Stop all fossil fuel projects by 2050 to reach net zero, says International Energy Agency

New investment in fossil fuel projects must end if governments want to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, warned the International Energy Agency (IEA) on Tuesday in a special report designed to inform COP26 negotiators meeting in Glasgow, UK, in November.

Neurath, northwest of Cologne, Germany. /Reuters/Wolfgang Rattay/File

The Paris-based think tank developed a roadmap to net zero emissions by 2050, including 400 milestones. Halting fresh exploitation and development of "new oil and gas fields" is a fundamental one. Radical change is needed, according to the IEA, in the world's approach to fossil fuels, demand for which needs to sharply decrease and be replaced by rapid and vast ramping up of renewable energy investment and capacity.

"The pathway to net zero is narrow but still achievable. If we want to reach net zero by 2050 we do not need any more investments in new oil, gas and coal projects," the IEA's Executive Director Fatih Birol told Reuters. "It is up to investors to choose whatever portfolio they prefer but there are risks and rewards," he added, saying that achieving the net zero emissions goal is "perhaps the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced."

Following the path designed by the IEA, fossil fuels should cover only around a fifth of energy supply by 2050, down from almost four-fifths currently. According to the IEA's roadmap, sales of new internal combustion engine passenger cars would have to end by 2035.

Over the past five years, global investment in fossil fuels has accounted on average for a total $575 billion. According to the IEA, this number should fall to $110 billion by 2050, with fossil fuel investment restricted to maintaining production at existing oil and natural gas fields.

Investment in renewable, green energy will need to rise from $2 trillion to $5 trillion a year by 2030. And every month from that year, 10 industrial plants will need to be fitted with carbon capture technology, three new hydrogen-based industrial plants will need to be built and 2 gigawatts of electrolyzer capacity for green hydrogen production needs to be added at industrial sites, the report said. The IEA's roadmap relies not only on existing technology to reduce emissions by 2050, but also on "technologies that are currently only in demonstration or prototype phase," such as direct air carbon capture and green hydrogen. Some have criticized this approach. "Any role of future technologies should be to replace fossil fuels, not justify their use," Teresa Anderson, climate policy coordinator at ActionAid International, told AFP. "Given all the uncertainties and risks around long-shot technologies and land availability for bioenergy, the IEA would do better to focus on bringing emissions down to real zero, rather than using 'net' zero accounting to pander to the fossil fuel industry's fears of losing profits." Even if all net zero pledges were to be met on time and in full, there will still be 22 billion tons of carbon dioxide worldwide in 2050 – which would lead to a rise in temperature of around 2.1 degrees Celsius by 2100, according to the IEA.

Source: CGTN Europe | Reuters AFP

How did it happen that Israel’s Jews and Arabs rose up against each other?

The endless rocket attacks no longer shock, but the divisions that have come violently to the surface in Israeli towns have horrified the country

It was a week of carnage in Israel and Palestine, as Israeli airstrikes pounded Gaza and Hamas fired a near-continuous hail of rockets at Israel. More than 140 people died. But Israelis were more stunned – and horrified – to see towns inside the country erupt into violence between Jewish and Palestinian citizens.

Israel has known demonstrations and violent clashes with security forces. Wartime is especially tense; in 2000, the Israeli police killed 13 Israeli Arab citizens who were demonstrating at the start of the second intifada, a wound that has never healed. But since Israel’s founding, no one could recall waves of people attacking people, property and symbols, civilians on civilians, among Israeli citizens. The violence began on Tuesday and spread through towns around the country and it has not ended.

A face-off between a Palestinian and a member of the Israeli forces

Tel Aviv was not a flashpoint for riots and on Friday took no more rocket fire. In a break from rocket attacks which resumed in force on Saturday, the city suddenly felt quiet on a spring day, but eerie. Last week, Israelis learned that beneath the sunny veneer lies the menace of ethnic conflict, but only after it crashed through the surface.

Some see the acts of destruction as symmetrical – Jewish and Arab mobs hunting each other down. In TV studios, journalists sought to quantify which group, Jews or Arabs, committed more violence. But the quest for symmetry or quantification is futile. What matters is to learn how it happened that citizens rose up against one another. For Jews and for Arabs, the answers are vastly different. Many Palestinian citizens of Israel have been swept up in demonstrations in recent weeks, around the events in Jerusalem that precipitated the latest Israeli-Palestinian escalation. They were expressing a long history of despair. These citizens often liken themselves to African Americans: they too have been excluded from the nation since its founding. The two groups share a long history of political, social and economic marginalisation that continues today. Among Palestinians in Israel, those conditions have contributed to severe problems of gangs and gun violence, with little redress from the state. The community has been under-policed internally or met with heavy-handed enforcement if crime – or demonstrations – spill out. The Covid-19 crisis hit both the health and economy of this community hard; gang warfare flourished and pushed casualties to a peak.

But the deterioration of the political status of Palestinians in Israel hangs heavily over social and economic problems. Over the last decade, Israel has passed laws targeting Palestinian citizens’ rights, culminating in the 2018 “nation state” law, elevating Jews to a superior status in Israel. Anti-Arab rhetoric from right-wing politicians has crossed the line to incitement. In a longstanding process, the state even attacks their homes, through lack of planning for Arab localities, making permits difficult to access, and then issuing demolition orders for construction without permits. From 2012 to 2014, 97% of home demolition orders were in Arab towns. Entire villages have been razed; a controversial 2017 law sought to increase the punishment for “illegal construction”. Many see this situation as an extension of Israel’s occupation, so when the eviction of Palestinian families from their East Jerusalem homes seemed imminent recently, it sparked solidarity protests around Israel. When an Arab man in Lod was shot dead by Jews on Tuesday after the rocket attacks had begun, demonstrations gave way to riots targeting people, synagogues and even a theatre and a restaurant in the northern city of Acre that had symbolised coexistence.

