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RenewEconomy - Michael Mazengarb


Australia’s main scientific research organisation, along with academics, economists, policy analysis and business people such as National Australia Bank chair Ken Henry, say that the shift to 100 per cent renewables in Australia’s grid is inevitable, and likely by 2050.
A new landmark report by the CSIRO – titled Australian National Outlook – provides a comprehensive vision for what a prosperous Australia can look like throughout the 21st century, and has found that governments need to be proactive in working towards that vision, otherwise Australia risks undergoing a ‘slow decline’.Key to Australia’s future prosperity is for governments to embrace technological change and plan for the transition to a 100 per cent renewable energy grid, along with working cooperatively with other countries to tackle climate change.
NAB’s Ken Henry, the former Treasury Secretary, said that customers and shareholders were putting pressures on companies to adopt a positive vision for the Australian economy that included investments in renewables, which meant Australia was on a pathway towards 100% renewables irrespective of the policy environment.
“Australia’s energy transition is going to happen anyway, almost no matter what the policy framework is. Decisions taken by business leaders today will ensure that by about mid-century, Australia’s electricity sector will be 100% renewables. That’s almost irrespective of what decisions are taken at a policy level.” Henry said in an interview with ABC’s The Business.
“And that’s because, leaders of businesses in the energy sector are having to take investment decisions on behalf of their shareholders right now. Shareholders obviously don’t want to see stranded assets.”
NAB worked with CSIRO to produce the report.
CSIRO’s projections of Australia’s future electricity system show what the future energy mix will look like and how Australia will shift to an electricity market that is almost completely powered by renewable energy, as renewables replace coal and gas, and fossil fuels are pushed out of the market.
With proactive policies in place, Australia can each 100 per cent renewables by around 2050, while also lowering electricity prices for Australian consumers.
The CSIRO predicts that under an ambitious policy scenario, Australians would spend between 58 per cent and 64 per cent less on electricity as a proportion of their income than they are today. This is due to both falling energy costs driven by renewables uptake, as well as increased wages through improved prosperity.
In fact, the worst thing Australia could do in terms of bringing down electricity prices is to continue to foster uncertainty about Australia’s future energy and climate change policies.
Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions could also be reduced to net-zero emissions by 2050, in a plan that both provides a sustainable transition away from fossil fuels, while providing lower energy prices and a strong economy.
If Australia fails to embrace a future energy system powered predominantly by renewable energy, the CSIRO has predicted that it will fall behind in an increasingly competitive global economy, leading to slower economic growth and a drop in living standards for Australians.
CSIRO forecasts that energy prices will be highest under scenarios where there are no established policies to secure investment in renewable energy and guide the transition away from fossil fuels.
“Without stable policy and the investment that flows from it, investors would require higher rates of return, resulting in a cost of wholesale energy that is higher than all other scenarios in the medium term, alongside a slower reduction in emissions” the report said.
Under the more prosperous scenario, Australia’s overall energy use will be lower, driven by substantial improvements in energy productivity and efficiency, but electricity consumption will grow, as industries undertake a shift towards electrification of their energy use, allowing greater utilisation of renewable energy sources.
This includes a dramatic shift towards electric vehicles, with the CSIRO predicting that electric vehicles will be the cheapest form of transport as early as 2025, with around half of all vehicles to be all-electric by 2040.

Links

• Australian National Outlook 2019 - CSIRO
• Warning of reform or forgo $1.5 trillion GDP windfall
• It’s time for Australia to commit to the kind of future it wants: CSIRO Australian National Outlook 2019
• CSIRO maps outlook for Australia in 2060
• Australia risks 'slow decline' without reform
• By 2060, Australia cities could be cheaper, entirely powered by renewables and you could earn $40k more — if we don’t screw it up
• Cleaner, cheaper electricity: Australian National Outlook 2019

Carbon Brief - Zeke Hausfather

Credit: Julie Johnson via Unsplash.Global emissions of CO2 need to decline precipitously over the next few decades, if the world is to meet the Paris Agreement goals of limiting global warming to “well below 2C” and, ideally, below 1.5C.
If these goals are to be met, young people would have to live the greater part of their lives without contributing significantly to global emissions. Essentially, they would have fewer “allowable” CO2 emissions during their lifetime, compared with older generations.
To determine just how much smaller their personal CO2 limits would be, Carbon Brief has combined historical data on emissions and population with projections for the future. In a world where warming is limited to 1.5C, the average person born today can emit only an eighth of the lifetime emissions of someone born in 1950.
The interactive tool, below, shows the size of each person’s “carbon budget” during their  lifetime – based on when and where they were born.
It looks at two different scenarios: one where the world limits warming to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels by 2100; and one were warming is limited to 1.5C.
It also considers two different ways of sharing future allowable emissions: one where each country tracks “optimal” pathways taken from models; and another, focused on equality, where each person can use the same portion of future emissions, no matter where they live.
In all cases, younger generations will have to make do with substantially smaller lifetime carbon budgets than older generations, if the Paris limits are to be respected. This is because most of the allowable emissions have already been used up, meaning young people will not have the luxury of unmitigated emissions enjoyed by older generations.
The idea for this analysis was first proposed to Carbon Brief by Dr Ben Caldecott at the University of Oxford. The methodology used – and its limitations – are explained in detail at the end of this article. Carbon Brief is now working to further develop the analysis with Dr Caldecott and his colleagues.
The global picture
Global emissions must peak in the next decade and quickly decline for the world to stay below its Paris Agreement limits, according to the UN. In the scenarios examined in this article (see methodology at the end for details), global emissions peak around 2020, decline around 50% by 2045 and then fall below zero around 2075 in order to hold global warming to below 2C.
Emissions have to fall even faster for warming to be kept below 1.5C – falling around 50% by 2030 and to below zero by 2055. In the 1.5C scenarios examined here, large amounts of negative emissions are deployed by the end of the century, removing carbon from the atmosphere equivalent to roughly a third of today’s emissions.
These emissions pathways can be divided up into average “lifetime carbon budgets” that depend on an individual’s year of birth. This allocation is based on the changing global population and emissions during each individual’s lifetime.
The figure below shows the global average lifetime carbon budget for people born in each year between 1900 and 2017, in scenarios where warming is kept below 1.5C (dark blue) or 2C (light blue).

Global average lifetime carbon budgets per-capita by birth year for 1.5C and 2C scenarios, assuming a lifespan of 85 years. Based on historical emissions data from the Global Carbon Project, historical and future projected population from the United Nations and global emission projections from MESSAGE-GLOBIOM. Generation birth years shown at the bottom from the Pew Research Center. See the methodology section for details. Chart by Carbon Brief using Highcharts.
As the chart above shows, if warming is limited to well below 2C the global average lifetime carbon budget for someone born in 2017 is 122 tonnes of CO2, only about a third as large as the budget for someone born in 1950. If warming is to be limited to 1.5C, the remaining budget is only 43 tonnes of CO2 and the difference is eight times as large.
Current per-capita global emissions are around 4.9 tonnes per person per year. This means that the lifetime carbon budget of someone born today is equal to 25 years of current emissions if warming is limited to well below 2C – and only nine years of current emissions if warming is limited to 1.5C.

Divvying up emissions
The analysis above uses a global average carbon budget. However, in reality, there is no such thing as a “global average” person and each country’s emissions will follow a slightly different trajectory in “well below” 2C and 1.5C worlds.
In general, emission reductions will need to be proportionally larger in developed, wealthier countries, such as the US, where per-capita emissions are very high. Developing nations, such as India, already have much lower per-capita emissions.
To put the difference into perspective, the average Indian had emissions of 1.9 tonnes of CO2 in 2017, whereas the figure in the US was 16.9 tonnes of CO2.
Moreover, historical emissions vary greatly between countries, with the likes of the US and UK responsible for a far larger share of cumulative emissions since the industrial revolution. This poses an open question as to how the fixed global carbon budgets set by the Paris Agreement should be divided between different countries.
Integrated Assessment ModelsIAMs are computer models that analyse a broad range of data – e.g. physical, economic and social – to produce information that can be used to help decision-making. For climate research, specifically,… Read More There are lots of different ways to allocating future emissions between countries. Integrated assessment models (IAMs) – energy system models that examine what mix of different technologies and choices are needed to meet climate targets – provide one set of budget allocations, reporting future emissions for each region of the world.
The figure below is based on the allocations in 1.5C scenarios from IAMs. It shows how lifetime carbon budgets vary based on birth year, for four major countries and regions that are responsible for the bulk of global CO2 emissions. These are the US (light blue line), Europe (dark blue), China (red), and India (yellow).

Lifetime carbon budgets by birth year based on historical emissions and future IAM 1.5C scenarios, assuming a lifespan of 85 years. Based on historical emissions data from the Global Carbon Project, historical and future projected population from the United Nations and regional emission projections from MESSAGE-GLOBIOM. Generation birth years shown at the bottom from the Pew Research Center. See the methodology section for details. Chart by Carbon Brief using Highcharts.
If the remaining carbon budget is divided up in this way, based on IAM pathways, then national  allowable lifetime emissions are much more similar for someone born in 2017 than in 1950 – but there are still large differences between countries.
For example, someone born today in the US would still be allocated a lifetime carbon budget some 15 times larger than someone born in India. Their budget would be four times larger than someone born in China and around twice as large as in Europe.
The table below shows the lifetime carbon budget in a 1.5C world (2C world) both globally and by major country/region, broken down by generation:
Pre-Boomer
(pre-1946)Boomers
(1946-1964)Gen X
(1965-1980)Millennials
(1981-1996)Gen Z
(1997-2012)Post-Gen Z
(post-2012) Global275325 (348)276 (322)202 (264)118 (191)56 (134) US14941464 (1530)1191 (1342)846 (1052)472 (709)238 (489) Europe686698 (733)582 (668)398 (521)218 (363)105 (259) China119255 (291)256 (334)220 (326) 151 (279)71 (213 India3864 (71)61 (74)52 (69)23 (54)18 (39)
Lifetime carbon budgets in tonnes of CO2 by birth year based on historical emissions and future IAM 1.5C (and 2C) scenarios. Pre-Boomer generations have identical 1.5C and 2C carbon budgets. Using generation periods from the Pew Research Center and averaging the lifetime budget of all the birth years of each generation.
This approach raises obvious questions about equity, as it implies that countries with high historical emissions will also receive a larger share of the proverbial pie in the future. There are lots of different ways to define equity – and little agreement – regarding which approaches would be both possible and “fair” for allocating future emissions.
One alternative would be to allocate the remaining budget equally between all people, wherever they live. This might be hard to achieve in practice as, say, per-capita US emissions would need to fall rapidly towards the global average while those in India would immediately rise.
But it provides a useful thought experiment that can be contrasted to the lifetime carbon budget allocation set out above. Even this might not be truly equal, is it neglects responsibility for historical emissions.
The figure below shows the effect of this allocation on lifetime carbon budgets by birth year for the same four major countries and regions. It is based on historical per-capita emissions and equal per-capita shares of the remaining carbon budget from 2018 onwards, in a scenario where warming is limited to 1.5C.


Same as the prior figure, but using global emission projections from MESSAGE-GLOBIOM to calculate future global per person emissions. See the methodology section for details. Chart by Carbon Brief using Highcharts.
The chart above shows that lifetime carbon budgets converge much more quickly when future emissions are divided equally, even though historical differences between countries remain. As a result, someone born in 2017 would have a similar lifetime carbon budget no matter where they are born.

Some limitations
Calculating lifetime carbon budgets is necessarily imperfect and relies on a series of unrealistic assumptions. Every person is different and, in practice, individual emissions will be strongly affected by income, behaviour and other factors.
While the average 1.5C lifetime carbon budget of someone, say, born in the US around 1995 might be 696 tonnes of CO2, people in that generation will, in practice, have widely varying individual emissions.
The approach taken here – dividing national emissions by population – also glosses over the fact that a sizable portion of emissions for some countries are the result of industrial and commercial activity producing goods for trade that are not consumed at home. These “consumption footprints” can differ significantly from national emission estimates, as Carbon Brief has previously examined.
For simplicity, a constant lifespan of 85 years is assumed when calculating lifetime carbon footprints. This is higher than the current average lifespan in most countries, but may be more realistic for younger generations today given expected advances in medical science and access to healthcare. However, in practice, lifespan differences between countries will likely persist into the future and could impact these calculations.
Finally, this approach assumes that emissions in a given year can be assigned equally across the population regardless of age. In reality, people are probably responsible for considerably lower emissions when they are children than adults, as they are not, say, driving cars and are often consuming less.
That said, this analysis provides a first look at how lifetime carbon budgets vary by age. It suggests that the allowable lifetime emissions for young people today is a fraction of that of previous generations, as the global budget for avoiding warming of 1.5C or 2C has already been mostly used up.

