Over the past three days, more than 4,000 people have gathered in San Francisco for the Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS) convened by California Governor Jerry Brown to mobilize regional, local and business leaders around climate change. Seventeen states and 400 cities, representing together the world's third largest economy, have now joined Brown and summit co-chair and UN special envoy for climate action Michael Bloomberg's "We're Still In" commitment to honor the terms of the Paris agreement despite President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw, and Bloomberg announced at the summit Thursday that the group was making progress, The Nation reported. "Today, we announce that this 'bottom up' movement will put us within striking distance of the US commitment to the Paris Agreement, even with zero support from our federal government," Bloomberg said, according to The Nation. That announcement was based on a report written by researchers at the University of Maryland and the Rocky Mountain Institute that found that business, regional and local efforts have taken the U.S. nearly halfway towards meeting its 2025 Paris goal and will carry it two-thirds of the way by 2025 without federal support, according to a GCAS press release. But that was only one of the many announcements made by cities, states and businesses as they celebrated their progress and reaffirmed their commitment to fighting climate change. Here is a roundup of some of the highlights. 1. 27 Cities Have Reached Peak Carbon Scientists have warned that global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak in 2020 and then rapidly decline in order to avoid catastrophic warming. Luckily, on Thursday, Paris mayor and chair of the C40 network of cities committed to climate action Anne Hidalgo announced that 27 major cities, representing 54 million people, had already passed this milestone, according to a GCAS press release. Barcelona, Basel, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Copenhagen, Heidelberg, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Melbourne, Milan, Montréal, New Orleans, New York City, Oslo, Paris, Philadelphia, Portland, Rome, San Francisco, Stockholm, Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver, Warsaw and Washington, DC have all seen their emissions fall over the last five years to at least 10 percent below peak levels while their economies have continued to grow. "It is an incredible achievement for these 27 cities, including Paris, to have peaked their emissions," Hidalgo said. "As the greatest custodians of the Paris Agreement, mayors of the world's great cities have once again shown that cities are getting the job done." 2. NYC Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Is It is not enough for cities to rest on past accomplishments. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio followed up an earlier commitment to divest the New York pension fund from fossil fuels with a new commitment to double the fund's investments in climate change solutions to $4 billion within three years, a GCAS press release reported. Ahead of the summit, de Blasio had joined with London Mayor Sadiq Khan to call on other cities to divest from fossil fuels and invest in solutions like renewable energy. De Blasio was joined in his announcement by Comptroller Scott Stringer and other fund trustees. "New York City leads from the front when it comes to the fight against climate change," de Blasio said. "We're taking a stand for generations to come with our goal to double our pension investments in job-creating climate solutions. I know that other cities will look to our example, and I implore them to join us." 3. West Coast Represents The Pacific Coast Collaborative (PCC), representing the states of California, Oregon, Washington, the Canadian province of British Columbia and the cities of Los Angeles, Oakland San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, renewed its commitment to working together against climate change and towards a growing renewable energy economy. Commitments included reducing carbon emissions, developing a low-carbon, regional transportation system, improving building efficiency and reducing food waste 50 percent by 2030. "The West Coast represents the world's fifth largest economy and we are creating a blueprint for other regions," Washington Governor Jay Inslee said. "We are building a thriving, innovative economy that combats climate change and embraces a zero-emission future. Our efforts aren't just building a clean energy economy, they're also creating great places to live. Our communities are growing healthier and more prosperous, and attractive to new businesses and workers." 4. EV Innovators Charge Forward Business leaders made commitments as well, including ChargePoint, one of the world's largest networks of electric vehicle chargers, according to Reuters. The company announced a pledge to add 2.5 million charging points to its network within the next seven years on Friday, according to a press release emailed to EcoWatch. The commitment represents a nearly fifty-fold expansion of its charging network, would prevent two million tons of greenhouse gas emissions from entering the atmosphere and would help establish infrastructure for a future in which EVs are expected to represent more than 50 percent of new car purchases by 2040. ChargePoint President and CEO Pasquale Romano said in a press conference that the company had done the math, and the commitment meant the company was "going to grow in line with the adoption rate of EVS." The commitment actually only covers a "subset" of ChargePoint's business, Romano said. ChargePoint has developed a business model of going from business to business and installing chargers in company parking lots, and this is the network it is committed to expanding. Its home and transportation fleet charging efforts are not included and will represent additional greenhouse gas savings. Romano said that policy decisions by individual governments, such as Trump's reversal of Obama-era fuel efficiency standards, could be "speed bumps" in the growth of EVs, but policies already established in California and the EU, as well as the quality and falling price of EVs, meant that their use would continue to expand. "In the long term, this is an unstoppable train," he said.