Just how bad is the drought in the Western US? The shrinking of Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir, is a troubling indicator.

The massive man-made lake, which straddles the border of Arizona and Nevada, is now only at 39 percent of its full capacity, down from 44 percent in April 2020. That’s equivalent to a 10-foot drop in the water level, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Reclamation. Which means mandatory restrictions on the amount of water surrounding states draw from Lake Mead could be triggered in the next few months.

“This year will be really telling because it will provide a stress test of the newest policies that we thought were stricter but likely will need to be even more strict in the future,” said Elizabeth Koebele, a political scientist at the University of Nevada who focuses on water policy.

The impending restrictions have been a long time coming — the reservoir started contracting well before 2020, as Vox writer Brad Plumer explained in 2016. The latest drought in the West is but one episode in a two-decade megadrought, and it has taken a toll on the Colorado River, which feeds Lake Mead.

The animated map below, from Google Earth’s new Timelapse feature, shows just how much the reservoir’s boundaries have shriveled since 1984.

Lake Mead’s dropping water levels will affect Arizona’s water supply as soon as next year

Lake Mead’s recent contractions are concerning because the body supplies water to 25 million people across Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico. Built in 1936, the Hoover Dam and the attached reservoir have shaped the geography of the West, making life in Las Vegas and Los Angeles possible.

As the lake level has dropped, states have so far managed to avoid reaching the point where mandatory water restrictions kick in, but it looks like they are coming soon.

The Bureau of Reclamation keeps tabs on the lake by measuring its height at Hoover Dam. There, the water level is currently at 1,081 feet, and the Bureau projects it will drop below 1,075 feet as soon as June. After it crosses that threshold, the federal government will declare an official water shortage. Under a Drought Contingency Plan agreed upon by the affected states in 2019, some states will start to see big cuts in how much water they receive from Lake Mead starting in 2022.

Based on the pecking order from past negotiations, Arizona will have the biggest reductions in allocation from Lake Mead while California won’t face restrictions until the reservoir drops below 1,045 feet. The agreement dictates that Arizona will have one-third of its water supply from the reservoir cut, Ian James reported for AZ Central. Farmers will be among the most impacted, according to the state’s drought plan, but they will be allowed to use groundwater resources to compensate to some extent.

As a result of the preemptive drought planning, states have already prepared for the inevitable point when they will have to endure such cuts, said Koebele. “The basin has become increasingly collaborative over time, and people are thinking about it as, ‘It’s not if this happens, it’s when it happens and how do we best handle it.’”

Generally speaking, she said, cities will be relatively unaffected by any cuts for now, whereas farms, which consume the vast majority of the basin’s water, will have to start investing in technologies like drip irrigation to become more efficient.

Climate change poses a serious long-term threat to the millions who depend on the Colorado River

The imminent resource crunch is just the beginning of the problems for the millions of people in Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico who depend on Lake Mead and the Colorado River for their water.

Rising global temperatures are expected to bring more frequent and more intense droughts to the Southwest, according to the latest National Climate Assessment, which was authored by 13 US federal agencies in 2018. Climate change is also increasing the likelihood of long-term megadroughts like the one we are seeing now.

In a 2020 study published in Science, US Geological Survey researchers found that warming will reduce the flow of the upper Colorado River by 14 to 26 percent by mid-century under a moderate climate action scenario.

“Climate change is really severely impacting the basin,” said Koebele. Rising heat increases evaporation, she explained, “Even when we get a good snowpack, if the soil is super dry we can see really big reductions in run-off.” That means less precipitation from the mountains ultimately makes it to the river.

To adjust to an increasingly water-scarce future, basin states and stakeholders are starting to negotiate a post-2026 deal, which will set the framework for the coming decades. In the meantime, cities and farms will need to continue to find ways to make their water use more efficient. Arizona is even considering building a desalination plant with Mexico to import water from the sea.

“We are going to hit a peak with efficiency and conservation, or hit a limit eventually, but there is still more to do there,” Koebele said.

