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September 01, 2021
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In the realm of climate diplomacy, it's the little engine that could, the 80-to-1-odds Kentucky Derby winner, the low-budget multiverse fantasy that came out of nowhere to sweep the Oscars.
We are talking, of course, about the Paris Agreement goal of capping Earth's average surface temperature at 1.5 degrees Celsius above levels in the late 19th century, when burning fossil fuels began to seriously heat up the planet.
At barely 1.2C above that threshold, the world today has already seen a crescendo of deadly and destructive extreme weather.
Fifteen years ago, a 1.5C limit on global warming -- championed by small island nations worried about sea level rise -- was rejected by most scientists as unrealistic and by most countries as unnecessary.
A 2C "guardrail" was assumed to be safe enough.
Today, the 1.5C target is enshrined in everything, everywhere, all at once. While technically no more than an "aspirational" goal, it has become the de facto North Star for UN climate talks, national climate plans and the business world.
From Apple and Facebook to Big Pharma and even Big Oil, multinationals have unveiled promises and plans to be "1.5C-aligned", even if most of those plans don't hold up very well under scrutiny.
You can draw a straight line from 1.5C to the science-base imperative to nearly halve global emissions by 2030 and achieve net zero around mid-century, meaning any residual carbon pollution must be offset by removals.
Both of these targets are set to be affirmed in a report summarizing six years of climate science, released Monday by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
2C not good enough
This raises a perplexing question, according to Beatrice Cointe, a sociologist at France's National Centre for Scientific Research and co-author of a recent study on the history of the 1.5C target.
"How did an almost impossible target become the point of reference for climate action?" she asked.
And what will happen when the world experiences its first full year at or above 1.5C, which the IPCC says could easily happen within a decade, even under aggressive emissions reduction scenarios?
"The target appears increasingly unattainable," Cointe and co-author Helene Guillemot, a historian of science at the Centre Alexandre-Koyre, wrote in the journal WIREs Climate Change.
"And yet calls to 'Keep 1.5C Alive' have been growing louder."
The backstory of the 1.5C goal reveals an interplay of science and politics, with one driving and shaping the other.
Going into the 2015 climate negotiations that yielded the breakthrough Paris treaty, it seemed unlikely that 195 nations would significantly improve on the 2C target already set in stone.
But a scientific evaluation by a UN technical body delivered ahead of the December summit sounded an alarm about the dangers of a +2C world and suggested greater ambition might be wise.
"While science on the 1.5C limit is less robust, efforts should be made to push the defense line as low as possible," it concluded.
A growing coalition of developing nations, meanwhile, had gathered behind the 1.5C goal, eventually joined by the European Union and the United States.
Emerging giants and oil exporters baulked, fearful of the constraints on their fossil-fuel dependent economies.
"China was against it, India was against it, Saudi Arabia fought us tooth-and-nail to the very end," recalled Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka.
Even today, these nations remain lukewarm on the idea.
But in the end, nearly 200 nations committed to cap warming at "well below 2C", while "pursuing effort to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C."
'A moral target'
It was a stunning diplomatic coup. Many scientists, however, were less than thrilled.
"It will be very hard -- if not impossible -- to keep warming below 1.5 C during the entire 21st century," Joeri Rogelj, a climate modeler currently at Imperial College London who played a key role in the technical report, told AFP at the time.
But because the target was part of the Paris Agreement, nations called on the IPCC -- which exists to brief policymakers on climate science -- for a "special report".
The resulting bombshell, delivered in October 2018, left no doubt as to the difference a half-a-degree makes: a 1.5C world will see deep change but remain livable; a 2C world could tip the climate system into overdrive, outstripping our capacity to adapt, it warned.
Today, the IPCC -- including Rogelj, a lead author of the 2018 report -- insists that the 1.5C goal is technically feasible.
But that conclusion hangs by the thinnest of threads.