<doc-sep>Delegates from around the world are in San Francisco for a three-day Global Climate Action Summit hosted by Governor Jerry Brown. More than 4,000 people were invited to the event at the Moscone Center in a call to action for those still committed to reaching the goals of the Paris climate agreement by 2020. "'We've got people from businesses, from cities, from state and regional government, you've got investors, civil society representation, really everyone arriving in San Francisco to really talk about the climate and what we need to do to take dramatic action," said Helen Clarkson, CEO of The Climate Group, and a member of the Summit's Advisory Board. Among the speakers Thursday will be the mayor of Paris talking about how cities can achieve their climate goals. Michael Bloomberg will talk about speeding the pace of climate action. Corporate leaders from Levi's, McDonald's and Walmart are set to discuss their commitments to reduce carbon emissions. Actors Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin will also participate in sessions, along with Dave Matthews. At a VIP reception Wednesday night, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg welcomed the crowd. Brown also was lauded for signing an executive order Monday calling for zero carbon emissions by 2045 and signing SB100 which sets a goal for California to use 100 percent renewable energy sources by 2045. Some attendees came to address the impacts of climate change on communities and health. Dr. Joy St. John, one of the attendees, came from the World Health Organization, where she is Assistant Director-General for Climate and Determinants of Health. "I'm very excited. I feel empowered because there is a movement, here is a feeling, a wellspring among the delegates," said St. John, "I believe that instead of being a talk shop. It will be an action shop." Many say they're hopeful the summit will bring new ideas and action. "California is saying we're here. We're willing to pick up the slack. And not only do we have other people from around the county here, we have countries here. 'We're meeting with delegations from Mexico and the EU tomorrow from our California State Assembly," said Assemblyman Phil Ting, a Democrat from San Francisco. . Hundreds of affiliated events are also being held throughout the Bay Area. Environmentalist and former Vice Presdient Al Gore spoke at one event about impacts of rising temperatures on California. "There are 129 million dead trees in California, aka kindling. Lighting strikes get more numerous when the temperature goes up. Droughts take hold more quickly," Gore said, "The same heat that's being trapped in the atmosphere, makes droughts so more worse, causes so many more fires" At Lyft headquarters in San Francisco, the co-founder John Zimmer pledged action. "Transportation, which we are part of, is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. We're well aware of that. and our goal is to move the transport system completely off of carbon," said Zimmer. Lyft executives say they stand by the Paris agreement and are moving their company to be eco-friendly. Sam Arons is Director of Sustainability for Lyft. "For renewable energy we actually partnered with Clean Power SF, the city's renewable energy program to power this building and our driver hub with renewable energy directly." Advertisement The Opening Plenary welcome is set to begin at 9 a.m. Thursday and the summit continues through Friday.<doc-sep>SAN FRANCISCO — With President Donald Trump mute and Congress moribund on the issue of climate change, it feels to many like official Washington is fiddling while the world burns. That sense became literal this summer, as wildfires charred broad swaths of the drought-stricken West for a second straight year. California Gov. Jerry Brown will seize the initiative on the issue this week by hosting a global climate conference here that seeks to shift attention away from the stymied national government to regional governments, businesses and individuals worldwide that are pledging to do more to rein in global warming. Brown on Monday signed two ambitious measures that enhance California’s claim to international leadership on the issue. Many more pledges are planned for the days ahead at the Global Climate Action Summit — on everything from preserving and expanding oxygen-producing forests, to fast-tracking the use of electric vehicles, to cracking the conundrum of how to store power produced by “intermittent” fuels like wind and solar. Gov. Jerry Brown, untethered from any re-election concerns, will take center stage in the fight against climate change and Trump administration environmental policies as he hosts a global climate summit in San Francisco that begins Wednesday. Rich Pedroncelli / AP But the pledges from California and others will mean little, analysts here said, without even greater movement — and participation from all of the world’s 195 national governments — away from the fossil fuels that still generate