Methodology
Lifetime carbon budgets were calculated by adding the historical and projected future per-capita emissions for each year that an individual is expected to live – assuming a constant lifespan of 85 years since a given birth year for simplicity. This is higher than the current global average lifespan (it is typical of Japan today), but may be more typical for the lifespan of younger people today given continuing medical advances.
For example, if someone were born in the year 2000 in India, their lifetime carbon footprint would be the sum of historical per-capita emissions in India from 2000 to 2017, plus forecast per-capita emissions in India between 2018 and 2085.
The end of 2017 serves as the demarcation between historical and future emissions because 2018 emission and population values are not yet available for all countries.
Carbon budgets were calculated for all possible birth years from 1900 to 2017 for major countries and each of the world regions where UN population projections were available: Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, Oceania and Asia.
Historical CO2 emission estimates for each country from 1751-2017 were obtained from the Global Carbon Project. Historical population data from 1950-2017 and future population projections from 2018-2100 were obtained for each country from the UN World Population Prospects 2017. The “medium” scenario was chosen for future population projections, as it matches reasonably well with the population assumptions in the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP2) world used for IAM emission scenarios.
Future emissions by country for both 1.5C and 2C targets were based on IAM runs from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) MESSAGE-GLOBIOM model using the SSP2 world. SSP2 is a world where current economic and population trends broadly continue and MESSAGE-GLOBIOM was the model chosen to represent SSP2. MESSAGE-GLOBIOM emissions by region – and globally – were taken from the IAMC 1.5C Scenario Explorer.
As IAM runs in recent years lack country-specific values, regional emission estimates were used to estimate country-specific trajectories by scaling current country emissions by the percent reduction in regional emissions from the IAM runs. For example, if the IAM runs showed OECD countries reducing emissions by 50% by 2040 in a 1.5C scenario, emissions in each OECD country were estimated to decrease by 50% by 2040.
Net future emissions were used for per-capita emission estimates. This means that in many countries future per-capita emissions go negative in the second half of the 21st century, particularly in 1.5C scenarios. The distribution of negative emissions in MESSAGE-GLOBIOM varies regionally, with a particularly high concentration of negative emissions in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Finally, as both emission and population projections are only available through to 2100, but people born after 2015 will still be alive post-2100, per-capita emissions are assumed to remain constant at 2100 values in subsequent years.
Two future emission allocation scenarios are provided: one based on the regional MESSAGE-GLOBIOM emission pathways and one where the global MESSAGE-GLOBIOM projected emissions are distributed evenly to every country on a per-capita basis after 2017. The latter shows how a more equitable distribution of remaining emissions would affect lifetime carbon budgets, compared to the allocation in IAMs.
The countries featured in the interactive tool are a subset of those with the largest populations. However, major regions are also included, so if there is a country not featured on the list its region should provide a reasonable estimate. The “North America” region is not shown as all member countries appear on the list.

Links

• How ‘integrated assessment models’ are used to study climate change
• Analysis: How much ‘carbon budget’ is left to limit global warming to 1.5C?
• UNEP: Limiting warming to 1.5C requires ‘fivefold’ increase in climate commitments
• Explainer: 10 ways ‘negative emissions’ could slow climate change
• How to divide up carbon budgets fairly
• Thinking hard about “Equity Reference Frameworks”
• Mapped: The world’s largest CO2 importers and exporters
• Global Carbon Budget
• World Population Prospects 2019

The Guardian - Katharine Murphy

Countries also raise concerns about rise in Australia’s transport emissions and the use of Kyoto carry-over credits
The Coalition has told China it ‘is supporting low and zero emissions transport options in a number of ways’. Photograph: zetter/Getty Images/iStockphotoThe Morrison government has been challenged by the European Union and by China about whether it can meet its Paris commitments given rising emissions, and about growing pollution from vehicles, ahead of a progress meeting about climate commitments in Bonn next week.
Nineteen countries, including Australia, will gather in Bonn on 24 and 25 June for a multilateral assessment of progress made under international climate commitments, and ahead of that session countries have submitted a range of questions about the performance of signatories in meeting their climate targets.
As well as questions about rising emissions, the EU and Canada have also queried the Morrison government’s decision to use carry-over credits from the Kyoto protocol in its latest carbon budget.
The Coalition is counting a 367 megatonne abatement from carry-over credits (an accounting system that allows countries to count carbon credits from exceeding their targets under the soon-to-be-obsolete Kyoto protocol periods against their Paris commitment for 2030) to help meet Australia’s 2030 target.
The EU in its questions to Australia points out that net emissions will grow during the period 2013 to 2020 and notes “Australia is also increasing coalmining, in particular for export”.
It has asked whether Australia considers its emissions profile, which has seen pollution rise since the repeal of the carbon price, to be “on a structural path of decrease in line with its commitments”. It has also flagged fossil fuel exports and asked whether they are sustainable “in the context of Paris agreement”.
Morrison government officials have addressed the implicit criticism by arguing in a submitted answer that “Australia’s national emissions peaked in 2007” and pointing to a fall in emissions per capita.
It says even without its climate policies, unveiled just before the recent federal election, including the reboot of the Abbott-era emissions reduction fund (ERF), “the decoupling of economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions has been progressing steadily since 1990”.
The government says the mix in electricity generation has changed between 2013 and 2020, and the Renewable Energy Target (RET) will see renewable energy grow to about 23.5% of Australia’s energy mix by 2020.
Australian officials do not, in the answer to the EU, mention the RET winds down from 2020, or that a sectoral target to drive emissions reduction in the electricity sector, proposed by Malcolm Turnbull in the national energy guarantee, was scrapped after he was replaced as prime minister by Scott Morrison.
The EU has also challenged Australia on its 2030 Paris target, pointing out “on the basis of reported projections with existing policies and measures it is not on track to meet this commitment”.
The EU asked Australia whether it would need further policies to meet the Paris commitment, given the current trends. Australian government officials point to the policies outlined before the recent election, including the funding boost for the ERF.
But in defending the status quo, the government has also restated a commitment to “review and refine” domestic policies aligned with the five-yearly review process under the Paris agreement. “This approach will provide for integrated consideration of domestic policy and international targets, and provide guidance for industry about future policy review processes,” officials said.
China, in a question to Australia, notes there will be a significant increase in transportation greenhouse gas emissions, and asks what measures Australia plans to take to reduce transport pollution in the future.
While the Morrison government pilloried Labor in the recent election campaign for proposing a vehicle emissions standard and targets for the uptake of electric vehicles, characterising Labor’s plans as a “war on the weekend”, government officials have told China the Coalition “is supporting low and zero emissions transport options in a number of ways”.
It says it is “developing” a national electric vehicle strategy – a strategy the government has not yet unveiled – which it says will build on support being rolled out through the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
It also points to the government’s Green Vehicle Guide website, and mandatory fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emission labels, that “help consumers identify and choose more fuel efficient vehicles” as well as “action to bring our fuel quality in line with international standards”.
The government says the safeguard mechanism “puts regulated limits on the emissions of large transport facilities that emit more than 100,000 tonnes C02-equivalent each year (mostly rail freight, domestic aviation and shipping)” and says the ERF “incentivises businesses, households and landowners to proactively reduce their emissions [and] provides incentives to reduce the emissions intensity of land and sea transport activity”.
It also points to the national hydrogen strategy, which is being led by Australia’s chief scientist, Alan Finkel, which is due to be delivered by the end of 2019.

Links

• Australia's standing in Pacific has plummeted because of our climate change failure
• Australia missing out on huge cuts in emissions through energy efficiency failure
• United Nations Climate Change Multilateral Assessment
• Cabinet papers 1996-1997: how Australia worked to water down Kyoto climate targets
• China demands developed countries 'pay their debts' on climate change
• Australia likely to use controversial Kyoto loophole to meet Paris agreement
• Record emissions keep Australia on path to missing Paris target
• Australia being 'left behind' by global momentum on climate change
• Breakthrough as US and China agree to ratify Paris climate deal
• Obama: US and China have joined Paris climate pact – video
• Paris climate deal: where US and China have led, others must quickly follow
• US and China to sign Paris climate deal in April

Los Angeles Review of Books - Franz Baumann*


BILL MCKIBBEN, and this is meant as a compliment, is the Don Quixote of the environmental movement, or perhaps its Vivaldi. For over 30 years, he has been tilting at the windmills of ignorance, indifference, and interests — and composed the same concerto a few hundred times. Since his groundbreaking The End of Nature in 1989, he has written 16 more books and countless articles on humanity’s predatory and self-destructive relationship with nature. All are readable, measured, sensible, informative, factual, and incisive, yet short on polemics, hyperbole, and dubious assertions.
Puzzled by the recklessness with which the planetary branch we are sitting on is being sawed off, McKibben in Falter once more explains nature’s workings, asks profound questions, and tells wonderful stories. Unable to do otherwise, McKibben goes after the same windmills yet again — and crafts another lyrical masterpiece.
Falter reads like a book-length article in The New Yorker, which is not surprising since McKibben began his professional life there as a staff writer in the 1980s. This book is the latest installment of a trilogy of environmental disaster chronicles published within the space of a few weeks in the spring of this year. First came David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, then Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth: A Recent History, and now Falter. Binge-readers and political activists will benefit from all three.
Falter, organized in four parts and an epilogue, is broadest in scope. It is a humane and wise book, even a beautiful one, if that’s not oxymoronic, given its subject. Amply sourced and referenced for deeper study or for skeptics, it tracks the state of the natural world in exhaustive detail, and identifies the forces imperiling it: the blistering heatwaves in North America and Europe; the droughts in Africa, Asia, and Australia; the typhoons in South-East Asia; the dying old-growth forests attacked by pests and diseases unleashed by climate change; the rising sea levels and unexpectedly speedy warming of the Earth’s oceans as well as their expectedly speedy acidification as well as their overfishing and choking with plastics, “the dead zones at the mouths of all major rivers where fertilizers pour into the sea”; the plummeting corn, rice, sorghum, and wheat crop yields resulting from higher temperatures as well as uncertain rainfall; the biological annihilation of species.
McKibben minces no words on the first page: “Put simply, between ecological destruction and technological hubris, the human experiment is now in question.” To avert catastrophe, no less is required than, in the clinical language of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “systems transitions” that are technically possible, yet “unprecedented in terms of scale.” The implication is that we are in existential peril and nothing short of a World War II–like mobilization in terms of commitment, focus, resources, and global reach will do. Too much time has been lost in the past decades — squandered actually.
Those who think we have never had it so good, for instance the obnoxiously cheerful author Steven Pinker, are off base because the implied assumption that past performance is indicative of future results. Climate change is so vexing precisely because it is the flip side of the phenomenal accomplishments of the past century or so. Things went right for too long, especially since World War II. Life expectancy, health, calorie intake, disposable income, car ownership, air travel, living space, and other treats rose to historically unprecedented levels. The bill for all this good living is now coming due, quite like the heart attack that strikes down the middle-aged, obese, sedentary, hard-drinking, chain-smoking guy, shattering his self-image of invulnerability. Except that, in the case of global heating, the cost for this generation’s profligacy is passed on to the next, and all generations thereafter. The combination of abundant cheap energy — fossil fuels all, first coal, then oil, and now gas — and scientific as well as technological progress has resulted in historically unparalleled economic growth, wealth, and opportunities.
Humans, on account of numbers and consumption, have become a geological force. “[N]o Roman emperor could change the pH of the oceans, but we’ve managed that trick in short order.” Humans have changed the energy balance of the planet, and thus fundamentally the way the world operates. To wit, the hottest five years on record were the last five years, and 20 of the hottest years happened in the last 22 years.
McKibben has a knack for scare facts, all backed up by documentary evidence. Who knew that humanity’s energy and resource usage during the past 35 years was more than during all of previous history? Or that more than “half of all the greenhouse gases emitted since the start of the Industrial Revolution have spewed from exhaust pipes and smokestacks since 1988”? Or that the carbon dioxide we’re emitting into the atmosphere is the equivalent of “400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs every day, or four each second”? Or that, “if the billions of years of life on Earth were scaled to a twenty-four-hour day, our settled civilization began about a fifth of a second ago”? Or that a barrel of oil, “currently about sixty dollars, provides energy equivalent to about twenty-three thousand hours of human labor”? It is the scale and speed of humanity’s impact that has nature reeling.
The science is clear, and has been for a long time — for two centuries actually. As any encyclopedia or biology, chemistry, or physics textbook will confirm, the greenhouse effect was mentioned as early as 1824 by the French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier. The argument and the evidence were further strengthened by another French scientist, Claude Pouillet, and the Irish physicist John Tyndall. In 1896, the Swedish physicist and eventual Nobel Prize winner (in chemistry) Svante Arrhenius more fully quantified the greenhouse effect. McKibben notes that in November 2017, 15,000 scientists from 184 countries issued a forthright “Warning to Humanity,” which, within months, became the sixth-most-discussed academic paper in history. It has now been signed by well over 20,000 scientists. A similar initiative, Scientists for Future (S4F) of German, Austrian, and Swiss scientists, collected nearly 27,000 signatures in March 2019. Scientific uncertainty is certainly not the issue.
McKibben devotes a chapter to retracing how the fossil fuel companies — the main villains of the book — knew as early as 1959 about the warming effects of carbon dioxide. The initial concerns soon gave way to salivating at the prospect of a warming arctic and thus lower drilling costs there. Ignoring the findings of their in-house scientists, the marketing folks took over, emphasizing the — nonexistent — uncertainty in the scientific community about climate change. Before that happened, Walter Cronkite reported as fact the looming dangers of climate change on the evening news on Thursday, April 3, 1980. Nathaniel Rich reminds us that in 1988 32 climate bills were introduced in Congress, many enjoying not only Democratic but also Republican support. In 2007, the Republican Senator John McCain said:
The science tells us that urgent and significant action is needed. […] If the scientists are right and temperatures continue to rise, we could face environmental, economic, and national security consequences far beyond our ability to imagine. If they are wrong and the Earth finds a way to compensate for the unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, what will we have accomplished? Cleaner air, greater energy efficiency, a more diverse and secure energy mix, and U.S. leadership in the technologies of the future. There is no doubt; failure to act is the far greater risk.What flipped the Republican Party? Was it better data, unforeseen facts, or new revelations? For politicians — given two-, four-, or six-year election cycles, immediate grievances are paramount, such as unemployment, depressed wages, rising inequality, immigration, and whatnot — it is a losing strategy to campaign on a platform of short-term sacrifices for long-term gains, regardless of the smallness of the former and the vastness of the latter. A majority of “voters must support the adoption of substantial restrictions on their excessively consumerist lifestyle, and there is no indication they would be willing to make such sacrifices,” McKibben quotes two analysts as declaring. There is indeed a co-dependency between businesses and consumers, quite like that between drug pushers and drug users. Addicts care only about the daily fix. They cannot envision obvious solutions, let alone adopt them, even if staying the course dooms all. But only tomorrow.
The Earth’s carrying capacity is a secondary concern, as are the costs of delayed mitigation measures. McKibben quotes environmental writer Alex Steffen, who coined the term predatory delay, “the blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” Those with no power today and having contributed nothing to global heating — future generations, the poor in the Global South, and other species — will inherit a scorched Earth and an economic calamity.
Meanwhile, there are those who deny the climate problem altogether, or those who find prohibitive the costs of decisive remedial action, or those who, like McKibben, hope that technological progress will obviate the need for a change in the Western lifestyle. I don’t believe that he actually believes this. But he thinks, correctly, that solar energy is the closest there is to a solution. Not only can it provide unlimited clean power, but it also would reduce the power of a nefarious fossil fuel industry, reduce pollution, and, as a “technology of repair, social as well as environmental,” enhances the autonomy and dignity of people everywhere. He cites studies “that every major nation on earth could be supplying 80 percent of its power from renewables by 2030, at prices far cheaper than paying the damage for climate change.” A just-published German-Finnish analysis claims that
[a] global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors — power, heat, transport and desalination before 2050 is feasible. Existing renewable energy potential and technologies, including storage, is capable of generating a secure energy supply at every hour throughout the year.The problem, though, goes far beyond power generation and requires a radical restructuring of production, consumption, and mobility in Western countries. The imperative is to pull off, in the next few years, a mobilization on the scale of World War II. McKibben evokes how, “[a]fter the attack on Pearl Harbor, the world’s largest industrial plant under a single roof went up in six months, near Ypsilanti, Michigan; […] within months, it was churning out a B-24 liberator bomber every hour.”
Hope being more motivating than despair, the book is a call to arms: “Let’s be, for a while, true optimists, and operate on the assumption that human beings are not grossly defective. Let’s assume we’re capable of acting together to do remarkable things.” It is a lovely sentiment, but also a reminder that it is not only the climate change deniers who are anti-science. So, too, are the technology enthusiasts and renewable-energy optimists who entertain the fantasy that it will be possible for 10 billion people — 40 percent more than today by the end of the century — to live in the style of the American or European middle class.
Population growth is one of the blind spots in Falter; nuclear energy, carbon pricing, carbon capture, and sequestration are others. Sensing, perhaps, that the political traffic cannot bear much, the book’s US-centrism avoids another uncomfortable insight, namely that climate change is a global public policy problem that cannot be solved in one country only, but requires international cooperation, compromise, and cohesion. But these are not notions in sync with “America First.” Possible, too, that McKibben prefers not to complicate matters, get side-tracked, or cause paralyzing gloom, even though he acknowledges that a “writer doesn’t owe a reader hope — the only obligation is honesty.”
Nevertheless, Falter provides ample evidence that we are on the cusp of an avoidable disaster. Weighing future cataclysm against short-term comfort should be a no-brainer because, if the climate breaks down, all bets are off. Don Quixote’s exertions may turn out to be worthwhile after all.

