COP30 Summit Begins in Brazil without the U.S., India, China, and Russia
The UN COP30 climate summit started on November 10 in Belém, Brazil, drawing tens of thousands of people from around the world. Notably absent from the 12-day conference are government leaders from the U.S., China, India, and Russia.
Before the meetings began, both the leaders of Chile and Colombia called the U.S. president Donald Trump a liar. At the UN in September, Trump said that climate change was the “greatest con job ever perpetuated on the world,” and earlier this year he pulled the country out of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming.
California sent a delegation to COP30, including Governor Newsom and Wade Crowfoot, his Natural Resources Agency Secretary. The mayor of Phoenix, Arizona, Kate Gallego, told the audience that 50 U.S. cities were there and committed to ambitious climate action.
Making progress on curbing climate change may be difficult. The UN’s yearly Emissions Gap Report stated that countries are far from meeting the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, while making efforts to stay below 1.5C. There are only a few dozen world leaders at the conference, and most countries have not submitted new plans to decrease carbon emissions.
COP30 is taking place in a city on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, a massive area at risk from climate change and other threats like deforestation. Belém is at the mouth of the Amazon River and is exposed to rising seas because of its proximity to the ocean. Forty percent of the city lies below sea level, and its location was chosen to show world leaders that the crisis must be addressed.
Before the start of the conference, Brazilian officials announced a plan called the Tropical Forest Forever Facility to make it more lucrative for nations to protect their forests rather than cut them down, as trees absorb enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. Brazil will make a $1 billion contribution to initiate the fund. At least 70 countries that are heavily forested could receive payments from the fund if they limit deforestation. However, while Brazil is touting its deforestation efforts, two weeks ago the country approved a license for oil drilling near the mouth of the Amazon.
“Day Zero” Could Hit One Major World City—and More Could Be at Risk
A historic drought in Iran could make its capital city Tehran reach “Day Zero” within two weeks, according to state media. Day Zero is the term signifying when the main source of drinking water runs dry and nothing comes out of faucets. As of November 6, one of the five dams that supplies Tehran was at only eight percent of its capacity, enough for two weeks.
Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, reportedly said that if it doesn’t rain by late November, Tehran, a city of ten million people, will have to ration water. If there’s no rain after that, they will have to evacuate the city. Mismanagement and overexploitation of water resources as well as climate change are said to be the cause of the shortages.
The possibility of a Day Zero occurring in other parts of the world was the subject of a new study by researchers in South Korea. The authors write that regions along the Mediterranean Sea, parts of North America, and southern Africa could see shortages arriving as early as this or next decade, and they could last longer. Cape Town, South Africa, faced a complete shutdown of its water in 2018, which was avoided by severe restrictions like limiting people to just a few liters a day.
The authors say that solutions must come from policy makers prioritizing smart management and modernizing leaky infrastructure as well as from people using water more responsibly.
The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.
“The Election Was Electric
Voters in last week’s election were energized…about their electric bills. Democrats won numerous races in many states, citing spiraling costs and affordability.
In two major contests for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, as well as down-ballot races in Pennsylvania and Georgia, candidates won by tying Republicans to soaring prices. Nearly six in ten Americans blame Trump for high utility bills, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll. Democrats say high costs are because of his efforts to kill clean energy and shift to more expensive natural gas and coal.
In the past 12 months, electricity costs across the country have risen 5.1 percent, according to government data. A portion of that spike is due to demand by data centers for AI, many of which are in Virginia, the state most affected by the AI boom’s hunger for data center power, according to E&E News. As the Associated Press reports, projects to modernize the grid and harden poles, wires and substations against extreme weather and wildfires have added to rate increases, as have bitcoin miners, a drive to revive domestic manufacturing, and rising natural gas prices.
Virginia’s Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger campaigned on making data centers “pay their own way and their fair share” of skyrocketing electricity costs. She also promised to speed up clean energy projects and to rejoin Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) to support more clean energy and energy efficiency projects.
Democrats retook 13 seats in Virginia’s House of Delegates in part by railing against data centers. Democrat John McAuliff, a former clean-energy staffer in the Biden administration, ran a campaign ad, where he accused his opponent of personally profiting from hundreds of data centers, saying “I’m tired of losing family farms to data centers.”
In New Jersey, where electricity prices increased as much as 20 percent this year, Governor-Elect Mikie Sherrill, said she would declare a state of emergency and freeze utility bills. She too pledged to build more clean energy projects and to work with neighboring states to upgrade the energy grid to handle and store more energy supply.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, Democrats gained two seats on the state’s Public Service Commission, by promising to lower energy costs. Peter Hubbard and Dr. Alicia Johnson won voters’ support by pledging to stand up to the state’s utility companies, which have raised prices six times in the last two years. They also campaigned on expanding low-cost clean energy sources like solar over expensive fossil fuel projects.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats retained three state Supreme Court justices, to keep the party’s 5-2 majority—just as the high court considers a pending climate case.
If the “cost of eggs” was the alleged concern for voters in 2024, look for next year’s midterms to be “electric.”