greenhouse gas emissions
In the Year of Climate Finance, We Need to See Billions Flow Towards Transforming Our Food Systems
A growing coalition of philanthropic organizations, under the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, is committing to scale up funding for agroecological food systems to address intersecting challenges across climate, food and nature.
This year climate finance is all the talk. As the UN Climate Conference in Bonn wraps up and the stage is set for COP29 later this year, expectations are high for governments to agree on a new climate finance package that will tackle the worsening climate and ecological crises.
In many countries, food production is the climate frontline. Nearly 95% of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) include adaptation and mitigation actions in the agriculture sector yet fail to address the full food system.
It only takes one climate disaster—a drought, flood or heatwave—for entire villages to spiral into debt, poverty and hunger, impacting regional food systems and economies.
Responding to the climate and nature crises, will require a transformation of food systems backed by a rapid redirection of funds to flip agriculture from being part of the problem to offering solutions. Last year, 25 philanthropies—coordinated by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food—called for a tenfold increase in funding towards agroecological and regenerative approaches. Philanthropy, multilateral and bilateral organizations and governments must scale and align funding to catalyze a transition to 50% regenerative and agroecological systems by 2040 and to ensure all agriculture and food systems are transitioning by 2050. Read the full report.
Right now, industrialized food systems account for one-third of greenhouse gas emissions and at least 15% of fossil fuel use. This broken system—the ‘true cost’ of food production—comes at a staggering $12 trillion a year, according to the FAOlast year. It manifests in hefty medical bills and the degradation of our soil, air, water, and biodiversity.
In this decisive decade, the way we grow, consume and package our food cannot be ignored or siloed in an all-hands-on-deck effort to meet our climate and biodiversity goals.
Moving away from a fossil-fuel based food system will not be cheap. It requires unlocking $250-430 billion per year, but this is in fact cheaper— than what is currently spent each year on harmful agricultural subsidies ($635 billion each year) and a fraction of the true cost of current food production.
Right now, investments into agroecology and regenerative approaches by the philanthropic, public, and the private sectors is estimated to be just $44 billion per year.
As representatives of leading philanthropy we are committed to scaling up funding into agroecological and regenerative approaches as a means to leverage existing policies that address the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. By embracing agroecology, communities have better control over the food they produce to future-proof their livelihoods and to make decisions to strengthen food sovereignty based on locally-tested solutions and knowledge.
There is a political appetite to make this transition and intergrate agroecological approaches into policy.
For example, the Tanzania government has worked with national civil society organizations to develop a National Ecological Organic Agriculture Strategy and implementation plan. Similar agroecology strategies are being developed in other Eastern African countries, like Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda. Priority actions include making agroecological and bio-inputs available, ensuring avenues for knowledge exchange and skills-sharing among farmers, expanding market access for food producers, mainstreaming village land use planning, fostering investments across the value chain, and supporting coordination, capacity building and governance at all levels.
And they’re not alone. In the Andes, smallholder farmers are stewarding thousands of varieties of native potatoes, preserving their cultural heritage, supporting their livelihoods and providing food for domestic consumption while also growing new markets in collaboration with researchers, civil society experts and other food system actors. Mountains are unique ecosystems, many of which are biodiversity hotspots and home to Indigenous Peoples. Mountain ecosystems are generally forgotten in national and international discussions, but are critical to biodiversity and resilience, especially in the face of climate change. The Andes are also not an island—they are critical for the existence of the Amazon and in turn the Amazon has a dramatic influence on the climate of the Andes, highlighting the interconnectedness that very often is broken by industrial agriculture. Support for Indigenous and agroecological approaches is vital to sustain the important contributions made by smallholder farmers in building thriving and sustainable local and regional food economies.
In this decisive decade, the way we grow, consume and package our food cannot be ignored or siloed in an all-hands-on-deck effort to meet our climate and biodiversity goals. It’s a race against time and we urgently need to see the money—in the tens of billions of dollars—move towards real solutions, particularly where policies are ready to be turned into action.
We are calling on governments, the private sector and other philanthropic partners to join us in this initiative and commit to scaling up their investments so communities, Indigenous Peoples and the health and the future of all living beings and the planet are at the center of our financial decisions.
