Renewable Friday: AOC, Cities' Global Climate Summit, PreCOP25

What can you and I do about Global Warming? Yes, electric cars and efficient houses, but what about the larger scale? Well, you can act locally in your city, and nationally in your country, and globally, as cities and nations and activists come together. Let's take a look at some of those doing it, at the C40 cities conference, and the PreCOP25 Conference for sharing lessons learned before the upcoming COP25 Conference of Parties.

BTW You can invest in Green technologies. There are several funds for smaller investors. You can also agitate for pension funds and endowments that you have a connection to to divest from polluting, environment-destroying, lying denialist companies, and make better money in renewables and other green technologies. But that is a different Friday.

AOC takes the Green New Deal to the C40 Global Climate Summit—Common Dreams

C40 Cities

We have reached a defining moment for our planet. To achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and avoid catastrophic climate change we need to act faster and with more urgency than ever before. Fortunately, mayors of the world’s leading cities have emerged as strong and inspiring champions of the kind of ambitious climate action the world needs. Cities know what needs to be done to limit global heating to 1.5° Celsius, and they know that achieving this climate-safe future is only possible if we act now and in collaboration with other levels of government, businesses, civil society and citizens.

PreCOP25 will be held from October 8 to 10 in Costa Rica

• The PreCOP in San José will convene negotiating delegates as well as representatives from sectors of civil society, academia, private sector, finance and subnational governments, who will share practical solutions and challenges in order to accelerate climate action in diverse territories.

• The aim is to give the agenda a new twist, focusing on the dissemination of positive actions and integrating the processes of negotiation and implementation.

Regular readers know that the whole point of Renewable Fridays is to let people know of the opportunities that we are actually taking, that we hardly ever hear about. And look! Here we are taking more of them.

C40 Cities Global Climate Summit

Applause at Global Summit as Ocasio-Cortez Calls Climate Crisis 'Consequence of Our Unsustainable Way of Life'

"She got a rockstar welcome in that audience," Nicholas Reece, a city councillor from Melbourne, Australia, toldThe Guardian. "There's just something about her which is really mobilizing and electrifying people around the world, particularly young people."

The Guardian reported that "from the moment she began speaking, the main hall at the summit became completely still, and when she finished, the ovation she received far exceeded that received by the veteran climate campaigner and former Vice President Al Gore, Denmark's prime minister, Mette Frederiksen; or the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres."

This video is more than just AOC. She starts at 16:00.

AOC AND THE GREEN NEW DEAL GO GLOBAL: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) delivers the keynote address at the C40 summit on the climate crisis. This is her first international trip as a lawmaker. She is joined by mayors, lawmakers and city administrators from across the globe as they reaffirm their commitment to climate action.

She hit a high point early.

A crossroads: one of extinction or opportunity.

C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group

The C40 Research, Measurement and Planning team leverages their unprecedented database of city actions, extensive network of partnerships,[16][17] and unique organizational insight to demonstrate the power of cities to address climate change. C40's Research analyses key trends, identify opportunities for further action across the global C40 network, and help prioritize C40 initiative areas with the greatest potential for action and impact. C40's research agenda is committed to turning data and planning into implementation. Producing tools, standards and frameworks Research, Measurement and Planning supports cities to implement the most impactful mitigation and adaptation actions and measure and manage their effectiveness.[18]

The host city, Copenhagen, is usually at 100% renewables. Denmark routinely sells surplus power to its neighboring countries. There are several other cities at comparable levels, usually with very favorable locations near hydropower resources, or vast stretches of wind farms, or in desert or arid landscapes there there is vast solar potential. But The Solutions Project has made the point that any city can do so, with plans for many US cities, as can all fifty US states and all countries. Many cities have taken note, and taken action.

PreCOP25

This is a planning conference for the Santiago Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC COP 25)

to be held in Chile.

The Santiago Climate Change Conference, which will feature the 25th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 25) to the UNFCCC and meetings of the UNFCCC subsidiary bodies, will convene from 2-13 December 2019. The pre-sessional period will be from 26 November to 1 December 2019.

The Santiago Climate Change Conference will be informed by the outcomes of, among other meetings, the UN Climate Action Summit held in New York, US, in September 2019, as well as three Regional Climate Weeks: Africa Climate Week held in March, Latin America and Caribbean Climate Week held in August, and Asia-Pacific Climate Week held in September.

Did you see any news of any of those? I expect that a few people around here are sufficiently tuned in to have picked up something. Me, I'm still learning this business. I started with the tech, with US politics, and corporate shenanigans. I'm fairly new to global UN initiatives and their widespread machinery.

There have been several other PreCOPs in the past.

From the link up above:

• The Government has announced the dates of the meeting prior to the Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP25), which will be held at the National Convention Centre.

• The PreCOP in San José will convene negotiating delegates as well as representatives from sectors of civil society, academia, private sector, finance and subnational governments, who will share practical solutions and challenges in order to accelerate climate action in diverse territories.

• The aim is to give the agenda a new twist, focusing on the dissemination of positive actions and integrating the processes of negotiation and implementation.

Most of the governments of the world are about as ignorant of the realities as anyone else. The first round of national plans under the Paris Accords from COP15 were feeble, and many of those feeble goals have not been achieved. The one I consider most consequential is the failure to provide financing to poor countries so that they can install less expensive renewable energy systems, leaving the way open to China to finance and build about 300 coal-fired plants for them, as a form of predator capitalism. If the country fails to pay its debts, China gets to own a chunk of its grid.

Well, even with those, it is estimated that the number of coal plants may have peaked.

Carbon Brief: Mapped: The world’s coal power plants

Anyway, back to PreCOP25, which is likely to have something to say about that.

At COP24, held in Katowice, Poland, the Paris Agreement Work Program (PAWP) was defined as a relevant milestone for the operationalization of the Agreement, establishing a framework for enhanced climate action.

This PAWP, however, left the negotiation open with respect to Article 6 of the Agreement, which concerns Carbon Market Mechanisms and which should ideally be finalized at the COP in Chile.

It is for this reason that, for this PreCOP, Costa Rica has proposed the promotion of ideas and positions as well as the exchange of experiences regarding possible solutions in order to accelerate the decarbonization and resilience of different economies.

This is a huge opportunity for activists. The world had to educate Indian PM Modi pretty strongly before COP15 to get him to go in and make the Paris Accords nearly universal, leaving out only two countries that joined up later. Now we have to educate a multitude of heads of state and energy ministers and many others in all of the governments of the world about what other cities, states/provinces, and nations have done, that they can also put in their plans and expect to over-achieve.

That includes

• Electricity
• Electric vehicles
• Storage
• Agriculture
• Tree planting
• Various industries
• Finance
• And more

All of the things we have been talking about in seven months of Renewable Friday Diaries, and in our new Electric Vehicle Diaries, starting with electric airplanes for regional airlines.

Again, there is far too much here to cover adequately in a Diary.

Isn't that a wonderful problem to have?