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UN negotiations in Bonn are set to end in stalemate today as delegates have become bogged down in technical arguments about the Paris climate pact. Poorer nations say they are fed up with foot dragging by richer countries on finance and carbon cutting commitments. Some countries, led by China are now seeking to renegotiate key aspects of the Paris agreement. An extra week of talks in September has been scheduled to try and get the process back on track. Poorer countries have become frustrated by what they see as the cavalier attitude of the rich to the urgency of the...

Every 25-year-old in the country should be given a £10,000 Government grant in an effort to solve the yawning economic gap between the generations, a prominent think tank has proposed. The proposal for a Citizen's Inheritance, to be funded by a revamped, tougher version of inheritance tax, is one of a number of policies proposed by the Resolution Foundation at the end of a two-year study into intergenerational inequality. The report from the think tank's Intergenerational Commission, backed by business lobby group the CBI and trade union group the TUC, warns that today's thirty-somethings are the first generation to see...

Student groups placed signs displaying refugee statistics along the walkways of the Arts Quad to foster discussion about the global refugee crisis, including the plight of climate change refugees. The South Asian Council installed the signs in collaboration with Cornell Welcomes Refugees and Climate Justice Cornell for People’s Climate Week. “I think the U.S. should provide sanctuary to those who it has indirectly and directly, temporarily and permanently, displaced by being the highest greenhouse gas emitter (and largest contributor to climate change) for most of modern history despite its fairly modest population density,” said Elizabeth Chi ’18, former campaign coordinator...

LISBON - The Green Climate Fund, set up to help developing countries tackle climate change, could seek to refill its coffers in 2019, a year which is likely to see “a huge amount of attention on climate finance”, said the fund’s executive director. The fund began making investment decisions in 2015, with pledges from donor governments of $10.3 billion. But it is expected to receive only about $8 billion of that after U.S. President Donald Trump - a climate change skeptic who plans to pull out of the Paris climate accord - indicated he would not make good on the...

Finance for poor countries to help them reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and deal with climate change is lagging behind the promises of rich countries, an Oxfam report finds. While taxpayer-funded finance has increased, and the private sector has stepped up with some initiatives, the amount raised could still fall short of the goal of providing $100bn a year to the developing world by 2020. The 2015 Paris agreement on climate change re-stated the $100bn financial target, but Oxfam says the taxpayer-funded finance from rich countries in 2015-16 stood at about $48bn, or nearly half the amount promised for 2020....

The clean energy transition and other initiatives to decarbonise Europe’s economy will represent 25% of EU spending under a seven-year EU budget plan put forward by the European Commission on Wednesday (2 May). Another key aspect is whether the EU will commit to stop funding fossil fuel projects like gas pipelines, which environmentalists claim risk locking Europe into unnecessary infrastructure. “I’m not sure it’s reached the upper layers of the Commission yet,” Gaventa said. Other parts of the budget could prove controversial, like a proposal to allocate 20% of revenue from carbon trading to the EU budget, as well as...

Old divisions between rich and poor over money and ambition are again threatening to limit progress in UN climate negotiations. Discussions between negotiators from nearly 200 countries have resumed in Germany, aiming to flesh out the rules on the Paris climate pact. But developing countries say they are "frustrated" with the lack of leadership from the developed world. Commitments to cut carbon are still "woefully inadequate" they said. The developing nations are incensed that enthusiasm for the $100bn per year in climate finance support from the rich, due to start in 2020, has started to wane. "It has been frustrating...

LINK ONLY per posting guidelines: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-30/climate-linked-spending-set-to-rise-to-a-quarter-of-eu-budget

A University of California, Berkeley Student Senator proposed that all student government funding for the Berkeley College Republicans be reallocated to the Black Student Union. According to The Daily Californian, Senator Rizza Estacio made an amendment to the proposed budget allocations to student organizations and university groups which would eliminate the $1,000 funding for the BCR and add it to the budget for the BSU. Estacio said that her reasoning for the reallocation is because the BCRs “have violated a lot of, like, lead center rules during like free speech week,” adding that because of this, the organization does not...

Austin will celebrate Earth Day on April 29 with a festival on the beautiful grounds of Huston-Tillotson University. They will pay tribute to the unique ecosystems of Texas and the Hill Country, the animals and plants that make our region so spectacular. Earth Day is also a potent call to action. So, it is extremely gratifying that Austin’s leadership has heeded the intent of Earth Day with bold action. On Thursday, the City Council signed a resolution endorsing a powerful climate change solution called carbon fee and dividend, making Austin the first city in Texas to do so. Carbon fee...