*Franz Baumann is a senior fellow and a member of the board of trustees at the  Hertie School of Governance in Berlin as well as a visiting professor at New York University. Prior to entering academia, he worked for the United Nations for over 30 years in many places and capacities. As an assistant secretary-general, his last assignment was special advisor on the Environment and Peace Operations.

Links

• No Happy Ending: On Bill McKibben’s “Falter” and David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth”
• X and the Leviathan: Can We Imagine an Alternative Politics of Climate Change?
• “When I Was Alive”: William T. Vollmann’s Climate Letter to the Future
• On the Front Lines of Climate Change
• Enough Hot Air: Paul G. Harris’s Case For A New Climate Politics
• Book Reviews: The End Of The World Is Coming, And You Are Responsible

Canberra Times - Ebony Bennett*

Australia's debate on the climate crisis reached a new level of lunacy this past week. Almost nowhere else in the world is the climate debate so divorced from reality.
Firstly, Adani's groundwater plan was approved by the Queensland government in a rushed process.
This came after the former commonwealth environment minister rushed Adani's water plan through federally.
The CSIRO's advice to both Commonwealth and Queensland governments was Adani's groundwater model was "not fit for purpose".
Despite this, both have accepted Adani's promise to fix the model later, after it has started mining coal.
Canberra school students earlier this year striked from school against Adani's coal mine and climate change. Picture: Terry CunninghamAs writer and anthropologist Professor Marcia Langton observed on ABC's The Drum: "If we want an economy run like Brazil or PNG, where political pressure and corruption can distort the decision-making process on issues as important as the largest coalmines in the world, then we should continue on the way we are."
This week Energy Minister Angus Taylor dissembled that it was good news that Australia's emissions have risen for the third year in a row (mainly due to LNG), because our LNG is replacing coal overseas, thereby reducing global emissions.
A few years back, then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull tried to tell us exporting coal helped to reduce global emissions because Australia's coal was "cleaner" than other countries' coal.
It was a nonsense argument then and it is now. Basically, Taylor, like Turnbull before him, is trying to persuade us our crap doesn't stink and that Australia happens to be uniquely blessed with the only pollution-reducing fossil fuels on Earth. Think about it. More coal and more gas pushes emissions down? Only in Australia would this pass for legitimate debate.
The very the same people who run this line also argue that stopping new mines and exporting less will make no difference. They can't have it both ways.
For decades Australian governments and fossil fuel companies have tried try to distract Australians from the enormous climate impacts of our fossil fuel exports.
Australia's fossil fuel exports contain more than twice as much CO2 potential as Australia's domestic emissions. Australia is the biggest per capita domestic emitter in the OECD, and our exports do twice as much damage.
Let's be clear, the science hasn't changed - together, coal, gas and oil are the number one cause of the climate crisis engulfing this little planet we all share. More coal and gas exports will fuel more droughts, bushfires, floods and heatwaves. That's a fact. And if we don't have a plan to move beyond coal, gas and oil soon, the climate impacts will only get worse.
This year's Queensland budget talks about needing to "build greater resilience ... in the face of the headwinds, like more frequent natural disasters caused by climate change". The damage bill from Queensland's summer of bushfires and floods will be $1.3 billion - that's from just one summer - entirely paid for by taxpayers. It is a special kind of madness to acknowledge in the budget the cost of climate impacts will grow, while rushing through approval for a new coal mine.
To avoid dangerous climate change and comply with the Paris Agreement, coal use needs to immediately decline and be almost entirely phased out by 2050.
There has never been a worse time in human history to approve or build a coal mine that aims to produce 60 million tonnes of coal per year for 90 years.
The fact Queensland voters swung away from Labor at the federal election doesn't magically solve the climate crisis or change the science; the environment doesn't negotiate. Burning fossil fuels for decades has increased the temperature of the oceans. Half of the Great Barrier Reef is dead and no amount of coal royalties can bring it back to life. We could pass a law prohibiting anyone from talking about it, but it's the dead coral that's driving tourists away from the reef, not the scientists and environmentalists who are sounding the alarm.
Adani's mine, and all the proposed coal mines in the Galilee Basin, are a threat to the tens of thousands of existing jobs that rely on a healthy Great Barrier Reef. Solving regional unemployment in central and north Queensland is important but building the Adani mine will barely shift the needle on greater employment.
Coal mining is one of the least labour-intensive industries in Australia, it just doesn't need many workers. Especially not when the demand for coal is declining.
That's why it was extraordinary when in an interview, the MP for Capricornia Michelle Landry admitted she has never actually asked Adani how many ongoing jobs there will be.
Considering Adani has constantly changed its jobs figures depending on who it is talking to, and publicly stated it plans to automate the mine from pit to port, this seems like an oversight.
Adani's proposed mine is now four times smaller than originally planned yet it is supposed to deliver five times more jobs. Magic or madness?
The Queensland government is still offering Adani free water, a free pass on the mine rehabilitation bill and a special royalty subsidy that's being kept secret.
But I'm an optimist. People thought the one-billion dollar Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility loan was a done deal before the Queensland government vetoed it when Queenslanders made it clear they oppose public subsidies for fossil fuel projects.
The state government pulled out of its previous plans to give Adani a free $100 million road upgrade. Backers of Adani said it would have no trouble finding finance, but more than 50 financial institutions, contractors and insurers have ruled out any involvement and Adani was forced to self-finance the project.
And there's plenty more standing in Adani's way. To name just a few, it requires two more Commonwealth approvals for groundwater plans, which CSIRO says are not up to scratch. Adani has no construction contractor and it's still unclear how they will fund the project. There is a court judgment still to come on the Indigenous Land Use Agreement, which is disputed by the Wangan & Jagalingou traditional owners.
But just as climate action being cheap isn't the reason to take climate action - though it's true - the fact that coal mines face obstacles isn't the reason why we need to stop new coal mines.
Like damming the Franklin River, building an enormous new coal mine is fundamentally a bad idea - economically and environmentally. That's why two thirds of Australians oppose the Adani mine.
A different way is possible. Sometime next year the ACT will become the first Australian jurisdiction to be 100 per cent powered by renewable electricity. Tasmania is set to achieve the same goal by 2022.
But we can't pretend Australia is in any kind of "transition" while we are still approving new coal mines. That way lies madness.

*Ebony Bennett is deputy director of The Australia Institute

Links

• Adani Decision Must Not Be Last Word In Climate Fight
• Adani Mine Gets Final Environmental Approval For Carmichael Mine
• Scientists Warn Ancient Desert Springs May Dry Up Under Adani Plan
• Al Gore Slams Adani, Tells Queensland 'Good Luck' In Selling Coal To India
• ABC Says It Didn't Reject Adani Story Because Of Company Pressure
• Environment Leaders Reflect On Their Role In The 'Climate Election'
• Explaining Adani: Why Would A Billionaire Persist With A Mine That Will Probably Lose Money?
• Australia Keeps Voting For Coal, But Investors Are Quietly Abandoning Plans For New Mines
• Australia Plans Coalfield The Size Of Britain In Climate Change U-Turn
• Morrison Sprints To Adani Approval

The Conversation - Michael J. I. Brown

New South Wales, which was 100% drought-declared in August 2018, is already suffering climate impacts. Michael Cleary The Coalition has been re-elected to government, and after six years in office it has not created any effective policies for reducing greenhouse emissions. Does that mean the Australian climate change debate is stuck in 2013? Not exactly.
While Australia still lacks effective climate change policies, the debate has definitely shifted. It’s particularly noticeable to scientists, like myself, who were very active participants in the Australian climate debate just a few years ago.
The debate has moved away from the basic science, and on to the economic and political ramifications. And if advocates for reducing greenhouse emissions don’t fully recognise this, they risk shooting themselves in the foot.
Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions are not falling. Department of Environment and EnergyThe old denials
Old-school climate change denial, be it denial that warming is taking place or that humans are responsible for that warming, featured prominently in Australian politics a decade ago. In 2009 Tony Abbott, then a Liberal frontbencher jockeying for the party leadership, told ABC’s 7.30 Report:
I am, as you know, hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science on climate change.The theory and evidence base for human-induced climate change is vast and growing. In contrast, the counterarguments were so sloppy that there were many targets for scientists to shoot at.
Climate “sceptics” have always been very keen on cherrypicking data. They would make a big fuss about some unusually cold days, or alleged discrepancies at a handful of weather stations, while ignoring broader trends. They made claims of data manipulation that, if true, would entail a global conspiracy, despite the availability of code and data.
Incorrect predictions of imminent global cooling were made on the basis of rudimentary analyses rather than sophisticated models. Cycles were invoked, in a manner reminiscent of epicycles and stock market “chartism” – but doodling with spreadsheets cannot defeat carbon dioxide.
That was the state of climate “scepticism” a decade ago, and frankly that’s where it remains in 2019. It’s old, tired, and increasingly irrelevant as the impact of climate change becomes clearer.
Australians just cannot ignore the extended bushfire season, drought, and bleached coral reefs.zzz
“Since 2010, all of Western Australia’s reefs systems have bleached at least once” due to anthropogenic heating.

