World Bank ends oil and gas financing, in accordance with Paris Agreement

[mentalfloss]

1. WBG and upstream oil and gas

As a global multilateral development institution, the World Bank Group is continuing to transform its own operations in recognition of a rapidly changing world. To align its support to countries to meet their Paris goals:

The World Bank Group will no longer finance upstream oil and gas, after 2019.

(In exceptional circumstances, consideration will be given to financing upstream gas in the poorest countries where there is a clear benefit in terms of energy access for the poor and the project fits within the countries’ Paris Agreement commitments.)

2. Ramping up WBG climate ambition through its Climate Change Action Plan

The WBG is on track to meet its target of 28% of its lending going to climate action by 2020 and to meeting the goals of its Climate Change Action Plan - developed following the Paris Agreement.

In line with countries submitting updated and potentially more ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the World Bank Group will present a stock-take of its Climate Change Action Plan and announce new commitments and targets beyond 2020 at COP24 in Poland in 2018.

3. Transparency and disclosure to drive our own decarbonization

The World Bank Group is working hard to ensure that climate accountability is mainstreamed throughout its operations. In addition to measures already in place:

I) Starting next year, the World Bank Group will report greenhouse gas emissions from the investment projects it finances in key emissions-producing sectors, such as energy. The results will be published in late 2018, and annually thereafter.

II) The World Bank will be applying a shadow price on carbon in the economic analysis of all IBRD/IDA projects in key high-emitting sectors where design has begun since July 2017. IFC started using carbon pricing in key sectors in January 2017 and will mainstream the same starting January 2018"

World Bank Group Announcements at One Planet Summit

 

[taxslave]

That will certainly save a bunch of countries from getting fleaced.

 

[darkbeaver]

 

[mentalfloss]

That will certainly save a bunch of countries from getting fleaced.

Unless they're poor and need the fleecing.

 

[petros]

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...iscovered-speeding-beneath-russia-and-canada/

AILY NEWS 19 December 2016
Molten iron river discovered speeding beneath Russia and Canada
By Andy Coghlan

Deep below our planet’s surface a molten jet of iron nearly as hot as the surface of the sun is picking up speed.

This stream of liquid has been discovered for the first time by telltale magnetic field readings 3000 kilometres below North America and Russia taken from space.

The vast jet stream some 420 kilometres wide has trebled in speed since 2000, and is now circulating westwards at between 40 and 45 kilometres per year deep under Siberia and heading towards beneath Europe (see diagram, below). That is three times faster than typical speeds of liquid in the outer core.

Straight to the core
“It’s a remarkable discovery,” says Phil Livermore of the University of Leeds, UK, who led the team. “We’ve known that the liquid core is moving around, but our observations haven’t been sufficient until now to see this significant jet.”

“We know more about the Sun than the Earth’s core,” says another team member, Chris Finlay, from the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby. “The discovery of this jet is an exciting step in learning more about our planet’s inner workings.”

What made the discovery possible was the combined monitoring power of the European Space Agency’s trio of satellites, called Swarm, which were launched in 2013. From orbit, they can measure magnetic field variations as deep down as 3000 kilometres below Earth’s surface, where the molten core meets the solid mantle.

“Having all three meant we could strip away magnetic fields from elsewhere such as the ionosphere and the crust, providing our sharpest ever image of the fluctuations at the core-mantle boundary alone,” says Livermore.

Plugging the new data into models also allowed the team to figure out how the fluctuations changed over time.

Invisible river
Earth’s magnetic field is generated by the movement of molten iron in the outer core, so examining the magnetic field can reveal details of the behaviour of the core that underpins it.

The discovery of the jet involved tracking two massive but unusually strong lobes of magnetic flux originating from the core-mantle boundary, situated beneath Canada and Siberia respectively, but moving with the flow of the molten iron. Because their motion could originate only from the physical movement of molten iron, the lobes served as markers, allowing the researchers to track the flow of iron.

Livermore likens it to being able to track the course of a river at night by watching candles floating on the surface. “As the iron moves, it drags the magnetic field with it,” he says. “We can’t see the flow of iron itself, only the motion of the flux lobes.”

He says there may be a southern counterpart to the jet, but because there are no trackable flux lobes in the south, any magma stream there can’t be picked up geomagnetically.

Rotating cylinders
Livermore and his colleagues say the jet is created by movement of molten iron around the inner, solid iron core.

Next to the inner core, there are parallel cylinders of swirling molten iron in the outer core running from north to south. Where these swirling cylinders meet the solid core, and squash against it, they act like a pair of rollers, squeezing out additional molten iron sideways to create the jet stream.

This produces and moves the two lobe-like magnetic fields, which is what the satellites detected and tracked.

Why the jet is getting faster is more of a mystery. It may be related to the rotation of the inner core, which was found in 2005 to rotate a bit faster than Earth’s crust, says Xiaodong Song of the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois.

Xiaodong was a member of the team that used seismological data to make that 2005 discovery. “If these seismological and geomagnetic observations can be tied together to a common process in the fluid core, it would be really exciting,” he says.

Livermore thinks the acceleration of the jet is down to push-back from magnetic fields. The flow of iron generates the magnetic field, but, he says, the magnetic field may then be affecting the flow of the iron.

Studying the jet should enable geophysicists to better understand how the planet’s core behaves, and the factors that influence Earth’s magnetic field strength.

Flip the polarity
“If we can understand how the field is generated, we understand how it changes over time and whether and when it will weaken and reverse,” says Livermore.

Other geophysicists agree. “The more we understand the core’s behaviour at various time and spatial scales, the more we can hope to understand the beginnings, renewal and future of our magnetic field,” says William Brown of the British Geological Survey’s geomagnetism team.

Earth’s magnetic field seems to have been weakening, especially since around 1840, at about 5 per cent per century. The magma stream should help geophysicists predict more accurately if and when the magnetic field of the planet’s core will flip, and the magnetic north and south poles trade places, which happens every few hundred thousand years.

And thanks to the satellite monitoring system, says Xiaodong, we have now opened a new window to view in “real time” the activity of molten iron deep in Earth’s core.

Journal reference: Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO2859

 

[mentalfloss]

Charles Lamb (1775-1834). A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig. Lionel Strachey, et al., eds. 1906.

MANKIND, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his “Mundane Mutations,” where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Chofang, literally the Cook’s Holiday. The manuscript goes on to say that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother), was accidentally discovered in the manner following. The swine-herd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son, Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who, being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw which, kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished.


Charles Lamb (1775-1834). A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig. Lionel Strachey, et al., eds. 1906. The World's Wit and Humor: An Anthology in Fifteen Volumes