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Why Is The US News Media So Bad At Covering Climate Change?

Lethal Heating - 27 April, 2019 - 05:00
The Guardian - Kyle Pope | Mark Hertsgaard

The US news media devotes startlingly little time to climate change – how can newsrooms cover it in ways that will finally resonate with their audiences?
A firefighter sprays water as flames from the Camp Fire consume a home in Magalia, California, in 2018. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP This article is excerpted from a piece published by Columbia Journalism Review and the Nation. The Guardian is partnering with CJR and the Nation on a 30 April conference aimed at reframing the way journalists cover climate change. More information about the conference, including a link to RSVP, is here. Last summer, during the deadliest wildfire season in California’s history, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes got into a revealing Twitter discussion about why US television doesn’t much cover climate change. Elon Green, an editor at Longform, had tweeted, “Sure would be nice if our news networks – the only outlets that can force change in this country – would cover it with commensurate urgency.” Hayes (who is an editor at large for the Nation) replied that his program had tried. Which was true: in 2016, All In With Chris Hayes spent an entire week highlighting the impact of climate change in the US as part of a look at the issues that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were ignoring. The problem, Hayes tweeted, was that “every single time we’ve covered [climate change] it’s been a palpable ratings killer. So the incentives are not great.”
The Twittersphere pounced. “TV used to be obligated to put on programming for the public good even if it didn’t get good ratings. What happened to that?” asked @JThomasAlbert. @GalJaya said, “Your ‘ratings killer’ argument against covering #climatechange is the reverse of that used during the 2016 primary when corporate media justified gifting Trump $5 billion in free air time because ‘it was good for ratings,’ with disastrous results for the nation.”
When @mikebaird17 urged Hayes to invite Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, one of the best climate science communicators around, on to his show, she tweeted that All In had canceled on her twice – once when “I was literally in the studio w[ith] the earpiece in my ear” – and so she wouldn’t waste any more time on it.
“Wait, we did that?” Hayes tweeted back. “I’m very very sorry that happened.”
This spring Hayes redeemed himself, airing perhaps the best coverage on American television yet of the Green New Deal. All In devoted its entire 29 March broadcast to analyzing the congressional resolution, co-sponsored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, which outlines a plan to mobilize the United States to stave off climate disaster and, in the process, create millions of green jobs. In a shrewd answer to the ratings challenge, Hayes booked Ocasio-Cortez, the most charismatic US politician of the moment, for the entire hour.
Yet at a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media. Especially on television, where most Americans still get their news, the brutal demands of ratings and money work against adequate coverage of the biggest story of our time. Many newspapers, too, are failing the climate test. Last October, the scientists of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report, warning that humanity had a mere 12 years to radically slash greenhouse gas emissions or face a calamitous future in which hundreds of millions of people worldwide would go hungry or homeless or worse. Only 22 of the 50 biggest newspapers in the United States covered that report.
Instead of sleepwalking us toward disaster, the US news media need to remember their Paul Revere responsibilities – to awaken, inform and rouse the people to action. To that end, the Nation and CJR are launching Covering Climate Change: A New Playbook for a 1.5-Degree World, a project aimed at dramatically improving US media coverage of the climate crisis. When the IPCC scientists issued their 12-year warning, they said that limiting temperature rise to 1.5C would require radically transforming energy, agriculture, transportation, construction and other core sectors of the global economy. Our project is grounded in the conviction that the news sector must be transformed just as radically.
The project will launch on 30 April with a conference at the Columbia Journalism School – a working forum where journalists will gather to start charting a new course. We envision this event as the beginning of a conversation that America’s journalists and news organizations must have with one another, as well as with the public we are supposed to be serving, about how to cover this rapidly uncoiling emergency. Judging by the climate coverage to date, most of the US news media still don’t grasp the seriousness of this issue. There is a runaway train racing toward us, and its name is climate change. That is not alarmism; it is scientific fact. We as a civilization urgently need to slow that train down and help as many people off the tracks as possible. It’s an enormous challenge, and if we don’t get it right, nothing else will matter. The US mainstream news media, unlike major news outlets in Europe and independent media in the US, have played a big part in getting it wrong for many years. It’s past time to make amends.
If 1.5C is the new limit for a habitable planet, how can newsrooms tell that story in ways that will finally resonate with their audiences? And given journalism’s deeply troubled business model, how can such coverage be paid for? Some preliminary suggestions. (You can read this story in its entirety at Columbia Journalism Review or The Nation.)
  • Don’t blame the audience, and listen to the kids. The onus is on news organizations to craft the story in ways that will demand the attention of readers and viewers. The specifics of how to do this will vary depending on whether a given outlet works in text, radio, TV or some other medium and whether it is commercially or publicly funded, but the core challenge is the same. A majority of Americans are interested in climate change and want to hear what can be done about it. This is especially true of the younger people that news organizations covet as an audience. Even most young Republicans want climate action. And no one is speaking with more clarity now than Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Villaseñor and the other teenagers who have rallied hundreds of thousands of people into the streets worldwide for the School Strike 4 Climate demonstrations.
  • Establish a diverse climate desk, but don’t silo climate coverage. The climate story is too important and multidimensional for a news outlet not to have a designated team covering it. That team must have members who reflect the economic, racial and gender diversity of America; if not, the coverage will miss crucial aspects of the story and fail to connect with important audiences. At the same time, climate change is so far-reaching that connections should be made when reporting on nearly every topic. For example, an economics reporter could partner with a climate reporter to cover the case for a just transition: the need to help workers and communities that have long relied on fossil fuel, such as the coal regions of Appalachia, transition to a clean-energy economy, as the Green New Deal envisions.
  • Learn the science. Many journalists have long had a bias toward the conceptual. But you can’t do justice to the climate crisis if you don’t understand the scientific facts, in particular how insanely late the hour is. At this point, anyone suggesting a leisurely approach to slashing emissions is not taking the science seriously. Make the time to get educated. Four recent books – McKibben’s Falter, Naomi Klein’s On Fire, David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, and Jeff Goodell’s The Water Will Come – are good places to start.
  • Don’t internalize the spin. Not only do most Americans care about climate change, but an overwhelming majority support a Green New Deal – 81% of registered voters said so as of last December, according to Yale climate pollsters. Trump and Fox don’t like the Green New Deal? Fine. But journalists should report that the rest of America does. Likewise, they should not buy the argument that supporting a Green New Deal is a terrible political risk that will play into the hands of Trump and the GOP; nor should the media give credence to wild assertions about what a Green New Deal would do or cost. The data simply does not support such accusations. But breaking free from this ideological trap requires another step.
  • Lose the Beltway mindset. It’s not just the Green New Deal that is popular with the broader public. Many of the subsidiary policies – such as Medicare for All and free daycare – are now supported by upwards of 70% of the American public, according to Pew and Reuters polls. Inside the Beltway, this fact is unknown or discounted; the assumption by journalists and the politicians they cover is that such policies are ultra-leftist political suicide. They think this because the Beltway worldview prioritizes transactional politics: what will Congress pass and the president sign into law? But what Congress and the White House do is often very different from what the American people favor, and the press should not confuse the two.
  • Help the heartland. Some of the places being hit hardest by climate change, such as the midwestern states flooded this spring, have little access to real climate news; instead, the denial peddled by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh dominates. Iconic TV newsman Bill Moyers has an antidote: “Suppose you formed a consortium of media that could quickly act as a strike force to show how a disaster like this is related to climate change – not just for the general media, but for agricultural media, heartland radio stations, local television outlets. A huge teachable moment could be at hand if there were a small coordinating nerve center of journalists who could energize reporting, op-eds, interviews, and so on that connect the public to the causes and not just the consequences of events like this.” Moyers added that such a team should “always have on standby a pool of the most reputable scientists who, on camera and otherwise, can connect natural disasters to the latest and most credible scientific research”.
  • Cover the solutions. There isn’t a more exciting time to be on the climate beat. That may sound strange, considering how much suffering lies in store from the impacts that are already locked in. But with the Green New Deal, the US government is now, for the first time, at least talking about a response that is commensurate with the scale and urgency of the problem. Reporters have a tendency to gravitate to the crime scene, to the tragedy. They have a harder time with the solutions to a problem; some even mistake it as fluff. Now, with climate change, the solution is a critical part of the story.
  • Don’t be afraid to point fingers. As always, journalists should shun cheerleading, but neither should we be neutral. Defusing the climate crisis is in everyone’s interest, but some entities are resolutely opposed to doing what the science says is needed, starting with the president of the United States. The press has called out Trump on many fronts – for his lying, corruption and racism – but his deliberate worsening of the climate crisis has been little mentioned, though it is arguably the most consequential of his presidential actions. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil has announced plans to keep producing large amounts of oil and gas through at least 2040; other companies have made similar declarations. If enacted, those plans guarantee catastrophe. Journalism has a responsibility to make that consequence clear to the public and to cover the companies, executives, and investors behind those plans accordingly.
If American journalism doesn’t get the climate story right – and soon – no other story will matter. The news media’s past climate failures can be redeemed only by an immediate shift to more high-profile, inclusive and fearless coverage. Our #CoveringClimateNow project calls on all journalists and news outlets to join the conversation about how to make that happen. As the nation’s founders envisioned long ago, the role of a free press is to inform the people and hold the powerful accountable. These days, our collective survival demands nothing less.

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The Uncanny Power Of Greta Thunberg’s Climate-Change Rhetoric

Lethal Heating - 26 April, 2019 - 05:00
New Yorker - 

Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old climate activist, says that all she wants is for adults to behave like adults, and to act on the terrifying information that is all around us. Photograph by Facundo Arrizabalaga / ShutterstockDuring the week of Easter, Britain enjoyed—if that is the right word—a break from the intricate torment of Brexit.
The country’s politicians disappeared on vacation and, in their absence, genuine public problems, the kinds of things that should be occupying their attention, rushed into view.
In Northern Ireland, where political violence is worsening sharply, a twenty-nine-year-old journalist and L.G.B.T. campaigner named Lyra McKee was shot and killed while reporting on a riot in Londonderry. In London, thousands of climate-change protesters blocked Waterloo Bridge, over the River Thames, and Oxford Circus, in the West End, affixing themselves to the undersides of trucks and to a pink boat named for Berta Cáceres, an environmental activist and indigenous leader, who was murdered in Honduras.
Slightly more than a thousand Extinction Rebellion activists, between the ages of nineteen and seventy-four, were arrested in eight days. On Easter Monday, a crowd performed a mass die-in at the Natural History Museum, under the skeleton of a blue whale. In a country whose politics have been entirely consumed by the maddening minutiae of leaving the European Union, it was cathartic to see citizens demanding action for a greater cause.
In a video message, Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, compared the civil disobedience in London to the civil-rights movement of the sixties and the suffragettes of a century ago. “It is not the first time in history we have seen angry people take to the streets when the injustice has been great enough,” she said.
On Tuesday, as members of Parliament returned to work, Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swedish environmental activist, was in Westminster to address them.
Last August, Thunberg stopped attending school in Stockholm and began a protest outside the Swedish Parliament to draw political attention to climate change. Since then, Thunberg’s tactic of going on strike from school—inspired by the response to the Parkland shooting in Florida last year—has been taken up by children in a hundred countries around the world.
In deference to her international celebrity, Thunberg was given a nauseatingly polite welcome in England. John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons, briefly held up proceedings to mark her arrival in the viewing gallery. Some M.P.s applauded, breaching the custom of not clapping in the chamber.
When Thunberg spoke to a meeting of some hundred and fifty journalists, activists, and political staffers, in Portcullis House, where M.P.s have their offices, she was flanked by Ed Miliband, the former Labour Party leader; Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary and a prominent Brexiteer; and Caroline Lucas, Britain’s sole Green Party M.P., who had invited her.
Thunberg, who wore purple jeans, blue sneakers, and a pale plaid shirt, did not seem remotely fazed. Carefully unsmiling, she checked that her microphone was on. “Can you hear me?” she asked. “Around the year 2030, ten years, two hundred and fifty-two days, and ten hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.”
Thunberg—along with her younger sister—has been given a diagnosis of autism and A.D.H.D. In interviews, she sometimes ascribes her unusual focus, and her absolute intolerance of adult bullshit on the subject of climate change, to her neurological condition. “I see the world a bit different, from another perspective,” she told my colleague Masha Gessen.
 In 2015, the year Thunberg turned twelve, she gave up flying. She travelled to London by train, which took two days. Her voice, which is young and Scandinavian, has a discordant, analytical clarity. Since 2006, when David Cameron, as a reforming Conservative Party-leadership contender, visited the Arctic Circle, Britain’s political establishment has congratulated itself on its commitment to combatting climate change.
Thunberg challenged this record, pointing out that, while the United Kingdom’s carbon-dioxide emissions have fallen by thirty-seven per cent since 1990, this figure does not include the effects of aviation, shipping, or trade. “If these numbers are included, the reduction is around ten per cent since 1990—or an average of 0.4 per cent a year,” she said.
She described Britain’s eagerness to frack for shale gas, to expand its airports, and to search for dwindling oil and gas reserves in the North Sea as absurd. “You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before,” she said. “Like now. And those answers don’t exist anymore. Because you did not act in time.”
The climate-change movement feels powerful today because it is politicians—not the people gluing themselves to trucks—who seem deluded about reality. Thunberg says that all she wants is for adults to behave like adults, and to act on the terrifying information that is all around us. But the impact of her message does not come only from her regard for the facts. Thunberg is an uncanny, gifted orator. Last week, the day after the fire at Notre-Dame, she told the European Parliament that “cathedral thinking” would be necessary to confront climate change.
Yesterday, Thunberg repeated the phrase. “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking,” she said. “We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.” In Westminster, Thunberg’s words were shaming. Brexit is pretty much the opposite of cathedral thinking.
It is a process in which a formerly great country is tearing itself apart over the best way to belittle itself.
No one knew what to say to Thunberg, or how to respond to her exhortations.
Her microphone check was another rhetorical device.
 “Did you hear what I just said?” she asked, in the middle of her speech. The room bellowed, “Yes!” “Is my English O.K.?” The audience laughed.
Thunberg’s face flickered, but she did not smile. “Because I’m beginning to wonder."

