GCAS: The Field (Part III)
In a four-part series from December 3–6, Michael Northrop, Director of the Sustainable Development Program at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, attempts to catalogue the deluge of commitments made at and around the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, California.
When multilateral climate policymaking first arose to prominence in the early 1990s after the Rio UNCED meeting, price signaling dominated policy thinking; a price on carbon would elevate the cost of fossil fuel-based energy and offer an economic incentive to squeeze high-cost carbon out of all levels of the economy. Policy and practice would necessarily follow.
In the current era, carbon pricing has not been forgotten and many are attempting to create carbon tax-like measures. They are still much needed, but carbon pricing is unfortunately still far from becoming the global lever for climate policymaking many had hoped for. Instead, cities, states, and companies are using a mix of goal setting, policymaking, regulations, legislation, and declining prices to squeeze carbon and other greenhouse gases out of their systems.
Buildings are the largest slice of the global emissions pie. Architects, designers, cities, states, companies, and countries are now seriously talking about constructing and renovating buildings to be “net zero,” which means they generate or purchase at least as much renewable energy each year as all the energy they consume in a year. At the Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS), what seemed like an extremely ambitious, George Jetson-kind of idea only five years ago seemed to have become an accepted benchmark for policy ambition. Progress in this arena has been rapid. Scores of cities, states, and companies have announced their commitment to net zero carbon buildings in recent years. An inventory of net zero buildings in the United States and Canada counted a 70 percent increase in the number of these units in the last year. In California, the most significant mover so far, the state has mandated that all of its new residential and commercial buildings be net zero by 2020 and 2030 respectively. Santa Monica, California, announced that all new residential buildings there must be net zero beginning in May 2017, making it the first jurisdiction anywhere to take this step. More recently, London declared that all of its new buildings will be net zero by 2019.
This is game changing progress. At GCAS, there were multiple additional buildings announcements: the World Green Building Council, C40 Cities, and the Climate Group unveiled a net zero buildings partnership with 23 cities, 5 states, and 15 businesses committed to making all their buildings net zero by 2030. Architecture 2030 announced the release of its ZERO Code, the first national and international net zero building standard that can be adopted immediately for all large buildings in cities today. A number of U.S. local jurisdictions have begun the process of officially adopting the ZERO Code.
In the Chinese pavilion at GCAS, officials described a “near zero” building code standard for commercial and high-midrise residential buildings being developed by the China Academy of Building Research. The standard will incorporate onsite and offsite renewable energy procurement, resulting in net zero buildings.
In another important breakthrough, there was lively conversation in several GCAS meetings about how to limit the carbon emissions embodied in building materials like cement, steel, and glass from production. As much as half of a building’s lifetime emissions are baked into a building before the first tenant moves in. Reducing embodied carbon emissions may be one of the biggest carbon reduction opportunities in any arena. To take on this challenge, Skanska, the University of Washington Carbon Leadership Forum, Interface, and C-Change Labs are developing the Embodied Carbon Calculator for Construction (EC3), a free online tool to track the carbon emissions of raw building materials. Microsoft announced at GCAS that it has adapted the tool for its use. EC3 is scheduled to be released to the public in 2019. Architecture 2030 also released its Carbon Smart Materials Palette, which identifies key attributes that contribute to a material’s embodied carbon impact and offers guidelines and options for lower emissions materials. The Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance also put out word that it is creating a workgroup of cities who will come together over the next six months to create a replicable regulatory approach it hopes all leading cities will adopt for managing embodied building emissions.
Transportation is responsible for the next largest slice of the emissions pie after buildings. For some jurisdictions, like California, that have moved furthest on efficiency and electricity generation, transportation has become the largest source of emissions. Governor Brown’s announcement that California plans to zero-out transportation emissions on a net basis was one of the most significant transportation announcements at GCAS, not least because it represents a huge shift in technology and behavior in a famously car-dependent jurisdiction. California also announced that it will become the first North American jurisdiction to join the Transportation Decarbonization Alliance, a coalition of 20 countries, cities, states, and companies committed to working together to accelerate worldwide transformation of the transport sector to achieve net zero-emission mobility by 2050.