ALL of Australia’s reefs are rapidly declining. https://t.co/icJgojEyAV https://t.co/eNvVAq84tR https://t.co/8R0S5BxsjA— Terry Hughes (@ProfTerryHughes) May 22, 2019
Partisans
Climate “scepticism” was always underpinned by politics rather than science, and that’s clearer now than it was a decade ago.
Several Australian climate contrarians describe themselves as libertarians - falling to the right of mainstream Australian politics. David Archibald is a climate sceptic, but is now better known as candidate for the Australian Liberty Alliance, One Nation and (finally) Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party. The climate change denying Galileo Movement’s claim to be to be non-partisan was always suspect - and now doubly so with its former project leader, Malcolm Roberts, representing One Nation in the Senate.
Given this, it isn’t surprising that relatively few Australians reject the science of climate change. Just 11% of Australians believe recent global warming is natural, and only 4% believe “there’s no such thing as climate change”.
Old-school climate change denial isn’t just unfounded, it’s also unpopular. Before last month’s federal election, Abbott bet a cafe patron in his electorate A$100 that “the climate will not change in ten years”. It reminded me of similar bets made and lost over the past decade. We don’t know whether Abbott will end up paying out on the bet – but we do know he lost his seat.
This is the signed $100 bet former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott made with a woman at a Manly coffee shop, "that the climate will not change in ten (10) years". Read her story: https://t.co/CUIBP0VTvc #WarringahVotes #auspol #ausvotes2019 #ausvotes #ausvotes19 pic.twitter.com/hkJsRmdLdg— Guardian Australia (@GuardianAus) May 7, 2019
The shift
So what has changed in the years since Abbott was able to gain traction, rather than opprobrium, by disdaining climate science? The Australian still runs Ian Plimer and Maurice Newman on its opinion pages, and Sky News “after dark” often features climate cranks. But prominent politicians rarely repeat their nonsense any more. When the government spins Australia’s rising emissions, it does it by claiming that investing in natural gas helps cut emissions elsewhere, rather than by pretending CO₂ is merely “plant food”.
As a scientist, I rarely feel the need to debunk the claims of old-school climate cranks. OK, I did recently discuss the weather predictions of a “corporate astrologer” with Media Watch, but that was just bizarre rather than urgent.
Back in the real world, the debate has shifted to costs and jobs.
Modelling by the economist Brian Fisher, who concluded that climate policies would be very expensive, featured prominently in the election campaign. Federal energy minister Angus Taylor, now also responsible for reducing emissions, used the figures to attack the Labor Party, despite expert warnings that the modelling used “absurd cost assumptions”.
Shorten is still refusing to costs his climate policies. BAEconomics has told us. 336,000 jobs lost, a $9,000 hit to annual wages and a 58% increase in electricity. No wonder Shorten won’t ‘fess up. #auspol https://t.co/3S7UB4OT6v— Angus Taylor MP (@AngusTaylorMP) April 30, 2019
Many people still assume the costs of climate change are in the future, despite us increasingly seeing the impacts now. While scientists work to quantify the environmental damage, arguments about the costs and benefits of climate policy are the domain of economists.
Jobs associated with coal mining were a prominent theme of the election campaign, and may have been decisive in Queensland’s huge anti-Labor swing. It is obvious that burning more coal makes more CO₂, but that fact doesn’t stop people wanting jobs. The new green economy is uncharted territory for many workers with skills and experience in mining.
That said, there are economic arguments against new coalmines and new mines may not deliver the number of jobs promised. Australian power companies, unlike government backbenchers and Clive Palmer, have little enthusiasm for new coal-fired power stations. But the fact remains that these economic issues are largely outside the domain of scientists.
Debates about climate policy remain heated, despite the scientific basics being widely accepted. Concerns about economic costs and jobs must be addressed, even if those concerns are built on flawed assumptions and promises that may be not kept. We also cannot forget that climate change is already here, impacting agriculture in particular.
Science should inform and underpin arguments, but economics and politics are now the principal battlegrounds in the Australian climate debate.

Links

• Australia's greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise
• Climate sceptic or climate denier? It’s not that simple and here’s why
• Whichever way you spin it, Australia’s greenhouse emissions have been climbing since 2015
• More than half of the corals died on red reefs, in two consecutive summers with record-breaking heat
• Mega mine next to Adani quietly put on hold, thousands of promised jobs in doubt
• Facebook’s Newest ‘Fact Checkers’ Are Koch-Funded Climate Deniers
• The Next Reckoning: Capitalism And Climate Change
• Climate Change Denial Is Evil, Says Mary Robinson
• Donald Trump’s Climate Denial Gets More Ridiculous By The Day
• Malcolm Farr: ‘The Public Debate On The Existence Of Climate Change Is Over And We Are Owed An Apology’
• How The Weather Gets Weaponized In Climate Change Messaging
• 11 Things Climate Change 'Dismissive' People Say On Social Media
• This Summer Is Angry: Are You?
• Using The Big Freeze To Deny Climate Change... Stupidity Or Cynicism?

.qq { color: #E77500; } Undark - Isabella Kaminski

Increasingly, global warming science is going unchallenged in lawsuits seeking to curb fossil fuel use and hold companies to account.
Alexander Pohl/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesIn September 2017, San Francisco experienced its hottest day on record, with temperatures reaching a searing 106 degrees. Weeks later, the city joined Oakland to announce it would sue five major fossil fuel firms — BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips — for the costs of building sea walls and other infrastructure to protect residents from global warming.
“I don’t even imagine a case where there is a jury hearing a liability issue that you’d see a vigorous attack on the underlying science.”When the case reached court the following year, federal district judge William Alsup ordered a tutorial on climate change in which he asked both sides a series of pointed questions, including what caused the planet’s ice ages and what the main sources of CO2 in the atmosphere were. In the news media, the trial was cast as a possible “Scopes” moment for climate change, a reference to the seminal 1925 Tennessee trial in which evolutionary theory was pitted against Biblical teaching.
The cities called on a number of expert witnesses, including Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford. By walking the judge through the century-long history of climate science, punctuated with rapidly ascending line graphs, the witnesses brought global warming to the court’s attention in a way that left no doubt about how credible a threat it was. The fossil-fuel companies, meanwhile, took a different tack. Chevron’s evidence during the tutorial was presented through a lawyer, who acknowledged the role of human activity in climate change but denied the company could have known the future implications of its actions and said a court wasn’t the right place to deal with the issue. Statements submitted by the other defendants were largely in line with Chevron’s presentation.
Filed alongside the case were two amicus briefs — documents produced by someone who is not a direct party in a case, but has an interest in the subject at hand — questioning aspects of climate science. They were written by well-known climate skeptics and promoted by the Heartland Institute, a libertarian organization with links to the fossil fuel industry. Alsup challenged the briefs’ validity and asked who had funded the research behind them, which turned out to include fossil fuel firms such as Peabody and ExxonMobil.
In the end, Allen said, the defense chose not to call on those climate skeptics when presenting its formal evidence in court, a sign of how much progress has been made in climate science and public understanding over the past decade. “Maybe 10 years ago they would have been called, but I think it’s recognized now that it’s become so discredited that it’s not worth putting them up,” said Allen.
Alsup ultimately dismissed the case, ruling that while the evidence of climate change is real and persuasive, the courts are not the proper place to decide issues of such global magnitude, deferring the matter to the legislative and executive branches. Even so, his overall sympathy to the science and the short shrift he gave climate-change denial show how the basic facts of anthropogenic global warming are increasingly being accepted in law. Indeed, other jurisdictions in the United States and abroad now regularly hear about the effects of global warming and the threats it poses. And campaign groups, individuals, and public authorities involved in the burgeoning field of climate litigation are testing out various legal strategies to try to force recalcitrant governments and companies to cut their emissions faster and to get compensation for damages.
“I think the real reason you don’t see the basic science challenged much in these cases is that courts are places of inquiry where the standards of reliability are reason and evidence rather than tweets, falsehoods, and the kind of manipulative discourse that you hear in the political sphere,” said Douglas Kysar, the deputy dean of Yale Law School. “In the U.S., I don’t even imagine a case where there is a jury hearing a liability issue that you’d see a vigorous attack on the underlying science.”
Oakland and San Francisco are now appealing Alsup’s decision, but the judge’s active engagement with the science was nonetheless in stark contrast to a Supreme Court case 12 years earlier, involving the Environmental Protection Agency’s responsibility for regulating greenhouse gases. When Justice Antonin Scalia was corrected for confusing the layers of the atmosphere, he blurted out in frustration: “I’m not a scientist. That’s why I don’t want to have to deal with global warming.”
That would be unlikely to fly today, and Kysar notes that expert testimony in most courtrooms is subject to rigorous admissibility standards. “The courts’ legitimacy and credibility is not based on the power of the purse, having an army, or being elected; it’s based on making pronouncements that seem to be driven by evidence, reason, and principle,” he said. “So when they’re making scientific claims about what actions are causing what effects in the world, they want to be quite sure they’ve got it right.”
••••KRISTIN CASPER, litigation counsel for Greenpeace’s Global Climate Justice and Liability campaign, said judicial awareness of climate science will continue to grow as public awareness and acceptance increases. “I would expect almost every judiciary will have a climate case before it at some point in the next couple of years,” Casper said. One example: In 2017, an Australian judge was asked to determine whether an open-cut coal mine should be built in Gloucester, New South Wales. The Rocky Hill Coal Project had been denied permission by the state’s planning minister.
“I would expect almost every judiciary will have a climate case before it at some point in the next couple of years.”In a masterclass of science communication, Will Steffen, emeritus professor at the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute and a member of Australia’s Climate Council, explained how the world has already vastly overcommitted to spending its carbon budget. He gently led the court to the conclusion that any project which opens up new fossil fuel deposits is incompatible with the Paris Agreement on climate change which most countries signed in 2015. “I wanted to make sure that the chain of logic we used in a scientific approach came through very clearly,” Steffen said. In February 2019, the judge refused to approve the Rocky Hill project in a judgment that extensively referenced Steffen’s testimony.
In other countries — particularly in Europe — public acceptance of climate change science is broader and is often reflected in legal cases. When the Urgenda Foundation, a Dutch organization devoted to promoting use of renewable energy, challenged the Dutch government’s strategy to curb greenhouse-gas emissions in 2015, it deliberately chose not to put forward any climate experts as witnesses. Urgenda’s legal counsel, Dennis van Berkel, said they based their case entirely on official reports from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), of which the Netherlands is a member. “We wanted to have a discussion on the law, not the facts,” van Berkel said. “So it was very much our goal to present the facts as they were acknowledged by the state themselves.”
The Dutch government didn’t dispute that climate change is real, but it disagreed that it had to act as quickly as campaigners wanted. It had already set a target to cut emissions by 2020 but was unlikely to meet it. Urgenda responded by presenting evidence from the IPCC and UNEP showing that delays in confronting climate change would exacerbate its risks and costs. Van Berkel said politicians often argue that it’s too expensive to act on climate change. “But that argument came up short in court because there was no way to substantiate it,” he said, “because the reports all read in the other direction.”
In 2015, the judge agreed, ordering the Netherlands to cut its emissions by 25 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. The Dutch government is appealing the decision in the Netherlands’ Supreme Court, where the final argument is likely to revolve around an interpretation of human rights law. But it was the first time a court had forced a government to act on climate change, and it inspired similar cases in Ireland, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Pakistan.
••••OF COURSE, judges still have to address knotty questions about who is ultimately responsible for putting emissions into the air, who should stop it from happening, and who should pay for the consequences. Answers will only come as more cases go to court, and it seems likely that plaintiffs will be helped by the accumulation of scientific evidence analyzing the extent to which climate change contributes to sea-level rise or extreme weather, and how much can be traced to particular companies.
Plaintiffs will be helped by the accumulation of scientific evidence analyzing the extent to which climate change contributes to sea-level rise or extreme weather.But even if climate litigation doesn’t succeed, it has helped to shift the tone of public debate, as is clear with one of the most important cases currently going through the courts. In Juliana v. United States, a group of 21 young people claim inaction on climate change violates their fundamental constitutional rights to liberty, life, and property. While the Obama administration initially attempted to dismiss the case, filed by the nonprofit organization Our Children’s Trust in 2016, its lawyers didn’t dispute many of the stated facts about climate change. And even now, Kysar said, despite the current climate-change skepticism guiding the Trump White House, the department’s new political appointees can do little to change its formal response.
“If they tried to file an amended answer which went back on those stipulations,” said Kysar, “they would have looked like a laughing stock.”
The Juliana case has many procedural and institutional hurdles to overcome before it reaches trial. Earlier this month, a panel of judges heard arguments from both sides on whether the case should be allowed to proceed. But if it does, Kysar believes it will be very hard for the government to win.
“What it would have to say is that, although we stipulate to all these facts about the existential threat that we are substantially contributing to through our actions and inactions, we don’t believe that it’s the responsibility of government to preserve the basic conditions for civilized life,” he said. “What lawyer wants to make that argument?”