As for the coming year after Lake Mead drops below 1,075 feet, it will be the first stress test for states as they collaborate to conserve Lake Mead’s water for the future.

On Thursday, President Joe Biden will try to pull off some diplomatic gymnastics: hosting a Leaders Summit on Climate to convince countries to take bolder action on climate change, while the US is still very much rebuilding its own climate credibility after the Trump years.

During his presidency, Donald Trump tore down dozens of environmental regulations and withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement, undermining global progress to reduce emissions.

“[Biden] comes into this summit with the need to repair US credibility after four years of a president who denied the existence of climate change and did everything in his power to undermine the programs in the US that were attempting to reduce emissions,” said John Podesta, the founder of the Center for American Progress and former climate adviser to President Obama, during a press briefing. 

To show that the US has indeed shifted course, Biden will be releasing a new 2030 climate target ahead of the event, and the administration has pledged that it will be “ambitious.”

The summit will be one of the drumbeats crescendoing to the big UN climate conference of the year: COP 26, to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November. Under the Paris agreement, all countries are supposed to submit new climate targets before the conference — five years after the first targets were set when the deal was signed.

The goal is to collectively put the world on track to prevent a 1.5-degree Celsius rise above pre-industrial levels.

The US State Department described the summit as an opportunity for the 40 invited leaders to reveal new targets in line with that goal. Some US allies are expected to do so, while others, including China, Russia, and Brazil, appear reluctant to return to US-centric climate diplomacy or to step up climate action alongside their peers.

The pageantry surrounding climate action can seem endless, but as the US retakes the global stage, this summit will be an important measure of its commitment and influence on climate action globally.

The US and other major emitters will drop new climate targets

The level of ambition in the new US 2030 climate target is likely to be the most consequential news coming out of the summit.

In 2015, then-President Obama set the first US climate target under the Paris agreement (a Nationally Determined Contribution, or NDC): to cut emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025. The US is currently on track to meet that goal due to the Covid-19 pandemic’s effect on emissions, but it is far from what climate scientists say is required. To keep the 1.5 Celsius target alive, countries need to cut emissions nearly in half by 2030, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Biden administration is likely to aim for that high mark. According to Bloomberg, officials are eyeing a target to reduce emissions somewhere between 48 and 53 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. That would put the US in the running with the most ambitious nations.

The next highest emitter, the European Union, has proposed 51 percent cuts from 2005 levels while the UK has proposed a more ambitious goal of 63 percent. (The various baseline years each country uses to set their climate goals makes comparisons difficult, but the Rhodium Group calibrated them — see the chart below.)

Thousands of scientists, hundreds of executives from major corporations, and environmental organizations back a US target of at least 50 percent. A coalition of international development groups, however, argues that the US should cut its emissions by at least 70 percent to account for its outsized responsibility for climate change as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over the last century.

Whatever the level of ambition the Biden administration commits to, the White House is limited by what will be feasible under the constraints of US politics, and specifically Congress. Hitting 50 percent cuts is within the realm of possibility according to recent studies — some show that it is even possible without federal legislation approved by both the House and Senate, although new legislation would certainly significantly boost chances of success.

Beyond the big reveal of the US target, other announcements to watch for include new 2030 targets from Canada, Japan, and South Korea. Environmental groups are calling for all these big economies to join the 50 percent club — and Japan, at least, is expected to do so, the New York Times reported.

Some nations are likely to be conspicuously quiet at the summit

New targets from the US and its allies could help resurrect the Paris agreement and make the summit a success, but the virtual gathering will also shine a light on the global laggards — those who simply do not want to play by the US’s rules.

In the lead-up to the summit, China has clearly expressed that it will not readily realign with a US vision of climate cooperation between the two nations. President Xi Jinping has yet to confirm that he will even attend the summit. “China is not and won’t be the ‘attendant’ of US-centered climate campaign,” according to an article published on Wednesday in the state-owned Global Times, summarizing the viewpoint of several Chinese academics.