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Analysis: $130 Billion Per Year Benefit To Australia's GDP By Avoiding Climate Change

Lethal Heating - 26 April, 2019 - 05:00
Australia Institute

The Australia Institute 2019 Budget Wrap: Cuts to the climate and energy budgetUnless national action is taken to meet the Paris Target to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees, Australia’s GDP faces a hit of an average of $130 billion per year according to a new briefing note by The Australia Institute.
The analysis released today by the Canberra-based think tank shows that the current climate debate is largely missing three key points:
  • The cost of inaction on climate change is huge – Australia’s GDP would average $130 billion per year lower if the Paris Agreement is not achieved according to a prominent study.
  • Under the carbon price period, Australia successfully reduced emissions by 2% while the economy grew by 5%.
  • Economic literature suggests the economic impacts of climate policy will be minor.
“As an economist, it is hard to understand why policymakers are ignoring Australia’s own recent history in climate policy and the clear costs imposed by climate change,” said Rod Campbell, Research Director at The Australia Institute.
“Australians have seen firsthand how emissions reduction and economic growth are possible at the same time – as a nation Australia experienced this very phenomenon five years ago.
“For political leaders to suggest we now need economic modelling to tell us whether this is indeed possible after all is a furphy.
“In just two years Australia reduced emissions by 2% and grew the economy by 5% under a carbon price and the sky did not fall in. In fact, employment grew by 200,000 jobs.
“Analysts cannot claim to base their work on the likes of Lord Nicholas Stern or Professor Joseph Stiglitz and then ignore the conclusions drawn by those very same pieces of research.
“Nicholas Stern’s own conclusion was that “the benefits of strong and early action far outweigh the economic costs of not acting [on climate change].”
“Similarly, consultant Brian Fisher cites a study that estimates climate costs to Australia of $130 billion per year, but ignores the conclusion of that very same study.
“Analysis that ignores the economic benefits of acting on climate and only focuses on costs is misleading and does a disservice to this year’s voters and future generations.”

Links
  • Australia Institute Report: Cost of Climate Inaction (pdf)
  • Declare War on Global Warming, Say SA Voters as Climate Election Looms
  • Poll: North/South Divide on Climate Action Exposed as Political Myth
  • Poll: One in Two Voters Support New Car Sales 100% EV by 2025
  • Hydrogen and Climate: Trojan Horse or Golden Goose
  • Labor dumps one carbon policy fantasy
  • Opposition Climate Proposal: Solid Plan to Reduce Emissions
  • Business Council of Australia at Odds With Own Members on Climate Action
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To Solve Climate Change And Biodiversity Loss, We Need A Global Deal For Nature

Lethal Heating - 26 April, 2019 - 05:00
The Conversation - 

An aerial photo of Borneo shows deforestation and patches of remaining forest. Greg Asner, CC BY-NDEarth’s cornucopia of life has evolved over 550 million years. Along the way, five mass extinction events have caused serious setbacks to life on our planet. The fifth, which was caused by a gargantuan meteorite impact along Mexico’s Yucatan coast, changed Earth’s climate, took out the dinosaurs and altered the course of biological evolution.
Today nature is suffering accelerating losses so great that many scientists say a sixth mass extinction is underway. Unlike past mass extinctions, this event is driven by human actions that are dismantling and disrupting natural ecosystems and changing Earth’s climate.
My research focuses on ecosystems and climate change from regional to global scales. In a new study titled “A Global Deal for Nature,” led by conservation biologist and strategist Eric Dinerstein, 17 colleagues and I lay out a road map for simultaneously averting a sixth mass extinction and reducing climate change.
We chart a course for immediately protecting at least 30% of Earth’s surface to put the brakes on rapid biodiversity loss, and then add another 20% comprising ecosystems that can suck disproportionately large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. In our view, biodiversity loss and climate change must be addressed as one interconnected problem with linked solutions.
International Union for the Conservation of Nature status ratings for assessed species (EW – extinct in the wild; CR – critically endangered; EN – endangered; VU – vulnerable; NT – near threatened; DD – data deficient; LC – least concern). Many species have not yet been assessed. IUCN, CC BY-NDLet’s make a deal
Our Global Deal for Nature is based on a map of about a thousand “ecoregions” on land and sea, which we delineated based on an internationally growing body of research. Each of them contains a unique ensemble of species and ecosystems, and they play complementary roles in curbing climate change.
Natural ecosystems are like mutual funds in an otherwise volatile stock market. They contain self-regulating webs of organisms that interact. For example, tropical forests contain a kaleidoscope of tree species that are packed together, maximizing carbon storage in wood and soils.
Forests can weather natural disasters and catastrophic disease outbreaks because they are diverse portfolios of biological responses, self-managed by and among co-existing species. It’s hard to crash them if they are left alone to do their thing.
Man-made ecosystems are poor substitutes for their natural counterparts. For example, tree plantations are not forest ecosystems – they are crops of trees that store far less carbon than natural forests, and require much more upkeep. Plantations are also ghost towns compared to the complex biodiversity found in natural forests.
Another important feature of natural ecosystems is that they are connected and influence one another. Consider coral reefs, which are central to the Global Deal for Nature because they store carbon and are hotspots for biodiversity. But that’s not their only value: They also protect coasts from storm surge, supporting inland mangroves and coastal grasslands that are mega-storage vaults for carbon and homes for large numbers of species. If one ecosystem is lost, risk to the others rises dramatically. Connectivity matters.
Reef-scale coral bleaching in the Hawaiian Islands, 2016. Warming oceans are causing repeated coral bleaching events, threatening reefs worldwide. Greg Asner, CC BY-NDThe idea of conserving large swaths of the planet to preserve biodiversity is not new. Many distinguished experts have endorsed the idea of setting aside half the surface of the Earth to protect biodiversity. The Global Deal for Nature greatly advances this idea by specifying the amounts, places and types of protections needed to get this effort moving in the right direction.

Building on the Paris Agreement
We designed our study to serve as guidance that governments can use in a planning process, similar to the climate change negotiations that led to the 2015 Paris Agreement. The Paris accord, which 197 nations have signed, sets global targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, provides a model for financial assistance to low-income countries and supports local and grassroots efforts worldwide.
But the Paris Agreement does not safeguard the diversity of life on Earth. Without a companion plan, we will lose the wealth of species that have taken millions of years to evolve and accumulate.
In fact, my colleagues and I believe the Paris Agreement cannot be met without simultaneously saving biodiversity. Here’s why: The most logical and cost-effective way to curb greenhouse gas emissions and remove gases from the atmosphere is by storing carbon in natural ecosystems.
Forests, grasslands, peatlands, mangroves and a few other types of ecosystems pull the most carbon from the air per acre of land. Protecting and expanding their range is far more scalable and far less expensive than engineering the climate to slow the pace of warming. And there is no time to lose.

Worth the cost
What would it take to put a Global Deal for Nature into action? Land and marine protection costs money: Our plan would require a budget of some US$100 billion per year. This may sound like a lot, but for comparison, Silicon Valley companies earned nearly $60 billion in 2017 just from selling apps. And the distributed cost is well within international reach. Today, however, our global society is spending less than a tenth of that amount to save Earth’s biodiversity.
Nations will also need new technology to assess and monitor progress and put biodiversity-saving actions to the test. Some ingredients needed for a global biodiversity monitoring system are now deployed, such as basic satellites that describe the general locations of forests and reefs. Others are only up and running at regional scales, such as on-the-ground tracking systems to detect animals and the people who poach them, and airborne biodiversity and carbon mapping technologies.


AsnerLab’s airborne observatory is mapping and monitoring species and carbon storage to bring the problems of biodiversity loss and climate change into focus.

But key components are still missing at the global scale, including technology that can analyze target ecosystems and species from Earth orbit, on high-flying aircraft and in the field to generate real-time knowledge about the changing state of life on our planet. The good news is that this type of technology exists, and could be rapidly scaled up to create the first-ever global nature monitoring program.
Technology is the easier part of the challenge. Organizing human cooperation toward such a broad goal is much harder. But we believe the value of Earth’s biodiversity is far higher than the cost and effort needed to save it.

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The Guardian View On Greta Thunberg: Seizing The Future

Lethal Heating - 26 April, 2019 - 05:00
The Guardian - Editorial

The Swedish teenager’s clarity and urgency have cut through layers of obfuscation and helplessness – and forced climate change up the agenda
Swedish environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg at the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday.Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images Nobody could have predicted that a Swedish teenager would shift the terms of the global climate debate in the way that Greta Thunberg has done.
Since she began her school strike in Stockholm last August, Greta has addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, the European parliament and the UN climate talks in Poland. Last week she met the pope in Rome.
On Tuesday she met UK political leaders at the House of Commons. That Theresa May opted out of an encounter with one of the world’s foremost young activists is an embarrassing error of judgment.
By any rational calculus, Greta is in the process of doing humanity a huge favour.
That is because we struggle to give the global warming and wildlife crisis the attention they deserve. We have the science, with predictions of a manmade greenhouse effect dating back to the 1890s. (One of Greta’s distant relatives, Svante Arrhenius, was a pioneer in the field.)
We have the international structures to collate the experts’ findings: the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its first report in 1990. We have some, although not all, of the knowledge and technology we need to wean us off our addiction to fossil fuels: wind and solar energy; healthy alternatives to meat; bicycles and trains. Many nations have laws to help us transition to a low-carbon future. The world has the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the agreement struck in Paris in 2015.
But for reasons that are psychological as well as political, we seem mostly unable to concentrate on the existential threat we face as global warming gathers pace (20 of the hottest-ever years were in the last 22) and climate chaos unfolds. Something else is always more important – or more manageable. Even those who recognise that we must use all the tools at our disposal, to stop emitting greenhouse gases as soon as possible, struggle to be heard.


 Greta Thunberg tells MPs: 'Our future was sold'
Thanks in no small part to the eye-catching tactic of the school strike, over the past nine months the movement spearheaded by Greta Thunberg has cut through. Green activists and scholars have spoken for years of the generational injustice of climate change.
The school strikers belong to a 21st-century generation who have either taken this idea on, or arrived at it through a process of deduction of their own.
Greta, who believes her outlook has been influenced by her autism, says she learned about climate change at school aged eight, and became depressed at 11. By 15, her angst had translated itself into a distinctive form of civil disobedience – the Friday school strikes which spread around the world.
Hints that Greta has been manipulated by adults appear to be unfounded. As a teenager, she is in any case entitled to advice. And while it is natural to focus on her as a figurehead, the movement does not depend on her. As she told the audience at a Guardian Live event on Monday, she does not see herself as a leader, but as a participant.
How the wave of demonstrations she helped start develops will be fascinating, as will the progress of the Extinction Rebellion protesters. Peaceful protest and activism are vital to democracy. The climate crisis makes them urgent and necessary. But decision-making requires processes and structures. This is not easy, and partly explains why so many of the successful civil disobedience campaigns of the past have been shaped by charismatic individuals.
The school strikers’ message, similar to the extinction rebels, is that we should panic. Our house, in Greta’s memorable phrase, is on fire. We must embrace “cathedral thinking” – laying the foundations for the carbon-free future without knowing how we are going to paint the roof.
This way of thinking does induce fear. But since doing nothing is not an option, except for nihilists and misanthropes, the rest of us have little choice but to battle through these darker emotions – and act with hope.
The IPCC said last year that the next 12 years are critical, a warning echoed on the BBC by David Attenborough in a landmark documentary last week. The film should have been made a decade ago.
We should have been alert to the dangers before children went on strike.
But we still have some time.

