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Climate Change Denial Is Evil, Says Mary Robinson
The Guardian - Damian Carrington
Exclusive: chair of Elders group also says fossil fuel firms have lost their social licence
Mary Robinson: ‘I believe that climate change denial is not just ignorant, it is malign, it is evil.’Photograph: Johnny Savage/The Guardian The denial of climate change is not just ignorant, but “malign and evil”, according to Mary Robinson, because it denies the human rights of the most vulnerable people on the planet.
The former UN high commissioner for human rights and special envoy for climate change also says fossil fuel companies have lost their social licence to explore for more coal, oil and gas and must switch to become part of the transition to clean energy.
Robinson will make the outspoken attack on Tuesday, in a speech to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London, which has awarded her the Kew International Medal for her “integral work on climate justice”.
She also told the Guardian she supports climate protests, including the school strikes for climate founded by “superstar” Greta Thunberg, and that “there is room for civil disobedience as a way of communicating, though we also need hope”.
Robinson is chair of the Elders, an independent group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela that works for human rights. She will say in her speech: “I believe that climate change denial is not just ignorant, it is malign, it is evil, and it amounts to an attempt to deny human rights to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.”
“The evidence about the effects of climate change is incontrovertible, and the moral case for urgent action indisputable,” she will say.
“Climate change undermines the enjoyment of the full range of human rights – from the right to life, to food, to shelter and to health. It is an injustice that the people who have contributed least to the causes of the problem suffer the worst impacts of climate change.”
Robinson, a former president of the Republic of Ireland, told the Guardian her angry words were the result of seeing the impact on people’s lives. “In Africa, I saw the devastating impacts on poor farmers, villagers and communities when they could not predict when the rainy season was going to come.”
She also attacks big oil, gas and coal companies in her speech. She is expected to say: “We have entered a new reality where fossil fuel companies have lost their legitimacy and social licence to operate.” She says exploration for new reserves must end, given that most of existing reserves must be kept in the ground if global warming is to be tackled.
Robinson condemns the UK government for the £4.8bn support given by its export finance body for fossil fuels from 2010-16. “It stirs painful memories of past exploitative behaviour to see the UK and other rich, industrialised countries proclaim their good intentions and act in a progressive way at home, whilst effectively exporting their emissions to poorer foreign countries and leaving them to pay the price socially and environmentally.”
The US president, Donald Trump, is also criticised by Robinson for his “egregious act of climate irresponsibility” in withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement. “Bad leadership has consequences now that are really bad for the people in the poorest communities, including in the US,” she told the Guardian.
Robinson says as well as taking personal action – she has given up meat – people need to get angry with those who have more power and are not meeting their responsibilities, saying: “Just as the suffragettes needed to embrace militant tactics to win the fight for female emancipation, so today we need to be fiercely determined to challenge vested interests, especially in the fossil fuel sector.”
There have been several strong attacks on climate change denial in recent months, with critics saying that proposals in the US for a new national security council panel of climate change deniers are “Stalinist”.
In November, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said: “Smoking kills people, and tobacco companies that tried to confuse the public about that reality were being evil. But climate change isn’t just killing people; it may well kill civilisation. Trying to confuse the public about that is evil on a whole different level. Don’t some of these people have children?”
The BBC accepted in September it gets coverage of climate change “wrong too often” and told staff: “You do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate.”
Links
Exclusive: chair of Elders group also says fossil fuel firms have lost their social licence
Mary Robinson: ‘I believe that climate change denial is not just ignorant, it is malign, it is evil.’Photograph: Johnny Savage/The Guardian The denial of climate change is not just ignorant, but “malign and evil”, according to Mary Robinson, because it denies the human rights of the most vulnerable people on the planet.
The former UN high commissioner for human rights and special envoy for climate change also says fossil fuel companies have lost their social licence to explore for more coal, oil and gas and must switch to become part of the transition to clean energy.
Robinson will make the outspoken attack on Tuesday, in a speech to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London, which has awarded her the Kew International Medal for her “integral work on climate justice”.
She also told the Guardian she supports climate protests, including the school strikes for climate founded by “superstar” Greta Thunberg, and that “there is room for civil disobedience as a way of communicating, though we also need hope”.
Robinson is chair of the Elders, an independent group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela that works for human rights. She will say in her speech: “I believe that climate change denial is not just ignorant, it is malign, it is evil, and it amounts to an attempt to deny human rights to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.”
“The evidence about the effects of climate change is incontrovertible, and the moral case for urgent action indisputable,” she will say.
“Climate change undermines the enjoyment of the full range of human rights – from the right to life, to food, to shelter and to health. It is an injustice that the people who have contributed least to the causes of the problem suffer the worst impacts of climate change.”
Robinson, a former president of the Republic of Ireland, told the Guardian her angry words were the result of seeing the impact on people’s lives. “In Africa, I saw the devastating impacts on poor farmers, villagers and communities when they could not predict when the rainy season was going to come.”
She also attacks big oil, gas and coal companies in her speech. She is expected to say: “We have entered a new reality where fossil fuel companies have lost their legitimacy and social licence to operate.” She says exploration for new reserves must end, given that most of existing reserves must be kept in the ground if global warming is to be tackled.
Robinson condemns the UK government for the £4.8bn support given by its export finance body for fossil fuels from 2010-16. “It stirs painful memories of past exploitative behaviour to see the UK and other rich, industrialised countries proclaim their good intentions and act in a progressive way at home, whilst effectively exporting their emissions to poorer foreign countries and leaving them to pay the price socially and environmentally.”
The US president, Donald Trump, is also criticised by Robinson for his “egregious act of climate irresponsibility” in withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement. “Bad leadership has consequences now that are really bad for the people in the poorest communities, including in the US,” she told the Guardian.
Robinson says as well as taking personal action – she has given up meat – people need to get angry with those who have more power and are not meeting their responsibilities, saying: “Just as the suffragettes needed to embrace militant tactics to win the fight for female emancipation, so today we need to be fiercely determined to challenge vested interests, especially in the fossil fuel sector.”
There have been several strong attacks on climate change denial in recent months, with critics saying that proposals in the US for a new national security council panel of climate change deniers are “Stalinist”.
In November, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said: “Smoking kills people, and tobacco companies that tried to confuse the public about that reality were being evil. But climate change isn’t just killing people; it may well kill civilisation. Trying to confuse the public about that is evil on a whole different level. Don’t some of these people have children?”
The BBC accepted in September it gets coverage of climate change “wrong too often” and told staff: “You do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate.”
Links
- Humans need to become smarter thinkers to beat climate denial
- Is it socially acceptable to challenge climate denial?
- BBC apologises over interview with climate denier Lord Lawson
- Let's expose everyday climate denial. Here's how
- Climate change sceptics are 'headless chickens', says Prince Charles
- Climate change study forces sceptical scientists to change minds
- Climate change arguments incite 'weird religiosity', says Greg Barker
- Weatherwatch: should TV forecasters talk about climate change?
- G20 nations still led by fossil fuel industry, climate report finds
- BBC admits ‘we get climate change coverage wrong too often’
Categories: External websites
The Young Minds Solving Climate Change
BBC - Chad Frischmann*
Factory billowing smoke. Credit: Getty ImagesGlobal warming, and its effect on climate, is one the most pressing issues facing the world today. It is a metaproblem that exacerbates most other challenges that keep us up at night – from sea level rise or the loss of natural resources to increased conflict, poverty, and gender inequality.
Despite much already having been written on the urgency with which we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions, pull carbon out of the air, and redesign our social-environmental systems towards new ways of doing business, most decision makers, from individual consumers to world leaders, have been excruciatingly slow to take action.
What seems to be lacking is an understanding and consensus of real, workable technologies and practices to solve the crisis of growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere.
Younger generations, however, seem to be clued in to the reality that there are indeed climate solutions to this global problem.
"The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change,” said Nobel Prize nominee Greta Thunberg in her 2018 TED talk.
Her bold, decisive, and informed rhetoric has inspired a global movement of school strikes for climate called #FridaysForFuture, orchestrated by students the worldwide. On 15 March 2019, 1.5 million young people and their allies hit the streets, striking in 2052 locations in 123 different countries.
The planet’s remaining forests will have to be protected, as they do vital work to soak up excess carbon.While they are marching for a future they want, the endless debating over the different technologies needed to halt rising temperatures delay the necessary change. Climate solutions already exist and are scaling. There is no technology or economic barrier; rather, it is a lack of will and leadership to move farther and faster than the future of upcoming generations demand.
I lead a team of researchers from around the world, and together we map, model, and detail the world’s most impactful solutions to try and reverse global warming. Our research at Project Drawdown shows that there are better technologies and practices for electricity generation, transportation, buildings, industry, the food system, land use, and overconsumption. Climate solutions exist for nations, municipalities, businesses, investors, homeowners, so that consumers can shift towards a system that benefits all.
This is already happening across the globe through existing solutions that promote social justice, equity, and economic development, while restoring the planet’s natural carbon cycle. It is in younger generations that we will find the inspiration and courage for this change. Adopting regenerative practices on current cropland, grassland and degraded land can restore soil health and fertility Solutions abound, both scientifically proven and financially feasible. They are interventions that can shift the way the world does business. The global economy is based on extractive and exploitative growth models, spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere through fossil fuel combustion, land conversion, and excessive consumption of everything – but the economy does not need to be.
Instead, renewable energy options, such as solar photovoltaics, wind turbines, and geothermal plants, can produce clean, abundant access to electricity, which currently accounts for approximately 25% of global emissions. Along with enabling technologies like energy storage and grid flexibility, renewable energy systems can fully replace coal, oil, and gas-fired power plants.
A plethora of options are available to moving people and goods from Point A to Point B that reduce or avoid burning fossil fuels from the tailpipe. Hybrids or electric vehicles are a good choice for medium or longer distance travel, but biking, using public transport, or walking are better options for emissions and human health for most people’s daily lives.
As consumers, we have to take more responsibility about how our actions affect the planet – like how much our food travels, and how it is processedBy reducing food loss and waste and moving towards a healthy, plant-rich diet, all the extra emissions and energy associated with producing, processing, packaging, distributing, cooking, and decomposing of food left uneaten or overconsumed could be avoided, while also providing sustenance to populations in need. These are some of the most impactful decisions every individual can make every day to help solve the climate crisis
Rather than cutting down forests and degrading wetlands to supply our rapacious appetite for meat, timber, and energy, protecting ecosystems can safeguard, expand, and create new carbon sinks. Adopting regenerative practices on current cropland, grassland and degraded land can restore soil health and fertility, increase yield and provide the same abundance of materials without destroying the natural systems. We do not need an economy based on exploiting fossil fuels; instead we can create a new economy that is based on restorative and regenerative growth Taken together, implementing regenerative practices for agriculture and livestock management, adopting a plant-rich diet, and reducing food waste, could result in enough food being produced on current farmland to feed the world’s growing population, now until 2050 and beyond. Taking actions to change the food system from supply through demand can prevent the need to cut down forests for food production, with enough existing cropland to produce biomass to supply feedstocks for other materials such as bioplastics or alternative concrete.
Accomplishing all this, however, requires individuals to make different decisions every day on what is produced, purchased, and consumed. These decisions can be hard for some, but when the results help to solve global warming, food insecurity, human health, and deforestation, they become what might be called the solution ‘duh-factor’. With enough cascading benefits, or ‘win-win-win-wins’, implementing climate solutions simply become common sense.
Non-polluting forms of power like solar can replace those which burn fossil fuels – if the will is there to make the change.The growth of these interventions needs to accelerate at a much faster rate. Young people know this, perhaps because it is the only future worth fighting for. Along with the world’s poor, women, and indigenous peoples, younger generations will disproportionately experience the worst effects of climate change if nothing is done; or too little is accomplished too late. Acting now is essential for everyone and everything on this planet; however, as a motivating principle, ensuring that future generations can live healthy, meaningful lives should be humanity’s highest priority.
Like Greta Thunberg, Lauren Howland is not waiting quietly for adults to figure it all out. A 23-year-old indigenous woman from the Jicarilla Apache Nation, Lauren is a co-founder of International Indigenous Youth Council (IIYC), which received the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2018 for its continued work on environmental issues. Older people who hold the reins of political, economic, and intellectual power today must listen to these voices of change A voice for young indigenous peoples worldwide, Howland says: “Young people are more connected and in tune with each other and this planet than any other point in humanity's existence. We realise we are fighting to save humanity from literal extinction, and we need the policymakers of this planet to collectively realise this also. It is here, climate changed. We need climate policies enacted and enforced across the globe now, that include the solutions we are already implementing in our own local communities."
Other young people are jumping to into the solution space, actively working on potential game-changing innovations. Aäron Claeys, a self-taught young entrepreneur based in Antwerp, Belgium, works on developing nanotech solutions for sustainable materials with the aim of “reversing global warming, improving the health, energy efficiency and quality of life, while restoring the planet's biosphere”.
He and his team have already marketed products that can double the lifetime of textiles, leather, and footwear to the fashion industry, which may account for up to 10% of global greenhouse gases. He is now working on developing self-cleaning, air-purifying, and carbon-capturing building materials.