much of the world’s electricity and power most of its cars and trucks. “Both the nonstate actors and nations can be more ambitious,” said Angel Hsu, who led recent research by Data-Driven Yale, which teamed with other scientists to analyze the climate plans of nearly 6,000 cities, states and regions, and more than 2,000 companies, worldwide. “We are not there yet. There needs to be more.” With myriad pledges in the air, the study suggests that much depends on promises being kept. Full implementation of the reported city, region and company commitments would get the U.S. halfway to the commitment it made under the 2015 Paris climate accord: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, Hsu’s research concluded. Even more ambitious commitments by multi-national nonprofits and corporations could help spur the U.S. to meet or even exceed the Paris benchmark, the research found, even though President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. government from the agreement more than a year ago. (One such global effort comes from the group RE100 — to get 100 big businesses to obtain 100 percent of their electricity from green sources.) The plethora of pledges, even unfulfilled, amount to the good news. The bad news is that even if every nation on Earth met the benchmark pollution goal set in Paris, the result would still be a 3 degrees Celsius hike in global temperatures, compared to pre-industrial levels, according to the Yale research. Scientists agree that any increase of more than 2 degrees would plunge Earth into the danger zone. Those findings have not been lost on Brown. “The emissions keep mounting. Global warming is not stopping,” Brown said in an interview with NBC News this week. “So we have got to do a lot more. And this summit is a way to boost ambition and push the parties to do better.” Players and promises The summit will draw an estimated 5,000 people, including former Vice President Al Gore; former Secretary of State John Kerry; China’s top climate minister, Xie Zhenhua; Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson; musician Dave Matthews; and actor Alec Baldwin. The ultimate goal of the climate activists is for the world to reach “carbon neutrality” by midcentury. That would mean reducing greenhouse gases enough so they can be safely absorbed by forests, oceans, soil and other natural systems. When the conference wraps up Friday, participants are set to release a sharply worded “call to action” for the U.S. and other national governments to aim more intently at that goal. While governments will be crucial to any successful bid to defeat the profusion of heat-trapping gases, Brown and the planners of the Global Climate Action summit know that they can also be fickle. Witness Canada’s whipsaw from Stephen Harper’s regime, packed with climate change skeptics, to Justin Trudeau’s greenhouse-gas-fighting administration. America lurched in the opposite direction: replacing Barack Obama and his campaign for the Paris agreement, with Donald Trump’s fossil-fuel-friendly White House. The San Francisco gathering envisions a kind of “bottom up” climate action that will become so deeply embedded in the world’s economy and culture that it can’t be reversed, even by national leaders. In just a little more than a year, the U.S. already has added enough new electrical capacity for solar, wind and other renewable sources to power more than 3 million homes a year. The country has drawn up mass transit plans that should cut a total of 36 billion miles of car and truck travel by 2025. And progress on other fronts is well within reach, according to America’s Pledge, the organization formed by Brown and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to make good on America’s previous international climate commitments. America’s Pledge called in a report Wednesday for bold action on 10 fronts by 2025. Among the proposed goals: shuttering plants responsible for producing 30 percent of America’s coal-fired power, doubling the number of electric vehicles on the road, to 8.4 million, and fully activating carbon trading markets in at least 16 states, to goad a faster flight away from fossil fuels. The U.S. has already cut its carbon output by about 14 percent from 2005 to 2016. And with enactment of the 10 measures outlined by America’s Pledge, the U.S. could bring the load down to 21 percent below the 2005 mark — within sight of the Paris goal, according to the group’s analysis. In the days and weeks leading into Wednesday’s summit kickoff, other organizations rolled out initiatives they said demonstrated the power of sub-national action: Nine of the world’s biggest nonprofits and foundations — including the Ford Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation — announced they would spend at least $459 million through 2022 to protect, restore and expand the world’s forests and open spaces. Such “land-based” initiatives have the potential for absorbing carbon and delivering up to 30 percent of the carbon dioxide reductions envisioned in the Paris agreement, the coalition said. Nineteen major cities — including New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Tokyo, Sydney, Paris and London — committed that, by 2030, new buildings would add a net of no new greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Heating, air-conditioning and other building systems account for more than half of carbon dioxide emissions in cities, the alliance said. A total of 476 major companies globally — including tech giants Adobe Systems and Dell Technologies — have signed on to abide by stringent carbon limits and to have those guidelines verified by outside analysts. The Science