Outside of the Alliance membership, a number of others have also made related commitments: Copenhagen mayor Frank Jensen wants the city to ban all new diesel cars starting next year. Last December, Paris, Madrid, Athens, and Mexico City said they would ban diesel cars and vans by 2025. Norway will phase out conventional cars by 2025, followed by the Netherlands in 2030 and the United Kingdom by 2040. The province of British Columbia, Canada, announced several weeks after the summit that all new cars and light trucks sold in the province will produce zero emissions by 2040. Volvo meanwhile has said 50 percent of its automobile sales will be electric vehicles (EV) by 2025.
Additional information on the rapid pace of electrification splashed out across GCAS week. ChargePoint declared its belief that by 2025 there will be 20 million electric vehicles on the road in the markets it supplies, including the United States and Europe. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) projects that annual electric car sales will reach 11 million in 2025 and 30 million by 2030, with China responsible for much of this growth. In 2017 the number of EVs worldwide had just surpassed 3 million. BNEF also projects that by 2040 55 percent of all new car sales and 33 percent of the global fleet will be electric, and believes EV bus sales will skyrocket to make up 84 percent of the new bus market in 2030.
Also speeding the arrival of an EV future is the increase in charging infrastructure. EV charging companies ChargePoint and EVBox announced at GCAS their commitment to provide 3.5 million new charging points for electric vehicles by 2025. In 2017, there were about 350,000 public charging points — 102,500 in the European Union, 47,117 in the United States, and 213,903 in China — so this announcement by itself represents a near ten-fold increase. China, meanwhile, plans to build 4.8 million additional charging points by 2022, which will require approximately $1.9 billion of investment in infrastructure. In July 2018, the UK government also announced a £400 million Charging Infrastructure Investment Fund to support companies that install charging points. The New York Power Authority in like manner committed up to $250 million in May 2018 to build electric vehicle infrastructure in New York state, and, in June 2018, the California Public Utility Commission approved $738 million worth of EV charging projects for several Californian utilities.
To accelerate EV market movement, cities came together at GCAS to announce plans to build a demand pipeline for EVs. Los Angles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the launch of the Climate Mayors Electric Vehicle (EV) Purchasing Collaborative, a new online portal that will help lower the cost of electric vehicles by enabling cities to bid on them together in larger quantities. The portal will provide cities across the country equal access to competitive pricing and charging infrastructure. As a result of the new platform, 20 founding cities and two counties have initially committed to purchasing 391 EVs — a figure that is expected to grow rapidly as the program continues to engage U.S. cities.
Los Angeles also launched a Zero Emissions 2028 Roadmap, which aims to significantly ramp-up transportation electrification ahead of the 2028 Olympics. Mayor Garcetti was one of 35 mayors of California cities to write to California state regulators last month to demand 100 percent zero-emission buses by 2040.
Another group of 26 city, business, and regional/state leaders, representing 122 million people around the world, used the Global Climate Action Summit to announce targets for vehicles that produce zero emissions. Twelve cities — Birmingham, Greater Manchester, Honolulu, Medellin, Oslo, Oxford, Rotterdam, Santa Monica, Seoul, Tokyo, Warsaw, and West Hollywood — representing more than 140 million urban citizens committed to deliver a zero-emission mobility future, including using all-electric buses. They join Paris, London, Los Angeles, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Quito, Vancouver, Cape Town, Seattle, Mexico City, Auckland, Milan, Rome, and Heidelberg, all of whom were already signed on.
Numerous companies made EV deployment commitments, including IKEA, which plans to pilot a program to make home deliveries emissions-free by shifting away from gasoline-powered cars and trucks. LeasePlan, a Dutch company that is one of the biggest fleet providers in world with 1.8 million vehicles, will also step up purchases of electric vehicles. So will the French electricity giant EDF Energy, which has about 30,000 vehicles. FedEx joined the fray by announcing in early November that it will purchase 1,000 new electric delivery vehicles. It has also recently put in an order for 20 fully-electric tractor trailers from Tesla.