The recent climate strikes show how younger people are being galvanised over climate change.The crisis we all are facing together is an opening to bring young people into the conversation. Creating the future we all want requires older and younger generations to work together for the change we need. Young people are hungry to take part. Older people who hold the reins of political, economic, and intellectual power today must listen to these voices of change, support new ideas and innovation, and rethink assumptions about the way the world works, because the world will not be ours forever. No discussion of our younger generations’ future should take place without them sitting at the same table.
“It is not enough to prepare youth to eventually assume the roles you [adults] currently hold. Youth are prepared to be impactful as we are right now. We need those above us to mentor us now, so that we don’t have to wait to have your jobs; so that when we are in your positions, we can be even more successful,” said Silas Swanson, a second-year student at Columbia University during a youth panel at the Omega Institute ‘Drawdown Learn’ event held last year in Rhinebeck, New York. Silas woke me up to this truth, and we have been in contact ever since. Greta Thunberg launched a legion of young climate strike organisers around the world who are waking people up to the need for change Every climate-motivated scientist, policymaker, engineer, architect, lawyer, city planner, investor, business person, activist, economist, environmentalist, thought leader, and every other interested professional should carve out time in their week to mentor at least one young person. Five would be better, and worth the effort.
Mentoring is not simply teaching in classrooms or offering advice during office hours. It is about committing to give to and learn from others; to do whatever one can to support, empower, and lift up others to achieve their fullest potential. It does not cost too much in time, and the potential rewards are incalculable.
Poorer people will bear a disproportionate burden of the worst effects of climate change, such as flooding.Greta Thunberg launched a legion of young climate strike organisers around the world who are waking people up to the need for change. There are many other young unsung voices across the globe working to create the future they need. We older generations must look to youth for inspiration, motivation, and courage.
Rather than seeking the courage to “fight” climate change, we need to find the courage to see the common-sense solutions right in front of us. The youth of today can help us all find the way, and together we can create the future we want.
*Chad Frischmann is the vice-president and lead researcher of Project Drawdown, an organisation seeking to find ways the global community can help mitigate and reverse the effects of climate change. He is also a willing mentor, with two spots open.
Links
Factory billowing smoke. Credit: Getty ImagesGlobal warming, and its effect on climate, is one the most pressing issues facing the world today. It is a metaproblem that exacerbates most other challenges that keep us up at night – from sea level rise or the loss of natural resources to increased conflict, poverty, and gender inequality.
Despite much already having been written on the urgency with which we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions, pull carbon out of the air, and redesign our social-environmental systems towards new ways of doing business, most decision makers, from individual consumers to world leaders, have been excruciatingly slow to take action.
What seems to be lacking is an understanding and consensus of real, workable technologies and practices to solve the crisis of growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere.
Younger generations, however, seem to be clued in to the reality that there are indeed climate solutions to this global problem.
"The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change,” said Nobel Prize nominee Greta Thunberg in her 2018 TED talk.
Her bold, decisive, and informed rhetoric has inspired a global movement of school strikes for climate called #FridaysForFuture, orchestrated by students the worldwide. On 15 March 2019, 1.5 million young people and their allies hit the streets, striking in 2052 locations in 123 different countries.
The planet’s remaining forests will have to be protected, as they do vital work to soak up excess carbon.While they are marching for a future they want, the endless debating over the different technologies needed to halt rising temperatures delay the necessary change. Climate solutions already exist and are scaling. There is no technology or economic barrier; rather, it is a lack of will and leadership to move farther and faster than the future of upcoming generations demand.
I lead a team of researchers from around the world, and together we map, model, and detail the world’s most impactful solutions to try and reverse global warming. Our research at Project Drawdown shows that there are better technologies and practices for electricity generation, transportation, buildings, industry, the food system, land use, and overconsumption. Climate solutions exist for nations, municipalities, businesses, investors, homeowners, so that consumers can shift towards a system that benefits all.
This is already happening across the globe through existing solutions that promote social justice, equity, and economic development, while restoring the planet’s natural carbon cycle. It is in younger generations that we will find the inspiration and courage for this change. Adopting regenerative practices on current cropland, grassland and degraded land can restore soil health and fertility Solutions abound, both scientifically proven and financially feasible. They are interventions that can shift the way the world does business. The global economy is based on extractive and exploitative growth models, spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere through fossil fuel combustion, land conversion, and excessive consumption of everything – but the economy does not need to be.
Instead, renewable energy options, such as solar photovoltaics, wind turbines, and geothermal plants, can produce clean, abundant access to electricity, which currently accounts for approximately 25% of global emissions. Along with enabling technologies like energy storage and grid flexibility, renewable energy systems can fully replace coal, oil, and gas-fired power plants.
A plethora of options are available to moving people and goods from Point A to Point B that reduce or avoid burning fossil fuels from the tailpipe. Hybrids or electric vehicles are a good choice for medium or longer distance travel, but biking, using public transport, or walking are better options for emissions and human health for most people’s daily lives.
As consumers, we have to take more responsibility about how our actions affect the planet – like how much our food travels, and how it is processedBy reducing food loss and waste and moving towards a healthy, plant-rich diet, all the extra emissions and energy associated with producing, processing, packaging, distributing, cooking, and decomposing of food left uneaten or overconsumed could be avoided, while also providing sustenance to populations in need. These are some of the most impactful decisions every individual can make every day to help solve the climate crisis
Rather than cutting down forests and degrading wetlands to supply our rapacious appetite for meat, timber, and energy, protecting ecosystems can safeguard, expand, and create new carbon sinks. Adopting regenerative practices on current cropland, grassland and degraded land can restore soil health and fertility, increase yield and provide the same abundance of materials without destroying the natural systems. We do not need an economy based on exploiting fossil fuels; instead we can create a new economy that is based on restorative and regenerative growth Taken together, implementing regenerative practices for agriculture and livestock management, adopting a plant-rich diet, and reducing food waste, could result in enough food being produced on current farmland to feed the world’s growing population, now until 2050 and beyond. Taking actions to change the food system from supply through demand can prevent the need to cut down forests for food production, with enough existing cropland to produce biomass to supply feedstocks for other materials such as bioplastics or alternative concrete.
Accomplishing all this, however, requires individuals to make different decisions every day on what is produced, purchased, and consumed. These decisions can be hard for some, but when the results help to solve global warming, food insecurity, human health, and deforestation, they become what might be called the solution ‘duh-factor’. With enough cascading benefits, or ‘win-win-win-wins’, implementing climate solutions simply become common sense.
Non-polluting forms of power like solar can replace those which burn fossil fuels – if the will is there to make the change.The growth of these interventions needs to accelerate at a much faster rate. Young people know this, perhaps because it is the only future worth fighting for. Along with the world’s poor, women, and indigenous peoples, younger generations will disproportionately experience the worst effects of climate change if nothing is done; or too little is accomplished too late. Acting now is essential for everyone and everything on this planet; however, as a motivating principle, ensuring that future generations can live healthy, meaningful lives should be humanity’s highest priority.
Like Greta Thunberg, Lauren Howland is not waiting quietly for adults to figure it all out. A 23-year-old indigenous woman from the Jicarilla Apache Nation, Lauren is a co-founder of International Indigenous Youth Council (IIYC), which received the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2018 for its continued work on environmental issues. Older people who hold the reins of political, economic, and intellectual power today must listen to these voices of change A voice for young indigenous peoples worldwide, Howland says: “Young people are more connected and in tune with each other and this planet than any other point in humanity's existence. We realise we are fighting to save humanity from literal extinction, and we need the policymakers of this planet to collectively realise this also. It is here, climate changed. We need climate policies enacted and enforced across the globe now, that include the solutions we are already implementing in our own local communities."
Other young people are jumping to into the solution space, actively working on potential game-changing innovations. Aäron Claeys, a self-taught young entrepreneur based in Antwerp, Belgium, works on developing nanotech solutions for sustainable materials with the aim of “reversing global warming, improving the health, energy efficiency and quality of life, while restoring the planet's biosphere”.
He and his team have already marketed products that can double the lifetime of textiles, leather, and footwear to the fashion industry, which may account for up to 10% of global greenhouse gases. He is now working on developing self-cleaning, air-purifying, and carbon-capturing building materials.
The recent climate strikes show how younger people are being galvanised over climate change.The crisis we all are facing together is an opening to bring young people into the conversation. Creating the future we all want requires older and younger generations to work together for the change we need. Young people are hungry to take part. Older people who hold the reins of political, economic, and intellectual power today must listen to these voices of change, support new ideas and innovation, and rethink assumptions about the way the world works, because the world will not be ours forever. No discussion of our younger generations’ future should take place without them sitting at the same table.
“It is not enough to prepare youth to eventually assume the roles you [adults] currently hold. Youth are prepared to be impactful as we are right now. We need those above us to mentor us now, so that we don’t have to wait to have your jobs; so that when we are in your positions, we can be even more successful,” said Silas Swanson, a second-year student at Columbia University during a youth panel at the Omega Institute ‘Drawdown Learn’ event held last year in Rhinebeck, New York. Silas woke me up to this truth, and we have been in contact ever since. Greta Thunberg launched a legion of young climate strike organisers around the world who are waking people up to the need for change Every climate-motivated scientist, policymaker, engineer, architect, lawyer, city planner, investor, business person, activist, economist, environmentalist, thought leader, and every other interested professional should carve out time in their week to mentor at least one young person. Five would be better, and worth the effort.
Mentoring is not simply teaching in classrooms or offering advice during office hours. It is about committing to give to and learn from others; to do whatever one can to support, empower, and lift up others to achieve their fullest potential. It does not cost too much in time, and the potential rewards are incalculable.
Poorer people will bear a disproportionate burden of the worst effects of climate change, such as flooding.Greta Thunberg launched a legion of young climate strike organisers around the world who are waking people up to the need for change. There are many other young unsung voices across the globe working to create the future they need. We older generations must look to youth for inspiration, motivation, and courage.
Rather than seeking the courage to “fight” climate change, we need to find the courage to see the common-sense solutions right in front of us. The youth of today can help us all find the way, and together we can create the future we want.
*Chad Frischmann is the vice-president and lead researcher of Project Drawdown, an organisation seeking to find ways the global community can help mitigate and reverse the effects of climate change. He is also a willing mentor, with two spots open.
Links
- Project Drawdown: 100 Solutions to Reverse Global Warming
- BE.Hive: A day filled with hope, solutions, and the unexpected
- 25 badass women shaking up the corporate climate movement
- Project Drawdown Fellow Adrien Salazar named in Grist 50 2019
- Women hold the key to curbing climate change
- How This New Refrigerator Could Help Prevent the World From Getting Warmer
- As Awareness Grows About Food’s Role In Climate Change, What Solutions Exist?
- Why Investing in Women Is the Next Step in Funding Sustainability Solutions
- Launching K-12 Climate Science Literacy to Scale in Washington State
- Global Warming Solutions, Explained
- How Empowering Women and Girls Can Help Stop Global Warming
- Optimistic readings on climate change strategies
- Reversing Global Warming Through Our Food Choices
Categories: External websites
Climate Change: Top Lawyer Says Councils May Soon Be Liable For Climate Damage
Stuff - Eloise Gibson Newsroom.co.nz
Councils might find themselves liable for climate damage - for example if they let people build in the path of storms, floods and rising seas. Photo: Lynn GrievesonLocal authorities that fail to prepare for climate change might find themselves in court, a top lawyer has warned.
The umbrella group for councils, Local Government New Zealand, has warned local government politicians it "may only be a matter of time" before councils face claims for damages for failing to adapt their communities to climate change.
Just as the government was found negligent for leaky buildings and for letting the kiwifruit virus PSA in the country, councils might find themselves liable for climate damage - for example if they let people build in the path of storms, floods and rising seas, according to a paper prepared for LGNZ by a leading barrister, Jack Hodder QC.
The legal opinion was presented to all councils earlier this month, Newsroom understands, and later circulated to some elected leaders by email.
Councils might find themselves liable for climate damage - for example if they let people build in the path of storms, floods and rising seas. ANDY JACKSON/STUFFThe warning comes as a minority of councils decide whether to sign up to LGNZ's Local Government Leaders' Climate Declaration stating there is an urgent need to address the threats of climate change.
Most councils have signed but others remain skeptical of the value of joining.
Thames-Coromandel mayor Sandra Goudie has refused to say whether she believes climate change is real, while West Coast Regional Council – the area projected by climate models to be most at risk from more extreme rainfall – has rejected the government's proposed Zero Carbon Bill and asked for more evidence to prove climate change is happening.
Newsroom reported in late 2017 that Thames-Coromandel council was still approving multi-million dollar housing developments on the waterfront after considering as little as 0.49m of sea level rise.
Guidance at the time was to consider 0.8m and newer guidance is to consider up to 1.9m, however, a 73-unit apartment block for the elderly, expanding the retirement village Richmond Villas, was approved based on a 2001 flood hazard assessment, then 16 years old.
A year after Newsroom's special inquiry was published, and 18 months after approving the new development, Thames Coromandel District Council put a warning notice on the Richmond Villas title saying the land it was built on was considered at risk of flooding, overland flow, storm surge and tidal effects.