AC and Global Heating: The Feedback Loop From Hell
In so many places experiencing extreme heat, air-conditioning will become nothing short of a protective survival tool, but (all too sadly) it’s also a prodigious generator of—yes, of course!—greenhouse gases.
The odds are that the entire continental United States will swelter through a hotter-than-normal summer this year. And no surprise there. It seems as if that’s been the forecast every spring for years now. But this summer promises to eclipse even the summer of 2023, which, in the Northern Hemisphere, was the hottest since at least the year 1 AD, according to tree-ring analysis. You read that correctly: This summer may be hotter than any summer in the last 2,024 years (and undoubtedly many tens of thousands before that, since tree rings can take the data back only so far).
The world’s hot future has already arrived in parts of the Global South, thanks largely to past greenhouse gas emissions mainly from the Global North. On May 29, in Delhi, India, residents suffered under record-melting 127°F heat. Earlier in May, deadly heat descended on Southeast Asia. The heat index (the “feels like” temperature that takes humidity into account) exceeded 125°F in both Manila and Bangkok this spring, thereby “rewriting climatic history,” according to experts.
Can we somehow work ourselves free of such a dependence on industrial cooling, or have we already passed the point of no return?
And here’s the simple truth: When it comes to a sweltering planet, that’s only the start and no one is safe anymore. Last year, 3.8 billion people globally suffered dangerous heat for at least a short period of time and that number will only continue to rise. In fact, heat deaths are forecast to skyrocket by a staggering 370% over the next 25 years.
In so many places experiencing extreme heat, air-conditioning will become nothing short of a protective survival tool, but (all too sadly) it’s also a prodigious generator of—yes, of course!—greenhouse gases. The climate impact of air-conditioning and refrigeration, which together already account for more than 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions from all sources, is expected to double in the next 25 years. If that happens, the world’s nations will be thrown even further off track when it comes to fulfilling their pledges to meet U.N. climate goals.
The question is: Can we somehow work ourselves free of such a dependence on industrial cooling, or have we already passed the point of no return?
For an AC Critic, Life’s Complicated These Days
Between 2005 and 2015, I wrote a lot of pieces (as well as a book) about air-conditioning and talked a lot about it, too. I’ve long focused on how a technology designed to keep us comfortable in hot weather simultaneously ensures even hotter future summers. Consider it the feedback loop from hell in which the greenhouse gas emissions air-conditioning releases ensure that even more cooling will be required as time passes, dragging humanity into yet another intensifying feedback loop of heat. The question of how to break that cycle has always been a vexing one and will only become more so as the cycle spins ever faster.
I’ve always made it a point to emphasize the life-saving role that air-conditioning plays during severe heatwaves, stressing that what I want to see eliminated is the routine overcooling that occurs at other times. Consider the widespread American practice of keeping windows closed year-round and simply switching the thermostat from “heat” to “cool” in the spring and back to “heat” in the fall. That not only wastes energy and increases emissions, but also squanders opportunities to enjoy comfortably warm stretches of summertime and comfortably cool stretches of winter that commonly occur in much of the country. Sadly, though, if those grim climate forecasts prove correct (and unless global emissions are reduced dramatically and fast, there’s no doubt they will be), such temperate summer interludes will become rarer and shorter in the years ahead, and Americans will become even more dependent on indoor cooling.
I’m not going to stop defending open windows or critiquing air-conditioning just because the world’s getting hotter, but I’ll need to stress more than ever that the harms aggravated by air-conditioning extend well beyond global warming. For example, as I’ve frequently pointed out, in many towns and suburbs, the overuse of air-conditioning has quelled community spirit. Front porches, yards, sidewalks, playgrounds, and parks that abounded with human life on pleasant 80°F evenings before the era of ubiquitous air-conditioning are now largely deserted for much of the summer.
Together, air-conditioning and digital technology—an addictive tag team if there ever was one—have played a crucial role in luring American children and adults indoors for an estimated 90% or more of our existence. Social life in countless neighborhoods and communities has been transformed, and not for the better. At the same time, increasing alienation from the non-human natural world, often described as “nature deficit disorder,” has become a topic of deep concern. As the outdoors grows ever hotter while the indoors remains comfy, it’s likely that collective social life and an appreciation of nature will shrink even further.
Can that process be reversed? I don’t know.