The number of full-time officials dedicated to climate change in the Foreign Office has dropped by almost 25% in the two years since Boris Johnson became foreign secretary, according to data released under freedom of information (FoI) rules. Johnson has also failed to mention climate change in any official speech since he took the office, in marked contrast to his two predecessors. The cutback in climate change diplomacy has come despite the prime minister, Theresa May, asserting that the UK leads the world on climate action. The UK has been praised for its past climate diplomacy, which helped pave the...

Land reform is a key issue in South Africa, due to the long history of dispossession of indigenous populations by white settlers. Progress has been painfully slow over the past 24 years, but the question of land is now suddenly at the top of the political agenda. A major controversy erupted at the end of February following a motion adopted in parliament, tabled by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and modified by the ANC, which started the process of potentially amending the constitution to allow for the expropriation of (white-owned) land without compensation, and its subsequent redistribution (to black people.)...

A report to be released Friday by the University of Massachusetts points to the challenges the city and the region face in funding solutions to combat climate change, with local neighborhood projects expected to amount to $2.4 billion. The report recommends a layered approach of federal, state, city, and private financing strategies, including: â–  A statewide carbon tax and an increase to the state gas tax that could support a climate resilience fund. â–  The possibility of a Boston climate resilience fee based on water and sewer bills, which could fund city general obligation bonds. â–  The creation of climate-focused...

Putting a price on carbon, in the form of a fee or tax on the use of fossil fuels, coupled with returning the generated revenue to the public in one form or another, can be an effective way to curb emissions of greenhouse gases. That’s one of the conclusions of an extensive analysis of several versions of such proposals, carried out by researchers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). What’s more, depending on the exact mechanism chosen, such a tax can also be fair and not hurt low-income households. The analysis was part of a multigroup effort...

Members of the Princeton Student Climate Initiative have drafted a New Jersey Carbon Fee and Dividend Policy, a 94-page white paper outlining a fee-based strategy for reducing carbon emissions and air pollution while minimizing environmental impact. “What a carbon fee and dividend does is it places a fee on fossil fuels based on their carbon content,” said Jonathan Lu ’18, the founder and research director of PSCI. The carbon fee provides an incentive for companies and individuals to reduce emissions. Another key aspect of the policy is that tax revenue will be recycled back to low- to moderate-income households and...

Securing enough money to combat climate change will be a challenge, but is “non-negotiable,” Mayor Martin J. Walsh said yesterday, a day after experts said Boston should expect to pay as much as $2.5 billion to curb the effects of rising seas and increasingly intense storms. “Two billion dollars is (an issue), our budget is $3 billion a year, so of course it’s going to be an issue,” Walsh said. “It’s non-negotiable, we have to do something. We’ve been doing things, we have to actually increase what we’ve been doing.” Earlier this week, climate experts warned city councilors that the...

If they’re a person of color, they pay $12. If they’re white, he’ll tell them they can either pay $12, or they can pay $30 — two and a half times the base price, which reflects the wealth disparity in New Orleans. He tells them the profits will be redistributed to people of color, but not as charity — just to any minority customers of his who want it, regardless of their income or circumstance. “When I tell black folks what’s happening, 90 percent of them start laughing, like, ‘For real?’ They’re tickled,” he said. “White folks, there’s this blank...

The Guardian bolstered the proliferation of lawsuits against governments and companies over climate change by portraying them as incredibly significant. The left-wing British newspaper asked in all seriousness on March 20, “Can Climate Litigation Save the World?” In it, environment editor Damian Carrington’s word choice revealed support for these efforts. He called courts the new “front line” against climate change and cited numerous instances where “groups and individuals seek to hold governments and companies accountable for the damage they are causing.”

Scientists have developed new models to better understand how governments can work together to ensure global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. The different models consider a variety of political, socioeconomic and technological factors, including the impacts of economic inequality, energy demand and regional cooperation. The models considered five different so-called Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, or SSPs. A critical value of the paper is the use of the SSPs, which has helped to systematically explore conditions under which such extreme low targets might become attainable," Keywan Riahi, energy program director at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis...

Thousands of women in Bangladesh will receive financing to develop livelihoods that can withstand the effects of climate change in one of the world's hardest-hit countries, the United Nations said. Women and girls in the disaster-prone coastal districts of Satkhira and Khulna will receive assistance from US$33 million (S$44 million) provided by the UN's Green Climate Fund and Bangladesh's Ministry of Women and Children's Affairs. "The rising sea level is a major threat to these areas," Mamunur Rashid, a climate change specialist at the UN Development Programme (UNDP), said from Dhaka. "Women are disproportionately affected by the impacts," Saleemul Huq,...