Links

• Cutting-Edge CO2 Tracking Technology Could Boost Climate Liability Claims
• Kids Suing The US Over Climate Change Are Getting Global Support
• Brace For Impact - Climate Change Litigation Is Fast Approaching
• Torres Strait Islanders Ask UN To Hold Australia To Account On Climate ‘Human Rights Abuses’
• Torres Strait Islanders Accuse Government Of Human Rights Breach Over Climate Inaction
• Climate Change Activists Worldwide Look To Courts As A Powerful New Ally
• Climate Change - The Gathering Legal And Policy Storm In Australia And Its Impact On The Energy And Resources Sector
• Climate Change Could Destroy His Home In Peru. So He Sued An Energy Company In Germany.
• More climate change legal links

Mother Jones - Emma McIntosh

In the fight against climate disinformation, experts like him are turning to new arenas.
Scientist Michael Mann attends the New York screening of the HBO documentary, "How To Let Go Of The World And All The Things Climate Can't Change" in New York City. Slaven Vlasic/Getty/HBOIn 2011, renowned scientist Michael E. Mann sued a Canadian think tank that published an interview suggesting his work on climate change was fraud.
Eight years later, the Winnipeg-based Frontier Centre for Public Policy—which often promotes climate change denial—apologized Friday and wiped the inflammatory interview from its website.
“(The apology) gives me faith in our legal system that truth can still win out, even in an era of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts,'” Mann said in an email to National Observer.
In the fight against climate disinformation, experts like Mann, an atmospheric scientist at Pennsylvania State University, are turning to new arenas.
Mann is best known as the lead researcher on a landmark 1998 paper on climate change. He and three colleagues reconstructed global temperatures going back about 500 years, producing a now-infamous sideways-hockey-stick-like graph of global temperatures that showed a sharp upswing beginning in the 1900s.
Mann has spent the two decades since the paper’s publication defending it and his reputation against climate change deniers—sometimes in court. He settled with the Frontier Centre on Friday, but a related case in British Columbia and a similar one in the United States are ongoing.
In a message posted to its website, the Frontier Centre apologized for publishing “untrue and disparaging” comments about Mann.
“Although the Frontier Centre for Public Policy still does not see eye to eye with Mr. Mann on the subject of global warming and climate change, we now accept that it was wrong to publish allegations by others that Mr. Mann did not comply with ethical standards…” the think tank wrote in part.
I've settled my claims in BC Supreme Court against The Frontier Centre for Public Policy Inc. on a basis which includes the following retraction & apology. I have not settled my claims against Tim Ball, who remains a defendant in that lawsuit: https://t.co/3q5YhWoxxQ pic.twitter.com/SMWrD6LxlG— Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) June 7, 2019 In an email to National Observer, Frontier president and CEO Peter Holle said the group is choosing to address the issue of climate change through its other activities instead of the courts.
“The organization had an opportunity to settle with Mann to avoid further expenditure of time and resources on the matter,” Holle wrote.
Though Mann said the Frontier Centre was smart to retract and apologize, he also pointed out that the case was about untrue allegations of misconduct, not the group’s stance on climate change, making it an outlier.
“Making false and malicious allegations about a scientist is illegal,” Mann said by email. “The law is the appropriate recourse, and often an effective one, as this latest episode demonstrates.”
Climate scientists should be challenging climate disinformation publicly more often, said University of Calgary climatologist Shawn Marshall, “but it is a matter of picking our battles.” Scientists aren’t marketers, Marshall added, but now find themselves in the business of convincing the public their findings are real—an especially difficult task in the polarized realm of social media.
One example played out in real-time Saturday when Milton MP and deputy Conservative party leader Lisa Raitt—who has a master’s degree in environmental biochemical toxicology—tweeted a link to a Financial Post opinion piece that falsely claimed, against scientific consensus and a report released by the federal government in April, that there’s “no solid connection between climate change and the major indicators of extreme weather.” The story was authored by an economist who does not believe in climate change.
Soon after, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe replied.
“Hi Lisa—I am a climate scientist,” tweeted Hayhoe, a Canadian working at Texas Tech University, linking to YouTube videos explaining the climate crisis. “The article you quote above is incorrect and dangerously misleading. For the sake of our shared country, please have the courage and the integrity to update your understanding.”
Hayhoe shared several more links and invited Raitt to reach out if she had questions. Raitt deleted the original tweet in short order and shared one of Hayhoe’s, saying it was “important to read this as well.”
Well I’ve learned my lesson in tweeting anything about climate change. I’m going to be transparent & let you know I’m deleting the earlier tweets. I’m not the one to fight with on this because like most I believe that emissions cause climate change and we should reduce emissions— Lisa Raitt (@lraitt) June 8, 2019 “Well I’ve learned my lesson in tweeting anything about climate change,” Raitt posted later the same day. “I’m not the one to fight with on this because like most I believe that emissions cause climate change and we should reduce emissions.”
Hayhoe replied with a thank you: “If all our politicians were like this, we would be in a much better place!” she tweeted.
Most people who deny climate change do so because they’ve received information that lines up with their beliefs from a source they trust, Hayhoe told National Observer.
“It’s not a case of people doing this largely for nefarious reasons, for selfish reasons, for greedy reasons, for evil reasons,” she said.
In an interview with National Observer Wednesday, Raitt said the original tweet wasn’t an attempt at a climate change-denying political statement—she was sharing an article she’d read, and wasn’t aware of the author’s background. Once Hayhoe and others pointed out the clash between the article and scientific consensus, she realized she “didn’t want to be a lightning rod on this topic” and deleted it, Raitt said.
“(Hayhoe’s) tweet spoke to me, because it was clearly somebody who was giving me the benefit of the doubt that I wasn’t trying to make a political statement,” Raitt said. The two later had a conversation in private messages and made plans to meet the next time Hayhoe is in Ontario.
The science of attributing extreme weather events to climate change is an emerging one, and Raitt said she’s just learning about it now. However, she said she “fundamentally” believes in climate change and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—something she then took flack over from climate change deniers on Twitter.
“Me being caught in this crossfire between two different streams of thought on whether or not extreme weather is a result of climate change, that’s not an argument I am educated enough to have,” Raitt said. “I wasn’t going to win on either side of this.”
Earlier in his career, Marshall said, he used to engage more with online climate-change denial, something he’s since given up on. “I used to try to respond to it and give proper sources to support the truth and facts, but then they just came back with more rant and often it turned to harassment and bad language.”
Marshall also participated in two public debates with representatives of Friends of Science, a climate change-denying nonprofit, but said he worries it didn’t help—climate change deniers can confuse the facts with false information, while scientists must stick to research that might be difficult for non-scientists to fully understand.
“On the other side there’s no rules,” he said. “It’s hard to win against that.”
Instead of fighting with climate change deniers directly, Marshall said he now prefers to spend time arming his students with the information they need to combat climate myths.
“I’m feeling defeated,” Marshall said. “I feel like we have to fight this in a different way than having arguments with people who don’t want to have a discussion.”
Another climate change-related legal dispute happened in 2009, when scientist Andrew Weaver, who’s now a BC MLA and leader of the province’s Green party, sued the National Post over a series of four articles he said attacked his character. The articles also expressed skepticism about climate change.
In April 2017, a BC judge overturned a previous ruling, which was in Weaver’s favour, and ordered a new trial. Weaver’s lawyer didn’t immediately respond to a request for an update, and Weaver said in a phone interview that he couldn’t comment on the case.
A spokesperson for the Post‘s parent company, Postmedia, declined to comment as the matter is still before the courts. One of the reporters named in the suit, Kevin Libin, was promoted on Monday to become executive politics editor for the entire Postmedia chain, including local dailies like the Edmonton Journal and Ottawa Citizen.
Climate change court cases remain rare—the best way to combat garden-variety denialism is to try to understand where the person is coming from on an individual basis, Weaver told National Observer. That can allow you to make arguments that appeal to the person’s values, rather than making them feel attacked.
“I don’t think it helps to belittle,” Weaver said. “People talk all over each other. Unless you know where someone’s coming from you don’t know how to address their arguments.”
Though public figures rarely, if ever, back down on climate change denial publicly, Hayhoe said she continues to try to have those conversations for the sake of others who are reading along and might be unsure what to believe.
“Every single one of us, what we do in areas that we don’t know too much about is we look to (thought leaders) to form our opinion,” she said.
“I do them more for other people who want to know what is the truth.”

Links

• Michael E. Mann - Wikipedia
• Michael E. Mann took climate change deniers to court. They apologized.
• 24 Media Organizations Oppose Defamation Suit Waged by Climate Scientist
• The Role Harassment Plays in Climate Change Denial – Mother Jones
• 7 Years Before Russia Hacked the Election, Someone Did the Same Thing to Climate Scientists
• Cutting-Edge CO2 Tracking Technology Could Boost Climate Liability Claims
• Kids Suing The US Over Climate Change Are Getting Global Support
• Brace For Impact - Climate Change Litigation Is Fast Approaching
• Torres Strait Islanders Ask UN To Hold Australia To Account On Climate ‘Human Rights Abuses’
• Torres Strait Islanders Accuse Government Of Human Rights Breach Over Climate Inaction
• Climate Change Activists Worldwide Look To Courts As A Powerful New Ally
• Climate Change - The Gathering Legal And Policy Storm In Australia And Its Impact On The Energy And Resources Sector
• Climate Change Could Destroy His Home In Peru. So He Sued An Energy Company In Germany.

Canberra Times - Mike Foley

A failed Canola crop near Parkes, NSW in August, 2018. Photo by AAP / Dean Lewins.It was drier in parts of NSW, Queensland, central South Australia, Tasmania and much of Western Australia in December last year than at the height of the Millennium drought.
That's according to scientists from the Australian National University, who developed software to analyse data from water-tracking satellites.
Dr Paul Tregoning headed the team which processed data captured by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission.
"Our preliminary results show already the drought last year appeared to be worse across a large area of Australia than late 2009," said Dr Tregoning from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences," Mr Tregoning said.
"The Millennium drought, which lasted from 2001 until 2009, is considered by some experts to be Australia's worst drought since European settlement, so to see the country in the grip of another bad drought less than a decade later points to more worrying times ahead."
"There was less water in the landscape in northern and northwestern NSW and southwestern Queensland in 2018 compared with 2009, but more water in the southern Murray-Darling Basin region and along the eastern coast."
With good timing, a new study by University of South Australia released on Thursday showed droughts in that state are becoming longer and more severe.
The study, led by Professor Simon Beecham, revealed a pattern of increasing drought that includes major river catchments and urban areas.
"We looked at data from 1960 to 2010 from every high-quality weather station in the state and there is a clear pattern, with drought increasing in the south of the State and over the Murray-Darling Basin, which is the food bowl of Australia," Mr Beecham said.
Significant long-term reductions in rainfall in autumn and winter were a particular concern, Mr Beecham said.
"This is when water systems should be recharging and flows should be building up again. When it is dry during this time, as it was earlier this year, it is a problem for the State's water supplies, as winter rain is soaked up by the dry environment and less ends up in reservoirs."
The GRACE Follow On satellite mission tracks changes in water across the earth by measuring the effect of changes in the gravitational pull of the Earth, caused by changes in groundwater, soil moisture, ocean tides and melting polar ice sheets, on two satellites separated by 200 kilometres.
Two satellites orbit the Earth 200km apart and tiny changes in the distance between the two, caused by changes in the gravitational field, are recorded.
The changes are around 1/10 of the thickness of a human hair, but contain information of movement of water on Earth and can be used to calculate how mass moves around the surface of the earth.
Dr Paul Tregoning and Rebecca McGirr from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.  Water is the dominant mobile mass on Earth and, by analysing the measurements, the ANU scientists calculated the amount of water was present in a given location, at a particular time.
The scientists measured total water storage across Australia, which includes aquifers, soil moisture and surface water, in grids of 200km by 200km. The measurement is accurate to around 2cm water height, which is fine enough to fit with hydrological models.
Two space gravity missions have been deployed. Grace circled the Earth between March 2002 and late 2017. GRACE Follow On launched in May 2018 and on May 22 NASA released the data it had captured to date. It is these data that the ANU researchers have used to estimate changes in water in the Australian landscape.
Satellite data also revealed the extent of ice loss in Antarctica over the past decade.
Dr Tregoning said the ice loss in the Totten Glacier region, east of Australia's Casey station in Antarctica amounted to around 1.4 billion tonnes of water.
"We could be watching the beginning of serious change to the ice sheet. This is very concerning, since a destabilisation of the ice sheet in that region could affect the global sea level by many metres," Mr Tregoning said.

Links

• GRACE satellite system to boost groundwater
• NSW Towns Including Dubbo And Tamworth Face Water Emergency Within Months
• 'Monster' El Nino A Chance Later This Year, Pointing To Extended Dry Times
• 'The Darling Will Die': Scientists Say Mass Fish Kill Due To Over-Extraction And Drought
• Floods, Fire And Drought: Australia, A Country In The Grip Of Extreme Weather Bingo
• Extreme Weather Events Are Fueling ‘Food Shocks’ And Jeopardizing Global Security
• Thousands Of Australian Animals Die In Unprecedented Heatwave
• 'Drought, Climate Change And Mismanagement': What Experts Think Caused The Death Of A Million Menindee Fish
• How Is Climate Change Affecting Australia?
• Scientists Warn Australia's Water Security Threatened By Climate Change
• 'This Drought Is Different': It's Drier And Hotter – And Getting Worse

The Guardian - First Dog On The Moon

If you think you’re miserable - imagine being oneof those long suffering mass extinction Cassandras!Cartoon by First Dog on the Moon
LARGE IMAGE
Links

• Adani: It All Looks Dodgy As Hell And None Of It Has Been Explained Properly
• As We Struggle To Save The Planet From Climate Collapse, Let's Dance (Dramatic Glockenspiel)
• The Billionaire's Guide To Surviving Global Warming – With Ian The Climate Denialist Potato
• 'Last Year I Gave The Kids Briquettes And Everyone Yelled At Me!' Christmas With Ian 
• The Children Are Rioting In The Streets! They Are Deadly Serious And Perhaps Our Last Hope
• This Is A Call To Arms On Climate Change. And By Arms I Mean Flippers!

ABC News - Michael Slezak

Emissions have increased again due to LNG and coal production. (ABC News: Michael Barnett) Key points:

• The program designed to sell contracts for emission reduction projects has received extra funding
• But the Emissions Reduction Fund has not spent its existing budget and emission abatement has flatlined
• Analysis of government data shows contracts terminations have meant nearly 20 per cent of expected emission reduction in some auctions did not happen

The central plank of the Morrison Government's climate policy involves pouring billions of extra dollars into an emissions reduction program that's not spending its existing funding, ABC analysis can reveal.The Emissions Reduction Fund also appears to be failing in its mission to lower emissions, Government data shows.
In 2014, the Abbott government allocated $2.55 billion to the newly established Emissions Reduction Fund, mostly to pay polluters to emit less greenhouse gas.
The Morrison Government has extended the program with an additional $2 billion and rebranded it the Climate Solutions Fund.
Twice a year, the Clean Energy Regulator holds reverse auctions, where companies bid to win the emissions reduction work.
The cheapest good-quality bids win and are awarded Emissions Reduction Fund contracts.
Those contracts are for a range of projects, including planting trees, stopping tree-clearing and installing energy efficient appliances.