Based Targets coalition argues that adopting new technologies and cutting pollution will boost the world’s economy. Trump's presence without attendance Trump and his advisers appear nowhere on an agenda of more than 350 workshops, seminars and demonstrations. But they have spoken loudly in their absence. In addition to the June 2017 withdrawal from the Paris agreement, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has fought tenaciously to lend support to a coal industry in retreat because of competition from cheaper wind, solar and natural gas. Last month, Trump rolled back tougher mileage standards for cars and moved to take away California’s power to maintain more ambitious mileage goals. And, this week, the administration revealed plans to make it easier for energy companies to release heat-trapping methane during their drilling operations.<doc-sep>
The world’s beleaguered climate takes center stage in San Francisco on Wednesday as thousands of activists, scientists, business leaders, entertainers and politicians from more than 100 nations gather for a three-day summit on global warming. Here’s what you need to know: How did it come about? The Global Climate Action Summit, at Moscone Center South, was organized by Gov. Jerry Brown as a public rebuke of President Trump, who decided last year to drop out of the Paris climate agreement, a landmark deal ratified by 170 nations, including the United States under President Barack Obama. The United Nations was seeking to hold an international event to maintain momentum on climate action. It is the first time a state has sponsored an event in support of the Paris Agreement, which Trump bashed as a bad deal for the United States. What is the history between Brown and Trump on this issue? Brown has served as a leading foil to Trump on climate change. The bad blood between the two men boiled to the surface Tuesday when Brown blasted a White House proposal to weaken regulations of the heat-trapping gas methane. “That is insane,” Brown said at a climate discussion at the Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco in advance of the summit. “It borders on criminality.” Is it personal? Not necessarily. Brown has advanced policies on global warming during his nearly eight years in office, well before Trump — who has called climate change a hoax — became president in January 2017. What is the summit’s main goal? To inspire a global commitment on regional and local levels to cut carbon emissions. The bottom-up effort is an attempt to fill the vacuum in climate action left by national governments, including the United States, that are coming up short on the emissions-reduction targets pledged in Paris. The progress of local and regional governments, as well as national governments, will continue to be assessed at future climate summits. The next is Dec. 3-14 in Katowice, Poland. Who will be there? Roughly 4,500 people. Among the biggest names are former Vice President Al Gore former U.S. Secretaries of State George Shultz and John Kerry and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Also, musician Dave Matthews, actor Harrison Ford, astronaut Mae Jemison, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and mayors and governors from across the nation, and policymakers from countries around the world, including China, Brazil and Germany. Meteorologists, hurricane and storm specialists, sustainable investment brokers, health care executives and business leaders will participate in panel discussions. No one from the Trump administration is expected to attend. What will summit attendees be doing? Representatives from cities, states and regional governments as well as businesses will share ideas on what can be done to reduce carbon emissions and setting goals for local action. Discussion will include construction of energy-efficient buildings, reduction of greenhouse-gas producing waste, investments in climate-friendly businesses, greening transportation infrastructure, and sequestration of carbon in forests and on farms. Can I go? Most of the panels during the summit, which ends Friday, are by invitation only and require accreditation. The public can view the panel discussions live on: YouTube at https://bit.ly/2wJFQRe Facebook at facebook.com/GlobalClimateActionSummit/ Twitter at https://twitter.com/gcas2018 But is there anything I can attend? Hundreds of affiliate panels, workshops, art exhibits and other special events sponsored by environmental groups, and academic and public agencies are scheduled in the Bay Area this week. The events open to the public include: Coal + Ice Photography Exhibition. More than 40 photographers and videographers highlight the consequences of fossil fuel use. Open daily through Sept. 23 at the Festival Pavilion, Fort Mason Center, 2 Marina Blvd., San Francisco. San Francisco Green Film Festival. Includes films about wildfires in California, vanishing islands in the Pacific, melting Arctic tundra and the receding forests of the Amazon. Showings are at various times through Sept. 14 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. California Carbon Fest 2018. The Carbon Institute has brought together an international team of specialists to discuss forest carbon sequestration and other climate change issues. Open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Sept. 13 at UC Berkeley’s Blue Oak Ranch Reserve, 16070 Mount Hamilton Road, San Jose. Find a calendar of affiliate events at https://bit.ly/2OczmBQ . How about protests? Thousands marched Saturday along Market Street , and hundreds of protesters on Monday demanded that local and indigenous protest representatives be heard. Others are planned.