On bad days you can see, hear and feel the gravel, rocks and sand being clawed back to the water in Haumoana, Hawke's Bay. RENE FISCHIn January 2018, six months after the council approved the new apartment block, Radio NZ reported that a storm surge came over the seawall and flooded the entrance to the existing units.
LGNZ sent Jack Hodder's opinion to elected officials with a note suggesting they discuss the implications.
"Up until now, it perhaps has been unclear whether councils may be liable for failing to provide climate change adaptation measures, or allowing developments to proceed in at risk areas, particularly where those decisions have physical and economic consequences for individuals/communities," said the letter.
"LGNZ's view has been that councils are exposed to legal risks, and that local government in New Zealand will not be immune from the growing international trend of climate change litigation by individuals and groups against larger organisations.
"To test whether LGNZ's thinking was on the right track, and to clarify the position for councils, LGNZ engaged Mr Hodder to prepare a paper addressing whether there are climate change litigation risks for councils."
Colac Bay, Southland, where the sea is causing coastal erosion. Robyn EdieUntil now, court cases against councils have been led by affected homeowners unhappy that risk notices had been slapped on their titles, warning future buyers about climate risk. Homeowners in Kapiti and elsewhere argued the risk was not well-enough supported by evidence.
Hodder's opinion suggests the longer-term risk may be the opposite - legal action by homeowners who are at risk and wish councils had done more. But any decisions to take defensive action or place restrictions on development would need to be very carefully weighed up, and backed up by information and evidence to stand up in court, he said.
Hodder concluded that climate changes cases around the world were getting more numerous, and creative. Unless central governments stepped in to properly tackle climate change risks, judges would likely step in, he wrote.
"There has not yet been any large damages claims in relation to failure to implement adaptation measures in New Zealand. However, it may be only a matter of time," noted LGNZ in its note to local politicians.
"We encourage you to discuss Mr Hodder's paper with your council, to start thinking about how you can prepare for the likely changes and the steps that you can take to reduce your council's exposure to litigation risk."
The local government group also noted that private insurers were already starting to price in increasing coastal hazards into policies, with possible implications for property prices.
"If the Government does not move, they will effectively be saying: let the courts, commercial insurers and banks set the rules." (The Government has previously said it is working on updated sea level measures to help councils, however the process is taking some time).
Hodder cited the Kiwifruit growers' case against MAF (now part of MBIE), where the High Court concluded that the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry was negligent in issuing an import permit for kiwifruit pollen in 2006/07, saying MAF's regulatory power to maintain biosecurity gave it a duty of care to kiwifruit growers who were devastated by the PSA outbreak.
That case is now heading to the Court of Appeal. Hodder has been representing the government.
Hodder also mentioned the leaky building cases, when New Zealand courts found territorial authorities were meant to "ensure" that building work complied with the Building Code, giving them a duty of care owed to residential home-owners (including future owners).
That ruling imposed huge costs on councils and years of litigation. His paper concluded that handling climate litigation would be difficult but "doing nothing requires a surprising level of bravery".
Newsroom has sought comment from LGNZ on the legal opinion.
Links
Councils might find themselves liable for climate damage - for example if they let people build in the path of storms, floods and rising seas. Photo: Lynn GrievesonLocal authorities that fail to prepare for climate change might find themselves in court, a top lawyer has warned.
The umbrella group for councils, Local Government New Zealand, has warned local government politicians it "may only be a matter of time" before councils face claims for damages for failing to adapt their communities to climate change.
Just as the government was found negligent for leaky buildings and for letting the kiwifruit virus PSA in the country, councils might find themselves liable for climate damage - for example if they let people build in the path of storms, floods and rising seas, according to a paper prepared for LGNZ by a leading barrister, Jack Hodder QC.
The legal opinion was presented to all councils earlier this month, Newsroom understands, and later circulated to some elected leaders by email.
Councils might find themselves liable for climate damage - for example if they let people build in the path of storms, floods and rising seas. ANDY JACKSON/STUFFThe warning comes as a minority of councils decide whether to sign up to LGNZ's Local Government Leaders' Climate Declaration stating there is an urgent need to address the threats of climate change.
Most councils have signed but others remain skeptical of the value of joining.
Thames-Coromandel mayor Sandra Goudie has refused to say whether she believes climate change is real, while West Coast Regional Council – the area projected by climate models to be most at risk from more extreme rainfall – has rejected the government's proposed Zero Carbon Bill and asked for more evidence to prove climate change is happening.
Newsroom reported in late 2017 that Thames-Coromandel council was still approving multi-million dollar housing developments on the waterfront after considering as little as 0.49m of sea level rise.
Guidance at the time was to consider 0.8m and newer guidance is to consider up to 1.9m, however, a 73-unit apartment block for the elderly, expanding the retirement village Richmond Villas, was approved based on a 2001 flood hazard assessment, then 16 years old.
A year after Newsroom's special inquiry was published, and 18 months after approving the new development, Thames Coromandel District Council put a warning notice on the Richmond Villas title saying the land it was built on was considered at risk of flooding, overland flow, storm surge and tidal effects.
On bad days you can see, hear and feel the gravel, rocks and sand being clawed back to the water in Haumoana, Hawke's Bay. RENE FISCHIn January 2018, six months after the council approved the new apartment block, Radio NZ reported that a storm surge came over the seawall and flooded the entrance to the existing units.
LGNZ sent Jack Hodder's opinion to elected officials with a note suggesting they discuss the implications.
"Up until now, it perhaps has been unclear whether councils may be liable for failing to provide climate change adaptation measures, or allowing developments to proceed in at risk areas, particularly where those decisions have physical and economic consequences for individuals/communities," said the letter.
"LGNZ's view has been that councils are exposed to legal risks, and that local government in New Zealand will not be immune from the growing international trend of climate change litigation by individuals and groups against larger organisations.
"To test whether LGNZ's thinking was on the right track, and to clarify the position for councils, LGNZ engaged Mr Hodder to prepare a paper addressing whether there are climate change litigation risks for councils."
Colac Bay, Southland, where the sea is causing coastal erosion. Robyn EdieUntil now, court cases against councils have been led by affected homeowners unhappy that risk notices had been slapped on their titles, warning future buyers about climate risk. Homeowners in Kapiti and elsewhere argued the risk was not well-enough supported by evidence.
Hodder's opinion suggests the longer-term risk may be the opposite - legal action by homeowners who are at risk and wish councils had done more. But any decisions to take defensive action or place restrictions on development would need to be very carefully weighed up, and backed up by information and evidence to stand up in court, he said.
Hodder concluded that climate changes cases around the world were getting more numerous, and creative. Unless central governments stepped in to properly tackle climate change risks, judges would likely step in, he wrote.
"There has not yet been any large damages claims in relation to failure to implement adaptation measures in New Zealand. However, it may be only a matter of time," noted LGNZ in its note to local politicians.
"We encourage you to discuss Mr Hodder's paper with your council, to start thinking about how you can prepare for the likely changes and the steps that you can take to reduce your council's exposure to litigation risk."
The local government group also noted that private insurers were already starting to price in increasing coastal hazards into policies, with possible implications for property prices.
"If the Government does not move, they will effectively be saying: let the courts, commercial insurers and banks set the rules." (The Government has previously said it is working on updated sea level measures to help councils, however the process is taking some time).
Hodder cited the Kiwifruit growers' case against MAF (now part of MBIE), where the High Court concluded that the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry was negligent in issuing an import permit for kiwifruit pollen in 2006/07, saying MAF's regulatory power to maintain biosecurity gave it a duty of care to kiwifruit growers who were devastated by the PSA outbreak.
That case is now heading to the Court of Appeal. Hodder has been representing the government.
Hodder also mentioned the leaky building cases, when New Zealand courts found territorial authorities were meant to "ensure" that building work complied with the Building Code, giving them a duty of care owed to residential home-owners (including future owners).
That ruling imposed huge costs on councils and years of litigation. His paper concluded that handling climate litigation would be difficult but "doing nothing requires a surprising level of bravery".
Newsroom has sought comment from LGNZ on the legal opinion.
Links
- The NZ council leading the way in determining who pays for climate change
- Environmental Groups Take France To Court Over Climate Change Inaction
- Trump’s Climate Policies Face 6 Big Legal Battles This Year
- Support Is Surging For Teens’ Climate Change Lawsuit
- Climate Change In Court
- Climate Change-Related Litigation Was Once Seen As A Joke, But It Could Soon Become Business Reality
- These Residents Stopped A Coal Mine, Made History And Sent Ripples Through Boardrooms Around The World
- Australia's Coal Future Under Threat As More Changes Hit Fossil Fuels Globally
- As Lawsuits Over Climate Change Heat Up, Oil Industry Steps Up Attacks On Its Critics
Categories: External websites
'Great Concern': World Meteorology Agency Reports Bad Climate Tidings
Fairfax - Peter Hannam
People pass through a section of the road damaged earlier this month by Cyclone Idai in Nhamatanda in Mozambique. Credit: AP World Meteorological Organization2018 State of the Global Climate
Key points:
Last year was the world's fourth hottest on record based on surface temperatures, with each of the years between 2015 and 2018 among the four hottest years since standardised records began more than a century ago.
“The data released in this report give cause for great concern," Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, said in a statement, noting average surface temperatures are about 1 degree above the pre-industrial level. “There is no longer any time for delay [on action to curb greenhouse gas emissions].”
A measure of the build-up of warming in the biosphere - as those gases trap more of the sun's radiation - is the record ocean heat levels for a second year in a row.
As the waters warm, the oceans are also expanding, lifting sea levels at an accelerating rate. Adding in the effect of melting ice sheets and glaciers, the global mean sea level last year reached a record 3.7 millimetres in 2018. That pace was quicker than the average 3.15mm annual increase during the 1993-2018 period.
For Australia, 2018 was the third hottest year on record for data going back to 1910. For day-time temperatures, last year was the second hottest, the Bureau of Meteorology said in January.
The heat has continued into 2019, with Australia's summer the hottest on record by a substantial margin, particularly for maximum temperatures.
Australia's summer maximum temperature anomaliesCompared with the 1961-90 baselineSource: Australian Bureau of Meteorology
Much of the WMO report looks at the impact of extreme weather events, particularly for developing nations.
It noted that food security was undermined in many places, with world hunger resuming its climb "after a prolonged decline".
Up to September last year, more than two million people had been displaced by disasters "linked to weather and climate events", with drought, flood and storms including cyclones leading culprits.
Heatwaves were also raising "alarm bells for the public health community" as they are expected to worsen in intensity, duration and frequency as the planet continues to warm.
"Between 2000 and 2016, the number of people exposed to heatwaves was estimated to have increased by around 125 million, as the average length of individual heatwaves was 0.37 days longer, compared to the period between 1986 and 2008," the report said. "In 2015 alone, a record 175 million people were exposed to 627 heatwaves."
Firefighters work on a wildfire on Winter Hill near Bolton, England in June 2018. Credit: PA via APLast year, 281 weather and climate events recorded by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters affected almost 62 million people. Of those, floods topped the peril list, affecting 35 million people.
The impacts were not restricted to poorer nations, though, with the US alone reporting 14 "billion dollar disasters" last year.
Major storms also included super typhoon Mangkhut, that affected more than 2.4 million people and killed at least 134 people, mainly in the Philippines, the report said.
Links
People pass through a section of the road damaged earlier this month by Cyclone Idai in Nhamatanda in Mozambique. Credit: AP World Meteorological Organization2018 State of the Global Climate
Key points:
- 2018 was the fourth warmest year on record
- 2015–2018 were the four warmest years on record as the long-term warming trend continues
- Ocean heat content is at a record high and global mean sea level continues to rise
- Artic and Antarctic sea-ice extent is well below average
- Extreme weather had an impact on lives and sustainable development on every continent
- Average global temperature reached approximately 1°C above pre-industrial levels
- We are not on track to meet climate change targets and rein in temperature increases
Last year was the world's fourth hottest on record based on surface temperatures, with each of the years between 2015 and 2018 among the four hottest years since standardised records began more than a century ago.
“The data released in this report give cause for great concern," Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, said in a statement, noting average surface temperatures are about 1 degree above the pre-industrial level. “There is no longer any time for delay [on action to curb greenhouse gas emissions].”
A measure of the build-up of warming in the biosphere - as those gases trap more of the sun's radiation - is the record ocean heat levels for a second year in a row.
As the waters warm, the oceans are also expanding, lifting sea levels at an accelerating rate. Adding in the effect of melting ice sheets and glaciers, the global mean sea level last year reached a record 3.7 millimetres in 2018. That pace was quicker than the average 3.15mm annual increase during the 1993-2018 period.
For Australia, 2018 was the third hottest year on record for data going back to 1910. For day-time temperatures, last year was the second hottest, the Bureau of Meteorology said in January.
The heat has continued into 2019, with Australia's summer the hottest on record by a substantial margin, particularly for maximum temperatures.
Australia's summer maximum temperature anomaliesCompared with the 1961-90 baselineSource: Australian Bureau of Meteorology
Much of the WMO report looks at the impact of extreme weather events, particularly for developing nations.
It noted that food security was undermined in many places, with world hunger resuming its climb "after a prolonged decline".
Up to September last year, more than two million people had been displaced by disasters "linked to weather and climate events", with drought, flood and storms including cyclones leading culprits.