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Melting Permafrost In Arctic Will Have $70tn Climate Impact – Study

Lethal Heating - 25 April, 2019 - 05:00
The Guardian - 

Study shows how destabilised natural systems will worsen man-made problem
Greenhouse gases, which have been frozen below the soil for centuries, have already begun to escape. Photograph: John Mcconnico/AP The release of methane and carbon dioxide from thawing permafrost will accelerate global warming and add up to $70tn (£54tn) to the world’s climate bill, according to the most advanced study yet of the economic consequences of a melting Arctic.
If countries fail to improve on their Paris agreement commitments, this feedback mechanism, combined with a loss of heat-deflecting white ice, will cause a near 5% amplification of global warming and its associated costs, says the paper, which was published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.
The authors say their study is the first to calculate the economic impact of permafrost melt and reduced albedo – a measure of how much light that hits a surface is reflected without being absorbed – based on the most advanced computer models of what is likely to happen in the Arctic as temperatures rise. It shows how destabilised natural systems will worsen the problem caused by man-made emissions, making it more difficult and expensive to solve.
They assessed known stocks of frozen organic matter in the ground up to 3 metres deep at multiple points across the Arctic. These were run through the world’s most advanced simulation software in the US and at the UK Met Office to predict how much gas will be released at different levels of warming. Even with supercomputers, the number crunching took weeks because the vast geography and complex climate interactions of the Arctic throw up multiple variables. The researchers then applied previous economic impact models to assess the likely costs.
Permafrost melt is the main concern. Greenhouse gases – which are released when organic matter that had been frozen below the soil for centuries thaws and rots - have already begun to escape at the current level of 1 degrees Celsius of global heating. So far the impact is small. Ten gigatonnes of carbon have been released from the permafrost but this source of emissions will grow rapidly once temperatures rise beyond 1.5C.
On the current trajectory of at least 3C of warming by the end of the century, melting permafrost is expected to discharge up to 280 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and 3 gigatonnes of methane, which has a climate effect that is 10 to 20 times stronger than CO2.
This would increase the global climate-driven impacts by by $70tn between now and 2300. This is 10 times higher than the projected benefits from a melting Arctic, such as easier navigation for ships and access to minerals, says the paper.
It would also add to global inequality because most of the economic burden – equivalent to almost the entire world’s current annual GDP – is likely to be borne by countries in warmer poorer regions such as India and Africa, which are most vulnerable to a rise in temperatures.
“It’s disheartening that we have this in front of us,” said Dmitry Yumashev of Lancaster University. “Even at 1.5C to 2C, there are impacts and costs due to thawing permafrost. But they are considerably lower for these scenarios compared to business as usual. We have the technology and policy instruments to limit the warming but we are not moving fast enough.”
The new projections contained a modicum of good news because the impact of land permafrost melt was at the lower range of what had been feared. Previous estimates suggested these Arctic tipping points could add more than 10% to climate costs. Some feared the methane alone could prove catastrophic but the new figures show CO2 remains the greatest concern.
“We still have a time bomb, but it may not be as large as previously believed,” said Yumashev. But he warned against complacency because even at the low end the damages are huge, the study has a considerable degree of uncertainty and the costs of several other potential tipping points have yet to be calculated.

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United Nations Report: One Million Species At Risk Of Extinction

Lethal Heating - 25 April, 2019 - 05:00
NEWS.com.au - AFP

One million species on earth are at risk of dying out due to an ‘imminent’ mass extinction event, according to a shocking new United Nations report. Pic: AFPUp to one million species face extinction due to human influence, according to a draft UN report obtained by AFP that painstakingly catalogues how humanity has undermined the natural resources upon which its very survival depends.
The accelerating loss of clean air, drinkable water, CO2-absorbing forests, pollinating insects, protein-rich fish and storm-blocking mangroves — to name but a few of the dwindling services rendered by nature — poses no less of a threat than climate change, says the report, set to be unveiled May 6.
Indeed, biodiversity loss and global warming are closely linked, according to the 44-page summary for policymakers, which distils a 1800-page United Nations (UN) assessment of scientific literature on the state of nature.All the world's wild horses are extinct, according to a 2018 study. Picture: AFPDelegates from 130 nations meeting in Paris from April 29 will vet the executive summary line by line. Wording may change, but figures lifted from the underlying report cannot be altered.
“We need to recognise that climate change and loss of nature are equally important, not just for the environment but as development and economic issues as well,” Robert Watson, chair of the UN-mandated body that compiled the report, told AFP, without divulging its findings.
“The way we produce our food and energy is undermining the regulating services that we get from nature,” he said, adding only “transformative change” can stem the damage.
Deforestation and agriculture, including livestock production, account for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions and have wreaked havoc on natural ecosystems as well.

Mass Extinction Event
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report warns of “an imminent rapid acceleration in the global rate of species extinction”.
The pace of loss “is already tens to hundreds of times higher than it has been, on average, over the last 10 million years”, it notes.
“Half-a-million to a million species are projected to be threatened with extinction, many within decades.”
Many experts think a so-called “mass extinction event” — only the sixth in the last half-billion years — is already under way.
The most recent ended the Cretaceous period some 66 million years ago when a 10-kilometre-wide asteroid strike wiped out most lifeforms.
Scientists estimate Earth is today home to some eight million distinct species, a majority of them insects.
A quarter of catalogued animal and plant species are already being crowded, eaten or poisoned out of existence.
The drop in sheer numbers is even more dramatic, with wild mammal biomass — their collective weight — down by 82 per cent.
Humans and livestock account for more than 95 per cent of mammal biomass.
Extinction Rebellion climate change activists perform a mass ‘die in’ under the blue whale in the foyer of the Natural History Museum in London on April 22, 2019. Picture: AFPPopulation Growth
“If we’re going to have a sustainable planet that provides services to communities around the world, we need to change this trajectory in the next 10 years, just as we need to do that with climate,” noted World Wildlife Fund chief scientist Rebecca Shaw, formerly a member of the UN scientific bodies for both climate and biodiversity.
The direct causes of species loss, in order of importance, are shrinking habitat and land-use change, hunting for food or illicit trade in body parts, climate change, pollution, and alien species such as rats, mosquitoes and snakes that hitch rides on ships or planes, the report finds.
“There are also two big indirect drivers of biodiversity loss and climate change — the number of people in the world and their growing ability to consume,” said Mr Watson.
Once seen as primarily a future threat to animal and plant life, the disruptive impact of global warming has accelerated.
Shifts in the distribution of species, for example, will likely double if the global average temperature rise goes up a notch from 1.5 degrees Celsius to 2C.
So far, the global thermometer has risen 1C compared with mid-19th century levels.
The 2015 Paris Agreement enjoins nations to cap the rise to “well below” 2C. But a landmark UN climate report in October said that would still be enough to boost the intensity and frequency of deadly heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms.
Climate change activists attempt to approach the Houses of Parliament during the ongoing Extinction Rebellion climate change demonstration in London on April 23, 2019. Source: AFPGlobal Inequity
Other findings in the report include:
  • Three-quarters of land surfaces, 40 per cent of the marine environment and 50 per cent of inland waterways across the globe have been “severely altered”.
  • Many of the areas where nature’s contribution to human wellbeing will be most severely compromised are home to indigenous peoples and the world’s poorest communities that are also vulnerable to climate change.
  • More than two billion people rely on wood fuel for energy, four billion rely on natural medicines and more than 75 per cent of global food crops require animal pollination.
  • Nearly half of land and marine ecosystems have been profoundly compromised by human interference in the last 50 years.
  • Subsidies to fisheries, industrial agriculture, livestock raising, forestry, mining and the production of biofuel or fossil fuel energy encourage waste, inefficiency and over-consumption.
The report cautioned against climate change solutions that may inadvertently harm nature.
The use, for example, of biofuels combined with “carbon capture and storage” — the sequestration of CO2 released when biofuels are burned — is widely seen as key in the transition to green energy on a global scale.
But the land needed to grow all those biofuel crops may wind up cutting into food production, the expansion of protected areas or reforestation efforts.

‘You Stole Our Future’
Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg met a cross-party group of British MPs on Tuesday, including Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn, as environmental protesters staged a ninth day of demonstrations in London.
In a powerful speech, the 16-year-old from Sweden implored the world’s leaders to act on climate change before it’s too late, fearing her generation “probably (doesn’t) have a future”.
“Because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money,” Ms Thunberg said.
“It was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit, and that you only live once.
“Around the year 2030, 10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it,” she said.
Swedish environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg addresses politicians, media and guests at the Houses of Parliament in London on April 23, 2019. Source: Getty Images“That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50 per cent.”
Ms Thunberg urged leaders to take a “cathedral thinking” approach to global warming — starting on an action plan even if we don’t have all the answers yet.
“The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.
“Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.”
Ms Thunberg’s visit to the UK — she refuses to fly and only travels from her native Sweden by train, electric bus or car to keep her emission low — comes as climate activism group Extinction Rebellion has been protesting on the streets of London for more than a week.
Extinction Rebellion Demonstrators March to Parliament from Marble Arch
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Climate Change Has Worsened Global Economic Inequality, Stanford Study Shows

Lethal Heating - 25 April, 2019 - 05:00
Stanford University - Josie Garthwaite

The gap between the economic output of the world’s richest and poorest countries is 25 percent larger today than it would have been without global warming, according to new research from Stanford University.

The map on the left shows countries where per capita GDP increased or decreased as a result of global warming between 1961 and 2010. The map on the right shows the same information from 1991, after economic data became available for more countries. (Image credit: Noah Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke)   LARGE IMAGEA new Stanford University study shows global warming has increased economic inequality since the 1960s. Temperature changes caused by growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere have enriched cool countries like Norway and Sweden, while dragging down economic growth in warm countries such as India and Nigeria.
“Our results show that most of the poorest countries on Earth are considerably poorer than they would have been without global warming,” said climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, lead author of the study published April 22 in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “At the same time, the majority of rich countries are richer than they would have been.”
The study, co-authored with Marshall Burke, a Stanford assistant professor of Earth system science, finds that, from 1961 to 2010, global warming decreased the wealth per person in the world’s poorest countries by 17 to 30 percent. Meanwhile, the gap between the group of nations with the highest and lowest economic output per person is now approximately 25 percent larger than it would have been without climate change.
Although economic inequality between countries has decreased in recent decades, the research suggests the gap would have narrowed faster without global warming.

Ideal temperature for economic output
The study builds on previous research in which Burke and co-authors analyzed 50 years of annual temperature and GDP measurements for 165 countries to estimate the effects of temperature fluctuations on economic growth. They demonstrated that growth during warmer than average years has accelerated in cool nations and slowed in warm nations.
“The historical data clearly show that crops are more productive, people are healthier and we are more productive at work when temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold,” Burke explained. “This means that in cold countries, a little bit of warming can help. The opposite is true in places that are already hot.”
In the current study, Diffenbaugh and Burke combined Burke’s previously published estimates with data from more than 20 climate models developed by research centers around the world. Using the climate models to isolate how much each country has already warmed due to human-caused climate change, the researchers were able to determine what each country’s economic output might have been had temperatures not warmed.
To account for uncertainty, the researchers calculated more than 20,000 versions of what each country’s annual economic growth rate could have been without global warming. The estimates in the paper capture the range of outcomes delivered by those thousands of different routes.
“For most countries, whether global warming has helped or hurt economic growth is pretty certain,” said Burke. Tropical countries, in particular, tend to have temperatures far outside the ideal for economic growth. “There’s essentially no uncertainty that they’ve been harmed.”
It’s less clear how warming has influenced growth in countries in the middle latitudes, including the United States, China and Japan. For these and other temperate-climate nations, the analysis reveals economic impacts of less than 10 percent.
“A few of the largest economies are near the perfect temperature for economic output. Global warming hasn’t pushed them off the top of the hill, and in many cases, it has pushed them toward it,” Burke said. “But a large amount of warming in the future will push them further and further from the temperature optimum.”

Dragged down by warming
While the impacts of temperature may seem small from year to year, they can yield dramatic gains or losses over time. “This is like a savings account, where small differences in the interest rate will generate large differences in the account balance over 30 or 50 years,” said Diffenbaugh, the Kara J. Foundation professor in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). For example, after accumulating decades of small effects from warming, India’s economy is now 31 percent smaller than it would have been in the absence of global warming.
Lifted up or dragged down?

5 countries burdened by warming• Sudan (population 41 million): -36%• India (population 1.3 billion): -31%• Nigeria (population 191 million): -29%• Indonesia (population 264 million): -27%• Brazil (population 209 million): -25%
5 countries boosted by warming• Norway (population 5 million): +34%• Canada (population 37 million): +32%• Sweden (population 10 million): +25%• Great Britain (population 66 million): +9.5%• France (population 67 million): +4.8%
World’s 3 largest economies• USA (population 327 million): -0.2%• China (population 1.4 billion): -1.4%• Japan (population 127 million): -1.1%
(Percentages refer to the median change in per capita GDP from global warming between 1961 and 2010.) At a time when climate policy negotiations often stall over questions of how to equitably divide responsibility for curbing future warming, Diffenbaugh and Burke’s analysis offers a new measure of the price many countries have already paid. “Our study makes the first accounting of exactly how much each country has been impacted economically by global warming, relative to its historical greenhouse gas contributions,” said Diffenbaugh, who is also Kimmelman Family senior fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
While the biggest emitters enjoy on average about 10 percent higher per capita GDP today than they would have in a world without warming, the lowest emitters have been dragged down by about 25 percent. “This is on par with the decline in economic output seen in the U.S. during the Great Depression,” Burke said. “It’s a huge loss compared to where these countries would have been otherwise.”
The researchers emphasize the importance of increasing sustainable energy access for economic development in poorer countries. “The more these countries warm up, the more drag there’s going to be on their development,” Diffenbaugh said. “Historically, rapid economic development has been powered by fossil fuels. Our finding that global warming has exacerbated economic inequality suggests that there is an added economic benefit of energy sources that don’t contribute to further warming.”