Ironically, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government poured money into Arab areas to improve infrastructure and social services. But money didn’t counter decades of what many experience as suppression of their legitimacy as Palestinians in Israel. Demonstrators are rebelling against powerlessness.

The Jewish rioters live in a different reality. Jews sit at the top of Israel’s social, political and economic hierarchy. The gangs still stalking Israeli towns shouting “death to Arabs” have tremendous power and want more. The party that represents their ideas is called Jewish Power. And power is available to them everywhere. Reports show Jewish rioters in Lod with police at their side as they threw stones – hardly any were apprehended. Jews from extremist settlements in the West Bank joined the riots in Lod.

Here, too, there are underlying trends. Israel’s right-wing parties have campaigned for far greater Jewish dominance in Israel. The nationalist right wing has led and legitimised rage against Arabs, left-wingers, migrants and the media. One of the most important but lesser-known campaigns of the right wing is a long-term assault on the legitimacy of the law itself. For a decade or so, leaders from the very top have been undermining the judiciary, including the supreme court, the state prosecutor, the attorney general and law enforcement itself. Tension with the supreme court has deep historic roots in Israel, but the relentless anti-judiciary campaign seems to have severed the ethos of compliance itself.

One of the Jewish vigilantes organising on Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, wrote to a journalist at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “I’m not interested in the law of the state, I go by the laws of the Torah from back then, 2,000 years ago. I’ll explain something: Arabs in Israel are taking over the state, they’ve lifted their heads too high.” His Telegram group laid out plans too graphic to reproduce here.

No cause or circumstance justifies vigilante violence. All attacks on civilians are a crime; defiling synagogues or mosques is atrocious. Perpetrators are personally responsible and must be held accountable.

The landscape looks grim, especially as sirens continue to scream. I have been asked if Jews and Arabs can live together again. We can, but the first step is to face the causes. Ideally, the next step is to heed WH Auden: “We must love one another or die.”

Dahlia Scheindlin is a political strategist and a public opinion expert; she is also a policy fellow at The Century Foundation.

Source: Guardian

IAEA says Iran enriched uranium to up to 63% purity

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says samples taken from the Natanz nuclear facility show Iran has enriched uranium to up to 63 percent, and that the purity level is “consistent with the fluctuations” announced by the Islamic Republic.

“According to Iran, fluctuations of the enrichment levels... were experienced,” the IAEA said on Tuesday in a confidential report to its member states, seen by Reuters.

“The agency’s analysis of the ES (environmental samples) taken on 22 April 2021 shows an enrichment level of up to 63% U-235, which is consistent with the fluctuations of the enrichment levels (described by Iran),” it added.

On April 13, Iran said it had informed the IAEA of a plan to start the 60-percent enrichment, under which 1,000 advanced centrifuge machines will be installed at Natanz nuclear site.

Iran says using advanced centrifuges to produce 60% uranium by next week

Iran says it has already started work to use IR-4 and IR-6 centrifuges in Natanz for enriching uranium to the level of 60 percent and that it expects the product to be ready next week.

The decision followed a suspected Israeli act of sabotage at the facility, which is among the sites being monitored by the UN atomic watchdog under the 2015 nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Additionally, the IAEA’s report said Iran was feeding the tails from the IR-4 cascade into a cascade of 27 IR-5 and 30 IR-6s centrifuges to refine uranium to up to 5 percent.

The report was published at a time when envoys from Iran and the P4+1 group of countries — Britain, France, Russia, and China plus Germany — have been holding talks in Vienna on a potential revival of the JCPOA.

A US delegation is also in the Austrian capital, but it is not attending the discussions because the United States is not a party to the nuclear accord.

Former US president Donald Trump abandoned the deal and re-imposed the anti-Iran sanctions that the JCPOA had lifted. He also placed additional sanctions on Iran under other pretexts not related to the nuclear case as part of the “maximum pressure” campaign.

Following a year of strategic patience, Iran resorted to its legal rights stipulated in Article 26 of the JCPOA, which grants a party the right to suspend its contractual commitments in case of non-compliance by other signatories.

Now, the new US administration says it wants to compensate for Trump’s mistake and rejoin the deal, but it is showing an overriding propensity for maintaining some of the sanctions as a tool of pressure.

Tehran insists that all sanctions should first be removed in a verifiable manner before the Islamic Republic reverses its remedial measures.

On Wednesday, Russia’s representative to the international organizations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, said the Vienna talks “make progress.”

In another tweet hours earlier, the Russian envoy reported a meeting between the representatives from the P4+1 group of countries and the US.

“In between official meetings of the Joint Commission of the #JCPOA the participants in the Vienna talks hold on a daily basis informal meetings in various formats. For instance this evening the JCPOA participants (without #Iran) met with the US delegation,” he wrote.

Also on Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov had met with Massimo Aparo, Deputy Director General and Head of the IAEA Department of Safeguards.

During the meeting, the two sides discussed issues related to the IAEA’s safeguards systems and the use of guarantees in Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Source: Press TV