Heatwaves were also raising "alarm bells for the public health community" as they are expected to worsen in intensity, duration and frequency as the planet continues to warm.
"Between 2000 and 2016, the number of people exposed to heatwaves was estimated to have increased by around 125 million, as the average length of individual heatwaves was 0.37 days longer, compared to the period between 1986 and 2008," the report said. "In 2015 alone, a record 175 million people were exposed to 627 heatwaves."
Firefighters work on a wildfire on Winter Hill near Bolton, England in June 2018. Credit: PA via APLast year, 281 weather and climate events recorded by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters affected almost 62 million people. Of those, floods topped the peril list, affecting 35 million people.
The impacts were not restricted to poorer nations, though, with the US alone reporting 14 "billion dollar disasters" last year.
Major storms also included super typhoon Mangkhut, that affected more than 2.4 million people and killed at least 134 people, mainly in the Philippines, the report said.
Links
- WMO Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2018
- 'Peak coal in sight' as new power stations drop and retirements jump
- New UN Global Climate report ‘another strong wake-up call’ over global warming: Guterres
- Climate change: Global impacts 'accelerating' - WMO
- Experts demand action after 'staggering' climate report
- Extreme weather affected 62 million people last year, UN climate change report says
Categories: External websites
Greens Set 2030 Cut-Off For Coal Exports And Coal-Fired Power Stations
The Guardian - Katharine Murphy
Party’s climate policy also proposes a new public authority, Renew Australia, and a government-owned energy retailer
The Greens’ new climate and energy policy lays down markers for the bartering that could play out after the federal election.Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP The Greens will propose 2030 as the cut-off point for thermal coal exports, and the shutdown date for Australia’s fleet of coal-fired power stations, in the party’s new climate and energy policy heading into the federal election.
With Labor expected to unveil the remaining elements of its climate policy before next week’s budget, the Greens will on Thursday open the bidding on ambition, laying down markers for the policy bartering that could play out after the federal election in the event Labor wins power and the Greens remain significant crossbench players.
The new Greens policy proposes the creation of a new public authority, Renew Australia, to lead the transition to low emissions, and a new government-owned energy retailer with a mandate to deliver cheaper power.
The party is proposing to phase out thermal coal exports by setting a yearly limit on coal exports from 2020, a set of procedures that would require resources companies to secure permits at auction in order to export product.
The Greens say Renew Australia will determine the timetable for shutting down the coal fleet, but the policy scenarios accompanying its policy puts the cut-off point at 2030.
The policy also advocates for vehicle emissions standards “that lead up to a complete ban on new internal combustion vehicles by 2030”, and a 17% tax on “luxury fossil fuel cars” to help cover the costs of scrapping registration fees, import tariffs, GST and stamp duty on electric vehicles, “reducing the cost of electric vehicles by around 20%”.
The Greens policy comes as the Investor Group on Climate Change will also on Thursday release a new policy document setting out what institutional investors such as the major super funds see as the climate policy priorities for the Australian and New Zealand governments between now and 2022.
The IGCC says from an investor perspective, three areas require action over the next four years. The first is developing durable policies that will create a pathway to a net zero emissions economy.
The second is creating structures that allow the transition to be managed, including implementing stable policy, “using public sector finance to crowd in private sector investment” and pursuing mechanisms that allow a just transition for workers and business in carbon-intensive industries.
The third is implementing national climate change adaptation strategies and strengthening the governance regime, including mandating climate-related disclosure requirements for companies and investors.
Reflecting the impatience now endemic in the business and regulatory community after a decade of rancorous partisan warfare on climate change, the IGCC warns that investors are currently “exposed to systemic, climate-related physical, transition and litigation risks” – a message that also echoes a recent intervention by a deputy governor of Australia’s central bank.
Guy Debelle issued a stark warning in the middle of March that climate change poses risks to Australia’s financial stability, and he argued that warming needed to be thought of by policymakers and business as a trend and not a cyclical event.
The IGCC says a carbon price – implemented by Labor during the time of the Gillard government, and repealed by Tony Abbott in 2013, and still the epicentre of the partisan war – needs to be reinstated. “Pricing carbon embeds climate risk into the lifeblood of investment decisions,” the group says.
“If carbon is priced, the cost of pollution can’t be ignored. Development of a carbon market that is transparent, liquid – many participants and free flowing trade – and focused on achieving net zero emissions will enable investors to better anticipate and plan for future carbon risks”.
Labor has already released its policy for reducing emissions in the electricity sector and in the first instance will attempt to persuade the Liberals to revive their now abandoned national energy guarantee in an effort to achieve some bipartisanship. If that fails, it will pursue other measures.
Shortly, the opposition will unveil the rest of its climate change policy, expected to include a trading scheme for liable entities – big polluters emitting more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon a year; new vehicle emissions standards to bring down pollution in transport; and its final position on the use of international permits and Kyoto credits.
The Greens have disavowed using Kyoto credits, which is an accounting system that allows countries to count credits from exceeding their targets under the soon-to-be-obsolete Kyoto protocol periods against their Paris emissions reduction commitments for 2030.
The Morrison government will bank a 367-megatonne contribution from carryovers as part of its recently released carbon budget, which details the emissions reductions from various programs that will be required to meet the Paris target.
Labor has sent a number of public signals over recent weeks that it is unlikely to use Kyoto credits, but the opposition is expected to deploy international permits to help with the abatement task.
Links
Party’s climate policy also proposes a new public authority, Renew Australia, and a government-owned energy retailer
The Greens’ new climate and energy policy lays down markers for the bartering that could play out after the federal election.Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP The Greens will propose 2030 as the cut-off point for thermal coal exports, and the shutdown date for Australia’s fleet of coal-fired power stations, in the party’s new climate and energy policy heading into the federal election.
With Labor expected to unveil the remaining elements of its climate policy before next week’s budget, the Greens will on Thursday open the bidding on ambition, laying down markers for the policy bartering that could play out after the federal election in the event Labor wins power and the Greens remain significant crossbench players.
The new Greens policy proposes the creation of a new public authority, Renew Australia, to lead the transition to low emissions, and a new government-owned energy retailer with a mandate to deliver cheaper power.
The party is proposing to phase out thermal coal exports by setting a yearly limit on coal exports from 2020, a set of procedures that would require resources companies to secure permits at auction in order to export product.
The Greens say Renew Australia will determine the timetable for shutting down the coal fleet, but the policy scenarios accompanying its policy puts the cut-off point at 2030.
The policy also advocates for vehicle emissions standards “that lead up to a complete ban on new internal combustion vehicles by 2030”, and a 17% tax on “luxury fossil fuel cars” to help cover the costs of scrapping registration fees, import tariffs, GST and stamp duty on electric vehicles, “reducing the cost of electric vehicles by around 20%”.
The Greens policy comes as the Investor Group on Climate Change will also on Thursday release a new policy document setting out what institutional investors such as the major super funds see as the climate policy priorities for the Australian and New Zealand governments between now and 2022.
The IGCC says from an investor perspective, three areas require action over the next four years. The first is developing durable policies that will create a pathway to a net zero emissions economy.
The second is creating structures that allow the transition to be managed, including implementing stable policy, “using public sector finance to crowd in private sector investment” and pursuing mechanisms that allow a just transition for workers and business in carbon-intensive industries.
The third is implementing national climate change adaptation strategies and strengthening the governance regime, including mandating climate-related disclosure requirements for companies and investors.
Reflecting the impatience now endemic in the business and regulatory community after a decade of rancorous partisan warfare on climate change, the IGCC warns that investors are currently “exposed to systemic, climate-related physical, transition and litigation risks” – a message that also echoes a recent intervention by a deputy governor of Australia’s central bank.
Guy Debelle issued a stark warning in the middle of March that climate change poses risks to Australia’s financial stability, and he argued that warming needed to be thought of by policymakers and business as a trend and not a cyclical event.
The IGCC says a carbon price – implemented by Labor during the time of the Gillard government, and repealed by Tony Abbott in 2013, and still the epicentre of the partisan war – needs to be reinstated. “Pricing carbon embeds climate risk into the lifeblood of investment decisions,” the group says.
“If carbon is priced, the cost of pollution can’t be ignored. Development of a carbon market that is transparent, liquid – many participants and free flowing trade – and focused on achieving net zero emissions will enable investors to better anticipate and plan for future carbon risks”.
Labor has already released its policy for reducing emissions in the electricity sector and in the first instance will attempt to persuade the Liberals to revive their now abandoned national energy guarantee in an effort to achieve some bipartisanship. If that fails, it will pursue other measures.
Shortly, the opposition will unveil the rest of its climate change policy, expected to include a trading scheme for liable entities – big polluters emitting more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon a year; new vehicle emissions standards to bring down pollution in transport; and its final position on the use of international permits and Kyoto credits.
The Greens have disavowed using Kyoto credits, which is an accounting system that allows countries to count credits from exceeding their targets under the soon-to-be-obsolete Kyoto protocol periods against their Paris emissions reduction commitments for 2030.
The Morrison government will bank a 367-megatonne contribution from carryovers as part of its recently released carbon budget, which details the emissions reductions from various programs that will be required to meet the Paris target.
Labor has sent a number of public signals over recent weeks that it is unlikely to use Kyoto credits, but the opposition is expected to deploy international permits to help with the abatement task.
Links
- What Are Major Parties’ Climate Change Policies?
- Greens pressure Labor with pre-election push for two new environmental agencies
- Labor edges away from using Kyoto credits to reach Paris target
- Government accused of fibbing about carbon emissions after tense Insiders interview
- Extraordinary claim that night-time sport could be at risk if Labor wins federal election
- Barnaby Joyce says he remains the ‘elected deputy prime minister of Australia’
- Morrison Government seeks interest from those wanting to build large-scale energy projects
- What is the National Energy Guarantee and will it reduce power prices?
- Scott Morrison’s busy morning announcing the ‘Climate Solutions Fund’
- ‘Groundbreaking’ Snowy Hydro 2.0 project gets the go-ahead
Categories: External websites
The Green Building Council's New CEO Signals A New Broader Focus
AFR - Lucas Baird
Australia is entering its "critical decade" for fighting climate change and construction standards must be brought up to speed to arrest its "catastrophic" consequences.
This was the assessment of the Green Building Council's incoming chief executive Davina Rooney, who will start in the role from June 11 after spending more than a decade heading up Stockland's sustainability initiatives.
Green Building Council's incoming chief executive Davina Rooney. Louie DouvisShe said it was time for the Council to look beyond its current remit as the "shining beacon for one part of the industry" and look to raising the minimum standards across the board.
"This is the critical decade that we have to take our asset communities and line them up to take them down to net zero [carbon emissions] so we can avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change," Ms Rooney said.
Key to this would be increased focus on long-term planning for the GBCA's initiatives, according to Ms Rooney, and she flagged her interest to start this with the Council's in development "Future Homes" policy.
The policy, which is in consultation with GBCA members at the moment, touts a new holistic approach to a housing development that takes into account numerous environmental factors.
For example, a house would be verified under the program based on its carbon-neutral performance through renewable energy generation like rooftop solar panels and its ability to adapt to future challenges that stem from climate change.
The "Future Homes" policy development is set to near its end in the latter half of 2019 when a first draft of the policy would be released, and the first pilot projects that use the rating system would begin.
As a voluntary rating tool, Ms Rooney was keen to note that "Future Homes" would not touch all of the construction industry but would instead provide the leadership in standards.
"[Rating tools] can provide the thought leadership that helps to work with rising minimum standards, which will raise all of the boats," she said.
"We do have to recognise that voluntary tools are one lever. Increasing minimum standards so that it is what's delivered on any project big or small anywhere is necessary for the overall trajectory change we need."
Ms Rooney said broadening this policy to touch mid and lower tier operators would be a "critical aspect" of her leadership as she sought to ensure the nation's construction sector played its part in reducing emissions heading towards 2030.
"If you look at the latest [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports they're actually saying we are going to have to move to net zero [emissions] sooner than we thought," she said.
"We are really excited to work with new partners as we go into the critical decade as we seek to deliver against the Paris agreements."
The renewed focus on broader topics marks a significant change between Ms Rooney and her predecessor, Romilly Madew, who was often criticised for a singular focus on just the "Green Star" rating tool.
Used on commercial office spaces, apartment complexes, and shopping centres the GBCA uses the tool to rate large scale developments.
Ms Madew, who was the chief executive from 2006 until her resignation earlier this year, even drew fire from the GBCA's founders for watering down the standards to capitalise on the popularity of sustainability rating systems.
Ms Madew announced her intention to step down in January after she was appointed to the role of chief executive of Infrastructure Australia.
Ms Rooney congratulated Ms Madew on her new position, which she starts in April, and hoped the previous connection would lead to a better working relationship with government.
Links
Australia is entering its "critical decade" for fighting climate change and construction standards must be brought up to speed to arrest its "catastrophic" consequences.
This was the assessment of the Green Building Council's incoming chief executive Davina Rooney, who will start in the role from June 11 after spending more than a decade heading up Stockland's sustainability initiatives.
Green Building Council's incoming chief executive Davina Rooney. Louie DouvisShe said it was time for the Council to look beyond its current remit as the "shining beacon for one part of the industry" and look to raising the minimum standards across the board.
