DeBriefed 9 August 2024: China’s first quarterly emissions fall since Covid; Harris chooses ‘climate vice president’; Athletes feel the heat

Giuliana Viglione

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

§ This week

US climate credentials and consequences

CLIMATE VEEP: US vice president Kamala Harris’s selection of Tim Walz as her running mate is being heralded by climate advocates, Inside Climate News wrote. The Star Tribune summarised Walz’s environmental record, saying that the current Minnesota governor has “passed ambitious climate policy” while in office – but “also clashed with environmental advocates” on other issues, including the Line 3 oil pipeline.

RAINFALL WRECKAGE: Tropical Storm Debby has wreaked havoc across the south-eastern US, with slow wind speeds contributing to the historic rainfall levels, NPR said. The Post and Courier documented some of the storm’s impacts, including flooding and downed trees and powerlines. Meanwhile, fire- and flood-prone areas of the US are seeing a net influx of residents, the Washington Post reported.

§ Around the world

  • CARBON CAP: China’s State Council announced a new “dual control” plan for its emissions that will put a cap on carbon for the first time, Carbon Brief’s China Briefing said. Analysis published by Carbon Brief also revealed that China’s emissions have seen their first quarterly fall since the nation’s Covid lockdowns.
  • CLIMATE COLLAB: Brazilian president Lula da Silva stressed the need for regional cooperation against climate change at a meeting with Chilean president Gabriel Boric that saw the two countries sign 19 bilateral agreements, Agencia Brasil reported. 
  • HEAT STRESSED: The Korea Times reported that five Koreans died of heat-related causes over the weekend, bringing the year’s total to 13. Meanwhile, heatstroke claimed more than 120 lives in Tokyo during July, according to the Associated Press.
  • IPCC UNCERTAINTY: Governments failed to agree upon the timeline for producing the next set of climate change assessment reports amid “deep divergences” at the meeting of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Home News reported. (See Carbon Brief’s detailed summary.)
  • KEEPING THE COAL: Global commodity company Glencore walked back on its plan to split its business in two, deciding instead to retain its coal division – a “major profit engine”, the Financial Times wrote. The newspaper explained that most shareholders had opposed the proposed restructure.
  • REQUESTING RELIEF: Bloomberg reported that the UN World Food Programme “is seeking 290,000 tonnes of corn from as far afield as Mexico and Ukraine” in an attempt to alleviate the effects of the El Niño-driven drought that decimated harvests across southern Africa.

§ $52,071,133

The amount of “lifetime campaign contributions” that the 123 climate-sceptic members of the current US Congress have together received from the fossil-fuel sector, according to a report from the Center for American Progress.

Latest climate research

  • Ocean temperatures around Australia are the hottest they have been in 400 years, imperilling the Great Barrier Reef’s iconic corals, a Nature study found.
  • According to research published in Earth’s Future, sea-level rise, land subsidence and other factors may cause increasingly saline groundwater in coastal areas by the end of the century.
  • A study in Nature Cities concluded that urbanisation increases local drought severity, while a majority of urban areas will “consistently suffer exacerbated drought severity” by mid-century.

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

§ Captured

Image - The world's biggest polluters, the US and China, lead the Olympics medals count. Chart shws Paris 2024 Olympics medals vs annual emissions, MtCO2 (note the x-axis uses a log scale). (note)

Many of the world’s largest emitting countries also stand atop the Olympic medal table, with the US and China securing the most medals so far, with Japan, France and South Korea all in the top 10 across both categories. In contrast, the world’s most populous country and third-highest annual emitter – India – has received four medals, while Dominica is the lowest-emitting country to win a medal at these games. (One notable omission from the chart is Russia, the world’s fourth-largest emitter of CO2. Russia is officially excluded from the Paris games following its invasion of Ukraine.)

§ Spotlight

What will sport look like in a warming world?

This week, Carbon Brief looks at the impact of climate change-driven warming on global sport. 

Amy Steel was an Australia-based professional netball player, in peak physical condition, when she collapsed following a pre-season match on a 39C day in 2016. 

At the time, she was not aware that heat could have such devastating long-term consequences. “It was sort of like, ‘All right, well, off you go and get better then,’” she said. But she “just really never got better after that day”.

Today, Steel shares her experience in order to raise awareness of the risks that heat poses to athletes and to advocate for change. She told Carbon Brief:

“As an athlete, you do feel a little bit invincible. You do feel like – you’re at your peak fitness; nothing can really touch you.”

Feeling the heat

Exertional heat illness – that which arises from intense exercise – is “not the same thing as the heat stroke that would kill your grandma sitting in her apartment without AC”, Dr Madeleine Orr, an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto, told Carbon Brief. 

Exertional heat stress occurs when the body accumulates heat during exercise and – whether due to protective gear or environmental factors – is unable to dispel it. “You can experience exertional heat illness in almost any condition,” Orr said. 

However, climate change is making dangerous conditions more likely – as well as expanding the range over which they occur. By 2050, 60% of urban areas around the world will be unsuitable for holding an Olympic Games in late July and early August, according to a recent analysis published by Axios. 

Dr Jessica Murfree, an assistant professor of sport administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Carbon Brief:

“These things are happening frequently. They’re severe. They’re happening to men and women, boys and girls.”

Murfree added that heat-related illness is “not going to necessarily discriminate” in terms of who it affects. But, she stressed, the reality of who is most affected by heat is influenced by myriad other factors, including socioeconomic status and historical discrimination. 

Rethinking sport

According to Orr, there are four actions that can help mitigate the dangers of heat in sport: educating people on what heat illness looks like; providing safety equipment, such as shade and  ice baths; creating and enforcing policies around heat; and rearranging the sporting calendar. 

These changes do not occur without resistance, Orr said:

“The challenge again, always, is that sport is very traditional…The way things are is the way they should be. And that’s not necessarily an equation that works.”

Heat policies, when in place, are not always enforced. And particularly at the grassroots level, Steel said, there is “not a great amount of understanding of the policy and what [are] the actual risks”.

Steel told Carbon Brief she worries about the future of grassroots sport and the “ability to rock up on a weekend and know that there’s going to be sport”. Whereas professional leagues can afford to build high-tech facilities to protect their athletes, most communities do not have that luxury.

At the same time, Murfree said, those organisations have the advantage of being “ingrained in their immediate community” and, thus, being able to advocate most directly for the solutions that will work for them. That gives her hope, she told Carbon Brief:

“No one knows the realities of climate change in a community more than the people who are in it every single day.”

§ Watch, read, listen

ISLAND IN THE SUN: Channel News Asia documented Kiribati’s efforts to fortify its land – and its geopolitical alliances – to keep the island nation from being swallowed by the sea.

HIDDEN HISTORY: A historian of science has uncovered documents revealing that US politicians have known the dangers of climate change since at least the 1960s, Grist reported.

DEADLY HOT: The Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast looked at the dangers of extreme heat – and how society can mitigate them.

§ Coming up

§ Pick of the jobs

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to [email protected].
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