During the Trump years, Xi continued to commit to tackling climate change and made a surprise announcement that China would strive to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 at the UN General Assembly last September. Xi also announced new NDC goals in December, but China hasn’t formally submitted those targets to the UN, so they could still change.

US Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry took a last-minute trip to Shanghai last week to try to convince his counterparts to jump on the US bandwagon. China’s official rhetoric remained critical of the US during his visit:

“It was the US that announced its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2017 and stopped implementing its NDCs, which held the world back from achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters on Friday.

Ultimately, Kerry’s trip yielded a rare statement of cooperation between the two economic rivals, including an agreement to enhance their respective climate actions to “raise ambition in the 2020s.”

Li Shuo, a senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace East Asia, noted that Xi could still make an announcement containing new climate targets on China’s turf ahead of the summit at the Boao Forum, often called China’s World Economic Forum.

However, it will be difficult politically for China to change its climate targets, which it formalized in its 14th Five-Year Plan in March, according to a former senior State Department official who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic. It is possible that China could announce a new goal outside of the scope of the 14th Five-Year Plan, such as ending its financing of overseas coal plants or curbing non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, they said, but expectations are limited for what China will serve up at this summit. 

It’s not just China — other major economies are approaching the summit with some hesitancy or outright denial. In a visit to India last week, Kerry lobbied the country to set a net-zero emissions goal, but no announcements were made. Instead, India’s Minister of Environment commented on the importance of action from the world’s biggest historical emitters.

Russia, freshly sanctioned by the US over the SolarWinds hack, will attend the summit but appears to have no interest in raising its weak climate goals. If Russia remains recalcitrant, the country could endanger the Paris targets, given that it is the world’s fifth-largest emitter.

Meanwhile, Brazil, the seventh-largest emitter, has also been pushing back on the US ahead of the talks. The two countries have been negotiating a deal to stop deforestation in the Amazon, but Reuters reported that a final settlement was not expected by the summit. Brazil has asked for $1 billion in foreign aid upfront while US representatives have insisted that they will only pay once they see progress, namely a decline in deforestation this year.

The other side of climate leadership: climate finance

Leaders from small island and low-income nations, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, and the Marshall Islands, were also invited to attend the summit. One of their key concerns is expected to be the shortfall in climate aid from developed countries, said Robert Bradley, the director of knowledge and learning at the NDC Partnership, which helps developing countries establish and pursue climate targets.

“The whole Paris agreement is based on a quid pro quo,” he said: Developing countries are expected to reduce emissions alongside developed countries, but in return, they are entitled to financial support. In 2009, developed countries pledged that they would be marshal $100 billion a year in climate finance for these countries, but they’ve fallen short.

During his presidency, Obama agreed to provide $3 billion for the Green Climate Fund, which supports developing countries’ mitigation and adaptation projects, but Trump did not deliver the outstanding $2 billion. Last week in his budget proposal, Biden slated $1.2 billion for the fund. “It is certainly very helpful,” said Bradley, “I don’t think anybody is going to argue that on its own it’s enough.” 

With low-income countries facing increased economic strife due to the pandemic, support is needed more urgently than ever.

“These are countries in some cases have hundreds of millions in population so could well be the major emitters of the future if we don’t help them get on the right development path,” said Bradley, adding, “done right, they can use cleaner technology and more resilient investments to lift millions out of poverty and improve the lives of their populations.”

Additional finance announcements are expected at the summit. South Korea is reportedly planning to announce a ban on coal financing, which would be significant as the country has been the third-largest financier of overseas coal projects. The US Treasury Department will also release a full climate finance strategy, which will shed more light on how the country intends to assist other nations.

To see whether leaders live up to the “climate leader” title, you can tune in to the virtual summit here on Thursday and Friday.

Just as the freshly vaccinated start to resume barbecues and vacation travel in the coming months, wildfires are likely to force residents of Western states back inside.

The warning signs are written in the parched landscape from New Mexico to California. This time last year, 27 percent of the West was in drought — now that has risen to 76 percent, turning forests into matchsticks.