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Greta Thunberg Backs Climate General Strike To Force Leaders To Act

Lethal Heating - 24 April, 2019 - 05:00
The Guardian - 

Swedish activist says world faces ‘existential crisis’ and must achieve goals of Paris deal

 Greta Thunberg spoke at a talk at Friends House co-organised by Guardian Events. 
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist, has given her support for a general strike for the climate, saying the student movement she inspired needs more support from older generations to ensure politicians keep their promises under the Paris agreement.
Speaking at a public event in London as Extinction Rebellion protests continued in the capital, the initiator of the school strike for climate movement was typically frank about the scale of the problem the world faces and the impact her campaign has made. “People are slowly becoming more aware, but emissions continue to rise. We can’t focus on small things. Basically, nothing has changed,” she said.
At several points, she stressed the need for the protests to spread. “This is not just young people being sick of politicians. It’s an existential crisis,” Thunberg said. “It is something that will affect the future of our civilisation. It’s not just a movement. It’s a crisis and we must take action accordingly.”
In a question and answer session, Franny Armstrong, the director of the climate documentary The Age of Stupid, asked whether it was time for a general strike. “Yes,” replied Thunberg in unison with the other members of the panel.
Traditional unions have so far been wary of joining the strikes. Although workers’ federations in Italy made Thunberg an honorary member, most others have given either tepid support or none due to concerns about the possible impact on jobs. But there is growing support in the UK, the US and other countries for a Green New Deal that would increase spending on renewable energy.
The talk took place on Earth Day, after a week of protests by Extinction Rebellion activists pushed the climate crisis on to news broadcasts and newspaper front pages.
Police have arrested more than 1,000 demonstrators at Parliament Square, Oxford Circus and Waterloo Bridge, but hundreds remain camped in Marble Arch, where Thunberg spoke on Sunday.
“I support Extinction Rebellion. What they are doing is good. Civil disobedience is important to show this is an emergency. We need to do everything we can to put pressure on the people in power,” she told the audience on Monday, prompting cheers and applause.
“Why study for a future that is being taken from us? Why study for facts when facts don’t matter in this society? It’s empowering to know I am doing something, I am taking a stand, I am disrupting.”
The interest in the event was so intense that a long line of supporters stretched along Euston Road waiting for the doors to open at Friends House. Most guests appeared to be fellow school strikers. A handful wore shirts or headbands printed with the Extinction Rebellion symbol.
An Extinction Rebellion activist sits in front of tents at Marble Arch in London. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images But the audience included all age groups, and just about every major environment organisation associated itself with the talk, which was hosted by the Quakers and co-organised by Guardian Events. When Thunberg appeared on stage, she was greeted with thunderous applause.
Armstrong said: “I’ve been to dozens of talks here over the years, but I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s the first time I have seen a standing ovation even before the event starts. She’s a rock star.”
In the past week, Thunberg has met Pope Francis in the Vatican and addressed members of the European parliament. On Tuesday, she will visit the Houses of Parliament, meet the House of Commons Speaker, John Bercow, and take part in an event with the leaders of all the main parties except Theresa May.
She told the audience she had been taken by surprise at the swift spread of a movement that began less than a year ago, when she went on strike alone outside the Swedish parliament. “It is hard to understand what is happening during the last months. It has all happened so fast. I don’t have time to think it through,” she said.
Veteran observers of the British parliament said she has helped push the climate issue higher up the UK political agenda than at any time since the 2008 Climate Change Act.
Green party officials said they hoped the meeting on Tuesday could spur a new phase of cross-party collaboration on climate change, including monthly meetings, wider public consultations and an agreement that party manifestos should be vetted by an independent body such as the Committee on Climate Change to assess whether they are in line with the Paris agreement.
People queue outside Friends House in London to hear Thunberg speak. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, said the current wave of climate action on the streets and the school strikes gave her hope. “There is more political leadership there and here than I have seen in Westminster. It feels like a turning point in the history of how we defend our planet,” she said.
“Young people are calling out against a system that is sadly broken … We are going to change the definition of what is politically possible so that it is what is scientifically necessary.”
The discussion ranged from veganism and avoiding flying to political change throughout society. Thunberg said everything was necessary, though she put the focus on challenging the companies and governments that are responsible for the bulk of emissions.
How to deal with with people in power was a frequent subject of questions to the panel. Thunberg said her autism helped her filter out much of the greenwashing.
The panel at the event also included the Green party MP, Caroline Lucas, right. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian “We are more likely to see through lies. We don’t follow the stream. You can’t be a little bit sustainable – either you are sustainable or you are not,” she said.
There were occasional moments of levity. At one point, Thunberg was asked how she dealt with climate deniers. “I don’t,” she replied.
Thunberg’s earlier point was reiterated by Anna Taylor from the UK Student Climate Network. “We are not going to be satisfied by politicians saying ‘we support you’ and then walking away,” she said.
“We won’t be satisfied until they meet our demands and act. That’s why simply taking a selfie or posting support on Twitter isn’t enough. That’s why we have to keep striking.”
For all the talk of politics and protest, however, some of the most poignant and pertinent questions came from the youngest children. One asked: “If pollution continues, how much time have we got left?” Another wanted to know: “Can we achieve our goal in the time we have?”
Thunberg, in response, was reassuring but measured: “Of course we can, it’s physically possible, the scientists say. It’s up to us. If we do this now then of course we will. But if we don’t, we might not do it. But yes, definitely we can.”

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Climate Change - The Gathering Legal And Policy Storm In Australia And Its Impact On The Energy And Resources Sector

Lethal Heating - 24 April, 2019 - 05:00
Lexology - Sarah Clarke (Piper Alderman)

Climate Change - the gathering legal and policy storm in Australia and its impact on the energy and resources sector
Australia’s 20-year-old national environment law does not mention climate change in its 527 provisions.Picture: Getty ImagesRecent developments suggest that the law in Australia is shifting inevitably towards a more climate change conscious approach for business.
Developments include changes in the way energy and resources projects may be assessed and approved based on their carbon emissions; and the disclosures companies may have to make in relation to climate change risks.
Sarah Clarke, Partner, and Nikita Siouzev, law clerk, investigate these changes in law and policy and suggest some solutions on how companies may mitigate their risks.
A clear shift towards a more climate conscious business environment in Australia is suggested by a number of recent developments in the law that have a significant impact on the energy and resources sector. These developments include:
  • the proposal for guidelines by the Western Australian Environmental Protection Authority requiring that proponents with scope 1 emissions in excess of 100,000 tonnes of carbon per annum have a net zero carbon policy (now withdrawn pending consultation);
  • the recent case of Gloucester Resources Limited v Minister for Planning [2019] NSWLEC 7, where the court rejected the appeal by Gloucester Resources against a decision to refuse the Rocky Hill Coal Project by the NSW Planning Assessment Commission, citing various adverse social, environmental and climate change impacts;
  • recommendation 7.4 in the newly released Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations Fourth Edition (4th Edition), dealing with the importance of a listed entity’s consideration of social and environmental risks, including climate change; and
  • the rise of shareholder activism focussed on climate change risks.
If they are not already doing so, energy and resources companies need to urgently consider how they can mitigate the risks created by this change in approach.

WA EPA Proposed Guidelines
On 7 March 2019 the Western Australian Environmental Protection Authority (WA EPA) introduced updated emissions guidelines, requiring proponents with scope 1 emissions in excess of 100,000 tonnes of carbon per annum to offset any residual (net) direct emissions associated with the proposal. The impact of the proposed guideline would have been significant on companies with operations in Western Australia, likely causing practical difficulty for implementation and delays, degrading investor confidence and added costs.
On 14 March 2019, following outcry from the energy and resources sector, the EPA withdrew the proposed guideline and committed to a public consultation process on the future emissions guidelines.
A major criticism, echoed by much of the industry, was that the proposed WA EPA guidelines were unachievable, with uncertainty regarding implementation of the full carbon emissions offset. The proposed guideline could have the effect of delaying major Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) projects by shifting the focus to implementing carbon offsetting environmental projects. This has been reported as potentially delivering an impact of $14.2 billion to the LNG and wider gas industry, as well as having the potential to prevent operations in WA from efficiently accessing and delivering on agreements in the national and global markets. This presents difficulties to companies trying to secure lenders or investors to finance their operations, as operating delays can impact investor timelines and delay financial returns. Introducing stringent guidelines will affect the operations of these companies and subsequently detriment investor confidence in the industry.
A further criticism of the proposed guideline was the costs that companies will incur. The Australian Institute, a public policy think tank, looked into the costs from offsetting carbon emissions from Chevron’s Gorgon and Wheatstone operations. It suggested that the cost to fully offset carbon emissions at these operations will be 2.16% of the combined cash surplus, or 1.74% if Chevron could implement its underground carbon storage facility. Costs may further be incurred indirectly from delays, decreased share value and operating inefficiencies as a result of compliance and concerns with the proposed guideline.
It also leaves WA unfavourably exposed to a competitive disadvantage to the other states, as the proposed guideline would apply to operations in WA rather than on a federal level. This means that companies operating in WA will have to satisfy the full carbon neutral offsetting guideline, whilst competitors in other states are not burdened with a similar requirement. The proposed guideline is further likely to catch out existing operations in WA seeking approval for changes and variations if it were to be implemented immediately.
The result would be reduced local investment activity in Western Australia and a deterrence of prospective investors, inducing energy and resources companies to focus on projects interstate or overseas, in a more favourable regulatory environment. These practical issues culminate into general uncertainty in regard to the operation, implementation and consequences of the proposed WA EPA guideline; affecting company activity within the state, investor confidence and operational productivity.
Until the consultation period ends, we will not know how the proposed guidelines may be changed or the full impact of them on the energy and resources industry.
It appears that the objective of this further consultation with industry and stakeholders will be to ensure the proposed guidelines can be practically implemented and that they are fully complementary to Commonwealth regulation.
If companies want to have an input on these guidelines they should engage with the WA EPA in the consultation process.

Rocky Hill decision
The recent and much publicised decision in the NSW Land and Environment Court in Gloucester Resources Limited v Minister for Planning [2019] NSWLEC 7 (Rocky Hill decision) has caused a level of discomfort for companies engaging in mining projects in New South Wales, as well as the energy and resources sector generally.
The case concerned the appeal by Gloucester Resources Limited (GRL) against a decision to refuse the Rocky Hill Coal Project by the NSW Planning Assessment Commission. In rejecting the appeal, the Court:
  • cited significant adverse impacts on the visual amenity and rural character of the town of Gloucester with significant impacts on existing uses of land in the mine’s vicinity;
  • found that the contribution of the project’s greenhouse gas emissions to climate change were unhelpful to achieving targets;
  • found that the costs of the mine would exceed the economic benefits;
  • held that scope 3 future emissions from offshore combustion of exported coal can constitute a valid ground for refusal due to the causal link to climate change;
  • rejected the market substitution argument (i.e. that investment rejected at Rocky Hill would instead flow to other large coal producers and coal mines overseas, rather than into the Australian economy); and
  • stated that Australia has an initiative to lead the way to achieve emissions targets.
The Rocky Hill decision has wider reaching repercussions than for just GRL’s operations. It has implications for the viability of future coal and fossil fuel developments and could impact on participation decisions by banks, lenders and investors who would traditionally engage with this industry. It also imposes stricter scrutiny when assessing the environmental and social impact of a project, which becomes particularly important to consider when an approval decision is challenged by environmental and community groups.
The Court interpreted scope 3 emissions to fall within the term downstream emissions, meaning that emissions from burning the mined coal need to be considered when assessing the environmental impact of the project. As such, companies proposing a mine should thoroughly address the direct and indirect greenhouse gases from the project, as well as explicitly account for scope 3 emissions.
The Court’s decision to evaluate the merits of each particular development involved a consideration of the proposal’s greenhouse gas emissions and its likely contribution to climate change, as well as a consideration of adverse costs through environmental, social and economic impacts. As a result, the approval process may show a preference to smaller projects with lower emissions, projects that are favourably located and projects with lower adverse costs. This means that as part of its approval process, an entity may need to address the project’s methodology for its carbon budget and include a comparison of the project’s emissions relative to those of similar projects to show how the project can minimise emissions and provide environmental benefits.
Another implication from this case is that an entity should have clear procedures for its carbon mitigation. GRL’s argument that the climate change impacts of the Rocky Hill project could be mitigated by removing enough carbon from the atmosphere to counteract the project’s emissions was found to be too hypothetical as no evidence was provided to show how this would actually be done. This suggests that if greenhouse gas emissions are to be key in determining approvals, companies should have a clearly defined process detailing how the carbon offsets for direct and indirect emissions will be achieved for the particular proposed project.
In contrast, on 22 March 2019, the NSW Land and Environment Court in Australian Coal Alliance Incorporated v Wyong Coal Pty Ltd [2019] NSWLEC 31 rejected a challenge put forth by the Australian Coal Alliance against Wyong Coal Pty Ltd for the Planning Assessment Commission’s consent of the Wallarah 2 Coal Project. It is to be noted that the proceedings in Wyong were a judicial review, rather than a consideration of the merits of the project, such that the Court considered the validity of the approval process by the PAC (and whether it involved an error of law), rather than the merits of the decision. In this case, Justice Moore noted that the PAC’s approval process was valid in these circumstances and rejected all 10 grounds submitted by the Australian Coal Alliance. Importantly, one of the grounds for the review was failure to consider downstream emission, but this was rejected on the basis that PAC did have regard to the downstream emissions that would arise from the burning of the coal proposed to be produced from this mine and that it had considered what conditions were appropriate.