In yet another unfortunate feedback loop, air-conditioning reduces the body’s physiological heat tolerance, creating the need for yet more cooling. It also affects our mental tolerance for heat. The “adaptive model of comfort,” a result of extensive research, shows that the temperature range in which we feel comfortable isn’t fixed but slides higher or lower depending on the temperatures our bodies have experienced in recent days or weeks. If we’re amply exposed to warming weather in spring and summer, our brains acclimatize. Conversely, if we avoid exposure to heat by staying in a controlled environment most of the time, we don’t build up heat tolerance, either mental or physical.
In today’s context, the message couldn’t be clearer: If you spend time outdoors when temperatures are in the 80s, you’ll be better prepared to experience the outdoors when they rise into the 90s or maybe even hit 100°F. But as we venture into a much hotter future, it will be physiologically impossible to develop a tolerance for 115°F, let alone the 127°F that struck Delhi in May, no matter how much time we’ve spent in the heat beforehand.
Running Out of Options?
Priti Gulati Cox and I live without air-conditioning by choice. She grew up in South India without air-conditioning, while I spent my childhood in North Georgia, also AC-less. As it happens, we both have an aversion to the indoor climate it produces—at times chilly, at times stuffy, always dry, dead-still, and silent. But as the years pass, temperatures in Salina, Kansas, our home, will undoubtedly rise into the red zone ever more often. And we’ll find ourselves resorting to air-conditioning, however remorsefully, as killer heat domes park themselves over Kansas.
Priti and I have long depended on fans—ceiling, pedestal, desktop, you name it—to get through summers in relative comfort. But even today, and certainly in our greenhouse future, the weather in many parts of the United States will get so hot and dry that fans can’t keep the human body cool enough and may, in fact, become a mortal threat by ensuring that the body will heat yet more. In normal conditions, fans cool the body in a couple of ways: by flooding us with air at a lower temperature and by evaporating sweat from our skin, in both cases transferring heat away from us. But ominously enough, recent research shows that when the temperature exceeds 95°F, the fan’s breeze can’t absorb heat from your skin. And if it’s really hot, it will, in fact, transfer heat to you, potentially preparing the conditions for a possible heat stroke.
Air-conditioning, a deeply negative influence on climate mitigation, is now also coming into its own as an essential aspect of climate adaptation and climate justice.
Here, research comes to the rescue, showing that, in a typical heat emergency, fan use accompanied by the repeated light spraying of water on your bare arms, legs, and face can keep the body temperatures down to safe levels during all but the most extreme, low-humidity heatwaves (think Phoenix last summer). But what about the future, when frequent hot spells will routinely exceed the intensity of today’s deadliest heatwaves? I’m afraid that then, we AC critics will have to abandon our stock argument. “Just turn on a fan and you’ll be fine!” won’t work anymore.
In dealing with summer heat, Priti and I are also lucky to live in a small city, in our own house, surrounded by some large shade trees. And we have a basement where we can take refuge during triple-digit Kansas heatwaves. In other words, dealing with heat and humidity is easier for us than for residents of apartment buildings, especially ones surrounded by the concrete-rich, vegetation-poor landscapes characteristic of urban heat islands. So, consider this a crisis of environmental injustice. For people who live in such situations and also can afford neither air-conditioning, nor the electricity needed to run it, summer heat will prove an ever-greater threat as time passes. Under such circumstances, everyone (I assume) can agree that air-conditioning must be considered a human right and be provided accordingly.
Shaping the 20th Century, Baking the 21st
When portraying air-conditioning at its peak of absurdity, my favorite punching bag is the business world. Too often, employers seem to believe that workers, like computer chips, labor most efficiently when well chilled. They don’t. Furthermore, both surveys and anecdotal reports show that the most frequent complaint raised by white-collar employees is that the workplace is too cold in summertime. Carrying a sweater to the office in July or even keeping a space heater under the desk has become a distinctly American tradition.
In the coming decades, however, the summer problem of overcooled office blocks will be behind us. By then, those hulking, glass-clad relics will need all the cooling power their systems can muster just to remain habitable. Or, more likely, they’ll just be abandoned.