With the pandemic dominating headlines, the severe drought has gotten little attention. “This one threatens to catch people by surprise who are exhausted by the events of the past year,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles.

But this latest episode in a two-decade megadrought is precisely what scientists like Swain have been warning about: Rising temperatures from climate change are making droughts more frequent and severe and increasing the likelihood of extended megadroughts. Heightened dryness, in turn, is contributing to an increased risk of wildfires.

These trends threaten all Western states, but California faces uniquely severe fire impacts due to its dry summers and population density. Here’s what the state and the rest of the Western US should be bracing for in the coming months and how you can start preparing.

How we got to this drought: Two dry years and a hot summer

Before we talk about how bad this fire season could get, it’s important to understand just how severe the current drought is. It started building last year when California experienced light winter precipitation and the Southwest had a weak summer rainy season, which typically brings strong monsoon thunderstorms. At the same time, intense heat waves rolled through the whole region.

“If I had to pinpoint one thing that really drove the drought to where we are right now, it was the heat of last summer,” Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the University of Nebraska’s National Drought Mitigation Center, told Vox in March. These high summer temperatures evaporated the moisture from the soil, further drying out vegetation.

Then, over the past few months, the typical rainy season in California once again came up short. This was due, in part, to La Niña — a weather pattern that occurs roughly every few years when cooler eastern Pacific ocean surface temperatures shift the trade winds, driving storms farther north.

But this drought is also being driven by larger climate trends. Scientists say that it is part of a megadrought — a decades-long dry spell, punctuated by severe droughts. This current megadrought began around 2000, and the majority of the land in the West has been at some level of drought ever since.

And this striking drought bears the fingerprints of climate change. Using tree ring data, a study published in Science in April 2020 found that “anthropogenic warming was critical for placing 2000–2018 on a trajectory consistent with the most severe past megadroughts,” and that megadrought has extended to today.

This fits in with a grim picture laid out by the latest National Climate Assessment, authored by 13 US federal agencies in 2018. Rising temperatures will increase the likelihood of megadroughts in the Southwest and make droughts more frequent and severe, according to the scientific literature cited.

This year’s drought has primed the landscape for big burns

As the latest drought episode within the larger megadrought has deepened, it has left plants and trees desiccated. And the biggest problem is forests.

“When talking about forest fires, for example, the link between dryness and more frequent and severe fires is just crystal clear,” said Swain.

In some ecosystems, the grass and brush growth will be stunted by the lack of moisture, creating less fuel for fires to burn. But that’s only a small silver lining, Swain said, because forests dominate land cover in the West.

The chart below shows how dire the situation has become this year. The current level of vegetation flammability in northern California (blue line) is at near the maximum levels recorded for this time of year (red line).

In its April 1 seasonal fire outlook, the National Interagency Fire Center predicted that these dry materials are going to cause significant problems for the West — and soon. The drought will bring up the start date for fire seasons, they wrote.

As the map below shows, the worst of the drought has been concentrated in the Southwest so far, and that’s where the fire danger will spike soonest. A wildfire spanning more than 500 acres already broke out north of Tucson, Arizona, last week.

The Fire Center projects that the Southwest will see above-average fire potential through June until the monsoon (hopefully) arrives. But the region might still get relief from summer monsoon rains, whereas the coming months tend to be dry in central and northern California.

Starting in June, they project that parts of the Pacific Northwest will see heightened fire risk and then the fire season will pick up in California in July.

The rapid melting of California’s snowpack is laying the groundwork for the early arrival of fires. Data from a snow survey on April 1 showed that the water content in Sierra Nevada snow was only 59 percent of the average. And the snow is melting quickly — the chart below shows that this year’s water content levels (dark blue line) are well below average (aqua blue) and dropping across all three regions of the state to levels typically seen around mid- to late May. With snow disappearing sooner, higher-elevation landscapes will be at a greater risk of fires, the Washington Post reported.

The wildfire risk is serious across the West, but California faces a unique set of threats: “a combination of climate and vegetation and intersection with highly populous areas that makes California sort of uniquely prominent in the wildfire impacts realm,” Swain said. And as the state continues to dry out and the winds pick up in the fall, the risks will continue to build.

