cape Cod, coverage has become much harder to find, and much more expensive—a reflection, says Robert Muir-Wood, chief research officer at Risk Management Solutions, Inc., a leading modeling firm, of the increased risk. Devastating hurricanes are potential symptoms of a disruption sweeping the entire world. "It's not that climate change is out there in the future," he says. "It's already happening. And the future will probably look a bit like this."

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[Manonthestreet]

We have met our Kyoto goals......next........chicken littles