ASX Corporate Governance Council
The Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations Fourth Edition (4th Edition), released by the ASX Corporate Governance Council on 27 February 2019, reinforced the importance for listed entities to consider environmental and social risks.
Under recommendation 7.4 the Council recommends that “a listed entity disclose whether it has any material exposure to environmental or social risks and, if it does, how it manages or intends to manage those risks”.
The Commentary to this recommendation indicates that:
  • an entity’s “ability to create long term value for security holders” can be affected by environmental and social risks, so entities should “consider whether they have a material exposure to climate change risk by reference to the recommendations of the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD);”
  • if a material exposure is evident, entities should “consider making the disclosures suggested by the TCFD.”
  • entities which “believe they do not have any material exposure to environmental and social risks should consider carefully their basis for that belief and benchmark their disclosures in this regard against those made by their peers.”
One particular source of “environmental risk” noted by the Council relates to climate change, including risks related to the transition to a lower-carbon economy.
This highlights that Australia’s legal and business shift towards compliance with emission targets is evident in the wider corporate sphere, rather than just the EPA guidelines or climate conscious court decisions.

Shareholder activism
In 2017 a case was brought in the Federal Court of Australia by shareholders against the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) for a failure to adequately disclose and inform investors of climate change risks in their annual reports. The case was dropped when CBA published its 2017 annual report stating that climate change posed a significant risk to operations, as well as a climate policy statement. The response by CBA shows the risk companies face of adverse shareholder activism regarding to climate change.
Other forms of activism include the report released on 25 March 2019 by environmental campaign group Market Forces, outlining 21 Australian companies that investors should avoid if they don’t want to invest in companies that are actively undermining climate change action.

Solutions
Energy and resources companies may mitigate their risks in this changing legal climate by the following:
  • ensure that direct and indirect carbon emissions are fully considered for each project;
  • set clear procedures for a project’s carbon mitigation to show how emissions will be offset;
  • give proper consideration to a carbon methodology outlining the project’s emissions relative to its peers;
  • investment in carbon reduction or sequestration programs may be prudent in light of the shifting legal environment towards climate friendly business;
  • possibly moving away from coal and other fossil fuels, towards the commodities that support the ‘green technology economy’, such as cobalt, nickel, copper and lithium, which are required for electric vehicles, battery technology and utilisation of renewable energy;
  • review corporate governance principles to ensure they are in line with the ASX Corporate Governance Council’s recommendation 7.4, to emphasise proper consideration of environmental and social risks with reference to the TCFD;
  • adequately disclose the effects of climate change in annual reports;
  • consider focussing on projects in more favourable jurisdictions that do not have such a focus on greenhouse gas emissions.
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A Climate Change Solution Slowly Gains Ground

Lethal Heating - 24 April, 2019 - 05:00
Washington Post - Steven Mufson | Salwan Georges

An inside look at one of Global Thermostat's large containers, which use large fans to draw air through slabs made of honeycomb-style ceramic cubes. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post) HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — At the end of a cul-de-sac called Fresh Way, two bright green structures the size of shipping containers gleam in the warm sunlight, quietly sucking from the air the carbon dioxide that is warming the planet.
One structure houses computer monitors and controls. Atop the other, large fans draw air through slabs made of honeycomb-style ceramic cubes. The cubes hold proprietary chemicals that act like sponges, absorbing carbon dioxide at room temperature. Every 15 minutes, the slabs rotate and the cubes are heated, releasing a stream of 99 percent pure carbon dioxide into a shiny steel pipe.
This is Global Thermostat, one of just three companies at the leading edge of the hunt for ways of skimming carbon dioxide from the air. It is a tiny step, but a hopeful one, toward reducing global warming. Amid a steady drumbeat of grim news about climate change, more and more people are captivated by the idea that a feasible process can help offset decades of damage to the atmosphere.
Some big deep-pocketed corporations — including oil companies — are looking, too. They are lured not so much by the virtues of fighting climate change but by the prospects of making money. Though long a prohibitively expensive technology, carbon capture has become a tantalizing possibility thanks to technological advances — and new generous government incentives.
There’s little time to spare. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has written that any hope to meet the 2 degree Celsius goal for global warming “will require measures to reduce emissions, including the further deployment of existing and new technologies.”
For a decade, the three companies — Carbon Engineering, Climeworks and Global Thermostat — have experimented with technologies such as the shape and chemical makeup of the spongelike membranes in an effort to reduce the towering cost of capturing carbon dioxide directly from thin air.
Now their work is poised to move beyond the lab tables and prototypes.
“Our business plan is to show that cleaning the atmosphere is a profitable activity,” said Graciela Chichilnisky, a Columbia University economics professor and one of the co-founders of Global Thermostat who estimates that CO2 could become a trillion dollar market.
TOP: The Global Thermostat plant in Huntsville, Ala. Global Thermostat, Carbon Engineering and Climeworks are three companies at the leading edge of the hunt for ways of skimming carbon dioxide from the air. BOTTOM LEFT: Global Thermostat uses steel piping as part of the process when capturing carbon dioxide. BOTTOM RIGHT: Plastic barrels are seen at the Global Thermostat in Huntsville, Ala. Over the past several years, the firms have vied to make technological progress. The cost of carbon capture has fallen from $600 a ton to as low as $100 a ton — and lower if a cheap or free source of heat or energy is available.
Federal subsidies are just as important. New U.S. federal tax credits provide as much as $50 for every ton of carbon dioxide captured and stored underground in well-sealed geological formations.
Oil companies can use the credits to pay for turning captured carbon dioxide into transportation fuels, essentially recycling the CO2. That would help Big Oil meet California regulations requiring lower amounts of carbon in motor fuels.
And the oil giants can also claim a $35-a-ton credit for enhanced oil recovery — injecting carbon dioxide into the ground to increase well pressure and boost oil production in old fields like the Permian Basin in West Texas. Oil companies currently extract natural carbon dioxide from natural reservoirs before pumping it back into the ground.
The federal tax credits, known as 45Q credits, were slipped into the 2018 federal budget in the wee hours of Feb. 9, 2018, after a nine-hour government shutdown. It attracted support from both parties, with leading roles played by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), whose state relies heavily on oil, gas and coal production, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who has spoken almost weekly on the Senate floor about the urgency of climate change and the danger of burning fossil fuels.
One reason they agree: It’s politically more appealing to give away money through a tax credit than it is to impose a carbon tax that takes money away. A carbon tax is levied on the carbon content of hydrocarbon fuels such as coal, oil or natural gas that emit carbon dioxide and it raises prices for products such as gasoline or electricity.
Environmentalists are divided on the tax credits. Most want to bury captured carbon dioxide in geological formations underground rather than using it to produce more fossil fuels.
“We concluded that it was not possible to square it with our work to end fossil fuel subsidies,” said David Hawkins, director of climate policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which stayed neutral on the measure.
But of the 65 million tons of carbon dioxide that is pumped underground in the United States every year, about 60 million tons is for enhanced oil recovery, said Sally Benson, co-director of Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy. And demand is growing.
Whitehouse said “at this point, the only revenue proposition for carbon capture is enhanced oil recovery.”
“As angry and frustrated I am at the behavior of these companies," he said, "if that’s what it takes to save the planet I’m willing to make that investment.”
And Republican senators joined in the name of “innovation,” and seemed unbothered that by putting a price on the credits they were flouting the Trump administration’s effort to stymie any form of carbon tax.
“People now understand the need for addressing climate change,” Carbon Engineering’s chief executive Steve Oldham said in an interview after testifying before a Senate committee. “When you don’t have a solution, it’s a scary thought.”
“We’re trying to get the message out that there is a solution here,” he added, “and it is not forcing everybody to buy a new car or stop taking airplanes.”
Global Thermostat lead scientist and engineer Miles Sakwa-Novak, left, talks with Jed Pruett, operations and development engineer, at the Alabama plant. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)A new skill set
Oldham himself is a sign that carbon capture is closer to becoming a business. He only recently took the helm at the 10-year-old Carbon Engineering, which has built a prototype on a scenic spot near an old lumber town about 30 miles north of Vancouver. Oldham wasn’t an expert on carbon capture, but he had worked at a big Canadian tech company raising money from government and commercial sources for complex projects such as large satellites and robotics.
Carbon Engineering “has been R&D focused,” Oldham said. “Now, they need a different skill set.”
The Squamish, British Columbia-based firm’s early investors included Bill Gates. And Carbon Engineering recently raised $68 million with investments from tar sands financier and Calgary Flames co-owner Murray Edwards, Occidental Petroleum’s Low Carbon Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, and BHP, an international mining and resources giant.
Oldham said the firm will use the money to design a full-size commercial plant and that it has already identified five sites in the United States and two in Canada.
Drawing on research at the University of Calgary and Carnegie Mellon University, Carbon Engineering converts carbon dioxide into transportation fuels. It does that by combining CO2 with hydrogen — creating a carbon neutral cycle. That could help oil companies meet California’s requirement to reduce the carbon intensity of motor fuels by 20 percent by 2030.
Harvard University engineering and public policy professor David W. Keith, acting chief scientist and a board member at Carbon Engineering, estimated in a paper last year that using current know-how and existing components, the company could capture carbon dioxide at $94 to $232 a ton. Even if Carbon Engineering’s technique is expensive, it might still be cheaper than alternative methods of meeting the California standards.
In addition, by producing fuel, Carbon Engineering could make air travel carbon neutral without having to turn to biofuels or electrification that would be difficult to use in aircraft.
“It gives you choices,” Oldham said.
Global Thermostat is the brainchild of two Columbia University professors: Graciela Chichilnisky, an economist and mathematician, and Peter Eisenberger, an applied physicist. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)Selling some fizz
Climeworks, based in Switzerland, was founded by two engineering graduate students, Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher. It became the first company to extract CO2 from the air and sell it to a commercial customer, albeit on a tiny scale. It sells about 900 tons a year — the equivalent of emissions from 200 cars — to a commercial greenhouse near Zurich that grows vegetables. The company has erected a vertical array of 18 fans, each the size of a full-grown adult that helps speed the capture process. The CO2 increases the greenhouse’s crop yields by 20 to 30 percent.
Climeworks has also forged an agreement to sell carbon dioxide to Coca-Cola HBC in Switzerland for sparkling drinks. Economics could drive future decisions. Last year Europe suffered carbon dioxide shortages when some British fertilizer plants that produce CO2 as a byproduct unexpectedly closed down for maintenance and Coke’s CO2 supplies were threatened.
Like Global Thermostat, Climeworks traps CO2 simply by exposing a filter to air. The filter contains amines, a derivative of ammonia. Once the filter is saturated, it is heated with steam past the boiling point of 100 degrees Celsius, hot enough to free the carbon dioxide so it can be pumped into pipes or storage tanks. Currently, the Climeworks uses free waste heat from a local incinerator, reducing its costs.
Bill Rosenbaum is a consultant at Global Thermostat. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)Farming the sky
Global Thermostat has a somewhat different model than the other two.
The company is the brainchild of two Columbia University professors: Chichilnisky, an economist and mathematician who took part in the 1990s climate conference in Kyoto, and Peter Eisenberger, an applied physicist who has worked at Bell Laboratories, Exxon, Princeton and now Columbia University. With his flyaway hair, he bears a passing resemblance to Dr. Emmett Brown from the film “Back to the Future.”
“When Peter and Graciela first talked about this, people thought it was crazy,” said Miles Sakwa-Novak, the plant’s young engineer. He says that Carbon Engineering essentially takes two mature processes and combines them in a new way, but that Global Thermostat is developing something new.
“We literally farm the sky,” Chichilnisky says in a company video.
The company’s early investors included the Canadian tycoon Edgar Bronfman and the utility NRG, one of the biggest U.S. emitters.
The company’s process uses devices called monoliths that look like sponges to maximize surface area. That area is covered with amines, the nitrogen based chemical that naturally absorbs carbon dioxide from the air. The monoliths are similar to those used in catalytic converters and Chichilnisky says that the manufacturer Corning has provided key materials.
A view of pipes near the steam generator at Global Thermostat. “We literally farm the sky,” says Graciela Chichilnisky, co-founder of the company. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)The next step — prying the carbon dioxide loose — is harder and more expensive. Yet Global Thermostat only needs to heat up its amine cells to 80 degrees Celsius, less than what it takes to boil a cup of tea, lower than its competitors and thus relatively cheaper.
This is the dark secret of virtually all carbon capture techniques: They tend to use large amounts of energy, which adds to carbon emissions and costs. Some say they can be combined with solar installations. So far, Carbon Engineering has tapped into cheap Canadian hydro power.
Many analysts wonder why the direct air capture companies don’t place their devices near the exhaust of a natural gas or coal plant. Chichilnisky explains that sometimes lower concentrations work better, just as gasoline in a combustion engine needs oxygen. She said that their process requires less energy and works best at concentrations found in the air at 400 parts per million, 300 times more diffuse than in power plant smokestacks.
The compact size of the Global Thermostat project could be part of its appeal, Chichilnisky says. Companies with modest CO2 needs — such as soft drink bottlers or oil field service firms — can move Global Thermostat’s equipment to a site without having to worry about building pipelines. Global Thermostat is already in talks with a soft drink maker and a major oil company.
Graciela Chichilnisky says that one of the dangers of carbon capture is that people might see it as a reason to relax their efforts in the fight to reduce emissions. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post) Big enough?
Chichilnisky is optimistic about Global Thermostat, but she’s worried carbon capture will be too little too late. “The real problem with climate change is time,” she says.
Time and scale. The carbon capture enterprises are minuscule compared to the global crisis.
In 2018, mankind pumped about 37.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the air. One of Global Thermostat’s container size units would capture just 4,000 tons; to offset all global emissions would take 9 million of the units.
Climeworks says it can manufacture 100 to 150 CO2 collectors a year, each one capable of sucking up the emissions of 250 cars. A unit with six Climeworks filters would fit in a shipping container. In order to meet its goal of capturing 1 percent of growing global emissions, Climeworks would need to fill up 750,000 shipping containers.
Arguing that is doable, Climeworks notes that it is equal to the number of shipping containers that pass through Shanghai harbor every two weeks.
Carbon Engineering is planning on much bigger projects, each costing close to $600 million, about the same as a coal-fired power plant. Oldham estimates that it would take 5,000 of his company’s plants to offset U.S. carbon emissions — 5.3 gigatons — at a cost of $3 trillion. That’s why, he says, “the real answer is a combination” or cutting emissions and building carbon capture.
What that means, Chichilnisky says, is that the fight to reduce emissions must continue. The danger of progress on carbon capture is that people will see it as a reason to relax their efforts.
Shades of one Global Thermostat's monolith containers. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)Until now, carbon capture has been a bad bet financially. Since 2010, the Energy Department spent about $1.1 billion to help nine carbon capture and storage demonstration projects, the General Accountability Office said in a report. Private industry chipped in $610 million. But most found the cost way too high and abandoned the projects; only one power plant was still active at the end of 2017, GAO said.
Many coal companies see the federal carbon credits as a new lease on their lives. “The coal lobby was always in our office” seeking credits, said a former Energy Department official from the Obama administration who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But, he said, “carbon capture and storage makes coal more expensive, not less.”
Dan Kammen, professor of energy and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, says that carbon capture is diverting attention from cheaper and more scalable ways to taking carbon dioxide out of the air.
“The prices [of carbon capture] would have to fall a huge amount for it to be part of our near-term portfolio, meaning 2050 or sooner,” Kammen says. Carbon capture from the air “can be an arrow in the quiver,” he says. But he adds that changing land use and forestry, using known techniques for taking CO2 from the air and storing it, “would be the best investment in carbon capture today.”
“I recommend the boring Charlie Brown strategy,” he says. “When is the best day to plant a tree? Yesterday. Second best? Today.”
New carbon capture technology is “the shiny new object on the table,” he says, but “with the 30-year clock more than ticking we have to scale up technology. We absolutely need to invest in carbon capture because we will have to do a good deal more of it.”
Heat exchange pipes between containers at Global Thermostat. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post) Links
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Climate Change Spurs Shannon Loughnane's 700km Cross-Country Protest Hike