It’s time to get your air filter out and keep those masks handy

Even with dry landscape inviting fires, the ultimate severity of the fire season is hard to predict. For one thing, because the vast majority of wildfires are human-caused, where those sparks are ignited will shape how damaging the fires are. But wind, heat, and other variables will also play a role — as last year highlighted.

It was a rash of rare dry lightning that set off the major blazes that hit California in late August. Coupled with a record warm August and dry winds, the fire season escalated quickly to record levels. “Last August and then into September, every single possible factor came together in the worst possible way,” said Swain.

It’s unlikely that we will see the same level of destruction this year, but not impossible, he said.

However, Swain also cautioned that the number of acres burned shouldn’t be the sole criterion for how severe a fire season is. Western states actually have a major backlog of land that needs to be burned, due to the history of limiting the use of fire to manage forests (“prescribed burning”) — an approach that American Indians have historically practiced.

“The goal is not to vanquish fire from the landscape. The goal really should be to decouple wildfire from catastrophe,” he said. Therefore, he suggests we judge our management of fires by their impact on structures and human health, rather than just acres burned.

Just two weeks ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a deal to allocate $536 million to help the state manage wildfires by staffing up fire crews, thinning forests, and hardening homes to withstand fires. Newsom has proposed a total of $1 billion in spending on fire management this year.

“This is a good start, but this is only Year One,” Michael Wara, the director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, told the Los Angeles Times. “We need sustained funding at this scale and maybe even larger for a decade.”

With the fire season rapidly approaching, residents of Western states can get ahead of the smoke by dusting off their air filters, stocking up on N95 respirator masks, and consulting this preparation checklist from the Environmental Protection Agency. In the meantime, it’s a good time to get outside before the fire season truly descends upon us again…

One of the great ironies of climate politics is that America continues to subsidize — to the tune of billions of dollars a year — the very industries that are most responsible for the warming of the planet. Biden wants to put an end to that.

His American Jobs Plan, released last week, recognizes that if the US wants to hit decarbonization targets, and get climate change under control, cutting off government support for fossil fuels is a logical first step. The proposal takes aim at tax preferences, loopholes, and laws that allow fossil fuel companies to dodge costs and avoid cleaning up their pollution.

As part of the tax reform section of the plan, removing preferential treatment for oil, gas, and coal corporations would also free up federal dollars to support dozens of other climate initiatives, for which Biden has proposed around $1 trillion in investment.

But prying away these perks from the industry has been challenging in the past. President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats tried in vain to slice out subsidies, ultimately hitting Republican roadblocks.

Now, with a slim majority in Congress, Democrats have a shot at finishing the job. In the coming months, they will be working on an infrastructure bill that could incorporate many elements of Biden’s American Jobs Plan — including the section on subsidy reform.

Climate advocates say ending subsidies will have a practical economic impact for an industry where margins are often tight, and it will also send a political signal that the government is unambiguously pursuing a clean energy future.

To grasp the potential impact of this reform, let’s look at the web of subsidies today and exactly what it will take to finally untangle it.

Sizing up government support for the fossil fuel industry

First off, the term “subsidy” can be interpreted in many different ways, but it broadly refers to government financial support for an industry.

Some of the biggest subsidies given to the oil and gas industry today extend back almost 100 years. As Molly Sherlock wrote in a 2011 report on their history for the Congressional Research Service, “For more than half a century, federal energy tax policy focused almost exclusively on increasing domestic oil and gas reserves and production.”

Over time, the government began providing subsidies to nuclear and renewable energy as well, but the support for the fossil fuel industry remains strong. The first major Covid-19 relief bill demonstrated that: Congress provided $8.2 billion in tax breaks to 77 fossil fuel companies, according to a new analysis from the nonprofit BailoutWatch.

“It is one of the more egregious ways that the government is prolonging the fossil fuel era and fossil fuel industry influence in our politics,” Collin Rees, a senior campaigner at climate advocacy group Oil Change International, told Vox.