Data shows flatlining of emissions reduction
The ABC examined figures from 10 different datasets published by the Government's Clean Energy Regulator — a series of auction results published in separate PDFs, as well as two spreadsheets containing information about the status of Emissions Reduction Fund contracts and projects.
The Great Barrier Reef has suffered from substantial bleaching. (Supplied: Australian Institute of Marine Science)That analysis shows that since 2017, outcomes from the Emissions Reduction Fund appear to have all but flatlined.
The program has only increased its total of avoided emissions by a relatively meagre 4 million tonnes over four auction rounds, despite signing 123 contracts worth $372 million.
That growth has fallen by 97 per cent, compared to the number of avoided emissions claimed in the first two years of the program.
When total avoided emissions committed by the program are charted over time, after an initial sharp increase, they appear to record almost no rise overall.

Cumulative avoided emissions in the ERF
Commenting on the ABC's analysis, climate and law expert Tim Baxter from the University of Melbourne said the fund did look like it had stalled.
"The cumulative abatement has stayed relatively static over the last couple of auctions," he said.
"It seems to be puttering out a little bit."
A significant contributor to the near-flatlining of the program is failing contracts — where companies that have pledged to avoid a certain amount of emissions find they are unable to do so.
So far, there have been eight reverse auction rounds in the ERF.
The ABC's analysis reveals in two of those rounds — November 2016 and April 2017 — contract terminations have meant between 17 and 19 per cent of the expected emissions reductions did not happen.
Those numbers are likely to rise, according to Dr Baxter, since it takes time for contracts to be cancelled. So far, none have been cancelled from the last three auctions.
Dr Baxter said it was not clear yet whether we would see the same level of contract failure in more recent auctions, or whether there was a large number of bad contracts signed in those early rounds.
"It could be that this is just the background extinction rate," Dr Baxter said. "That over a few years, we do lose 10 per cent or so."

Revoked contracts mean reductions are not delivered
In total, since the start of the Emissions Reduction Fund, 22 contracts have been cancelled.
Those contracts were supposed to avoid more than 13.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from being emitted into the atmosphere.
Climate change protests have been held around the world. (Reuters: Simon Dawson)
Assuming those contracts were awarded the average price per tonne of avoided emissions, that has meant nearly $145 million was earmarked for emissions reduction that did not occur.
Cancelled contracts could be a result of a number of things such as council permissions not being granted or weather stopping seedlings from growing, but the reason any particular contract is revoked is not made public.

Paris 2030: Will we make it?
Are Australia's efforts to curb global warming enough to meet our Paris targets? Four Corners investigates.
In each case, however, revoked contracts do not deliver the promised emissions reductions.
Associate Professor Paul Burke, an energy economist from the Australian National University, said he was not surprised contracts were failing because this type of policy required the Government to manage a large number of individual projects.
"This was the experience with the Howard-era Greenhouse Gas Abatement Program (GGAP) also. History repeats," he said.
"Ideally, Australia would not rely on a process that involves government sponsorship and monitoring of individual projects."

Contract failures built into the system, regulator says
A spokesperson for the Clean Energy Regulator, which oversees the auctions, told the ABC the failure of contracts was part of the design of the system — it's a form of flexibility that allows more companies to take part.

Explained: The Paris AgreementYou have no doubt been hearing a lot about the Paris Agreement and know that it pertains to climate change, but what is it actually all about?
"The Emissions Reduction Fund is designed to encourage participation by allowing flexibility in some circumstances for contracts that are successful at auction," the regulator's spokesperson said.
"This means that not all projects will come to fruition so it is normal for some contracts to lapse or terminate.
"This flexibility has facilitated project registrations and ensured a high-level of participation under the scheme."
Contracts are only paid after the emissions reductions occur, so money which was earmarked but never actually spent returns to the fund.
Because of that, the amount of money sitting in the fund has stayed relatively stable for two years, currently at $226 million.

Low-cost projects have dried up
At the same time, it seems the Government is having a harder time finding low-cost emissions reductions, causing the average price to rise.
The cheapest projects — like avoiding land clearing or burning methane waste gas from landfill — have mostly been exhausted, and more expensive methods of reducing emissions increasingly are being used.
Since 2016, the price of those emissions reductions has soared.
The third auction paid the lowest amount per tonne, offering an average of just $10.26 per tonne of avoided emissions.
Since then, the average price paid to successful bidders has jumped by more than 35 per cent to $13.87 per tonne.

Average price paid per tonne of avoided emissions
Dr Baxter said the figures seemed to show the Government was struggling to award new contracts.
"It might be that their reserve price has been set too low," he said, adding it was impossible to know for sure since details like that were kept secret.

'You will get less bang for your buck'
Dr Baxter said so long as the reserve price in the auction was set high enough, the Government would definitely be able to allocate its $2 billion over the next decade on emissions reductions because if you pay companies enough, they will reduce emissions.
"But you will get less bang for your buck," he said.
Dr Burke said the ABC's analysis showed people should not get excited by the promised abatement announced when auctions were completed.
"There is a long way from the auction to actual implementation of a project," he said.
The results of the ABC's analysis were put to the Energy Minister Angus Taylor.
In a statement, he said: "The small number of contracts that will not deliver abatement — currently representing a little over 5 per cent of contracted abatement — will be reinvested in new projects."
"Criteria for project registration is also set at a level to encourage participation and innovation.
"Once registered, some projects are revoked having failed to obtain, [for example], finance or third-party consent. These projects will not, however, have been awarded contracts or issued credits."
Mr Taylor said the ERF had been a great success.
"The $2.5 billion Emissions Reduction Fund has been highly successful in supporting Australian businesses, communities and landholders to reduce greenhouse gases, while improving the local environment and benefitting from new revenue opportunities."

Links

• Are Australia's emissions going up or down? It depends who you ask
• Australia's emissions rise again, delayed Government data shows
• Is Tony Abbott 2.0 really the strong climate policy Australia needs?
• Australia's Clean Economy Future: Costs and Benefits
• Australians Could Have Saved Over $1 Billion In Fuel If Car Emissions Standards Were Introduced 3 Years Ago
• Australia To Achieve 50% Renewables By 2030 Without Government Intervention, Analysis Finds
• The Government Thinks We’re Idiots And Is Not Serious About Reducing Emissions
• Scott Morrison Announces $2 Billion Climate Solutions Fund To Reduce Australia's Emissions
• 'Woefully Inadequate': Morrison Government To Use Paris Climate Short-Cut

AP - Nicole Winfield | Frank Jordans

Activists hold up signs outside the Vatican as Pope Francis meets with oil executives, Friday, June 14, 2019. The meeting marked the second year that Francis has invited oil and financial sector executives to the Vatican to impress upon them his concern that preserving God’s creation is one of the fundamental challenges facing humankind today. (Claudio Peri/ANSA via AP)VATICAN CITY — Some of the world’s major oil producers pledged Friday to support “economically meaningful” carbon pricing regimes after a personal appeal from Pope Francis to avoid “perpetrating a brutal act of injustice” against the poor and future generations.
The companies, including ExxonMobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Chevron and Eni, said in a joint statement at the end of a Vatican climate summit that governments should set such pricing regimes at a level that encourages business and investment, while “minimizing the costs to vulnerable communities and supporting economic growth.”
The CEOs, as well as leaders of major asset managers such as BlackRock and BNP Paribas, also called for companies to provide investors with clarity about the risks climate change poses to their businesses and how they plan to transition to cleaner energy sources.
The joint statement was issued at the end of a closed-door summit in the Vatican gardens, the second time the Holy See has convened the world’s petroleum leaders for private talks on climate change, scientific research and the moral imperative to save God’s creation.
Francis attended Friday’s session and told the gathering that a “radical energy transition” to clean, low-carbon power sources was needed and that if managed well, would “generate new jobs, reduce inequality and improve the quality of life for those affected by climate change.”
“Faced with a climate emergency, we must take action accordingly, in order to avoid perpetrating a brutal act of injustice toward the poor and future generations,” he said.
He praised the executives in particular for taking on the core issue of carbon pricing, which he said was necessary for humanity to use the resources of creation wisely and not burden the poor and future generations with the debt incurred by the rich.
In their joint statement, the CEOs said “Reliable and economically meaningful carbon pricing regimes, whether based on tax, trading mechanisms or other market-based measures, should be set by governments at a level that incentivizes business practices ... while minimizing the costs to vulnerable communities and supporting economic growth.”
The pledge comes ahead of a European Union summit next week at which leaders will discuss the bloc’s efforts to combat climate change including a proposal to stop adding carbon to the atmosphere by 2050. While the announcement refers to the 2015 Paris accord’s goal of “keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit)” by the end of the century compared to pre-industrial times, experts say capping the rise at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7F) would be safer.
The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based group that examines the impact the shift away from fossil fuels has on financial markets, welcomed the Vatican announcement.
“It is important that many of the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas companies and many of the world’s largest investors have endorsed carbon pricing regimes,” the group’s executive director, Mark Campanale, said in a statement.
“Critically, asset owners with trillions of dollars under management are also calling for company disclosures of meaningful and material information on plans and investments in the energy transition,” he added.
Outside the summit, around half-a-dozen protesters held up signs urging the oil executives to listen to the pope.
Signs in Italian read "Don't steal our future", left, and "Climate emergency is not an opinion!", second from right. (Claudio Peri/ANSA via AP)The meeting was held under unusual secrecy even by Vatican standards, with the program and guest list initially unpublished. A few executives confirmed their presence ahead of time, including the chief executives of BP and Eni, Bob Dudley and Claudio Descalzi.
On the BP blog, Dudley wrote this week that the meeting was coming at an urgent time, with BP’s own latest survey showing carbon emissions grew by 2% last year, even as experts say they have to dramatically decrease to meet standards set by the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Eni’s Descalzi said in a statement that four years after Paris, “it’s clear we have to change pace. Progress has been insufficient and the emissions continue to grow.”
The summit was co-organized by the University of Notre Dame, whose president, the Rev. John Jenkins, praised the commitment taken by the industry leaders.
The commitments taken “won’t solve the problem themselves,” he said. “But they’re extremely important first steps toward doing that.”
Francis has dedicated a major teaching document to the environment and is expected to press his case at a Vatican meeting of Amazon bishops later this year.

Links

• Pope Francis Backs Carbon Pricing And 'Radical Energy Transition' To Act Against Global Warming 
• Pope Francis Warns Against Turning Earth Into Vast Pile Of 'Rubble, Deserts And Refuse'
• Climate Change Is A Top Spiritual Priority For These Religious Leaders
• Pope Tells Oil Executives To Act On Climate: ‘There Is No Time To Lose’
• COP23: With Trump Absent At UN climate Talks, Pope Francis Blames 'Short-Sighted' Humans For Global Warming
• Pope Francis Slams 'Stupid' Climate Change Deniers
• Everything you need to know about the Paris climate deal
• Bellwether species on Gold Coast's hinterland serve as climate change 'canaries'
• World headed to recession if climate change ignored: John Hewson
• Impact of climate change on Indigenous communities
• Scientists urge The Times to improve 'sub-standard' climate reporting

Vanity Fair - Bess Levin

One guess as to how the president will respond.
SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images.Since taking the oath of office in 2017, Donald Trump has made it clear that he cares about the environment about as much as freedom of the press and sounding lucid on Twitter.
In the past 29 months, he’s:

• ditched the Paris climate agreement; 
• gutted regulations designed to prevent another Deepwater Horizon spill; 
• unveiled a proposal to freeze rules on planet-warming pollution from cars and trucks; and 
• put in motion a plan to bury evidence that his replacement for Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan could kill 1,400 Americans a year. 

The administration has muzzled science that contradicts its official stance that climate change is nothing to worry about—or is even a thing that exists—and, to that end, hired a guy who has said carbon dioxide is being demonized “just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” whose primary job is to discredit the conclusions of last year’s National Climate Assessment, a report written by 13 federal agencies that predicted harrowing consequences for not taking action on climate change.
At this point, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising to learn that government employees caught even uttering the words “climate change” and “not good” around the water cooler gets cattle prodded by Aunt Lydia. Which makes it all the more shocking that a top regulator has gone “rogue” and defied Trump to speak out about the issue.
Rostin Behnam, who sits on the powerful five-member Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told the New York Times in an interview Monday that the financial risks from climate change are akin to those posed by the mortgage meltdown that caused the 2008 financial crisis. “If climate change causes more volatile frequent and extreme weather events, you’re going to have a scenario where these large providers of financial products—mortgages, home insurance, pensions—cannot shift risk away from their portfolios,” Behnam said. “It’s abundantly clear that climate change poses financial risk to the stability of the financial system.”If you’re wondering how it came to pass that Trump appointed a guy who actually believes climate change is real, well, he didn’t exactly have a choice. Behnam’s seat, by law, had to be filled by a Democrat; legal experts told Times reporter Coral Davenport that it would be difficult, but not impossible, for Trump to fire or even demote Behnam. (The CFTC, like the Federal Reserve, is meant to operate more independently from the West Wing than other federal agencies, presumably to the president’s explosive chagrin.) “I have a unique bully pulpit,” said Behnam. While people in Behnam’s position have occasionally pushed back against presidential policies in private, government affairs experts told the Times that his initiative is unusual. “Rarely do you see a commissioner go rogue and public,” said James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University.And if Trump is unhappy about Behnam’s comments, he presumably won’t be thrilled with what’s coming next!On Wednesday, Mr. Behnam plans to detail the formation of a panel of experts at the trading commission assigned to produce a report on how global warming could affect the financial sector, potentially impacting food costs, insurance markets, the mortgage industry and other economic pillars.Because the report, expected late this year or early next, would be a product of the federal government, it would most likely put Mr. Behnam in direct conflict with the policies of the Trump administration.
The report, which Mr. Behnam said he expected would focus in particular on potential harm to the nation’s agriculture sector, is likely to emerge at a moment when Mr. Trump will be making the case to farm states, which have already been hurt by his crop tariffs, to reelect him in 2020.
His interest in the financial effects of climate change, he said, stems from six years working for Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat, on the Senate Agriculture Committee. He left the agriculture committee in 2017 to join the trading commission. Earlier, he had worked as a financial trader and a corporate lawyer in New York.In January, California electricity provider PG&E was forced to file for bankruptcy on account of billions of dollars in liability stemming from the deadly wildfires (for which Trump blamed the victims, which analysts believe is a taste of what’s to come re: the economic damage from climate change. Thirty-nine central banks, including those of England, Canada, China, Japan, and the European Union have formed a working group to study the effects of climate change on the financial markets, a project the United States has naturally declined to take part in. “We understand that climate change causes a big systemic risk,” said Stefano Giglio, a professor of finance at Yale University, told the Times. “But right now, we don’t have enough information, and we don’t have the right financial products to insure this risk. The CFTC can help give that information and help lay out a global marker for what we need to do.”Given the difficulty Trump would face in trying to get rid of Behnam, it’s likely the regulator is in for the sort of unhinged attacks that Fed chairman Jerome Powell has been subjected to.  Of course, you’d think the CEO president who ran for office on the claim that his head for business was just what the country needed might care about preventing another global financial crisis. Then you’d remember who we’re dealing with and pray the planet fares better than the Trump Taj Mahal.
Links