Lethal Heating - 23 April, 2019 - 05:00
ABC News - Rhiannon Tuffield

Shannon Loughnane wants more action from political leaders on climate change. (Supplied: Shannon Loughnane)A university student is walking hundreds of kilometres from Melbourne to Canberra to call for more action from Australian leaders on climate change.
Shannon Loughnane left his home in Coburg two days ago with a plan to trek along major highways, country roads and mountainous areas to deliver his message to Canberra.
He said he hoped his 700km trek would form part of a wider wave of protests aimed at pressuring leaders who he believed were not doing enough to address the issue.
Four months ago, the Melbourne University student made a New Year's resolution to read more about climate change.
He said he was concerned by the issue, but at the time did not know enough about it. As he read more and followed the protests of activists around the world, an urgency set in.
"For a while I occupied that ground of feeling very afraid of climate change but only vaguely understanding what it meant," he said. Key points
  • Shannon Loughnane is walking 700 kilometres to draw attention to climate change
  • He is stopping at country towns with a petition calling on politicians to do more to reduce emissions and pursue renewable energy
  • He set off on the hike after making a New Year's resolution to learn more about climate change
"As I learnt more I became concerned by the inaction of our government — Australia at the moment performs really poorly on a global scale in terms of what we're doing for climate change.
"This protest for me is about making a very direct plea to governments, and showing up and refusing to be ignored."

Petition calls for climate emergency, signatures from locals
The hike will take him through country towns from Yea, Violet Town, Benalla and Wangaratta to Albury, Lankeys Creek, Rosewood and Tumut.
Mr Loughnane plans to stop at each town to talk about climate change and garner signatures from any locals passionate about the cause.
The petition will ask members of the House of Representatives to declare a climate emergency, aggressively lift emissions reductions, pursue renewable energy, ban the proposed Carmichael Coal mine and other fossil fuel projects, and ratify climate policy into legislation.
Shannon will walk the 700km from Melbourne to Canberra. (Supplied: Shannon Loughnane)"I don't think my protest is going to hold leaders to account, but I hope it's part of a wider wave of protests and of action that pressures leaders to think about really changing things," he said.
"I think a lot of people would be really shocked to see how far it reaches, and the types of things it'll affect — from food and water availability, to the range of infectious diseases.
"It's really crucial that we all start looking at it as the whole picture."

Climate change a key political issue
Mr Loughnane considers himself among a growing number of young people across Australia and the world who are drawing attention to the impacts of climate change.
Shannon Loughnane hopes his long walk will draw attention to climate change. (Supplied: Shannon Loughnane)Last month, tens of thousands of young Australians walked out of their classrooms to stage protests across cities and regional towns.
According to early results from the ABC's Vote Compass survey, the environment has proved a major concern among respondents, with 29 per cent considering it to be the most important issue.
The results are a significant shift from 2016, where 9 per cent of voters saw it as the most important issue in the election.
Climate change is shaping up to be a key issue for the May federal election.
Mr Loughnane said he believed debate and protests would make an impact.
"I can't speak for what's happening in the minds of leaders, but I do think culturally there's a lot happening," he said.
"The student strikes for climate are amazing, those young people stepping up and demanding change, [it] is really enlightening, and it's drawing attention to the fact that these young people are going to be affected the most by climate change.
"People are starting to tune into that at a rate that I haven't seen before."

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Humanity Is At A Crossroads, Greta Thunberg Tells Extinction Rebellion

Lethal Heating - 23 April, 2019 - 05:00
The Guardian -  | |

Swedish climate activist’s speech comes amid police action to clear protesters from Waterloo Bridge
Greta Thunberg addressed protesters at the Marble Arch site on Sunday evening. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/GettyGovernments will no longer be able ignore the impending climate and ecological crisis, Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist, has told Extinction Rebellion protesters gathered at Marble Arch in London.
In a speech on Sunday night where she took aim at politicians who have for too long been able to satisfy demands for action with “beautiful words and promises”, the Swedish 16-year-old said humanity was sitting at a crossroads, but that those gathered had chosen which path they wish to take.
“I come from Sweden and back there its almost the same problem as here, as everywhere, that nothing is being done to stop an ecological crisis despite all the beautiful words and promises,” she told the crowd.
“We are now facing an existential crisis, the climate crisis and ecological crisis which have never been treated as crises before, they have been ignored for decades.
Swedish schoolgirl climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks to the Extinction Rebellion protestors. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA“And for way too long the politicians and the people in power have gotten away with not doing anything. We will make sure that politician’s will not get away with it for any longer.”
Her speech came amid police efforts to forcibly clear Extinction Rebellion protesters from Waterloo Bridge as the group debated whether to continue its campaign of mass civil disobedience. Police said on Sunday night they had cleared all the protesters from Parliament Square.
The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, said the disruption was “counter-productive” to the cause of climate change and was stretching resources so much it could damage police’s ability to fight violent crime.
Extinction Rebellion had earlier said it expected its supporters would be cleared out of the two sites occupied without permission as police prepared to evict them if they declined to leave voluntarily.
Last week, the group gained global coverage for the disruption its tactics of civil disobedience caused in central London. On Sunday, the organisers said they intended to change tack and would offer to vacate some sites in exchange for the mayor acting on some of their demands.
The Metropolitan police said they had made 963 arrests and charged 42 people. The force’s leader, Cressida Dick, said the group’s tactics, centred on peaceful direct action, had caused too much disruption.
On Saturday, Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus were returned to normal use, after complaints from businesses about the blocking of some of the capital’s key arteries.
Police dismantle the skate ramp erected by Extinction Rebellion demonstrators on Waterloo Bridge in London. Photograph: Victoria Jones/PAOn Sunday, activists rushed to Parliament Square, when police turned up in force to try to clear five roadblocks. Activists were using lock-on devices to hold the space, as well as gluing themselves to the ground and each other in order to slow down the police.
Activists said there were three people locked on trees in the square with more ready to go up. They promised attempts to evict them would be “spectacular” and could take police all night. However, by Sunday evening the police said the square had been cleared.
The stage-truck on Waterloo Bridge was finally removed by 5am on Sunday after police spent most of Saturday and well into the night removing protesters glued and locked on to it. Police spent hours using angle grinders to cut free the two protesters who had locked themselves down on the top of truck, before winching them down and carrying them into the back of waiting police vans.
By Sunday night they were moving the activists to one side of the carriageway, and arresting those who are refusing to move.
The Met has needed support from about 200 officers from other forces to deal with the protests, which have been peaceful.
Khan said 9,000 officers had been involved in policing the protest so far. He said: “I share the passion about tackling climate change of those protesting, and support the democratic right to peaceful and lawful protest, but this is now taking a real toll on our city – our communities, businesses and police. This is counter-productive to the cause and our city.”
The mayor added: “I remain in close contact with the Met commissioner, and agree that Londoners have suffered too much disruption and that the policing operation has been extremely challenging for our over-stretched and under-resourced police.
“I’m extremely concerned about the impact the protests are having on our ability to tackle issues like violent crime if they continue any longer. It simply isn’t right to put Londoners’ safety at risk like this.”
Young protesters hold placards on Waterloo Bridge on Sunday. Photograph: Jack Taylor/GettyThe protest group said a phalanx of police vans were gathered around Waterloo Bridge on Sunday amid mounting expectation protesters would be forced out.
Ronan McNern, a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, said: “We think they want everything cleared by the end of the week. People are willing to be arrested. There is a deep sense we do not want to be attached to any single site. What this disruption is doing, we are the news now. It is making people talk in pubs and buses about Extinction Rebellion. It makes them think about their existence which is under threat.”
Extinction Rebellion is discussing withdrawing from some sites in return for being allowed to remain in others and having its demands met.
One manifesto from Farhana Yamin, an international environmental lawyer, advocated a “pause” in disruption next week to better project their demands and press for negotiations with government.
She wrote: “Today marks a transition from week one, which focused on actions that were vision-holding but also caused mass ‘disruption’ across many dimensions (economic, cultural, emotional, social). Week two marks a new phase of rebellion focused on ‘negotiations’ where the focus will shift to our actual political demands.”
She continued: “We want to show that XR [Extinction Rebellion] is a cohesive long-term, global force, not some flash in the pan.”
Others in the group’s leadership were planning further disruption and a meeting this week will attempt to decide on the group’s strategy.

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Satellite Confirms Key NASA Temperature Data: The Planet Is Warming — And Fast

Lethal Heating - 22 April, 2019 - 05:00
Washington Post - Chris Mooney

New evidence suggests one of the most important climate change data sets is getting the right answer.
The temperature hovered around 100 degrees at the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, Mo., in July 2016. (Charlie Riedel/AP)A high-profile NASA temperature data set, which has pronounced the last five years the hottest on record and the globe a full degree Celsius warmer than in the late 1800s, has found new backing from independent satellite records — suggesting the findings are on a sound footing, scientists reported Tuesday.
If anything, the researchers found, the pace of climate change could be somewhat more severe than previously acknowledged, at least in the fastest warming part of the world — its highest latitudes.
“We may actually have been underestimating how much warmer [the Arctic’s] been getting,” said Gavin Schmidt, who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which keeps the temperature data, and who was a co-author of the new study released in Environmental Research Letters.
NASA’s flagship data set, known as GISTEMP, is one of two kept by agencies of the U.S. government, the other being maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Both data sets — along with several others maintained by institutions and academic groups around the world — are based on a merger of the records of thousands of thermometers spread across Earth’s land surfaces, and a growing volume of ocean measurements from buoys and other instruments.