Subsidies are often concealed in obscure language within state and federal tax codes, but Oil Change International combed through the records and produced an in-depth report in 2017. The authors chose to focus on subsidies for fossil fuel mining and drilling, which they argued are particularly egregious — and thus worth our attention — because they can tip the scale toward further fossil fuel extraction.

Consumption and indirect subsidies also support the survival of the fossil fuel business, but less directly. (We’ll circle back to those categories in a bit.)

OCI identified $20.5 billion in annual government subsidies for the oil, gas, and coal industries from 2015 to 2016 — $14.7 billion at the federal level and $5.8 billion at the state level. To put those numbers in context, support for fossil fuels outweighed support for renewable energy based on the data, Vox contributor David Roberts reported.

The majority of the subsidies — 80 percent — went to the oil and gas industry, according to OCI. And the largest subsidy is likely one few Americans have heard of. Corporations get a big tax write-off for “intangible drilling costs,” which applies to expenses for oil and gas exploration before drilling starts. Another obscure but significant subsidy comes in the form of a corporate structure, “Master Limited Partnership,” which allows fossil fuel companies to avoid paying any corporate income taxes.

For the coal sector, the top giveaway has been cheap leases in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana, where the vast majority of coal mining on federal land occurs. Leases have been allocated without a competitive bidding process for decades.

The chart below ranks these benefits among the other top subsidies.

Again, these production subsidies surveyed by OCI are only a subset of the total support for the industry. Further incentives are given to consumers to use oil and gas.

For instance, millions of homeowners receive support to pay their heating bills through the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. For homes heated by natural gas or oil, that support operates as an indirect fossil fuel subsidy. OCI argues that the program could be redesigned to support its aim without boosting fossil fuel consumption (by providing assistance to convert homes to electric heating, for instance).

Another indirect subsidy: Electricity markets are often structured to favor fossil fuels, as David Roberts explained in his 2018 rundown of subsidies.

Government assistance for the industry runs even deeper if you take into account the invisible externalities of burning fossil fuels — the costs of that are currently borne by the public. These include damage from climate impacts and the health burden of air pollution. As Vox’s Umair Irfan previously reported, the International Monetary Fund calculated that these broad subsidies cost an eye-popping $5.4 trillion globally in 2017.

There has been some debate, however, about how useful it is to classify these costs as “subsidies” from a policy perspective. When it comes to Biden’s approach, he recognizes these costs of fossil fuel burning, but he has shied away from proposing carbon pricing directly after the failure of the cap-and-trade bill under Obama. He has proposed using a clean electricity standard and other sectoral policies to tackle emissions and their social costs instead.

And in the subsidy reform section of his plan, he refers specifically to eliminating tax preferences and making polluters pay into the cleanup Superfund.

How Congress could make these subsidies disappear

From his campaign to his early months in office, Biden has made it clear that dismantling these fossil fuel subsidies one of his climate priorities.

Even without Congress, he has some power to make changes from the White House. One of the key moves he can make is blocking future leases for oil and gas drilling on federal land. Biden didn’t explicitly mention federal leasing in the subsidies section of the American Jobs Plan, but in his January 27 climate executive order, he called for a pause on issuing oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters. In early March, the Department of Interior launched a review of the leasing program.

Becca Ellison, policy manager at Evergreen Action, who co-authored a January paper on subsidies, sees the action on federal lands as progress. “The important thing is that the administration and Congress take comprehensive action, whether they call that a subsidy or not is up to them, but we’ve seen really promising steps on ending support for fossil fuel companies,” she said.

But many of the biggest reforms require congressional support; Democrats have proposed several bills to tackle the problem. A comprehensive plan co-authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), dubbed the End Polluter Welfare Act, is regarded as the “gold standard” by advocacy groups. Rees said the bill would be reintroduced — after failing to gain traction with the Republican-controlled Senate last July — later this month.