"This is the critical decade that we have to take our asset communities and line them up to take them down to net zero [carbon emissions] so we can avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change," Ms Rooney said.
Key to this would be increased focus on long-term planning for the GBCA's initiatives, according to Ms Rooney, and she flagged her interest to start this with the Council's in development "Future Homes" policy.
The policy, which is in consultation with GBCA members at the moment, touts a new holistic approach to a housing development that takes into account numerous environmental factors.
For example, a house would be verified under the program based on its carbon-neutral performance through renewable energy generation like rooftop solar panels and its ability to adapt to future challenges that stem from climate change.
The "Future Homes" policy development is set to near its end in the latter half of 2019 when a first draft of the policy would be released, and the first pilot projects that use the rating system would begin.
As a voluntary rating tool, Ms Rooney was keen to note that "Future Homes" would not touch all of the construction industry but would instead provide the leadership in standards.
"[Rating tools] can provide the thought leadership that helps to work with rising minimum standards, which will raise all of the boats," she said.
"We do have to recognise that voluntary tools are one lever. Increasing minimum standards so that it is what's delivered on any project big or small anywhere is necessary for the overall trajectory change we need."
Ms Rooney said broadening this policy to touch mid and lower tier operators would be a "critical aspect" of her leadership as she sought to ensure the nation's construction sector played its part in reducing emissions heading towards 2030.
"If you look at the latest [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports they're actually saying we are going to have to move to net zero [emissions] sooner than we thought," she said.
"We are really excited to work with new partners as we go into the critical decade as we seek to deliver against the Paris agreements."
The renewed focus on broader topics marks a significant change between Ms Rooney and her predecessor, Romilly Madew, who was often criticised for a singular focus on just the "Green Star" rating tool.
Used on commercial office spaces, apartment complexes, and shopping centres the GBCA uses the tool to rate large scale developments.
Ms Madew, who was the chief executive from 2006 until her resignation earlier this year, even drew fire from the GBCA's founders for watering down the standards to capitalise on the popularity of sustainability rating systems.
Ms Madew announced her intention to step down in January after she was appointed to the role of chief executive of Infrastructure Australia.
Ms Rooney congratulated Ms Madew on her new position, which she starts in April, and hoped the previous connection would lead to a better working relationship with government.
Links
- Climate Change Threatens Property And Lives, But Politicians Fail To Work Together
- Building Code Not Ready For Climate Change
- Australian Institute of Architects
- Assessing the climate change adaptability of buildings
- Australia’s policies on climate change
- Adapting to climate change
- Current and future impacts of climate change on housing, buildings and infrastructure
Categories: External websites
Copenhagen Wants To Show How Cities Can Fight Climate Change
New York Times - Somini Sengupta | Photographs Charlotte de la Fuente
The beginning of a ski run on the roof of Copenhagen’s new trash incinerator, which will help heat buildings in the city.COPENHAGEN — Can a city cancel out its greenhouse gas emissions?
Copenhagen intends to, and fast. By 2025, this once-grimy industrial city aims to be net carbon neutral, meaning it plans to generate more renewable energy than the dirty energy it consumes.
Here’s why it matters to the rest of the world: Half of humanity now lives in cities, and the vast share of planet-warming gases come from cities. The big fixes for climate change need to come from cities too. They are both a problem and a potential source of solutions.
The experience of Copenhagen, home to 624,000 people, can show what’s possible, and what’s tough, for other urban governments on a warming planet.
The mayor, Frank Jensen, said cities “can change the way we behave, the way we are living, and go more green.” His city has some advantages. It is small, it is rich and its people care a lot about climate change.
Mr. Jensen said mayors, more than national politicians, felt the pressure to take action. “We are directly responsible for our cities and our citizens, and they expect us to act,” he said.
In the case of Copenhagen, that means changing how people get around, how they heat their homes, and what they do with their trash. The city has already cut its emissions by 42 percent from 2005 levels, mainly by moving away from fossil fuels to generate heat and electricity.
Wind turbines along the strait that separates Denmark from Sweden, seen from the Amager Strandpark in Copenhagen.
A suburban commuter train. A new subway line, scheduled to open this year, will put most residents less than half a mile from a station.Politics, though, is making it hard to go further. A municipal government can only do so much when it doesn’t have the full support of those who run the country. Mr. Jensen, 57, a left-of-center Social Democrat, for instance, has failed to persuade the national government, led by a center-right party, to impose restrictions on diesel-guzzling vehicles in the capital. Transportation accounts for a third of the city’s carbon footprint; it is the largest single sector and it is growing.
By contrast, the national government, in a move that its critics say encouraged private car use, has lowered car-registration taxes. The transportation minister, Ole Birk Olesen, said the government wanted to reduce what he called “the over-taxation of cars,” though he added that, ideally, Danes would buy only zero-emissions cars in the coming decades.
And so, Copenhagen’s goal to be carbon neutral faces a hurdle that is common around the world: a divide between the interests of people who live in cities and those who live outside.
Many opposition politicians and independent analysts say they doubt Copenhagen can meet its 2025 target, and some critics say the plan focuses too much on trying to balance the city’s carbon books rather than change the way people actually live.
“We run around in fossil fuel burning cars, we eat a lot of meat, we buy a hell of a lot of clothes,” said Fanny Broholm, a spokeswoman for Alternativet, a left-of-center green party. “The goal is not ambitious enough as it is, and we can’t even reach this goal.”
Mr. Jensen, for his part, is bullish on what he calls the capital’s “green transformation.” City officials say this is only the start.
A new Metro line, scheduled to open this year, will put the vast majority of the city’s residents within 650 meters, a bit less than half a mile, of a station. Bicycle paths are already three lanes wide on busy routes for the whopping 43 percent of Copenhageners who commute to work and school by bike — even on wet, windy days, which are plentiful.
Recycling bins in the Christianshavn district of Copenhagen. The city requires residents to sort recycling into eight separate categories.All that wind helps generate the city’s electricity. Buildings are heated, in part, by burning garbage in a new high-tech incinerator — what garbage there is to burn, that is, considering that every apartment building now has eight separate recycling bins. For every unit of fossil fuels it consumes, Copenhagen intends to sell units of renewable energy. The city has invested heavily in wind turbines.
In big cities, you have the money and the scale to change things, Mr. Jensen said as he led me on a bike tour from City Hall, where excavations for a new Metro station recently turned up the remains of two Vikings. We crossed a bicycle bridge that led to a once-industrial district, now home to trendy restaurants.
As we rode, Mr. Jensen talked about parliamentary polls set for this spring. “Elections will come up in the next few months, and a lot of people living in the suburbs still have diesel cars,” he said. “It’s a political challenge. It’s not a technological challenge.”
For Copenhagen, the path to carbon neutrality is paved with imperfect solutions.
Frank Jensen, the Copenhagen mayor, at City Hall. Some of the city’s power plants have switched from coal to wood pellets, shipped in from the Baltics. That’s carbon neutral, in principle, if more trees can be planted in place of those that are cut down, and that has helped the city bring down its emissions significantly. But burning wood produces emissions; a lawsuit filed in the European Court of Justice argued that wood pellets should not count as renewable energy. Critics contend that big public investments in biomass only compel the city to use it for years to come.
Then, there’s garbage. The city recently opened a $660 million incinerator, 85 meters tall, or about 280 feet, resembling a shiny half-built pyramid, with an even taller stack. It’s just a short walk from one of the city’s most popular restaurants, Noma. Designed by one of the country’s best-known architects, Bjarke Ingels, it comes with a year-round ski slope to attract visitors (and recoup some of the expenses). The mayor was one of the first to take a test run.
Every day, 300 trucks bring garbage to be fed into its enormous furnace, including trash imported from Britain. That has a carbon footprint, too. But the chief engineer, Peter Blinksbjerg, pointed out that instead of going into a landfill, the rubbish of modern life is transformed into something useful: heat for the city’s long, cold winters.
The Arc incinerator, right, with its year-round ski slope visible on the roof. The stack releases steam, not smoke.
Inside the Arc, which burns 300 truckloads of garbage each day, including imported trash. Scrubbers remove most chemical pollutants before releasing steam into the air. By summer, a cafe is set to open in the shadow of the stack.
Pedaling through the city these days, it is difficult to imagine what Copenhagen once looked like. There were factories in the narrow streets and ships in the oil-stained harbor. Coal-fired power plants brought electricity. The air was smoggy. A generation of city dwellers moved out to the clean-air suburbs.
Today, even on wintry, wet days, commuters move along a busy bike highway that connects the warrens of the oldest part of the city, where some buildings date to the 1400s, to the northern neighborhoods, whizzing past the stately apartment blocks that overlook the lake. The bike lane is slightly elevated above the car lane, which feels safer than just a white line that demarcates bike lanes in many other cities.
Inside a cozy neighborhood cafe, a medical student named Mariam Hleihel said she welcomed Mr. Jensen’s efforts to reduce the number of polluting cars in the city. “If we don’t do anything about it now, the consequences could be irreversible,” she said.
Morning commuters on the Dronning Louises Bro, a bridge in central Copenhagen.She reflected a widespread sentiment among Danes. A 2018 survey by Concito, a think tank, found that addressing climate change was a top issue for voters. Slightly more than half of those polled said they would need to change their way of life to tackle global warming.
Simone Nordfalk, a cashier at a bountiful outdoor vegetable market, considered the prospect of changing eating habits for the sake of climate change. Figs had been shipped in from Brazil. Strawberries from Spain. It would be tough to return to how Danes ate a generation ago. “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” she said. “It sells.”
Copenhagen is girding itself for the impact of climate change, too. The rains are more intense, and the sea is rising. In the most vulnerable neighborhoods, the city is creating new parks and ponds for water to collect before it can drain out. There are new dikes by the harbor, and a proposal to build a new island in the northeast to block storm surges.
Politically speaking, public apprehension about climate change may be the strongest wind in the mayor’s sails.
“People are honestly concerned about it,” said Klaus Bondam, a former politician and now head of a bicyclists’ lobby. “You are an extremely tone deaf politician if you don’t hear that.”
A tough climb on the morning commute.
Links
The beginning of a ski run on the roof of Copenhagen’s new trash incinerator, which will help heat buildings in the city.COPENHAGEN — Can a city cancel out its greenhouse gas emissions?
Copenhagen intends to, and fast. By 2025, this once-grimy industrial city aims to be net carbon neutral, meaning it plans to generate more renewable energy than the dirty energy it consumes.
Here’s why it matters to the rest of the world: Half of humanity now lives in cities, and the vast share of planet-warming gases come from cities. The big fixes for climate change need to come from cities too. They are both a problem and a potential source of solutions.
The experience of Copenhagen, home to 624,000 people, can show what’s possible, and what’s tough, for other urban governments on a warming planet.
The mayor, Frank Jensen, said cities “can change the way we behave, the way we are living, and go more green.” His city has some advantages. It is small, it is rich and its people care a lot about climate change.
Mr. Jensen said mayors, more than national politicians, felt the pressure to take action. “We are directly responsible for our cities and our citizens, and they expect us to act,” he said.
In the case of Copenhagen, that means changing how people get around, how they heat their homes, and what they do with their trash. The city has already cut its emissions by 42 percent from 2005 levels, mainly by moving away from fossil fuels to generate heat and electricity.
Wind turbines along the strait that separates Denmark from Sweden, seen from the Amager Strandpark in Copenhagen.
A suburban commuter train. A new subway line, scheduled to open this year, will put most residents less than half a mile from a station.Politics, though, is making it hard to go further. A municipal government can only do so much when it doesn’t have the full support of those who run the country. Mr. Jensen, 57, a left-of-center Social Democrat, for instance, has failed to persuade the national government, led by a center-right party, to impose restrictions on diesel-guzzling vehicles in the capital. Transportation accounts for a third of the city’s carbon footprint; it is the largest single sector and it is growing.
By contrast, the national government, in a move that its critics say encouraged private car use, has lowered car-registration taxes. The transportation minister, Ole Birk Olesen, said the government wanted to reduce what he called “the over-taxation of cars,” though he added that, ideally, Danes would buy only zero-emissions cars in the coming decades.
And so, Copenhagen’s goal to be carbon neutral faces a hurdle that is common around the world: a divide between the interests of people who live in cities and those who live outside.
Many opposition politicians and independent analysts say they doubt Copenhagen can meet its 2025 target, and some critics say the plan focuses too much on trying to balance the city’s carbon books rather than change the way people actually live.
“We run around in fossil fuel burning cars, we eat a lot of meat, we buy a hell of a lot of clothes,” said Fanny Broholm, a spokeswoman for Alternativet, a left-of-center green party. “The goal is not ambitious enough as it is, and we can’t even reach this goal.”
Mr. Jensen, for his part, is bullish on what he calls the capital’s “green transformation.” City officials say this is only the start.
A new Metro line, scheduled to open this year, will put the vast majority of the city’s residents within 650 meters, a bit less than half a mile, of a station. Bicycle paths are already three lanes wide on busy routes for the whopping 43 percent of Copenhageners who commute to work and school by bike — even on wet, windy days, which are plentiful.