David Attenborough, narrator of the Netflix series “Our Planet,” spoke about the impacts of climate change on the natural world. (Alice Li/The Washington Post)

As the data sets have shown not only steady global warming also but a string of new temperature records, they have come under increased scrutiny, with occasional criticism of the high-profile findings and how they are stitched together. However, the research groups have maintained that their methods are valid and that the different records agree considerably more than they disagree, suggesting that the warming trend they are showing is, more or less, correct.
Enter NASA’s Aqua satellite, which has been in orbit since 2002, and carries an infrared device that is able to independently measure temperatures at the surface of Earth and, in fact, do so with a higher degree of resolution than characterizes the NASA climate data set.
The temperature record provided by the satellite, which runs from 2003 through 2018 at present, supports NASA’s finding that 2016 was the hottest year on record and, generally, that the warming trend continues just as the surface thermometers have claimed, finds the study led by NASA’s Joel Susskind.
“What you end up with is a really impressive correspondence between the trends that you’re seeing in this satellite product, which is totally independent of the surface temperatures, and the interpretations of the weather stations,” said Schmidt, one of Susskind’s three co-authors.
Here is a figure from the study showing how closely NASA’s data set from the years 2003 through 2017 matches the findings of the Atmospheric Infra-Red Sounder on the Aqua satellite, or AIRS — and how those in turn track three other global temperature data sets:
“What you end up with is a really impressive correspondence between the trends that you’re seeing in this satellite product, which is totally independent of the surface temperatures, and the interpretations of the weather stations,” said Schmidt, one of Susskind’s three co-authors.
Here is a figure from the study showing how closely NASA’s data set from the years 2003 through 2017 matches the findings of the Atmospheric Infra-Red Sounder on the Aqua satellite, or AIRS — and how those in turn track three other global temperature data sets:

Global mean anomalies for the AIRS and GISTEMP data sets for January 2003 through December 2017, along with three other selected data sets. (Susskind et al., Environmental Research Letters, 2019)Notably, AIRS sometimes shows more warming than the NASA data set, and especially does so in the Arctic, a region where measurements are scarce and warming is fastest. Shockingly, it even finds that over the Barents and Kara seas in the Arctic, the warming trend is at a rate of 2.5 degrees Celsius — or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit — per decade.
This suggests that, if anything, Earth as a whole may be warming faster than NASA has until now claimed — not more slowly.
“These findings should help put to rest any lingering concerns that modern warming is somehow due to the location of sensors in urban heat islands or other measurement errors at the surface,” said Zeke Hausfather, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley who works on another of the temperature data sets — called Berkeley Earth — and commented on the new study, with which he was not involved.
“The AIRS satellite data captures the whole surface of the planet and shows that, if anything, our surface measurements are slightly underestimating the rate of modern warming,” he said.
The study also reinforces "that the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the world, and that correctly estimating temperatures in the region is important to understanding what is happening to the world as a whole,” Hausfather said.
The new research “confirms (yet again) from an independent source that the surface temperature records over the past couple of decades are robust,” added Ed Hawkins, a climate researcher at the University of Reading in Britain, by email.
The methodologies used to calculate Earth’s temperature are being improved all the time — and the data sets are constantly updated with the most recent information. Lively debates will persist about how to deal with some of the problems involved in this process, such as that cities tend to be warmer than the countryside, and that records are far more numerous and reliable today than they were at the close of the 19th century or a little bit before it, when the data sets begin.
But the new study suggests none of this weakens the major conclusion: Warming is ongoing; and Earth keeps pushing record temperature highs, at least in the context of the past 140 years or so.
“For all the issues that there are, the patterns are not just qualitatively right, they’re pretty much quantitatively right, too,” Schmidt said.

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Electric Vehicles Are The Road To The Future

Lethal Heating - 22 April, 2019 - 05:00
SMH - Editorial

The Coalition's scare campaign against electric vehicles (EVs) is hypocritical and Luddite but the bright side is it might, at long last, start a meaningful debate about the role the transport sector can play in cutting carbon emissions.
The Coalition has gone in with all guns blazing over the past week after the ALP announced that as part of its climate change policy it had a target that 50 per cent of new cars sold in Australia would be electric by 2030.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten at an electric vehicle charging station in Canberra. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen Prime Minister Scott Morrison and other government MPs have described the ALP policy as a socialist plot that will confiscate utes from Aussie tradesmen and effectively end the weekend for families.
To be fair, both parties have form when it comes to scare campaigns, such as the ALP's 'Mediscare' campaign before the 2016 election.
But scare campaigns work best if they are consistent and the Coalition has just chucked a screeching U-turn on this issue. Until a few weeks ago many prominent Coalition ministers thought EVs were just great and were posing to be photographed driving them and stroking their paintwork.
The Coalition has defended its sudden negative reaction to the ALP's policy by arguing that it still likes EVs but it disagrees with the ALP's targets which it says are too ambitious. In fact, the targets are quite cautious and roughly in line with the government's position until two weeks ago. When Energy Minister Angus Taylor announced a $6 million fund to promote EVs last year he released a study based  on targets similar to the ALP's.
It is certainly true that EVs imply a huge shift for the transport sector but many of the Coalition's warnings about how this will affect people's lives ignore how fast world markets and technology are changing.
Even under the ALP plan, Australia would be well behind other countries. About half of Norway's new cars are already electric, in California 10 per cent and China's sales grew 175 per cent last year to about 5 per cent of the total.
The Coalition is now complaining about how long EVs take to charge and how short their driving range is. But the huge car companies such as  Toyota and General Motors are developing solutions. Indeed, the Herald on Wednesday profiled the technology of an Australian EV company called Tritium which is leading the way.
While the Coalition has warned about the end of the iconic tradesman's utility vehicle, Toyota has said it expects to release within six years an electric replacement for its best-selling HiLux, complete with the same rear trays for tradies' kelpie dogs to jump on to.
Because EVs are a little more expensive than petrol now,  most of the countries with high EV sales have relied on subsidies to encourage their use.  The ALP's plan considers tax breaks for EVs and tighter standards on emissions. But the cost of EVs is falling quickly with mass production and studies suggest drivers of EVs can recoup the up-front cost by saving on petrol. While EVs will increase demand for electricity, most drivers will mostly charge the batteries of their EVs at off-peak times when electricity is abundant and cheap.
Australia's debate on climate change has, until now, focused almost exclusively on the electricity sector but if Australia is to meet its emission reductions targets under the Paris treaty it will have to achieve similar cuts in transport which account for about 20 per cent of all emissions.  Achieving this reduction will require not just a switch to EVs but also a shift to electric buses and better public transport.

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VIDEO: David Attenborough Climate Change TV Show A 'Call To Arms'

Lethal Heating - 21 April, 2019 - 10:03
BBC

After one of the hottest years on record, Sir David Attenborough looks at the science of climate change and potential solutions to this global threat.
Interviews with some of the world’s leading climate scientists explore recent extreme weather conditions such as unprecedented storms and catastrophic wildfires.
They also reveal what dangerous levels of climate change could mean for both human populations and the natural world in the future.


Climate Change - The Facts
Sir David Attenborough's new BBC documentary on climate change has been praised by TV critics.
Climate Change - The Facts, shown on BBC One on Thursday, was a "rousing call to arms", said the Guardian.
In a four-star review, the Times said the veteran presenter "took a sterner tone... as though his patience was nearly spent".
Sir David, 92, has called global warming "our greatest threat in thousands of years".
In its review, The Arts Desk said: "Devastating footage of last year's climactic upheavals makes surreal viewing.
"While Earth has survived radical climactic changes and regenerated following mass extinctions, it's not the destruction of Earth that we are facing, it's the destruction of our familiar, natural world and our uniquely rich human culture.
"In the 20 years since I first started talking about the impact of climate change on our world, conditions have changed far faster than I ever imagined," Sir David said in the film.
Climate change protesters have closed off central London since Monday"It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies."
In a glowing review, the Telegraph called the title of the documentary "robust" and praised the use of Sir David in the central role.
"At a time when public debate seems to be getting ever more hysterical," it said, "it's good to be presented with something you can trust. And we all trust Attenborough."
"Sir David Attenborough might as well be narrating a horror film," wrote the FT.
"A panoply of profs line up to explain that the science on climate change is now unequivocal, never mind the brief clip of Donald Trump prating: 'It's a hoax, it's a hoax, OK'."
But it added: "Fortunately for our nerves the last 20 minutes focuses on what needs to be - and can be - done on an international and personal level."
Sir David's concern over the impacts of climate change has become a major focus for the naturalist in recent years and has been a theme of his Our Planet series on Netflix.
The new BBC programme has a strong emphasis on hope with Sir David arguing that if dramatic action is taken over the next decade, then the world can keep temperatures from rising more than 1.5C this century, limiting the scale of the damage.

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A Climate Reckoning Is Coming To Our Political Hothouse

Lethal Heating - 21 April, 2019 - 05:00
Fairfax - Peter Hartcher

When Tony Abbott was prime minister, he ordered more Australian strike aircraft and troops into Iraq. Not because Australia was big enough to turn the tide of battle against the barbarians of Daesh, so-called Islamic State or ISIL. But because he believed in the fight.
Climate is no longer a lefty concern. Illustration: Jim Pavlidis"It's absolutely vital that the world sees and sees quickly that the ISIL death cult can be beaten," he said in 2014. Australia's commitment ultimately made up less than 1 per cent of the combined effort against the terrorist thugs but it was early and firm. Abbott described it as "an important global concern" and he was right. And, with more than 60 countries co-operating, it was a success.
When it came to another important global concern, Abbott argued a very different case. He and like-minded Coalition conservatives have long maintained that Australian action against climate change was futile: "Even if carbon dioxide, a naturally occurring trace gas that’s necessary for life, really is the main climate change villain, Australia’s contribution to mankind’s emissions is scarcely more than 1 per cent," Abbott said last year.
On terrorism, Abbott argued for Australian leadership. On climate change, he argued for wilful helplessness. Australia is a 1 per cent contributor in both cases. In one case, it used its 1 per cent to show leadership and effective action. On the other, it used its 1 per cent as an excuse for inaction.
The defining difference, of course, is will. Specifically, political will. Australia is at another decision point on climate change as it heads to the May 18 election.
All indications are that Australia is heartily sick of the "climate war". In the decade that the "war" has raged between the political parties, the country has been harmed and opportunity lost. Australia, an energy superpower, now has the most expensive electricity in the world.
The power grid has become so unstable that the energy market operator says it is intervening in the market every day "to keep the lights on". If it handn't, we would have celebrated Australia Day with mass blackouts across Victoria and South Australia.
And no, despite the public impression of such things, it wouldn't have been because of renewable energy. "The contribution from coal generation was significantly less than expected and renewables was slightly more than expected" thanks partly to breakdowns in Australia's ageing coal-fired generator fleet, in the words of the Australian Energy Market Operator.
Solar cell technology invented at the University of NSW was taken offshore and helped make China the world's leading exporter of solar panels. That technology now accounts for half of global solar panel output worth $US10 billion in sales in 2017. Its annual sales are projected to be $US1 trillion in 2040.
We can buy them back one panel at a time – Aldi supermarkets had a special on solar photovoltaic panels in their Australian stores on April 6 for $179 each. Revelling in the adrenaline thrill of political battle and clutching abjectly to lumps of coal from the industrial revolution of the past, Australia is missing the industrial revolution of the future.
The electricity industry would like an energy policy. After six years in office, the Coalition hasn't been able to come up with one. Business would like a steady, affordable electricity supply so it can keep running the Morrison government's fabled "strong economy". Big investors would like enough policy certainty to put major sums into new Australian projects.
The "climate war" is not some sort of inevitability – recall that John Howard and Kevin Rudd both agreed on the need for an emissions trading scheme to curb Australia's carbon emissions.
We got into this endless war as a matter of political choice. The broad bipartisan consensus was shattered when two politicians – first the Nationals' Barnaby Joyce and then Tony Abbott – decided that they had more to gain by exploiting the problem than exploring a solution.
That's not to say Abbott is solely to blame. None of Australia's political parties has a clean record. If Labor under Rudd had held its nerve, and the Greens had been interested in cutting carbon emissions instead of striking a pose, the national outcome could have been very different.
So, what's next? There is every sign that a great reckoning is coming. Public opinion on climate change has moved against the Coalition. A record hot summer, and record extreme weather events, have helped crystallise the electorate's concerns. It's been a long time since it was a lefty fringe preoccupation.
The Reserve Bank deputy governor, Guy Debelle, last month called for immediate action on climate change to avert an "abrupt, disorderly" economic transition.
Only 13 per cent of voters consider the Coalition to be doing a "good" job of dealing with climate change, according to an Ipsos poll this month. In a head-to-head comparison, 42 per cent of voters prefer Labor's climate policy and 25 per cent prefer the Coalition's. This is a decisive margin.
Internal Liberal polling shows that it is one of the party's biggest liabilities, together with its chaotic handling of its leadership. And Abbott, one of the original warriors of the "climate war", is likely to become one of its latest casualties under challenge from independent Zali Steggall, who decided to go into politics because of her concern over climate change.
Scott Morrison's actions show that he's fully aware of the problem. The guy famous for holding a lump of coal aloft in the House as treasurer has announced as Prime Minister billions in funding for the Snowy 2.0 hydro scheme, a Tasmanian hydro "battery of the nation" project, and an extra $2 billion for the Abbott-era emissions reduction fund. These are not a comprehensive policy, of course. But they are talking points for his candidates to get them through the campaign.
And Morrison is doing pretty well in the argument so far, despite the Coalition government's dismal record. This week he managed to drag Bill Shorten into the old dead-end argument over the cost of Labor's climate change policy. The Liberals can't believe their luck – it's the same dead end that the Coalition lures Labor into every time, and every time they give Labor a beating.
This week's argument was over the cost of Labor's plan for a lower-carbon economy. Both Labor and Liberal were quoting figures from the same report to support their arguments.
Labor has a policy to cut carbon emissions by 45 per cent by 2030, and the Coalition by 26-28 per cent. A study for the Coalition by the well-regarded economist Warwick McKibbin found that the economy would continue to grow under both plans, but that Labor's more ambitious target would cut about $60 billion more from national GDP in the year 2030 than the Coalition's.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison performs a reading during Good Friday Easter services at St Charbel's Catholic Maronite Church at Punchbowl on Friday. Credit: AAP"Relative to what the size of the economy would be," about $2 trillion, "the impact is a small fraction," McKibbin said this week. But $60 billion sounds like a dauntingly large sum.
Of course, there are two much bigger questions. Instead of allowing itself to be pinned down on cost, Labor might want to look at the question of opportunity.
How much new investment went into renewable energy in Australia last year? The total for projects under way or completed was $26 billion in 2018, double the previous year's, according to the Clean Energy Council.
And the eminent economist Ross Garnaut points out that there is mind-boggling potential for Australia's post-carbon economy. Australia, says Garnaut, could be the world's "renewable energy superpower" because of the abundance of its resource.
Bill and Chloe Shorten help to serve food during a visit to the Salvation Army's Lighthouse Cafe in Melbourne on Good Friday. Credit: Alex EllinghausenBeyond that, whole new areas of competitive advantage would open up for Australia as a result. Australia would also be the natural location for the world's fastest-growing materials industry, pure silicon for computers and other electronics, as well as the global hub for steel-making, aluminium smelting and other industries where Australia today struggles to hold on to the last vestiges of its capacity.
This potential is almost entirely unmentioned in the Australian debate. Garnaut is delivering a series of lectures to develop the idea in the coming weeks.
And the second big question is the cost of inaction on climate change. The hothouse of Australian politics is nothing compared to the hothouse that carbon emissions are preparing for the planet. Britain's Financial Times this month reported on a new frontier of climate research that explores the prospect of a tipping point where the atmosphere not only heats up, but doesn't stop heating up.
"Some have warned of the risk of a sudden shift to a new 'hothouse' version of the earth," writes the FT's Matthew Green. "In this alien home, it is unclear how organised human life would survive."
To deliver the opportunity, and avoid the worst, Australia needs more investment. That means more ambitious policy and a steadier political commitment to change. The Coalition over six years has proven that it doesn't believe in the fight. But so far Morrison is doing a pretty good job of distracting Labor into showing that it's not up to it, either.
The Coalition may not believe in the fight on climate change, but it has ample will to defeat Labor.