Passing legislation to eliminate subsidies may prove difficult. Many Republicans have long ditched their free-market values to loudly advocate for support for fossil fuels in recent years, as Brian Kahn detailed in Gizmodo. And it may be hard to convince some Democrats who represent fossil-fuel producing states, Reuters reported. But if the slim Democratic majority holds together, Ellison said the subsidies could be removed through the budget reconciliation process.

If a bill including subsidy reform is passed, it could have significant ripple effects.

“You’d see a fossil fuel industry that is able to be phased out more quickly both because it is not receiving the same financial support and because it is not occupying the same political pedestal as it has for much of the last century,” Rees said.

A change in the US could also help push other countries forward, he added. Since 2009, the G20 has been calling for phasing out these subsidies, and the Paris agreement also pushes nations to align their public finances with its global climate targets.

A 2018 study in Nature found that eliminating global fossil fuel subsidies would decrease carbon dioxide emissions by 0.5 to 2 gigatons by 2030 — the equivalent of Japan’s annual emissions.

These subsidies helped the US become the world’s largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases over the last century. Tossing them out certainly seems like a basic prerequisite for America to reclaim leadership on climate change.

On Friday, Filipino youth activists stood outside a gleaming office tower with a giant, game show-style check. On it was the amount of financing the multinational bank Standard Chartered has provided to coal companies in the country since 2018, stamped red with the word “cancelled.”

This protest outside the bank’s Manila offices was one of hundreds held in 68 countries on March 19, organized by Fridays for Future, the youth climate activism movement started by Greta Thunberg, an 18-year-old Swede. This time, kids, teens, and adults showed up on the streets and on screens to call out world powers’ “empty promises” to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

In recent months, the activists have persevered through quarantines and Zoom fatigue, and while Friday’s turnout didn’t come close to the 4 million who participated in the massive September 20, 2019, climate strike, the strong coordinated effort suggested they are still a force to be reckoned with.

In the last year, a spate of nations including China, Japan, and South Korea have set net-zero emissions targets — often for 2050 or beyond. Corporations, including Standard Chartered, have also made their own pledges. While some of these goals are aligned with the Paris agreement, they are only goals. Currently, global emissions are surging back after dropping last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, and many governments and institutions continue to plow money into fossil fuel projects.

Focusing on the insufficiency of these net-zero targets and pressuring specific international institutions are new tactics for the global youth climate movement, which has historically made broader demands for action.

“I don’t think Fridays for Future has ever done something that is very specific at a global level,” Jon Bonifacio, a 23-year-old activist with Youth Advocates for Climate Action Philippines, told Vox on Friday after a long day coordinating protests in the Philippines.

As part of their latest campaign, the activists are highlighting a new scientific framework for inspecting whether net-zero targets are “empty” or impactful. This could inform future protests to hold companies and countries accountable for their new targets.

“Scientists clearly state that what we need isn’t meaningless net-zero targets filled with loopholes — what we need are transparent, legally binding targets that take in account the aspects of justice and equity,” Nicki Becker, a youth climate activist with Jovenes Por El Clima in Argentina, said in a statement to the press. 

Here’s what climate scientists say a robust net-zero target should look like, and how activists are pushing one bank to meet higher standards.

What activists and scientists want to see from net-zero pledges

A common refrain for youth climate activists when confronting politicians is “listen to the scientists.” This week, the activists showed they’re using that advice to add heft and specificity to their own messaging.

On a Zoom press call on Thursday, a group of youth activists from around the world critiqued the state of net-zero targets. Genesis Whitlock, an activist with Climate Justice Antigua, raised concerns about the impact of developed countries using land from countries in the Global South to offset their emissions. “Will we aim to heal the wounds of natural resource exploitation or will we continue to extract [from] and marginalize Black and Indigenous communities?” she asked.

The activists also invited Joeri Rogelj, the director of research at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, to discuss how to improve these targets. He shared the new framework, which he and co-authors published in the journal Nature on March 16.