Recycling bins in the Christianshavn district of Copenhagen. The city requires residents to sort recycling into eight separate categories.All that wind helps generate the city’s electricity. Buildings are heated, in part, by burning garbage in a new high-tech incinerator — what garbage there is to burn, that is, considering that every apartment building now has eight separate recycling bins. For every unit of fossil fuels it consumes, Copenhagen intends to sell units of renewable energy. The city has invested heavily in wind turbines.
In big cities, you have the money and the scale to change things, Mr. Jensen said as he led me on a bike tour from City Hall, where excavations for a new Metro station recently turned up the remains of two Vikings. We crossed a bicycle bridge that led to a once-industrial district, now home to trendy restaurants.
As we rode, Mr. Jensen talked about parliamentary polls set for this spring. “Elections will come up in the next few months, and a lot of people living in the suburbs still have diesel cars,” he said. “It’s a political challenge. It’s not a technological challenge.”
For Copenhagen, the path to carbon neutrality is paved with imperfect solutions.
Frank Jensen, the Copenhagen mayor, at City Hall. Some of the city’s power plants have switched from coal to wood pellets, shipped in from the Baltics. That’s carbon neutral, in principle, if more trees can be planted in place of those that are cut down, and that has helped the city bring down its emissions significantly. But burning wood produces emissions; a lawsuit filed in the European Court of Justice argued that wood pellets should not count as renewable energy. Critics contend that big public investments in biomass only compel the city to use it for years to come.
Then, there’s garbage. The city recently opened a $660 million incinerator, 85 meters tall, or about 280 feet, resembling a shiny half-built pyramid, with an even taller stack. It’s just a short walk from one of the city’s most popular restaurants, Noma. Designed by one of the country’s best-known architects, Bjarke Ingels, it comes with a year-round ski slope to attract visitors (and recoup some of the expenses). The mayor was one of the first to take a test run.
Every day, 300 trucks bring garbage to be fed into its enormous furnace, including trash imported from Britain. That has a carbon footprint, too. But the chief engineer, Peter Blinksbjerg, pointed out that instead of going into a landfill, the rubbish of modern life is transformed into something useful: heat for the city’s long, cold winters.
The Arc incinerator, right, with its year-round ski slope visible on the roof. The stack releases steam, not smoke.
Inside the Arc, which burns 300 truckloads of garbage each day, including imported trash. Scrubbers remove most chemical pollutants before releasing steam into the air. By summer, a cafe is set to open in the shadow of the stack.
Pedaling through the city these days, it is difficult to imagine what Copenhagen once looked like. There were factories in the narrow streets and ships in the oil-stained harbor. Coal-fired power plants brought electricity. The air was smoggy. A generation of city dwellers moved out to the clean-air suburbs.
Today, even on wintry, wet days, commuters move along a busy bike highway that connects the warrens of the oldest part of the city, where some buildings date to the 1400s, to the northern neighborhoods, whizzing past the stately apartment blocks that overlook the lake. The bike lane is slightly elevated above the car lane, which feels safer than just a white line that demarcates bike lanes in many other cities.
Inside a cozy neighborhood cafe, a medical student named Mariam Hleihel said she welcomed Mr. Jensen’s efforts to reduce the number of polluting cars in the city. “If we don’t do anything about it now, the consequences could be irreversible,” she said.
Morning commuters on the Dronning Louises Bro, a bridge in central Copenhagen.She reflected a widespread sentiment among Danes. A 2018 survey by Concito, a think tank, found that addressing climate change was a top issue for voters. Slightly more than half of those polled said they would need to change their way of life to tackle global warming.
Simone Nordfalk, a cashier at a bountiful outdoor vegetable market, considered the prospect of changing eating habits for the sake of climate change. Figs had been shipped in from Brazil. Strawberries from Spain. It would be tough to return to how Danes ate a generation ago. “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” she said. “It sells.”
Copenhagen is girding itself for the impact of climate change, too. The rains are more intense, and the sea is rising. In the most vulnerable neighborhoods, the city is creating new parks and ponds for water to collect before it can drain out. There are new dikes by the harbor, and a proposal to build a new island in the northeast to block storm surges.
Politically speaking, public apprehension about climate change may be the strongest wind in the mayor’s sails.
“People are honestly concerned about it,” said Klaus Bondam, a former politician and now head of a bicyclists’ lobby. “You are an extremely tone deaf politician if you don’t hear that.”
A tough climb on the morning commute.
Links
- These 8 Cities Are Taking Bold Steps To Get Rid Of Cars
- Four Ways Our Cities Can Cut Transport Emissions In A Hurry: Avoid, Shift, Share And Improve
- More Than 100 Cities Now Mostly Powered By Renewable Energy, Data Shows
- This Is How Climate Change Will Shift The World’s Cities
- How To Fix Climate Change: Put Cities, Not Countries, In Charge
- These Six Utopian Cities Of The Future Will Help You Re-Imagine Life On Earth
Categories: External websites
Heavyweights Now Speaking With One Voice On Climate Change Risks
Fairfax - Sam Hurley*
Climate change is reshaping Australia's economy and financial system, and its consequences will be devastating without urgent action. If that message had not hit home, the Reserve Bank of Australia's intervention last week made it clear.
Reserve Bank deputy governor Guy Debelle focused on how climate change can complicate setting interest rates. Credit: Alex EllinghausenIn last week's address to a Centre for Policy Development public forum, RBA Deputy Governor Dr Guy Debelle said climate change will have "first order economic effects" and could have major consequences for financial stability if transitions are disorderly and abrupt.
Hot on Debelle's heels, APRA subsequently released its first climate risk stocktake, calling for banks, insurers and superannuation funds to step up their responses. Its survey of 38 large entities suggests many are dragging the chain on climate-related financial analysis and disclosure.
The laggards can expect pressure to mount. APRA, its international counterparts and investors have signalled they want a little less conversation and a lot more action.
Looking beyond the headlines, there are three takeaways from recent, co-ordinated interventions by the RBA and other regulators on climate change.
First, for the regulators, this is about economics and not politics. The Reserve Bank, ASIC and APRA now speak with one voice on the serious economic challenges climate change poses.
The RBA's statement built on equally powerful markers laid down by APRA's Geoff Summerhayes in 2017 and ASIC's John Price in 2018. Just as the RBA is considering how climate influences monetary policy, APRA and ASIC are examining the implications for financial stability and whether companies, investors and directors are doing enough to respond.
This clear public stance matters. In an era defined by a cautious (and often downright craven) approach to climate in politics and business, influential independent voices have stepped up in a way that is reverberating in boardrooms around the country.
This is no small thing. Summerhayes and Debelle were both appointed to their current positions by a federal treasurer (now Prime Minister) notorious for waving a lump of coal around in parliament. Their statements are reminders that, when we get it right, good governance and strong institutions trump politics.
The second key takeaway is that policy matters enormously. Dr Debelle emphasised that "the policy environment has a key effect as well as the climatic environment" when it comes to the economic impacts of climate change. He warned that decisions taken now could "limit or eliminate" our ability to manage future climate impacts.
APRA's Geoff Summerhayes has also warned that policy delay or inaction, rather than minimising risks for businesses and the economy, could simply make these risks "greater and more abrupt."
These are not partisan points. They are sober reminders that policy failures make climate risks even harder to manage for regulators and businesses alike.
Dr Debelle also made a subtler observation: policies to support a smooth economic transition must carefully balance impacts across society. He used the example of trade policy, where overall gains from trade could have been used to compensate those who lose out. As he flatly points out, "In practice, the compensation has generally not occurred."
Adjustment costs from reform have "fallen on groups that have not received their share of the benefits." Over time, this failure has not just undermined support for free trade – it has also contributed to a destabilising turn in politics.
Here the speech provides a crucial insight: managing the distributional aspects of climate policy will be critical to sustaining good outcomes.
The third key takeaway is that we ignore international developments at our peril. Dr Debelle cited policy-driven changes in China's demand for Australian resources as a present-day example of climate risk for Australia. There are many others.
Global finance is being reshaped by new standards, regulations, financial products and markets to support a zero-carbon transition. Australia needs to access these markets – for goods, for services and for capital – to power its economy. But it will get harder to do so on favourable terms unless we lift our game, and our ambitions, on climate and sustainability.
Our regulators are on the case: the RBA has joined the global central banks' Network for Greening the Financial System, while APRA is a prominent voice in the global Sustainable Insurance Forum.
It is time the government itself engaged seriously in the sustainable finance agenda, too, rather than sitting on the sidelines.
*Sam Hurley is Policy Director at the Centre for Policy Development, which hosted last week's speech by Dr Guy Debelle and earlier statements by ASIC and APRA.
Links
Climate change is reshaping Australia's economy and financial system, and its consequences will be devastating without urgent action. If that message had not hit home, the Reserve Bank of Australia's intervention last week made it clear.
Reserve Bank deputy governor Guy Debelle focused on how climate change can complicate setting interest rates. Credit: Alex EllinghausenIn last week's address to a Centre for Policy Development public forum, RBA Deputy Governor Dr Guy Debelle said climate change will have "first order economic effects" and could have major consequences for financial stability if transitions are disorderly and abrupt.
Hot on Debelle's heels, APRA subsequently released its first climate risk stocktake, calling for banks, insurers and superannuation funds to step up their responses. Its survey of 38 large entities suggests many are dragging the chain on climate-related financial analysis and disclosure.
The laggards can expect pressure to mount. APRA, its international counterparts and investors have signalled they want a little less conversation and a lot more action.
Looking beyond the headlines, there are three takeaways from recent, co-ordinated interventions by the RBA and other regulators on climate change.
First, for the regulators, this is about economics and not politics. The Reserve Bank, ASIC and APRA now speak with one voice on the serious economic challenges climate change poses.
The RBA's statement built on equally powerful markers laid down by APRA's Geoff Summerhayes in 2017 and ASIC's John Price in 2018. Just as the RBA is considering how climate influences monetary policy, APRA and ASIC are examining the implications for financial stability and whether companies, investors and directors are doing enough to respond.
This clear public stance matters. In an era defined by a cautious (and often downright craven) approach to climate in politics and business, influential independent voices have stepped up in a way that is reverberating in boardrooms around the country.
This is no small thing. Summerhayes and Debelle were both appointed to their current positions by a federal treasurer (now Prime Minister) notorious for waving a lump of coal around in parliament. Their statements are reminders that, when we get it right, good governance and strong institutions trump politics.
The second key takeaway is that policy matters enormously. Dr Debelle emphasised that "the policy environment has a key effect as well as the climatic environment" when it comes to the economic impacts of climate change. He warned that decisions taken now could "limit or eliminate" our ability to manage future climate impacts.
APRA's Geoff Summerhayes has also warned that policy delay or inaction, rather than minimising risks for businesses and the economy, could simply make these risks "greater and more abrupt."
These are not partisan points. They are sober reminders that policy failures make climate risks even harder to manage for regulators and businesses alike.
Dr Debelle also made a subtler observation: policies to support a smooth economic transition must carefully balance impacts across society. He used the example of trade policy, where overall gains from trade could have been used to compensate those who lose out. As he flatly points out, "In practice, the compensation has generally not occurred."
Adjustment costs from reform have "fallen on groups that have not received their share of the benefits." Over time, this failure has not just undermined support for free trade – it has also contributed to a destabilising turn in politics.
Here the speech provides a crucial insight: managing the distributional aspects of climate policy will be critical to sustaining good outcomes.
The third key takeaway is that we ignore international developments at our peril. Dr Debelle cited policy-driven changes in China's demand for Australian resources as a present-day example of climate risk for Australia. There are many others.
Global finance is being reshaped by new standards, regulations, financial products and markets to support a zero-carbon transition. Australia needs to access these markets – for goods, for services and for capital – to power its economy. But it will get harder to do so on favourable terms unless we lift our game, and our ambitions, on climate and sustainability.
Our regulators are on the case: the RBA has joined the global central banks' Network for Greening the Financial System, while APRA is a prominent voice in the global Sustainable Insurance Forum.
It is time the government itself engaged seriously in the sustainable finance agenda, too, rather than sitting on the sidelines.
*Sam Hurley is Policy Director at the Centre for Policy Development, which hosted last week's speech by Dr Guy Debelle and earlier statements by ASIC and APRA.
Links
- Climate Change and the Economy
- The RBA Has Sounded The Climate Change Alarm. Time To Sit Up And Take Notice
- 'Milestone' RBA climate speech seen as 'changing the conversation'
- 'Change Now Or Pay Later': RBA's Stark Warning On Climate Change
- Climate change poses risk to Australia's financial stability, warns RBA deputy governor
- 'It's our time to rise up': youth climate strikes held in 100 countries
- Climate Change and the Economy | Speeches | RBA
- Climate change costs will have knock-on effect on interest rates, Reserve Bank warns
- RBA deputy warns climate change a threat to Australian economy (audio)
- RBA warns of 'abrupt, disorderly' effects of climate change
- Climate change poses risk to Australia's financial stability, warns RBA
- Coal baron and LNP donor blasts RBA for sounding alarm on climate
- Fossil fuel 'special interests' putting Australian economy at risk, warns Stiglitz
Categories: External websites
'Coal To Blame' For Last Year's Record Emissions From Energy
AFR - Angela Macdonald-Smith
Carbon dioxide emissions from energy production rose at the fastest rate for five years in 2018, increasing 1.7 per cent last year to a record 33.1 billion tonnes, with the use of coal for electricity generation the primary culprit, according to the International Energy Agency.