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Climate Campaigners May Sound Naive. But They’re Asking The Right Questions

Lethal Heating - 21 April, 2019 - 05:00
The Guardian - 

Extinction Rebellion might be mocked for unrealistic demands. Politicians, however, would be fools to dismiss them
‘The big pink boat has been moored at Oxford Circus for days now, floating on an ocean of what looks like general goodwill from passers-by.’ Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters Spring has sprung, and overnight the high street is awash with miraculously cheap summer dresses.
Flick through the racks of floaty, swishy nothings in any H&M store right now, however, and it’s clear something has changed in the last few summers.
Swinging from all that throwaway polyester are tags bragging about how much of it is sustainably made from recycled plastic bottles, not oil. Their tights and knickers use a man-made fibre made from recycled fishing nets, and by the till is a bin of reusable shopping bags.
These stores know their young customers are eco-conscious where past generations were oblivious, impressively fluent in the evils of plastic and diesel. But they’re also human, still occasionally craving the disposable fashion they’ve always had.
They want what most people secretly want, which is to enjoy the pleasures of a pre-climate-conscious age – foreign travel, strawberries out of season – but in ways sustainable enough to let us feel good about it.
The protesters have public sympathy for their broad aim. But that’s a very long way from securing consent to specificsThe Extinction Rebellion protesters’ big pink boat has been moored a stone’s throw from H&M’s flagship branch at Oxford Circus for days now, floating on an ocean of what looks like general goodwill from passers-by. Doubtless it’s exasperating for anyone who just wants to get home on the bus, or for 999 services trying to move around a gummed-up city, and if protesters deliver on threats to shut down Heathrow over Easter then perhaps the public mood will turn sour. But last week, at least, it was impossible not to get swept up in the infectious optimism of it all. What’s not to love about chilled-out tunes, free food, the sunny feeling of reclaiming streets from the traffic and, above all, the very strong feeling that they’re on the right side of the argument?
To watch passing shoppers and tourists stop and film the protest on their camera phones is, however, to wonder how prepared we really are for the life of minimal consumption inherent in treating climate change as an emergency. The protesters have public sympathy for their broad aim in the bag. But that’s a very long way from securing public consent to the specifics.
Extinction Rebellion wants Britain to commit to reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2025, rather than 2050, as the government is considering (which would itself be a step up from a target we’re not even currently on track to meet, to reduce them by 80% by 2050). And in practice, that indicates the kind of collective effort rarely seen outside wartime. It means goodbye to petrol cars, gas boilers and cookers – fine for those who can afford to replace whatever they’ve got now, impossible for the poor without significant subsidy – and hello to restrictions on flying. It implies eating significantly less meat and dairy, and no longer treating economic growth as the first priority, with all the possible consequences that entails for pay, tax revenues and public services. We might hope to create jobs in green industries but shed them in carbon-based ones, with no guarantee of the new, clean technologies basing themselves in those towns hit hardest by the loss of old, polluting industries.


'If this is what it takes': London​ reacts to the Extinction Rebellion ​'shutdown'

All of that might be necessary to stop global warming in the long run, but the difference is that doing it in six years, not 30, means it would have to happen at breakneck speed, with painfully little time for communities to adjust. Those who are prepared to accept sacrifices for themselves need to be honest about what they’re wishing on others, which is why alarm bells ring when Extinction Rebellion’s Gail Bradbrook says that “this is not the time to be realistic”. We’ve seen in the three years since the Brexit referendum what can happen when campaigners win an argument by refusing to be realistic about what their dream means for other people.
Yet there’s another lesson from recent history here, and it points towards taking campaigns themselves more seriously than campaigners. Eight years ago the tents were sprouting in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, not Marble Arch, and the cause was economic inequality, not climate change. But otherwise the similarities between the Occupy movement and Extinction Rebellion are uncanny. Then, too, the protesters’ demands were dismissed as wildly unrealistic, and they were mocked for demanding the overthrow of capitalism while queuing to use the loos in Starbucks.
If their argument was at best half-formed, however, they were just doing what protesters are supposed to do, which is articulating a powerful feeling that something is wrong. I didn’t see it at the time, but in retrospect they were canaries down the mine. They were pointing to a boiling anger building up against a perceived elite that would ultimately manifest itself in far more destructive ways.
 Illustration: Martin Rowson/The Guardian You can trace a direct path from Occupy not only to the rise of Corbynism but to Vote Leave’s exploitation of those anti-establishment feelings, and to their weaponisation by the far right. What starts out as a relatively benign movement of frustrated leftwing idealists doesn’t necessarily stay that way. In years to come, if the effects of climate change start hitting home in tangible ways – rising food prices hurting the poor, natural disasters triggering upsurges of migration or territorial conflicts – what stops all of that being somehow weaponised, too?
What we should have learned from 2011 is that when protesters are asking a valid question, it’s no good scolding them for not having all the answers, or even for personal hypocrisy. It may not look good for Emma Thompson to pitch up at Oxford Circus in solidarity with climate change protesters shortly after flying in from California, where she was appearing on a chat show. But in the broad scheme of things, so what? Climate change is an existential threat, and the response to it doesn’t currently feel urgent enough. So long as they keep hammering those two essentially inarguable points, Extinction Rebellion is going to resonate, not just with woke teenagers but increasingly with older people loath to bequeath their grandchildren a fried planet.
So if ministers had any gumption, they wouldn’t be sitting in Whitehall talking tough about police crackdowns. They’d be down at Oxford Circus, chatting to the crowds, pointing out what’s already being done – starting with the fact that the government’s independent climate change experts are about to publish a landmark report on speeding up progress to zero emissions – but also listening to arguments for why that might not be enough.
Giving protesters exactly what they ask for is rarely a good idea.
But identifying what the millions who broadly agree with them actually want is critical, and the lesson from Oxford Circus is that what people want has changed.
Woe betide politicians who fail to keep up.

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Sir David Attenborough Warns Of ‘Man-Made Disaster On Global Scale’ In Climate Change Film

Lethal Heating - 21 April, 2019 - 05:00
Yahoo! News

Sir David Attenborough warns of ‘man-made disaster on global scale’ in climate change film
Veteran broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has issued a stark warning regarding climate change, saying a ‘devastating future’ awaits if action is not taken soon.
The 92-year-old makes the frightening comments in new BBC One documentary Climate Change: The Facts.
“We are running out of time but there is still hope…”#ClimateChangeTheFacts with Sir David Attenborough. Tonight. 9pm. @BBCOne pic.twitter.com/OAmQ8Y13u6— BBC (@BBC) April 18, 2019He said: “Right now, we are facing our greatest threat in thousands of years. Climate change.
“Scientists across the globe are in no doubt that at the current rate of warming we risk a devastating future.
“What happens now and in these next few years will profoundly affect the next few thousand years.
“What can be done to avert disaster and ensure the survival of our civilisations and the natural world upon which we depend?
“We are facing a man-made disaster on a global scale.
“In the 20 years since I first started talking about the impact of climate change on our world, conditions have changed far faster than I ever imagined.
“It may sound frightening but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade we could face irreversible damage of the natural world, and the collapse of our societies.
“We are running out of time but there is still hope. I believe that if we better understand the threat we face, the more likely it is that we can avoid such a catastrophic future.
“Our climate is changing because of one simple fact … our world is getting hotter.”
Climate Change: The Facts sees Attenborough, a longtime campaigner for raising awareness about climate change, using his authoritative voice to discuss the perils currently facing our planet.
Attenborough added: “I’ve seen for myself that in addition to the many other threats they face, animals of all kinds are now struggling to adapt to rapidly changing conditions
“Scientists believe that 8% of species are now at threat of extinction solely due to climate change.
“This isn’t just about losing wonders of nature. With the loss of even smallest organisms we destabilise and ultimately risk collapsing the world’s ecosystems – the networks that support the whole of life on Earth.
“As temperatures rise, the threats we face multiply.”

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Extinction Rebellion And Attenborough Put Climate In Spotlight

Lethal Heating - 21 April, 2019 - 05:00
The Guardian - 

News bulletins are leading on global warming and the BBC is shedding some of its ‘balance’
Extinction Rebellion protesters and police on Waterloo Bridge in London. Photograph: Brais G Rouco/Barcroft Media With Extinction Rebellion making headlines and Sir David Attenborough broadcasting The Facts on BBC One, climate change has gone mainstream this Easter. A nation has been watching protesters glue themselves to trains, turn London’s roads into gardens and actively invite arrest in their hundreds.
As a media strategy it is working. How did glueing yourself to a train highlight climate change, Radio 4’s Today presenter Nick Robinson asked Dr Gail Bradbrook, an Extinction Rebellion co-founder. “It gets you on the Today programme,” she replied.
For Chris Packham, an environmental campaigner and BBC presenter, this is welcome progress, marking a long-awaited moment when news bulletins lead daily on global warming.
He, like others, has detected a recent change in the BBC’s coverage. Attenborough’s much heralded programme, broadcast on Thursday, was part of a series of hard-hitting documentaries by the corporation, along with a forthcoming programme on human population growth presented by Packham. “They [the BBC] are certainly making sure they are moving away from criticism levelled at them in the last few years of only showing a rose-tinted view of the natural world,” Packham said.
Demonstrators dancing down Oxford Street or planting shrubbery on Waterloo Bridge attract headlines, which in turn influence programme-makers, he believes. “So I think there is a change, yes. The BBC has got its fingers on the pulse.”
From the start Extinction Rebellion has made it easy for the media. Through its “Declaration of Rebellion” on Halloween, its “Blood of our Children” stunt in Downing Street and strip protest in the Houses of Parliament, it has made and nurtured key contacts at media organisations in the buildup to this week’s direct action.


Climate protesters climb on top of train at Canary Wharf

Another co-founder, Roger Hallam, has been clear that the strategy of public disruption is heavily influenced by Saul Alinsky, the US community organiser who wrote Rules for Radicals, and Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement. “The essential element here is disruption. Without disruption, no one is going to give you their eyeballs,” he has said.
That means accepting negative coverage in some parts of the media, such as hostile front-page stories in the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail on Thursday. “Obviously when you shut down central London for several days, you are going to attract attention,” said Howard Rees, one of Extinction Rebellion’s media organisers. “Getting media attention is very important.”
Rees said media reaction had been “mixed but fairly positive”. There had been some negative commentary, such as describing protesters as “sanctimonious eco-zealots” and “prancing hippies” whose direct action was merely a “tawdry New Age circus”. “It gives everyone a really good laugh because it is so totally inaccurate,” Rees said.
The protesters were pleased with the mainstream broadcast coverage, he said. “The BBC often does its best to try and ignore the issue and us, so we are pleased to see we have managed to have a bit of a breakthrough there.”
Twice in three years complaints have been upheld over Today programme interviews with the climate change sceptic Nigel Lawson for failing to challenge his views more robustly. In September last year the BBC’s director of news and current affairs, Fran Unsworth, accepted the corporation had got its coverage of climate change “wrong too often” and told staff: “You do not need a ‘denier” to balance the debate.”
In October Radio 4’s The World Tonight and BBC World Service’s Newshour announced they would be covering climate change at least once a week, every week.


'If this is what it takes': London​ reacts to the Extinction Rebellion ​'shutdown'

Rosie Rogers, a senior climate campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said: “The BBC’s slightly odd decision to maintain an even balance between climate science and conspiracy theory seems to have finally been overturned, and that’s extremely welcome. We do understand the pressure they have been under from the denial lobby, but science is not a political ideology and should not be treated as one.”
Richard Black, a former BBC environment correspondent and the author of Denied: the Rise and Fall of Climate Contrarianism, said the pressure exerted on the broadcaster by contrarians had been “quite extreme at times” in the past.
Much of the mainstream media was now having to take the issue seriously, he said, “because the facts have changed. And in the end, if you want to be credible you have to go with the facts.”
Negative commentary about Extinction Rebellion would not affect morale, said Black, the director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank. “They have got one central aim, which it to get people talking about climate change. And on the basis of what we have seen, they have been successful in that. Everyone in the media is talking about them. Politicians are talking about them.”
He added: “I think, though, what is probably more profound for the future is not Extinction Rebellion but the schoolchildren’s strike, which is a very organic movement, utterly driven by kids for kids.”

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