I’ve often argued that air-conditioning’s role in molding America’s built environment and society in general is underappreciated. An exception was a 1999 survey in which members of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History were asked to rank “the top 10 influences on the American metropolis of the past 50 years.” Air-conditioning made the list at number nine. More importantly, through its key role in the massive post-World War II population movement from Rustbelt to Sunbelt, air-conditioning helped drive six more of those top-ten influences: the de-industrialization of northern cities; Sunbelt-style urban sprawl; enclosed shopping malls; downtown redevelopment; the Levittown-style suburban tract house (which, without air-conditioning, could have functioned only as what Fortune magazine characterized in 1953 as a “TV-equipped hotbox”); and the dominance of the automobile. (Imagine hundreds of thousands of sweat-soaked commuters stuck, windows down, under the August sun, in one of Atlanta’s or Dallas’ legendary traffic jams.)
None of those hand-me-downs from the last century, including air-conditioning, is consistent with the sweeping climate-mitigation policies that will need to be put in place in the coming decades. Given climate policy’s three-legged stool (mitigation, adaptation, and justice), the utter failure so far to mitigate has created a much greater need for the other two legs: adaptation to a rapidly heating Earth and restorative justice for those being hit hardest by climate change.
And like it or not, air-conditioning, a deeply negative influence on climate mitigation, is now also coming into its own as an essential aspect of climate adaptation and climate justice. Its full Jekyll-and-Hyde persona makes a cameo appearance in the opening chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 climate sci-fi novel The Ministry for the Future. That chapter (all too redolent of the real world four years later) is set in a small northern Indian city sometime in the near future. Residents are suffering under an apocalyptic wave of heat and humidity, and death is everywhere.
An American aid worker on a short-term assignment there has gotten his hands on a clattery old window air conditioner and a generator to run it. In his workplace, a clinic, he sets up a community cooling center of sorts, gathering dozens of people into the small space out of the blazing afternoon heat. Most of them, but tragically not all, manage to survive the night thanks to air-conditioning. In the morning, though, three young men break in to steal that AC unit and generator. One of them tells the American, “We need this more than you do,” while another aims a gun at him and says, “You did this.” And they dash off.
As their words imply, climate mitigation, adaptation, and especially justice—all three—will be ever more desperately needed in the coming years. The Global South is demanding that the North pay for the ever more obvious damages that climate change has already brought to bear on that part of the planet. The North should pay that tab because, as that character said, we did this. Unfortunately, even if such payments were made (and that’s doubtful indeed), they will undoubtedly be as effective as pouring a teacup of water on a wildfire, unless the North also ceases its reckless production of planet-scorching greenhouse gas emissions. If instead we just carry on with business as usual, there soon will be no cool refuge anywhere, for just about anyone.
The Biden Administration Must Act to Stop Alaska’s North Slope ‘Carbon Bomb’
Pacific Environment and other green groups filed a legal petition this week asking the Department of the Interior for a new analysis of the climate damage and other harms related to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.
Recent technology breakthroughs have unlocked the potential production of many billions of barrels of Alaska’s high viscosity heavy oil, a development not yet accounted for in U.S. climate strategy. Federal intervention is needed now to keep this heavy oil carbon bomb in the ground.
Pacific Environment, alongside other environmental groups, filed a legal petition this week asking the Department of the Interior for a new analysis of the climate damage and other harms related to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). The petition was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Pacific Environment, Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, Alaska Community Action on Toxics, Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
Right now, more than 5 billion barrels of previously unrecoverable Alaska North Slope (ANS) heavy oil appear commercially feasible to produce using polymer flooding technology. For comparison, the sprawling, massive Willow field—development approval of which by the Biden administration last year sparked widespread objection because of the impacts to the climate, communities, and wildlife—is estimated to have 576 million barrels of recoverable oil reserves. The potential and incentive to produce the massive, viscous, and heavy oil accumulation larger than Willow is a huge, dangerous development for the climate.
It’s time for the Department of the Interior to review the nearly 50-year-old aging TAPS infrastructure and put a plan in place to decommission it.
The ANS heavy oil accumulation is enormous—large enough to qualify as a “carbon bomb” (greater than 1 gigaton of CO2 equivalent) with roughly 3 gigatons of CO2 emissions—and is Alaska’s largest prospective oil development. The accumulation contains an estimated 20 to 25 billion barrels, with more than 5 billion now commercially feasible to produce.