Amplifying these announcements and predictions was the news released right after GCAS that Tesla had a breakout third quarter and is now the best-selling U.S. luxury car brand and fourth overall on the list of top selling cars in the United States. The global acceleration of clean car markets is further confirmed in just-released International Energy Agency analysis concluding that oil use in cars will peak by 2025.
United Airlines also announced that during GCAS week it would fly a Boeing 787 using low-carbon biofuel from San Francisco to Zurich — the longest flight to date using low-carbon fuel. Low-carbon aviation biofuel could reduce a flight’s GHG emissions by 60 percent. The week before GCAS, San Francisco Airport signed an agreement with eight airlines and fuel producers to expand the use of low-carbon aviation fuels. With aviation emissions expected to grow from 2.5 percent of global emissions to between 8–10 percent, these steps are critical.
Ports are a key part of global transportation infrastructure and a major source of carbon emissions and other pollution. At GCAS, port authorities in Hamburg, Barcelona, Antwerp, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Vancouver, and Rotterdam announced the World Ports Climate Action Program, a commitment to help advance Paris carbon emission goals. The announcement outlined five actions: 1) using digital tools, 2) advancing sustainable public policies, 3) accelerating zero-emission solutions in the ports, 4) speeding up efforts to decarbonize cargo-handling facilities, and 5) developing infrastructure to make low-carbon fuels viable for maritime transport. The port authorities also called on their maritime partners and other ports to join the commitment and on regulators to adopt global carbon pricing policies. The Port of Rotterdam, the lead port on this initiative, is the largest port in Europe and tenth largest in the world. Every year it processes nearly half a billion tons of freight, and industry based at the port is responsible for 20 percent of Dutch emissions. At GCAS, the port confirmed that it is working toward becoming carbon neutral in line with the objectives of the Paris Climate Agreement.
Renewable Electricity announcements were a constant throughout the GCAS week. In all, there are nearly 400 companies, cities, and states that have publicly committed to a 100 percent renewable energy future. Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts the world will use 50 percent renewable energy by 2030, driven by cheap renewables and falling battery costsand projects $11.5 trillion will be invested in new energy infrastructure between 2018–2050, with a majority going toward renewables.
Powering this green energy acceleration are developments in many relevant renewable technology sectors. According to BNEF, the world added a record 1.6 gigawatts (GW) of energy storage in 2017 — a huge increase from 289 megawatts (MW) in 2013. This year is expected to easily set a new record, with 1.4GW added in the first half of the year alone. The size of wind turbines are increasing dramatically. General Electric announced in October that it will begin shipping 12MW offshore wind turbines in 2021. These huge turbines will become the cheapest sources of energy on the planet when they are operational. Solar, meanwhile, continues to decline in cost, coming down 32 percent in 2018 alone. Economists count five times more jobs in solar than in coal and project solar jobs will grow nine times faster.
Old fashioned dirty coal took multiple hits at GCAS. A coalition called the Powering Past Coal Alliance welcomed ten new states, cities, and regions into its membership. The Alliance now counts 74 members, including 29 national governments, 17 sub-national governments, and 28 businesses who are committed to phasing out coal.
Waste is the fourth largest source of emissions in most cities and in many states. San Francisco, the host city of GCAS, has been one of the leaders of the move toward zero waste. Seeing that it is possible, other cities are following. In an announcement organized by C40, 23 cities and regional governments committed to cut the amount of waste they generate, accelerating them on a path toward zero waste. These governments pledged to cut the amount they incinerate by 50 percent and to divert waste going to landfills by 70 percent by 2030. Some of the cities and regions participating include Auckland, Catalonia, Copenhagen, Dubai, London, Milan, Montreal, New York City, Paris, Philadelphia, Rotterdam, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Monica, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Toronto, Vancouver, and Washington, D.C.