“Plans are hard to compare, and definitions loose. The details behind ‘net-zero’ labels differ enormously,” the authors wrote. To make the pledges more legible, the study outlines a checklist of information that target-setters should disclose across three categories — scope, adequacy, and fairness — and a long-term road map.

Scope

Currently, the net-zero label masks large differences in actions, from what gases are actually being targeted to how much the plan relies on offsetting emissions. For instance, China has yet to clarify whether its proposed net-zero target just refers to carbon dioxide or all greenhouse gas emissions.

This lack of transparency raises serious issues — observers cannot evaluate whether a plan is in line with the science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showing that global carbon emissions must reach net-zero by 2050 to keep the world’s temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

So, as a starting point, the authors say pledges need to be clear about what gases they target, what activities they cover (whether they account for the carbon footprint of imported goods, for example), and when they plan to reach net-zero. The plan should also clarify how much they are relying on the “net” part of the net-zero target — in other words, does the plan rely on the massive deployment of carbon dioxide removal plants or other technologies to suck up emissions? The authors point out that some of these solutions are nascent or problematic.

Fairness

In net-zero targets, “ethical judgments are unavoidable, even if unvoiced,” the authors write. If a country sets a later date for net-zero targets, it assumes that other countries will pick up the slack and set earlier deadlines, for example. Similarly, by failing to include all greenhouse gases in their target, a country might let their methane-intensive agricultural sector off the hook, but those emissions will still be felt by the world.

“One really needs to consider whether one sector or one country that is in a better position doesn’t need to go faster or doesn’t need to go beyond net-zero,” Rogelj said during the press call.

The authors are not prescriptive about what constitutes fairness, but they suggest that all countries and other groups setting net-zero targets clearly describe the assumptions they’re making and the implications for other countries.

Road Map

Setting a net-zero target is not enough, the researchers argue. Rather, a clear timeline needs to be established to achieve that goal, along with a regular check-in process to ensure it is being met, otherwise countries might delay the hard work until it’s too late.

Through this checklist, Rogelj said he hopes to help activists and others boost accountability. “It really provides a recipe for activists to use and for them to talk to people in power.”

Putting Standard Chartered to the test

By highlighting the deficiencies in current net-zero targets through the #NoMoreEmptyPromises hashtag on social media, youth climate activists are pushing for the transparency the framework calls for.

On Friday, they chose to shine a light on the mismatch between Standard Chartered’s goals and actions, protesting at the bank’s offices in more than 10 countries, according to a Fridays for Future press release. The activists decided to target the bank because it is a large fossil fuel financier and is headquartered in the UK, which will be hosting the upcoming UN climate negotiations in November.

The bank, which had nearly $800 billion in assets in 2020, set a target to reach net-zero by 2030 — but just for its buildings, not its investments. The bank has provided $2 billion in loans and nearly $8 billion through underwriting services to coal companies since the IPCC’s dire 1.5 Celsius special report was published in 2018, according to German NGO Urgewald.

Since 2018, the bank’s loans and underwriting have supported coal companies across many developing countries including in the Philippines, Indonesia, and India, Urgewald reports. Last year, the bank pledged to divest from any company with more than 10 percent of its revenue from coal by 2030, but activists want divestment now.

Filipino activist Jon Bonifacio reported that the protests targeting the bank on Friday were successful, with activists turning out across the country’s three major island groups for the first time. A bank representative came down to meet the protesters outside the Manila office and accepted their letter of demands to divest from fossil fuels.

“With the strikes that went on today and of course are still going on in different time zones, most of them are targeting Standard Chartered offices and that is something that they’ll probably definitely notice,” Bonifacio said on Friday.

He described the complexity of pulling off this campaign at a time when Covid-19 cases are once again rising in the Philippines. Bonifacio himself was scheduled to speak at the protest, but he had to quarantine when a family member learned they had been in contact with someone who contracted the virus.

Despite the challenges of organizing during the pandemic, he said that spending more time online has helped activists connect and shift their focus to the most affected countries and people.

“The movement will keep growing, the movement will keep diversifying,” he said. “We’ll be here as long as the climate crisis is there.”