Although the international scientific consensus urges a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, Alaska crude oil production is projected to nearly double between 2024 and 2048, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook 2023.
The increase in Alaska production is driven by a combination of Willow, Pika, enhanced oil recovery in aging existing oil fields, and new enhanced oil recovery in previously uneconomic viscous and heavy oil formations using new polymer flooding technologies adapted for the Alaska North Slope. In contrast, the entire Lower 48 crude oil production is projected to be flat over the long run, growing by only one-twelfth of 1% (12.29 million barrels per day to 12.30 million b/d) from 2024 to 2048.
The heavy oil accumulation overlays deeper reservoirs on state-owned land in production for decades, including the Prudhoe Bay, Kuparuk River, and Milne Point units. ANS heavy oil, with a consistency ranging from molasses to tar, is extremely carbon intensive and is driving the greenhouse gas emissions intensity of ANS oil upward from already high levels, which have increased by 25% since 2012, according to California Air Resources Board greenhouse gas emissions estimates.
Polymer flooding technology for enhanced oil recovery was field tested and validated at the Milne Point Unit in a DOE-funded, four-year study that concluded in 2022, which dramatically improved the outlook for production of ANS heavy oil. The study was conducted by the University of Alaska, Fairbanks’ petroleum engineering department, with technical support from Hilcorp.
Because of the enormous climate impacts more heavy oil production would unleash, the Biden administration should act now to start a new environmental analysis that will evaluate and lead to implementation of remedial actions addressing climate impacts.
The existing environmental analysis of TAPS, now more than two decades old, fails to examine the climate harms of the extraction and burning of oil moving through the pipeline.
A Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process for TAPS should be initiated immediately to examine existing and potential climate impacts and the effects of using the heavy oil that could be transported through the nearly 50-year-old aging pipeline, among other issues.
During the past 45 years, TAPS has undergone two environmental assessments required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA): the initial pre-construction EIS in 1972 and the Reauthorization EIS in 2002. NEPA requires that an existing EIS must be supplemented whenever there is new information or circumstances relevant to environmental concerns, or if there are significant environmental impacts that were not evaluated.
A lot has changed since 2002—more than 20 years of science have increased understanding of the causes, impacts, and necessary actions to address the climate emergency.The contributions of fossil fuels to greenhouse gas emissions have been irrefutably documented. Global climate change has accelerated with dramatically observable effects including the increase in the frequency and severity of climate disasters and disruptions and storms eroding the rapidly melting Arctic.
The prior EIS assessments did not sufficiently address climate impacts nor the impact TAPS will have as the infrastructure that delivers Alaska’s heavy oil to market.
The 2002 EIS contains this dubious prediction: “Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from TAPS would add little to the global CO2 concentration level.”
Neither outdated EIS discussed the fact that the 18.5 billion barrels of crude oil transported through TAPS already has contributed 9 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent to the global atmosphere, including methane through leaks, venting, and flaring. The stale 2002 pipeline renewal EIS estimates refer only to emissions from the pipeline system itself (the pump stations, generators, etc.) and do not include the 92 million metric tons of CO2 per year currently associated with the crude oil that TAPS transports after it gets refined and burned.
Ironically, the physical stability of TAPS is threatened by thawing permafrost caused by fossil fuel-driven warming. The combination of advanced age and unstable land caused by thawing permafrost potentially jeopardizes the integrity of the pipeline and substantially increases environmental risk, including the increased potential for leaks and spills.
Under the current authorization the TAPS EIS will be reviewed again in 2032; however, changing circumstances and new information require that the Biden administration immediately reevaluate the TAPS authorization by initiating a Supplemental EIS process. New information since 2002 includes the commercialization of heavy oil and the listing of species as endangered including polar bears and ringed and bearded seals.
As the Trans Alaska Pipeline System approaches the end of its life, climate change is impacting Alaska and the Arctic region significantly. Alaska is warming faster than any other state and nearly four times faster than the global average.
By transitioning beyond fossil fuels, Alaska can build a thriving economy based on its abundant renewable energy resources, reduce energy costs for families and businesses, and increase the state’s energy security.
It’s time for the Department of the Interior to review the nearly 50-year-old aging TAPS infrastructure and put a plan in place to decommission it. How the TAPS is managed is key to America’s climate future.