The Independent  - Alessio Perrone

Series of 'anomalously warm summers' caused ground to thaw, researchers say


'Mothers Rise Up' protesters gather in May to demand action on climate change

Permafrost hs begun thawing in the Canadian Arctic more than 70 years early because of climate change, according to new research.
A "series of anomalously warm summers” has dramatically accelerated melting rates at three sites despite average annual ground temperatures remaining low. Ponds and hillocks have formed as a result.
It had been thought that the permafrost - ground that remains frozen for at least two years - would remain until at least 2090.
But the study found thawing levels were above 150 to 240 per cent above historic levels.
Researchers called this a “truly remarkable amount".
Mould Bay on Prince Patrick Island was the worst-affected site, according to the study, published on the journal Geophysical Research Letters.  
There, permafrost thawing levels were 240 per cent higher than historic levels and the ground sank 90cm over the course of the study which ran for over 12 years, between 2003 and 2016.
Researchers also recorded thawing at depths not expected until air temperatures rose to levels that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted it would reach in 2090.
Along with Mould Bay, researchers observed thermokarsts - a type of land surface that occurs when the ice melts in permafrost, characterised by uneven ground with low rounded hills and small ponds - at three siites along the 430 mile section of the high Arctic in Canada they were monitoring.
When permafrost thaws, it releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases stored in or beneath it into the atmosphere.
There in turn, cause temperatures to rise and create a perpetual cycle where more permafrost melts.

Links

• The Smithsonian’s Renewed Fossil Hall Sends A Forceful Message About Climate Change
• Melting Permafrost In Arctic Will Have $70tn Climate Impact – Study
• An Ocean Of Evidence On Warming Is Our Cue To Take Action - Now
• Melting Arctic Ice Is Now Pouring 14,000 Tons Of Water Per Second Into The Ocean, Scientists Find
• Arctic Cauldron
• NASA launches Satellite To Precisely Track How Earth's Ice Is Melting
• 'The Damn Thing Melted': Climate Change Sparks Scramble For The Arctic

CNBC - Lori Ioannou



Indigo Agriculture, the Boston-based start-up that uses natural microbiology to revolutionize the way farmers grow crops, has unveiled a first-of-a-kind program to tackle climate change worldwide.
The company launched the Terraton Initiative on Wednesday to accelerate carbon sequestration from agricultural soil on a massive scale.
The goal: to capture 1 trillion metric tons (a teraton) of carbon dioxide worldwide from 3.6 billion acres of farmland through a marketplace that gives farmers incentives to implement regenerative farming practices.
Capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide from agricultural soil is a way to restore soil health while returning carbon levels to those prior to the Industrial Revolution, according to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Today many environmental experts say agricultural farming emits 25% to 35% of all CO2 into the atmosphere — more than all modes of transportation combined. The trend has contributed to extreme changes in weather that are reducing crop yields and making livestock more vulnerable to disease.
All this threatens the global food supply as demand from a booming global population grows.
“The potential for agricultural soils to capture and store atmospheric carbon dioxide is the most hopeful solution I know of to address climate change,” said David Perry, Indigo’s CEO. “The technology and know-how for regenerative farming already exists, so we can begin to make a difference right now.”
“And this can be done on a massive scale,” says the company’s co-founder and chief innovation officer, Geoffrey von Maltzahn.
These practices include minimal tillage of the soil, cover cropping, crop rotations, using fewer chemicals and fertilizers, and incorporating livestock grazing. These are all ways to increase soil’s carbon content and water retention so less CO2 is released into the atmosphere.
As Maltzahn explains, soils play a key role in the carbon cycle by soaking up carbon from dead plant matter. Plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and pass carbon to the ground when dead roots and leaves decompose. But it can cause carbon to be released from the soil at a faster rate than it is replaced. This net release of carbon to the atmosphere contributes to global warming.

A marketplace to capture CO2
To catalyze the initiative, Indigo is creating the Indigo Carbon marketplace. Growers who join Indigo Carbon for the 2019 crop season are eligible to receive $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide sequestered.
In partnership with the Ecosystem Services Market Consortium and other organizations, such as The Rodale Institute and the Soil Health Institute, Indigo will use its digital agronomy capabilities and software imagery analysis to measure and verify soil carbon sequestration and on-farm emission levels.



At the same time, Indigo is partnering initially with the Soil Health Institute, the Rodale Institute, and a network of grower partners to launch the largest longitudinal study of soil carbon on record. The goal of the study, which will include tens of thousands of farms followed for a decade or more, is to quantify farming practices that maximize soil carbon sequestration and understand the impact of these practices on farm profitability and crop nutrition.
The results of this study will form the blueprint for maximizing soil carbon sequestration. Indigo intends to make the data from this study available to other research institutions.
We are willing to put our balance sheet at risk for the first year, because we have a high degree of confidence we will have buyers and other partners to help cover the costs.
David Perry
Indigo Agriculture CEOInitially, Indigo will market the initiative to its 10,000 grower customers worldwide through its account managers and agronomists. They will be testing soil samples to determine carbon and nutrient concentrations. But the exchange is open to everyone.
To encourage innovation and participation in the effort, Indigo is launching several open calls to action. This includes the Carbon Cup, a nationwide sequestration competition to spark on-farm innovation. Broken down on a region-by-region basis, first-place growers competing in the Carbon Cup will receive recognition and a monetary prize for their efforts.
Additionally, Indigo is launching a series of challenges, calling on innovators and entrepreneurs to develop technologies for maximizing soil carbon sequestration rates, improving soil carbon measurements and reducing the need for chemical and fertilizer inputs. Winning innovations will be awarded $1 million contracts by Indigo.

Source: Mauna Loa ObservatoryThe hope is that this effort will encourage more innovation in sustainable farming practices worldwide and encourage all parties in the food chain — from food companies and packaged goods companies to retailers — to align business practices toward this goal. Many companies are seeking ways to be carbon neutral, and many investors, insurance companies and nonprofits are eager to support such endeavors.
One of the first companies on board is Anheuser-Busch. It has agreed to buy 2.2 billion of Indigo sustainable rice that is grown with specific environmental attributes. Growers contracting with Indigo to produce rice for Anheuser-Busch will reduce water and nitrogen use by 10% and achieve at least 10% savings in greenhouse-gas emissions compared to state benchmarks.
Sparking a revolution in farming
The effort sounds like a cool idea from a company that snared the top spot for its innovations on CNBC’s 2019 Disruptor 50 list in May. But it may be challenging to scale up. The investment costs are high.
But Perry says it has a coffer of capital for these payouts to jump-start the initiative, and investors are supportive of the idea that could be a game changer in the fight against global warming. Currently, the company has a valuation of $3.5 billion and $650 million in VC funding, PitchBook reports.
“We are committed to this project, and all of our investors are on board,” Perry said. “We are willing to put our balance sheet at risk for the first year, because we have a high degree of confidence we will have buyers and other partners to help cover the costs.”
Then there is the issue of igniting a paradigm shift toward regenerative farming.
According to Indigo’s Maltzahn, “there is a group of regenerative growers who are remarkable entrepreneurs that gave Indigo the inspiration to do this. Many have been commissioned by Indigo to be consultants and teach methods to other farmers to spur adoption.”
Among them is Russell Hedrick, a fireman-turned-grain farmer in Hickory, North Carolina.
 Hedrick used regenerative practices taught by leading conservationists that has helped him grow the 30-acre farm he started in 2012 into a 1,000-acre farm and a 100-acre parcel for cattle and sheep grazing.
“A lot of these practices were used hundreds of years ago by farmers in the U.S.,” he says. “I think this is a way for farmers who are struggling to change their practices and boost profitability.”

Links

• The Climate Crisis Is Already Hitting Food Production: An Urgent System-Wide Response Is Needed
• Australian Musicians Band Together To Invest In Solar Farms
• Waste Not — If You Want To Help Secure The Future Of The Planet
• Life After Solving Climate Change: Not Mud Huts And Gruel But Clean Air And Warm Homes
• A Climate Change Solution Slowly Gains Ground
• The Next Reckoning: Capitalism And Climate Change
• Protests And Purchasing Power Could Be Positive Tipping Points In Climate Change
• Tip The Planet: Tackling Climate Change With Small, Sensitive Interventions
• Climate Change: Yes, Your Individual Action Does Make A Difference
• Be The Change You Want To See In The World: How Individuals Can Help Save The Planet From Climate Catastrophe
• How 34,500 Tonnes Of Food Waste Is Powering Melbourne Homes

ABC News - Reuters


The Pope has spoken extensively about climate change's impacts on the poor and future generations. (Malacanang Photo Bureau, Philippines) Pope Francis says that carbon pricing is "essential" to stem global warming — his clearest statement yet in support of penalising polluters — and appealed to climate change deniers to listen to science.
In an address to energy executives at the end of a two-day meeting, he also called for "open, transparent, science-based and standardised" reporting of climate risk and a "radical energy transition" away from carbon to save the planet.
Carbon pricing, via taxes or emissions trading schemes, is used by many governments to make energy consumers pay for the costs of using the fossil fuels that contribute to global warming, and to spur investment in low-carbon technology.
The Vatican did not release the names of those who attended the closed-door meeting at its Academy of Sciences, a follow-up to one a year ago, but industry sources said the companies represented were believed to be the industry giants Eni, Exxon, Total, Repsol, BP, Sinopec, ConocoPhillips, Equinor and Chevron.
A small group of demonstrators gathered outside a Vatican gate.
One held a sign reading "Dear Oil CEOs — Think of Your Children".
Pope Francis, who has made many calls for environmental protection and has clashed over climate change with leaders such as US President Donald Trump, said the ecological crisis "threatens the very future of the human family".

'Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony'
California's long-running drought has exacerbated its annual fire seasons in recent years. (AP: Mike Eliason/Santa Barbara County Fire Department)He implicitly criticised those who, like Mr Trump, deny that climate change is mostly caused by human activity.
"For too long we have collectively failed to listen to the fruits of scientific analysis, and doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain," he said.The regions most at risk from climate hazards are Asia-Pacific and South Asia. (Supplied)He said discussion of climate change and energy transition must be rooted in "the best scientific research available today".
Last year, Mr Trump rejected projections in a report by his own government that climate change will cause severe economic harm to the US economy.
The US President also announced his intent to withdraw the country from the 2015 Paris deal to combat climate change, becoming the first country to do so among 200 signatories.
Francis's 2015 encyclical Laudato Si' — a significant document on Church teaching — called for greater protections of the environment, and strongly supported the Paris accord, and said time was running out to meet its goals.
"Faced with a climate emergency, we must take action accordingly, in order to avoid perpetrating a brutal act of injustice towards the poor and future generations," he said."We do not have the luxury of waiting for others to step forward, or of prioritising short-term economic benefits."
The new US foe
The Trump administration insists climate change is not a big deal, but the Pentagon can see its bases going under water with its own eyes. This is how it's fighting back.Oil companies have come under growing pressure from investors and activists to meet the Paris goals.
Companies including Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Total have laid out plans to expand their renewable energy business and reduce emissions, though many investors say they will have to do more.

Links

• Pope Francis Warns Against Turning Earth Into Vast Pile Of 'Rubble, Deserts And Refuse'
• Climate Change Is A Top Spiritual Priority For These Religious Leaders
• Pope Tells Oil Executives To Act On Climate: ‘There Is No Time To Lose’
• COP23: With Trump Absent At UN climate Talks, Pope Francis Blames 'Short-Sighted' Humans For Global Warming
• Pope Francis Slams 'Stupid' Climate Change Deniers
• Everything you need to know about the Paris climate deal
• Bellwether species on Gold Coast's hinterland serve as climate change 'canaries'
• World headed to recession if climate change ignored: John Hewson
• Impact of climate change on Indigenous communities
• Scientists urge The Times to improve 'sub-standard' climate reporting

ABC News - Stephanie Chalmers
Norway's sovereign wealth fund may offload coal investments, including its stake in BHP. (Supplied: BHP) Key points:

• Environmental group Urgewald says the fund will have to offload stakes in companies including BHP, South32 and AGL Energy
• Rules will exclude companies that mine more than 20 million tonnes of coal annually or generate more than 10 GW of power from coal
• The fund is already prevented from investing in companies that derive more than 30 per cent of revenue from coal

The world's largest sovereign wealth fund will divest from a slew of coal companies and oil explorers and producers, after Norway's parliament approved tighter investment rules.
Norwegian politicians voted in favour of excluding the $US1 trillion fund from investing in companies that mine more than 20 million tonnes of coal annually or generate more than 10 gigawatts of power from coal.
The country's Government Pension Fund Global currently holds a $US1 billion stake in commodities giant Glencore, as well as investments in Australian companies BHP, South32 and AGL Energy.
Non-profit environmental group Urgewald said the new rules mean the fund will have to divest from those companies, as well as Anglo American, Italy's Enel and Germany's RWE and Uniper.
The new coal investment restrictions come on top of existing rules preventing the fund from investing in companies that derived more than 30 per cent of revenue from coal.
Urgewald estimates the divestments resulting from the new restrictions will total 5.1 billion euros ($8.3 billion), on top of the 4 billion euros the fund shed in 2015 when it adopted its first coal exclusion criteria.
"It is great to see Norway divesting some of the biggest enemies of the Paris Climate Agreement," said Urgewald director Heffa Schuecking, while urging the fund to also exclude companies that are planning new coal plants, coal mines or other coal infrastructure.

