Our Billings CCL meeting is the 2nd Thursday of each month. The next one is July 12, 2017, 7 pm – 8:30 pm. We meet at the Universalist Unitarian Fellowship at 2032 Central Avenue. 6:30 – 7 pre-meeting for newcomers.
For more information about the Citizens’ Climate Lobby check out this short video or go to the national Citizens’ Climate Lobby main website at https://citizensclimatelobby.org/.
To join the movement go to https://citizensclimatelobby.org/join-citizens-climate-lobby/.
The headline of a June 26, 2017 article in Bloomberg New Energy Finance “Energy to 2040: Faster shift to clean, dynamic, distributed.”
Seth Henbest’s analysis of the BNEF’s New Energy Outlook 2017 summarizes the “changing economics of energy generation” with these 10 “high level messages from 2017 to 2040.”
The article says that the emissions prediction shows “significant additional climate policy risk” because it is nowhere near what is needed and thus the dramatic changes we are painting to 2040 in NEO2017 may well be accelerated.”
An article from June 12 in Inside Climate News, says that “top economists,” led by Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern, report that the current average low price on carbon (less than $10 a ton) worldwide, will not achieve the transition to low carbon economies needed to meet the UN Paris Accord goals. (At least $40 to $80 per ton is needed by 2020.)
The report was published by the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition’s High Level Commission on Carbon Prices Report May 2017. They are unequivocal about pricing carbon emissions. “A well designed carbon price is an indispensable part of a strategy for reducing emissions in an efficient way… by incentivizing changes needed in investment, production, and consumption patterns…” (p. 1)
This report is indispensable if you are not an economist, but are looking for a summary of the most current international economic thought on carbon pricing. It addresses how a carbon pricing strategy, along with complementary infrastructure and planning approaches, can “fulfill the Paris goal of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius.” (p.50)
Carbon pricing alone is not a feasible or equitable solution to global warming. Decarbonizing electricity production; promoting electrification in housing, industry, and transportation; advancing efficiency; and land use changes (agricultural and landscape) are necessary changes worldwide. (p 6)
(Read the book Drawdown (2017), edited by Paul Hawken, for another hopeful take on these processes. KM)
We enjoyed more than a hundred enthusiastic visitors at our “History of the Universe” table on April 22 at the Rally for Science ZooMT !
Citizens’ Climate Education (Billings) and Eco-Angela (a program of Angela’s Piazza in Billings) volunteers presented two activities: a puppet show modified from Dr. Wendy Ring of Climate911, called “Montana D.O.G.S: Dozens of Good Solutions,” and an interactive exhibit of the Scientific History of the Universe, geared toward families.
We presented the model of the 14 Billion Year history of the universe from the Big Bang to the present, by late astronomer, cosmologist, and public educator, Carl Sagan. In this model, each month covers a little more than a billion years. The month of December covers the billion years since the earth’s atmosphere became oxygenated. No surprise, the dinosaurs were the biggest hit!
The April 23 Billings Gazette featured the puppet show in an article on the Rally for Science, Billings Gazette.
For more information, see this article CCL News January 19, 2017. You can request a puppet show through climate911.org.
Contact Kathy at billings@citizensclimatelobby.org about a performance in Montana!
In a February 14, 2017 post, Carbon Brief blog says “Climate change is a classic market failure. The costs of burning CO2 are borne by society at large, but the benefits accrue to those burning fossil fuels.” The Social Costs of Carbon (SCC) are currently set by the EPA at $37 a ton.
Just what those costs are was the subject of a hearing by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on Feb. 28. Read about it here in the Guardian.
On February 24, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis posted on ieefa.org about the recent announcement by ExxonMobil to its shareholders that at the end of 2016, it has 19% “fewer proven and probable oil reserves.”
This is a good introduction to how Exxon “suddenly became smaller.” And why.
This Wall Street Journal article from November, 2016, reports on the trend of global oil producers beginning to acknowledge the inevitability of a shift from oil-based fuels to natural gas and renewables.