There is no scenario that avoids "overshooting" the target, and bringing temperatures back under the wire will require extracting billions of tonnes of CO2 from thin air, something we can't do yet at scale.
But whether the 1.5C target is feasible may be missing the point, say others.
"Getting 1.5 C into the agreement was a moral target," Huq told AFP not long after the Paris pact was inked.
"It's our leverage, the whip we will use to hit everybody on the back so they can go faster," he added.
"Whether we achieve it or not is going down a dark track. From now on, it's about raising ambition."
Piers Forster, director of the University of Leeds Priestley International Centre for Climate and a coordinating lead author for the IPCC, describes the 1.5C objective as a "huge, but not impossible, task".
"Hopefully the IPCC report can push the urgency," he told AFP. "If it's ignored, we would have to give up on 1.5C."
© 2023 AFP
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A blanket of crops covers the floor of the Imperial Valley in southern California, a patchwork of vibrant greens given life by the Colorado River in a landscape bleached by the desert sun.
But as a decades-long drought desiccates the US West and the once-mighty river dwindles, questions are being asked about why a handful of farmers are allowed to take as much water as all of Nevada and Arizona combined.
"We average less than two inches (five centimeters) of rainfall per year," fourth generation farmer Andrew Leimgruber told AFP.
"So without the supply of Colorado River water coming here, there would be no one living here, there'd be nothing being grown here, this would be a desert."
The valley, along with Yuma in Arizona, is a vital part of America's huge agricultural sector, producing most of the vegetables the United States eats over winter, in a business that generates around $2 billion a year.
Farmers here also grow alfalfa, a forage crop supplied to beef and dairy ranchers.
Ancient agreement
The land here has always been fertile, but it's always been dry.
The pioneers who forged the West realized that with its permanent sunshine, Imperial Valley could produce crops year-round to feed a growing population, as long as they could keep the fields watered.
Their solution was to build an 80-mile (130-kilometer) canal from the Colorado River, positioning themselves at the head of the queue for the rights to that river.
An agreement hashed out over a century ago allows Imperial Valley farmers to use 3.1 million acre-feet of water every year -- about 70 percent of all the water California is allowed to take.
An acre-foot refers to an acre covered in water a foot deep, which equals some 326,000 gallons (1.23 million liters) or about half an Olympic-size swimming pool.
But as human-caused climate change worsens a drought that has now lasted more than two decades, the river is struggling to keep up with demand.
The 40 million people in the West who rely on it, including in some of America's biggest cities, are being told they need to cut back.
Residents of Los Angeles last year faced fines for watering their gardens too often, and are urged to take only short showers instead of baths.
The predicament has pitted suburban homeowners surveying their brown lawns against nearby farmers.
"As the largest water user on the river, we become a target because it becomes an easy solution," says Tina Shields of the Imperial County Irrigation District.
"We're not going to sacrifice our community for urban sprawl and urban development and other areas."
In any case, says Shields, many of the people who complain about farmers using water are happy to fill their refrigerators with the food they produce.
"We grow a half million acres a year of crops that feed our nation and other nations as well. So it's critical to our community and our economy in particular."
'No lack of work'
Despite its water wealth, Imperial County is one of the poorest in California and would struggle to survive without agriculture.
Rural workers, mostly Latinos, come from a wide area, including across the Mexican border several dozen miles away, to earn money in the fields.
"There has been no lack of work here," says Ramon Cardenas, who has toiled for three decades under summer temperatures that regularly top 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius).
Some farmers have cut deals with power generation companies, signing long-term leases that see crops replaced by solar panels.
They might not be using water anymore, but neither are they offering work.
Cardenas hopes the trend won't spread.
"We depend on this," he says gesturing to the crew picking lettuce.
Productive land
Despite a very wet California winter, Imperial Valley hasn't gotten much rain this year.
As Leimgruber's sprinklers spray hundreds of liters (gallons) of water onto a field, he insists it is well used.