'Signal to the rest of the market'
Norway's sovereign wealth fund will also offload stakes in oil and gas explorers and producers, but retain investments in integrated energy companies including Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil.
When first proposing the move in March, Norway's finance ministry said it was aimed at reducing the "aggregate oil price risk in the Norwegian economy".
The Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), a European group representing 170 members with a collective $US26 trillion in assets under management, has welcomed the decision by Norway's parliament.
"The multi-billion-dollar move out of fossil fuels into renewables by the world's largest sovereign wealth fund sends a clear signal to rest of the market," said IIGCC chief executive Stephanie Pfeifer.
"Other investors will take note when a fund built on oil shows the future is in clean energy."Norway's sovereign wealth fund was established to manage petroleum revenues from the North Sea oil fields.
Oil and gas companies represent 5.9 per cent of its equity investments, according to its 2018 annual report, and it currently invests more than 9,000 companies worldwide.

Links

• Glencore moves to cap global coal output after investor pressure on climate change
• Australia's biggest companies ignore climate change risk: report
• Audio: Australian mining may be affected by wealth fund coal divestment (PM)
• Adani has its environmental approvals, so what happens now?
• Climate Change Poses A Clear Financial Risk To Australia
• Heavyweights Now Speaking With One Voice On Climate Change Risks
• Why Climate Change Risks Are 'Material' For Big Finance
• APRA Demands Banks, Insurers Act On Climate Risk
• The RBA Has Sounded The Climate Change Alarm. Time To Sit Up And Take Notice
• 'Change Now Or Pay Later': RBA's Stark Warning On Climate Change
• Financial Giants Can Have A Pivotal Role For Climate Stability
• Australian Businesses Must Do More To Disclose Climate Change Risks To Investors, ASIC Says
• The Global Heatwave Is About To Hit Your Wallet
• 'Carbon Bubble' Could Spark Global Financial Crisis, Study Warns
• ASIC Warns On Climate Risk As Heat Turns On Directors

The Guardian - First Dog On The Moon

You deserve better, Queensland,
even though you don’t seem to think you doCartoon by First Dog on the Moon
LARGE IMAGELinks

• As We Struggle To Save The Planet From Climate Collapse, Let's Dance (Dramatic Glockenspiel)
• The Billionaire's Guide To Surviving Global Warming – With Ian The Climate Denialist Potato
• 'Last Year I Gave The Kids Briquettes And Everyone Yelled At Me!' Christmas With Ian 
• The Children Are Rioting In The Streets! They Are Deadly Serious And Perhaps Our Last Hope
• This Is A Call To Arms On Climate Change. And By Arms I Mean Flippers!

The Guardian - Simon Holmes à Court*

Australia could be a post-carbon superpower – but the energy minister must seize the day
‘Has Angus Taylor ever set out a vision for Australia’s energy future that’s even remotely compelling?’ Photograph: Mike Bowers/The GuardianThe worst part about being lied to is knowing that you weren’t worth the truth. — Jean-Paul SartreAustralia’s emissions have increased four years in a row. Excluding the land sector, our emissions have never been higher.
As the gravity of the unfolding climate emergency begins to dawn upon Australians, instead of lies and obfuscation from our elected representatives, we urgently need leadership capable of navigating our economy to a prosperous, zero-emissions future.
Cynically, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, has designated Angus Taylor as the minister for emissions reduction and, unfortunately, telling the truth doesn’t seem to be Taylor’s strong suit. (“You’re wrong, Barry,” interjected Taylor when the former host of ABC Insiders correctly pointed out that emissions were on the rise.)
Taylor never did deliver on his last posting, as the minister for reducing power prices. In his latest derogation of duty, he held back publication of the national emissions accounts. When he did finally front the media he falsely claimed seven times in two and a half minutes that the government’s plans to reduce emissions by 26% to 28% were “laid out to the last tonne” — when the government has no such plan.
In 2005 Australia’s total carbon emissions were 610 megatonnes. Reducing emissions by 26%, the lower end of our “ambition”, would mean annual emissions of 451 Mt. In 2015 our annual emissions reached their lowest point since 2005 at 530.7 Mt, some 13% below 2005 levels. They have increased every quarter thereafter. With LNG production set to increase 12.9% in 2019, there is no reversal in sight.

Change in annual Australian emissions 2015-18
Source: Quarterly Update of Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, December 2018 Table 1C derived Since our 2015 emissions nadir, the land sector and a slew of new wind and solar projects have delivered welcome emissions cuts. But all this progress has been wiped out by large increases from other sectors, especially from the “fugitive gas” released during gas extraction and processing.
There may come a quarter soon where the clean energy boom delivers such standout emissions reduction that increases in other sectors are temporarily offset. It would have come sooner if Taylor hadn’t worked so hard behind the scenes in 2014-15 to slash the renewable energy target, in a move that has cost Australia thousands of jobs, gigawatts of cheap power and up to 6 Mt of carbon abatement a year.

Australia’s carbon deficit and the climate solutions package
Photograph: Department of the Environment and Energy The Morrison government’s weak commitment to reducing emissions is evidenced by its climate solutions package (CSP), with its largest proposed “reduction” through an accounting trick – claiming credit for past tree-clearing that didn’t happen and that won’t avoid a single tonne of future emissions.
The second biggest proposed reduction is the carbon reduction fund, which was set up to buy $200m of carbon offsets annually. In the treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s first budget, he slashed the program to just $47m a year over the forward estimates. Even if funding were restored, the CRF’s total efforts would be swamped by the emissions of just one or two of our 10 operating LNG projects.
The third biggest proposed reduction is the amorphous category named “technology improvements and other sources of abatement”, ie, crossing our fingers and hoping that emissions fall through no efforts of our own.
The CSP even includes 10 Mt abatement via an “electric vehicle strategy” – awkward, given Taylor’s derision towards EVs during the election. Regardless, the government has conceded that the strategy won’t be released until mid-2020.
The figure below shows several emissions trajectories. The government’s CSP scenario (the orange line) sees emissions almost flatlining through the Paris agreement period, eventually reaching zero in 2980! Clearly the CSP does not deliver 26% emissions reductions (the green line) by 2030, or deliver Australia’s share of decarbonising the economy.

1.5C emissions pathways for Australia after 2030
Photograph: Tim Baxter, Climate and Energy College, Melbourne University based on analysis by Professor Ross Garnaut and data from the Department of Environment and Energy.
For Australia to do our fair share of meeting the Paris budget, the CSP leaves us with the impossible task of decarbonising the economy in just three years from 2030. A steeper trajectory before 2030 gives us breathing room for a more realistic trajectory afterwards.
It’s important to remember why reducing emissions is so important. As Joelle Gergis told RN Breakfast on Tuesday, in terms of climate, Australia is the most vulnerable nation in the developed world. At 2C we effectively lose the Great Barrier Reef, the natural wonder, the biodiversity and the tens of thousands of jobs. We’re on track for 4C of warming, which would make much of the country a living hell.
This month I travelled to China as part of a “Smart Energy” delegation. In Shenzhen, where every bus and taxi is fully electric, we toured the factory of BYD, where many of its 250,000-strong workforce are building the energy storage and transport systems of tomorrow. Our tomorrow, their today.
We toured the highly advanced factory of Jinko Solar. With 10.5 gigawatts of annual production, Jinko is the largest solar panel manufacturer in the world. These “factories of the future” are no longer dependent upon cheap labour, but on big investments, smart manufacturing, world-leading quality systems and highly skilled researchers and engineers. As we dither, China zooms past.
Prof Ross Garnaut paints a picture of Australia as a superpower of the post-carbon world economy. Our world-leading wind and solar resources can and should be harnessed into making the world’s lowest-emissions steel, aluminium and lithium, instead of just exporting ore. Our cheap clean energy can be turned into hydrogen, the “God molecule” of the post-carbon industrial era, and the economics are shifting such that it may soon make sense to export electricity by subsea cable to our south-east Asian neighbours.
Has Angus Taylor ever set out a vision for Australia’s energy future that’s even remotely compelling? Anything other than caretaking a highly polluting 20th century energy system while we push civilisation further into climate chaos?
No. Taylor ducks and weaves around the bad news in our quarterly emissions data, suggesting that Australia should be applauded for exporting gas. As experts have pointed out, claims about the environmental benefits of gas are “grossly exaggerated” and “likely to be wrong”, and, if we want praise for small, potential emissions reductions overseas, we must also take responsibility for the large, actual footprint of our coal exports.
Ask Taylor in which year emissions will fall to 451 Mt — 26% below 2005 levels — and you’ll get no straight answer.
History won’t be kind to this energy minister for approaching the climate challenge with all the care and subtlety that Captain Smith of the Titanic approached the fatal iceberg.
History will be doubly harsh on Taylor for his failure to navigate a course that captures the economic opportunities of the global energy transition.

*Simon Holmes à Court is senior adviser to the Climate and Energy College at Melbourne University

Links

• Australia missing out on huge cuts in emissions through energy efficiency failure
• Angus Taylor's claim LNG exports reduce global emissions 'likely wrong' – climate expert
• Australia can be 'superpower of post carbon world', says Ross Garnaut
• No govt EV strategy before mid-2020
• Budget 2019: Coalition cuts climate solutions fund by $70m a year 
• Angus Taylor ABC Radio National

Sydney Morning Herald - Editorial

The Queensland government has now approved the controversial Adani coal mine. This must not stop the crucial debate on how Australia can transition to a low-carbon economy.
The campaign against the mine, under the slogan "Stop Adani", has become a rallying cry for Australia's environmental movement that has gone far beyond the risks for local fauna and the precious local water supply on which Queensland has just issued a decision.
The mine has dominated, perhaps unduly, Australia's debate over how it can help fight global warming while being the world's biggest coal exporter.
Protesters ask for science to be the key factor in the decision to approve or reject the groundwater management plan for Adani's Carmichael mine in central Queensland. Credit: Tony Moore The Carmichael mine's planned peak output of 60 million tonnes a year would increase Australian thermal coal exports by a quarter but it could be just the first of several huge new mines planned in the remote Galilee Basin.
Environmentalists warn that if developing countries such as India burn this coal as fuel it will generate greenhouse gases which will contribute significantly to the rise in global temperatures.
It is a complicated debate because the likes of India will continue to burn coal regardless of whether Adani is approved.  Under the Paris Treaty on climate change, Australia's main responsibility is to curb its own emissions from domestic sources and it is up to other countries how they meet their own targets.
That makes it all the more worrying that the Coalition has failed to honour that bargain by failing to develop a serious plan to transition to a low-carbon emissions economy.
The federal election, where the ALP's ambivalence towards the mine cost it a swag of north Queensland seats, appears to have tilted the political scales decisively in favour of the mine.
Voters in regional Queensland were convinced by the promise of a jobs bonanza even though Adani scaled back its plans last year, cutting the expected number of direct jobs to just 1500 once the mine is built.
The fact that the Palaszczuk government announced a decision just three weeks after the poll will only deepen concerns that politics has contaminated the science of its approval.
Whatever the merits, the decision is likely final and the federal ALP, too, will be reluctant to take the legally questionable step of promising to re-open approvals if it ever wins government.
So it will be up to Adani and the others planning their own mines in the basin, such as Australian billionaires Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer, to decide whether they think it is worth investing tens of billions.
They should realise these decions come with signficant risks. The price of coal has held steady for some time but coal consumption will have to fall dramatically if there is to be any chance of controlling rising temperatures. In that scenario, Adani and others investors could do their dough.
For their part, neither federal nor state governments should do anything to underwrite the costs or reduce the risk of these private projects.
Governments should not offer subsidies or cut environmental corners or build infrastructure such as the expensive rail line which will be needed to take the coal to port. Any government money would be better spent on helping Australia's 100,000 coal miners transition to a new low-carbon world.
Australia should also lead by example by meeting and exceeding our Paris treaty obligations. In diplomatic forums it should encourage India and other potential customers to transition gradually to renewables. It might hurt Adani's financial returns but it will be good for the planet.

Links

• Coalition Is To Blame For Uncertainty Over Climate Costs
• Both Parties Still In Climate Policy Black Hole
• The Guardian View On Greta Thunberg: Seizing The Future
• Electric Vehicles Are The Road To The Future
• ALP Climate Policy Requires Serious Scrutiny
• Young Climate Strikers Can Win Their Fight. We Must All Help
• Climate Change: Young People Striking From School See It For The Life-Threatening Issue It Is
• Politicians have no clue what effect Adani will have on water: expert
• Al Gore slams Adani, tells Queensland 'good luck' in selling coal to India