The Pacific Coast Collaborative (California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver) committed to cut food waste by 50 percent by 2030, a commitment with the potential to reduce 25 million tons of GHG emissions a year from this often-overlooked sector.
The Netherlands announced that it will become a circular economy by 2050: from construction to fashion, all materials that enter the economy will be reused, leading to a major reduction of carbon emissions. To achieve this goal, Dutch companies, universities, and government are working together with partners worldwide to invent smart solutions. The government has selected five economic sectors and value chains that will be the first to switch to a circular economy, including biomass and food, plastics, manufacturing, construction, and consumer goods.
Land use. At the Forest, Food, and Land Day on September 12, experts explained:
“The way we use land for food, forestry, and other purposes contributes about 24 percent — or approximately 12 billion tons — of our total annual GHG emissions. Plants and trees pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and keep it rooted in the ground. When we slash, burn, and cut down forests, drain wetlands and mangroves, convert grasslands, or till soil, the GHGs that cause global climate change escape from land back into the atmosphere and heat the planet. If we conserve our natural lands, habitats, and soils and also cut food waste, reduce excess consumption, and improve efficiency in our food systems, we can deliver up to 30 percent of the climate solutions needed by 2030 to tackle the climate crisis and help implement the Paris Agreement.”
At this side event, 17 announcements were made under the umbrella of the 30x30 Forest, Food, and Land Challenge. Investors and 70 global supply chain companies, including Tesco and McDonald’s, pledged to work to halt deforestation and native vegetation loss in the Cerrado, Brazil. This group, which was originally launched in October 2017, is now the largest business group focused on halting forest conversion in the Cerrado, with over 100 signatories on the Statement of Support. Walmart, working with Unilever, also promised that it will source palm oil, paper, and pulp from jurisdictions with no deforestation and that it is supporting creation of a new platform to identify problematic jurisdictions.
A group of food providers serving more than 60 million meals annually announced their commitment to the Cool Food Pledge, a new global platform to help companies, universities, hospitals, and cities offer diners appealing and healthy food while reducing food-related GHG emissions by 25 percent by 2030. The Pledge will help signatories track the climate impact of the food they serve, develop plans to sell delicious dishes with smaller climate footprints, and promote their achievements as leaders in a growing movement.
In a breakthrough announcement, the Governors’ Task Force on Climate and Forests (GFC) — a group of 36 sub-national governments, 18 indigenous peoples’ organizations, and 18 civil society groups — unveiled a set of unifying principles to address deforestation, climate change, and the rights of Indigenous Peoples and forest communities. GFC members representing millions of indigenous peoples across Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Indonesia, and Brazil have been engaged in conversations for ten years to advance these principles. Following their unanimous agreement, forest state governors and indigenous leaders made a triumphant announcement from the main stage at the GCAS. Amazonian indigenous peoples’ federations in Ecuador and Peru also announced, during several side events, their determination to preserve 60 million acres of rainforests referred to as the Amazon Sacred Headwaters. These forests contain nearly 4 billion tons of carbon and hold fossil fuel reserves that if burned would emit another 1.5 billion tons of carbon.
Nine of the world’s leading philanthropic foundations also committed $459 million through 2022 to the protection, restoration, and expansion of forests and lands worldwide.
Oceans. At GCAS, the International Alliance to Combat Ocean Acidification announced it has grown to more than 70 national, regional, tribal, and city members, who are working to support coastal communities impacted by acidifying oceans. Each has committed to developing ocean acidification action plans that will assess vulnerabilities, create adaptation plans, pilot carbon sequestration strategies in seagrass, kelp, and mangroves, and elevate the threat of ocean acidification and the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions. Ocean acidification is a more recent addition to multilateral climate discussions but has been gaining prominence since the Paris COP and remained resonant with sub-nationals at GCAS in San Francisco.