Even thirsty alfalfa -- around 15 percent of which he says is exported -- is vital for a country that consumes so much meat and dairy, he says.
"California is the top dairy-producing state in the country, and that's because of the Imperial Valley's ability to plant alfalfa," he says.
"A lot of Americans don't think it's possible to see empty shelves, and it's areas like this that ensure the country is fed and I think that has to be protected."
And, he insists, if Imperial Valley didn't produce the alfalfa, other suppliers would simply step in and fill the void.
Why, he questions, should he and his fellow farmers miss out on that?
"People don't understand how productive this land is," he says.
© 2023 AFP
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Manicured fingers meticulously place cash in transparent envelopes marked "food," "gas" and other categories, demonstrating in a TikTok video a retro technique for controlling what you spend that is newly popular with some money-conscious Americans.
Returning to cash to control spending may be old fashioned, but in an era of high inflation, a growing number of consumers find that it works.
Judia Griner, 25, started "cash stuffing" two years ago when she was a student at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Now, her TikTok account has more than 200,000 followers.
"I was like, I need to somehow use my own money to pay off the tuition so I won't be in too much debt," Griner told AFP.
"I realized that I had no idea how to do that, because I just didn't know how much money I had," she said.
"I would swipe my card, and I would just kind of cross my fingers and hope that it wouldn't be declined."
It was a similar situation for 31-year-old Jasmine Taylor, who launched her Tiktok channel in February 2021 and now has more than 620,000 followers.
"I had a degree but no outlook for a job. My finances were bad," Taylor, a Texan, said. "I was a pretty big impulse shopper."
Both women decided the way to turn around their spending behavior was to rely on the technique of paying cash for everything.
Once they cash in their pay checks, they separate it into different envelopes for specific expenses -- rent, shopping, etc.
On TikTok, the hashtag #cashstuffing has now reached more than 930 million views.
- Old method, proven results -
The method is reminiscent of the age-old piggy bank system, and was popularized in its current form 20 years ago by financial guru Dave Ramsey, before the era of smartphones and contactless payments.
Despite being outdated and at times inconvenient -- some businesses refuse to accept cash -- the method has allowed Griner to save $7,500 to finance her education.
"The card didn't feel like real money to me," Griner said.
But using cold cash made it very real.
"I could physically see myself spending all my cash and it just went away and that's what helped me curb my spending," she said.
Taylor, too, saw immediate results. She pays 95 percent of her expenses in cash, got rid of $32,000 in student debt, $8,000 in credit card debt and $5,000 in health care debt.
Wracking up debt is a national affliction in a country with abundant credit card offerings that goad households to take on more and more loans.
"It's a problem that my generation kind of suffers from: consumerism and just overspending everything," Griner said.
- Sense of comfort -
For Priya Malani, founder of Stash Wealth, a financial advisory service for young professionals, the economic downturn plays a role in the current success of the envelope system.
"With so many insane headlines -- crypto crashes, market pullbacks, looming recession, the list goes on -- it makes sense that people are looking for a little more control," Malani said.
"A dollar bill you hold in your hand provides that comfort."
But, Jason Howell, a wealth management professor at American University warned that "2023 is probably the worst time to keep your cash in your house" because it earns no interest and depreciates.
Taylor, who keeps her envelopes stuffed with small bills in a fireproof safe in her home, is well aware of this. She still deposits money in the bank when she saves $1,000 or more.
The two experts acknowledge that there is no broader movement back to cash in the United States, where the trend has been the gradual decline of cash in favor of card or mobile payments.
In 2022, about four in ten Americans (41 percent) said they would not make any cash purchases in a typical week, compared to only 24 percent in 2015, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.
According to Griner, the envelope method still represents "the perfect kind of system for a beginner" to manage a budget.
For her, the change has been dramatic: "I trust myself with money."
Howell said that sense of control is a notable achievement.
"It makes you think, it's the greatest benefit of this system," Howell said.
© Agence France-Presse
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