China, India and the US accounted for 85 per cent of the increase, with emissions declining in Japan and Mexico and in several European economies including Germany, France and the UK. The electricity sector was to blame for almost two-thirds of the growth, the IEA carbon report said.
Coal is still in high demand for electricity generation in Asia. Phil HearneThe 560 million tonne rise in emissions was equivalent to the total emissions from international aviation and was driven by higher energy use from the robust global economy, as well as weather conditions in some regions that increased demand for heating and cooling.
Energy demand worldwide grew 2.3 per cent last year, its fastest pace this decade, with natural gas accounting for 45 per cent of the increase.
Coal-fired power plants drove a 2.9 per cent increase in CO2 emissions, up 280 million tonnes from 2017 to breach the 10 gigatonne threshold for the first time. Coal-fired electricity generation accounted for 30 per cent of global emissions, mostly from Asia, where the average age of plants is only 12 years, leaving decades still to run on the average lifetime of about 40 years.
"Global emissions are still rising, demonstrating once again that more urgent action is needed on all fronts." — IEA executive director Fatih BirolThe IEA said although 2014-16 had seen a stagnation in CO2 emissions, even as the global economy expanded, the dynamics changed in 2017 and 2018 when higher energy productivity and lower-carbon options did not scale up fast enough to counteract the rise in demand.
That meant that despite the growth in renewables and the contribution of nuclear power, CO2 emissions rose almost 0.5 per cent for every 1 per cent gain in global economic output, faster than the average 0.3 per cent increase since 2010.
IEA executive director Fatih Birol described last year's increase in global energy demand as "extraordinary“, saying 2018 was "another golden year for gas".
But while the increased use of gas helped limit the growth in emissions, he said the trend underscores the urgency of emissions reductions.
"Despite major growth in renewables, global emissions are still rising, demonstrating once again that more urgent action is needed on all fronts — developing all clean energy solutions, curbing emissions, and spurring investments and innovation, including in carbon capture, utilisation and storage," Dr Birol said.
Coal use in power generation accounted for a third of the total increase in CO2 emissions last year (Photograph: Shutterstock)Demand for fossil fuels met almost 70 per cent of the increased demand for all fuels for the second straight year. Although solar and wind generation expanded at double-digit pace – including a 31 per cent jump for solar – that was not enough to meet higher power demand that drove up the use of coal.
Global gas demand expanded at its fastest rate since 2010, up 4.6 per cent, driven by coal substitution, especially in China, where gas use soared almost 18 per cent. Coal-to-gas switching avoided almost 60 million tonnes of coal demand, with the transition helping avert 95 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, the IEA said, calculating that without the switching, which was most significant in China and the US, emissions would have increased 15 per cent more.
Demand for oil increased 1.3 per cent, led by the expansion in petrochemicals in the US, while coal use was up 0.7 per cent and nuclear grew by 3.3 per cent thanks to new capacity in China and the restart of four reactors in Japan.
For the first time, the Paris-based IEA assessed the impact of fossil fuel use on global temperature increases and determined that CO2 emitted from burning coal was responsible for more than 0.3C of the 1C increase in global average annual surface temperatures above pre-industrial levels.
This makes coal the single largest source of global temperature increase.
The global average annual concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere averaged 407.4 parts per million last year, up 2.4 ppm since 2017. This compares with pre-industrial levels of 180 to 280ppm.
Electricity demand grew at 4 per cent, the fastest since 2010 and almost double the rate of total energy demand, as electricity positions itself as the fuel of the future.
Australia was one of the few regions that saw a decline in electricity demand.
Links
Carbon dioxide emissions from energy production rose at the fastest rate for five years in 2018, increasing 1.7 per cent last year to a record 33.1 billion tonnes, with the use of coal for electricity generation the primary culprit, according to the International Energy Agency.
China, India and the US accounted for 85 per cent of the increase, with emissions declining in Japan and Mexico and in several European economies including Germany, France and the UK. The electricity sector was to blame for almost two-thirds of the growth, the IEA carbon report said.
Coal is still in high demand for electricity generation in Asia. Phil HearneThe 560 million tonne rise in emissions was equivalent to the total emissions from international aviation and was driven by higher energy use from the robust global economy, as well as weather conditions in some regions that increased demand for heating and cooling.
Energy demand worldwide grew 2.3 per cent last year, its fastest pace this decade, with natural gas accounting for 45 per cent of the increase.
Coal-fired power plants drove a 2.9 per cent increase in CO2 emissions, up 280 million tonnes from 2017 to breach the 10 gigatonne threshold for the first time. Coal-fired electricity generation accounted for 30 per cent of global emissions, mostly from Asia, where the average age of plants is only 12 years, leaving decades still to run on the average lifetime of about 40 years.
"Global emissions are still rising, demonstrating once again that more urgent action is needed on all fronts." — IEA executive director Fatih BirolThe IEA said although 2014-16 had seen a stagnation in CO2 emissions, even as the global economy expanded, the dynamics changed in 2017 and 2018 when higher energy productivity and lower-carbon options did not scale up fast enough to counteract the rise in demand.
That meant that despite the growth in renewables and the contribution of nuclear power, CO2 emissions rose almost 0.5 per cent for every 1 per cent gain in global economic output, faster than the average 0.3 per cent increase since 2010.
IEA executive director Fatih Birol described last year's increase in global energy demand as "extraordinary“, saying 2018 was "another golden year for gas".
But while the increased use of gas helped limit the growth in emissions, he said the trend underscores the urgency of emissions reductions.
"Despite major growth in renewables, global emissions are still rising, demonstrating once again that more urgent action is needed on all fronts — developing all clean energy solutions, curbing emissions, and spurring investments and innovation, including in carbon capture, utilisation and storage," Dr Birol said.
Coal use in power generation accounted for a third of the total increase in CO2 emissions last year (Photograph: Shutterstock)Demand for fossil fuels met almost 70 per cent of the increased demand for all fuels for the second straight year. Although solar and wind generation expanded at double-digit pace – including a 31 per cent jump for solar – that was not enough to meet higher power demand that drove up the use of coal.
Global gas demand expanded at its fastest rate since 2010, up 4.6 per cent, driven by coal substitution, especially in China, where gas use soared almost 18 per cent. Coal-to-gas switching avoided almost 60 million tonnes of coal demand, with the transition helping avert 95 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, the IEA said, calculating that without the switching, which was most significant in China and the US, emissions would have increased 15 per cent more.
Demand for oil increased 1.3 per cent, led by the expansion in petrochemicals in the US, while coal use was up 0.7 per cent and nuclear grew by 3.3 per cent thanks to new capacity in China and the restart of four reactors in Japan.
For the first time, the Paris-based IEA assessed the impact of fossil fuel use on global temperature increases and determined that CO2 emitted from burning coal was responsible for more than 0.3C of the 1C increase in global average annual surface temperatures above pre-industrial levels.
This makes coal the single largest source of global temperature increase.
The global average annual concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere averaged 407.4 parts per million last year, up 2.4 ppm since 2017. This compares with pre-industrial levels of 180 to 280ppm.
Electricity demand grew at 4 per cent, the fastest since 2010 and almost double the rate of total energy demand, as electricity positions itself as the fuel of the future.
Australia was one of the few regions that saw a decline in electricity demand.
Links
- Global energy demand rose by 2.3% in 2018, its fastest pace in the last decade
- Global Energy & CO2 Status Report
- 2018 spike in energy demand spells climate trouble: IEA
- Carbon Emissions Hit a Record High
- Energy-related carbon emissions rose in US in 2018: study
- World's carbon emissions on the rise again: IEA
- Asia coal plants worrying for climate targets: IEA
- Australian Faces Free Trade Agreement Pressure To Cut Emissions
- Expanding Gas Mining Threatens Our Climate, Water And Health
- Scientists Slap Down Australia Government Over Fake Climate Claims
- Angus Taylor Again Falsely Claims Australia's Greenhouse Emissions Are Falling
- 'Woefully Inadequate': Morrison Government To Use Paris Climate Short-Cut
Categories: External websites
What Are Major Parties’ Climate Change Policies?
NEWS.com.au - Charis Chang
World leaders have been warned that civilisation could collapse
Climate change action is likely to feature prominently at the federal election and could decide the future of a number of politicians.
We’ve seen both major parties stumble over their policies amid warnings the world only has about 10 years to act on climate change and tussles over whether Australia’s emissions are actually going up or down.
Most recently former prime minister Tony Abbott, under pressure in his electorate from independent Zali Steggall, did a backflip on his view that Australia should withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
Meanwhile you’ve got Nationals leader Michael McCormack suggesting Labor’s proposed 45 per cent renewable energy target would mean night-time sport would be scrapped.
There’s a power play going on in the Nationals as some MPs, including Barnaby Joyce, push for a new taxpayer-backed coal-fired power plant, while others in the Coalition fear the move would alienate Liberal voters in southern states who are calling out for action on climate change.
Here’s what you need to know about the major parties’ climate change policies.
Are we building new coal-fired power stations?
If Labor wins the election, no.
If the Coalition is returned, maybe.
Basically the Morrison Government hasn’t ruled out supporting coal projects as part of its Underwriting New Generation Investments program.
The program involves the government (in other words: taxpayers) taking on the risk of building new electricity generators and covering any losses if the project became a white elephant because of changes to climate policy for example.
“About 10” coal projects are being considered for funding but overall there were more than 60 proposals submitted for new electricity generation.
Meanwhile, some Nationals, such as Mr Joyce, are going even further and calling for the government to fund a coal-fired power station in Queensland.
The Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley was closed in 2017. Picture: Paul Crock/ AFPSource:AFPBut Prime Minister Scott Morrison has pointed out there is one major sticking point when it comes to building a new coal-fired power station in Queensland.
“For such a (coal) project to proceed, it would require the approval of a Queensland state government. The Queensland state government has no intention of approving any such projects,” Mr Morrison said.
“So I tend to work in the area of the practical. The things that actually can happen. And what actually can happen is the investments that we are making in renewable projects and reliable projects.”
The goals
Labor continues to support a 45 per cent emissions target by 2030, and a 50 per cent renewable energy target.
The Liberal party has committed to a 26 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030.
Labor policies
Labor has a $15 billion energy plan and it includes reviving former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s National Energy Guarantee (NEG).
Labor leader Bill Shorten has said he would adopt the energy policy, which has the support of business groups in Australia.
It involves retailers, such as gas, solar and wind farm owners, signing contracts to supply a minimum amount of energy that could be available at all times.
Electricity sold to consumers must produce an average emissions level that meets the 26 per cent reduction target in the Paris Agreement target.
Labor will also give 100,000 households (with incomes below $180,000) a $2000 rebate to buy and install a battery for their solar panels. It’s estimated this could allow them to save more than 60 per cent off their power bills.
Labor leader Bill Shorten. Picture: AAP/James Ross Source:AAPMost significantly, it will double the amount of government financing available for clean energy projects through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, from $10 billion to $20 billion.
Mr Shorten has also promised $5 billion to modernise Australia’s transmission network — which transports power around the country — including a Basslink cable to connect Tasmania with the mainland.
A Clean Energy Training Fund will be established to train workers in the skills they need for clean energy industries and an independent Just Transition Authority will be established to oversee the closures of coal-fired power stations in the future including pooled redundancy schemes and economic diversification plans.
Labor will also require large generators to give at least three years notice if they plan to shut down.
An independent Energy Security and Modernisation Fund will be created to upgrade energy networks and build new ones. Businesses will also be encouraged to improve productivity and efficiency so they can get more out of the energy they consume through a new Energy Productivity Agenda.
Liberal policies
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has staked his environmental reputation on a new Climate Solutions Fund.
The 10-year fund is an extension of former PM Tony Abbott’s “direct action” Emissions Reduction Fund.
Mr Morrison has said the $2 billion fund will ensure Australia meets its 2030 emissions reduction targets without “taking a sledgehammer” to the economy.
The fund will partner with farmers, local government and businesses to deliver “practical” solutions to climate change.
Examples of projects include improving the energy efficiency of commercial and public lighting, planting trees and collecting gas that is generated in landfills from decaying organic material.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison famously took a lump of coal into the House of Representatives. Picture: AAP/Mick Tsikas Source:AAPMr Morrison has committed $1.4 billion in equity into making Snowy Hydro 2.0 — another Turnbull proposal — a reality. The huge pumped hydro project involves pumping water up a hill during times when electricity is cheap, storing it, and then releasing the water to generate power when it’s needed.
The government is also funding a feasibility study into Battery of the Nation, another pumped hydro project in Tasmania.
Some National MPs are calling for the government to fund new coal-fired power plants.
They also want to push through so-called “big stick” measures to stop energy companies ripping consumers off. The government has shelved its laws for “divestiture”, which would allow the government of force the breakup of large energy companies, until after the election.