Other gases. Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and methane are two other greenhouse gases that have an especially strong impact on planetary warming. Because they have such a powerful impact but persist in the atmosphere for a more limited period of time than CO2 does, scientists reason that if their flow into the atmosphere can be reduced in the near term, the world can buy some time to slow carbon emissions.
HFCs are a kind of refrigerant gas that are thousands of times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere. The Kigali Amendment, an international agreement to phase-down HFCs, was approved in 2016, but implementation has slowed as a result of conflicting signals coming from the Trump Administration. At GCAS, regional governments and companies made a wide range of commitments to reduce their HFC emissions. New York, Maryland, and Connecticut each announced plans for statewide phaseouts of HFCs. California also approved legislation locking in rules for an HFC phaseout.
Additionally, the air conditioning industry in the United States reaffirmed its commitment at GCAS to transition away from HFCs. To help the industry make the technological leap necessary to build air conditioners that don’t rely on HFCs and that are also more energy efficient, the Rocky Mountain Institute launched a Global Cooling Prize competition.
Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, and it is ubiquitous. Scientists estimate that, at this point in time, methane is responsible for 25 percent of all current climate warming. If companies and jurisdictions can cut methane emissions, it would have an important near-term impact. At GCAS, the state of Virginia committed to reducing methane emissions from natural gas infrastructure. It joins Colorado and California in regulating these emissions. The Climate Alliance and Under2 Coalition also announced that they are sharing best practices with their members on reducing methane emissions.
At the close of GCAS, Governor Brown announced that California will launch its own satellites if necessary to monitor international methane emissions, noting that reducing methane leakage could save $10 billion a year. An experiment in California using overflights with attached sensors identified the state’s largest plumes of methane emissions, allowing the state to cost-effectively address them. This model, California believes, will be useful globally and could go a long way toward identifying and addressing methane release points.
The Climate and Clean Air Coalition is committed to reducing HFCs, methane, and other so-called short-lived climate pollutants (SCLPs) like black carbon globally. The Coalition is a partnership of national and sub-national governments, network organizations, and businesses representing 60 national governments and more than 100 non-state partners. Members believe they can collectively prevent about half a degree Celsius of warming through their actions. At GCAS, California became the first sub-national jurisdiction to join.
Finance. One of the biggest climate change challenges is moving the trillions of dollars of capital necessary to finance the transition to zero-carbon infrastructure across the globe. Cities, states, and companies are badly in need of capital to remake their buildings, transportation sectors, and electricity systems.
Finance proved to be one of the most significant topics of discussion at GCAS. There are multiple organizations like the World Bank and numerous regional Banks, including the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, and others, that are dedicated to financing carbon-reducing projects undertaken by nations but, until recently, few that focus on financing sub-national projects. The Global Green Bond Partnership, Institute For Climate Finance, CERES, PRI (Principles for Responsible Investment), UNEP-FI, The World Bank, Carbon Tracker, and others hosted several all-day and multi-day events at GCAS that focused on how to move capital to support sub-national efforts to accelerate the clean energy transition. The market for green bonds — created to fund projects that have positive environmental or climate benefits — grew to $173 billion in 2017 and is seen as one of the best ways to move capital. At GCAS, the Global Green Bond Partnership was launched to increase the issuance of green bonds to support decarbonization projects in cities, states, and regions. Green bond issuance is expected to grow to $250 billion in 2018, and many voices are calling for a target of $1 trillion of these bonds by 2020.
Numerous additional entities, including private banks, pensions funds, insurers, clean energy funds, and development funds, announced commitments to increase sub-national clean energy finance. Forty-two financial institutions, including multilateral and bilateral financial and development organizations representing $13 trillion in assets, also announced a commitment to helping cities, states, and regions finance climate action.
Continuing this theme, at the One Planet Summit two weeks later in New York, R20, Blue Orchard Finance, the European Union, and the Global Covenant of Mayors announced a $1.4 billion fund for subnational infrastructure development in Africa.
Major philanthropic organizations pledged to do their part as well with a five-year $4 billion commitment to climate action.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