PM Scott Morrison with Energy Minister Angus Taylor, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and Environment Minister Melissa Price visiting the Snowy Hydro Tumut 3 Power Station in NSW. Picture: Kym Smith Source:News Corp Australia
Links
World leaders have been warned that civilisation could collapse
Climate change action is likely to feature prominently at the federal election and could decide the future of a number of politicians.
We’ve seen both major parties stumble over their policies amid warnings the world only has about 10 years to act on climate change and tussles over whether Australia’s emissions are actually going up or down.
Most recently former prime minister Tony Abbott, under pressure in his electorate from independent Zali Steggall, did a backflip on his view that Australia should withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
Meanwhile you’ve got Nationals leader Michael McCormack suggesting Labor’s proposed 45 per cent renewable energy target would mean night-time sport would be scrapped.
There’s a power play going on in the Nationals as some MPs, including Barnaby Joyce, push for a new taxpayer-backed coal-fired power plant, while others in the Coalition fear the move would alienate Liberal voters in southern states who are calling out for action on climate change.
Here’s what you need to know about the major parties’ climate change policies.
Are we building new coal-fired power stations?
If Labor wins the election, no.
If the Coalition is returned, maybe.
Basically the Morrison Government hasn’t ruled out supporting coal projects as part of its Underwriting New Generation Investments program.
The program involves the government (in other words: taxpayers) taking on the risk of building new electricity generators and covering any losses if the project became a white elephant because of changes to climate policy for example.
“About 10” coal projects are being considered for funding but overall there were more than 60 proposals submitted for new electricity generation.
Meanwhile, some Nationals, such as Mr Joyce, are going even further and calling for the government to fund a coal-fired power station in Queensland.
The Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley was closed in 2017. Picture: Paul Crock/ AFPSource:AFPBut Prime Minister Scott Morrison has pointed out there is one major sticking point when it comes to building a new coal-fired power station in Queensland.
“For such a (coal) project to proceed, it would require the approval of a Queensland state government. The Queensland state government has no intention of approving any such projects,” Mr Morrison said.
“So I tend to work in the area of the practical. The things that actually can happen. And what actually can happen is the investments that we are making in renewable projects and reliable projects.”
The goals
Labor continues to support a 45 per cent emissions target by 2030, and a 50 per cent renewable energy target.
The Liberal party has committed to a 26 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030.
Labor policies
Labor has a $15 billion energy plan and it includes reviving former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s National Energy Guarantee (NEG).
Labor leader Bill Shorten has said he would adopt the energy policy, which has the support of business groups in Australia.
It involves retailers, such as gas, solar and wind farm owners, signing contracts to supply a minimum amount of energy that could be available at all times.
Electricity sold to consumers must produce an average emissions level that meets the 26 per cent reduction target in the Paris Agreement target.
Labor will also give 100,000 households (with incomes below $180,000) a $2000 rebate to buy and install a battery for their solar panels. It’s estimated this could allow them to save more than 60 per cent off their power bills.
Labor leader Bill Shorten. Picture: AAP/James Ross Source:AAPMost significantly, it will double the amount of government financing available for clean energy projects through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, from $10 billion to $20 billion.
Mr Shorten has also promised $5 billion to modernise Australia’s transmission network — which transports power around the country — including a Basslink cable to connect Tasmania with the mainland.
A Clean Energy Training Fund will be established to train workers in the skills they need for clean energy industries and an independent Just Transition Authority will be established to oversee the closures of coal-fired power stations in the future including pooled redundancy schemes and economic diversification plans.
Labor will also require large generators to give at least three years notice if they plan to shut down.
An independent Energy Security and Modernisation Fund will be created to upgrade energy networks and build new ones. Businesses will also be encouraged to improve productivity and efficiency so they can get more out of the energy they consume through a new Energy Productivity Agenda.
Liberal policies
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has staked his environmental reputation on a new Climate Solutions Fund.
The 10-year fund is an extension of former PM Tony Abbott’s “direct action” Emissions Reduction Fund.
Mr Morrison has said the $2 billion fund will ensure Australia meets its 2030 emissions reduction targets without “taking a sledgehammer” to the economy.
The fund will partner with farmers, local government and businesses to deliver “practical” solutions to climate change.
Examples of projects include improving the energy efficiency of commercial and public lighting, planting trees and collecting gas that is generated in landfills from decaying organic material.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison famously took a lump of coal into the House of Representatives. Picture: AAP/Mick Tsikas Source:AAPMr Morrison has committed $1.4 billion in equity into making Snowy Hydro 2.0 — another Turnbull proposal — a reality. The huge pumped hydro project involves pumping water up a hill during times when electricity is cheap, storing it, and then releasing the water to generate power when it’s needed.
The government is also funding a feasibility study into Battery of the Nation, another pumped hydro project in Tasmania.
Some National MPs are calling for the government to fund new coal-fired power plants.
They also want to push through so-called “big stick” measures to stop energy companies ripping consumers off. The government has shelved its laws for “divestiture”, which would allow the government of force the breakup of large energy companies, until after the election.
PM Scott Morrison with Energy Minister Angus Taylor, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and Environment Minister Melissa Price visiting the Snowy Hydro Tumut 3 Power Station in NSW. Picture: Kym Smith Source:News Corp Australia
Links
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases special report on global warming targets
- Government accused of fibbing about carbon emissions after tense Insiders interview
- Extraordinary claim that night-time sport could be at risk if Labor wins federal election
- Barnaby Joyce says he remains the ‘elected deputy prime minister of Australia’
- Morrison Government seeks interest from those wanting to build large-scale energy projects
- What is the National Energy Guarantee and will it reduce power prices?
- Scott Morrison’s busy morning announcing the ‘Climate Solutions Fund’
- ‘Groundbreaking’ Snowy Hydro 2.0 project gets the go-ahead
Categories: External websites
The Rise Of Students Against Climate Change
Independent Australia - Peter Henning
Students striking against the lack of climate change policy are a strong voice against an ineffective government, writes Peter Henning.
A sea of placards were the voice of a generation wanting a better future (Screenshot via YouTube)IT IS NOT OFTEN in Australian history that school students have been politicised to the extent of taking direct action on an issue. There have been other occasions, but they are fundamentally different from what is happening now in relation to the failure of the political system to address climate change.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, high school students who participated in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, against apartheid, on civil rights issues and against environmental destruction, for example, rallied in support behind a much broader movement without playing the key role in leadership.
The same is true of other public protests on a range of issues since then, such as saving the Franklin River, stopping old-growth logging, Aboriginal rights, gender equality — until now.
It is difficult to say at this point in time how this will play out because it is unprecedented for high school students to take the lead on an issue of such importance. The turnout on 15 March was clearly a shock to politicians and other authorities. In Melbourne, the police attempted for a brief period to keep the roads and tramlines clear at the top end of Collins Street but then gave up. They were simply overwhelmed by student numbers.
It was a sea of placards across the 20,000 people there and they dominated the space and told a story which is no flash in the pan.
People like Scott Morrison, Matthias Cormann, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, her Education Minister and other climate change deniers and delayers were variously “appalled”. Take them back in time and they would have opposed the eight-hour day, the old-age pension and the abolition of slavery. As in the case of all organised attempts at reform from beyond the corridors of established political and economic power and influence extending back in time and place for generations, the age-old canard of people being manipulated by “professional activists/agitators” has been raised once again.
In the vacuous rhetoric of Morrison et al, we can hear the voices of Bjelke-Petersen with Reds under the bed, John Howard opposing Wik and Mabo and an apology to the stolen generations, Tony Abbott proclaiming that same-sex marriage will wreak havoc and Scott Morrison informing us that lumps of coal are lovely, divinely-created gifts.
When Greta Thunberg commented that the statement of the NSW Minister for Education “belongs in a museum”, she could have been saying the same thing about nearly every Liberal and National Party politician in Australia.
Such political opposition to students having a voice about their own future will only strengthen this generation’s view that the current political class are active agents against them, with little interest in anything except their own piece of cake.
IMAGEThe placards were unequivocal in their overt contempt for the current Federal Government —
‘Governments are supposed to help. So where the bloody hell are you?’; ‘It’s time to change politics like we change PMs’; ‘Fossils should be in the ground not parliament’; ‘I can’t believe I’m marching for facts’; ‘I bet the dinosaurs thought they had time, too’; ‘School taught me that dinosaurs were extinct’; ‘If climate was a bank it would have been saved’; ‘The water is rising. Get your budgie smugglers ready’.Young Australians articulating a clear understanding that the Federal Government is essentially ignorant and contemptible is somewhat different to anything we’ve seen before.
One student, 17-year-old Manjot Kaur of Sydney said:
“The action of striking is so important. Students are so afraid, so upset, so worried about their future that they’re literally sacrificing their education to show how serious this problem is. Because right now we aren’t treating it as a crisis. The act of striking is us saying this needs to be treated as an emergency.”In Melbourne on 15 March, it was obvious that many schools fully supported the strike and encouraged students to wear their school uniforms with pride. On the other hand, some school principals threatened that those who participated could jeopardise their assessment results.
IMAGESchools which threaten sanctions and punitive action in this way are contradicting one of their essential and fundamental educational purposes to develop democratic values, participation in public life and critical thinking in students.
Such schools are contributing to the development of a mindset which encourages silence, passivity and acquiescence in the face of overwhelming evidence that climate change is here with us now and that Australia is already being severely impacted.
Schools not actively promoting discussion of climate change are breaching their responsibilities as educational institutions, undermining educational standards, inhibiting access to vital knowledge and are engaged in the wilful promotion of ignorance.
The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has recently stated that government inaction “is rapidly moving beyond a purely partisan or moral issue — indeed, the threat is distinctly financial in nature”. The regulator predicts “economic and environmental disaster” to Australia under the current leadership vacuum.
As Greg Jericho wrote in The Guardian, the RBA is no longer equivocating about the threat to the economy, either, saying that:
“...the physical impact of climate change and the transition are likely to have first-order economic effects”.IMAGE According to Jericho:
‘This week really should mark the end of the line for anyone within politics or the media being able to spout climate-change denialism without being met with scorn and jeers. It also should mark the time when boldness and verve becomes the norm for any climate-change policy’. Former corporate coal boss Ian Dunlop has come out swinging against proposals for new fossil fuel projects in Australia, labelling them as ‘crimes against humanity’ which must stop immediately:
‘To halt our suicidal rush to oblivion, the community must ensure no leader is elected or appointed in this country unless they are committed to emergency action.’The three main goals of the student campaign are to stop the Adani coal mine, no new gas or coal projects and 100 per cent renewables by 2030. The majority of informed Australians, including students, are well ahead of the main political parties. Energy Minister Angus Taylor inanely claims that Labor’s 45 per cent emissions reduction target is ‘aggressively high’, when, in fact, it is too low. We are at the end of an era. Australia is at a crossroad it hasn’t faced since late 1941.
The students are right. Ian Dunlop is right. This is a crisis. People like Taylor belong in a museum. If the incoming Shorten administration displays the same flat-Earth blind stupidity, it will follow the current Morrison Government into irrelevance. We simply can’t afford any more gutless and ignorant Federal administrations. Time is too short.
By now you will have seen the sea of students protesting today against climate change in almost every corner of Australia.
This is how the day went down through the eyes of one of those protesters, Aisheeya. #ClimateStrike #TheProjectTV pic.twitter.com/PVGENCzD2c— The Project (@theprojecttv) March 15, 2019Links
Students striking against the lack of climate change policy are a strong voice against an ineffective government, writes Peter Henning.
A sea of placards were the voice of a generation wanting a better future (Screenshot via YouTube)IT IS NOT OFTEN in Australian history that school students have been politicised to the extent of taking direct action on an issue. There have been other occasions, but they are fundamentally different from what is happening now in relation to the failure of the political system to address climate change.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, high school students who participated in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, against apartheid, on civil rights issues and against environmental destruction, for example, rallied in support behind a much broader movement without playing the key role in leadership.
The same is true of other public protests on a range of issues since then, such as saving the Franklin River, stopping old-growth logging, Aboriginal rights, gender equality — until now.
It is difficult to say at this point in time how this will play out because it is unprecedented for high school students to take the lead on an issue of such importance. The turnout on 15 March was clearly a shock to politicians and other authorities. In Melbourne, the police attempted for a brief period to keep the roads and tramlines clear at the top end of Collins Street but then gave up. They were simply overwhelmed by student numbers.
It was a sea of placards across the 20,000 people there and they dominated the space and told a story which is no flash in the pan.
People like Scott Morrison, Matthias Cormann, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, her Education Minister and other climate change deniers and delayers were variously “appalled”. Take them back in time and they would have opposed the eight-hour day, the old-age pension and the abolition of slavery. As in the case of all organised attempts at reform from beyond the corridors of established political and economic power and influence extending back in time and place for generations, the age-old canard of people being manipulated by “professional activists/agitators” has been raised once again.
In the vacuous rhetoric of Morrison et al, we can hear the voices of Bjelke-Petersen with Reds under the bed, John Howard opposing Wik and Mabo and an apology to the stolen generations, Tony Abbott proclaiming that same-sex marriage will wreak havoc and Scott Morrison informing us that lumps of coal are lovely, divinely-created gifts.
When Greta Thunberg commented that the statement of the NSW Minister for Education “belongs in a museum”, she could have been saying the same thing about nearly every Liberal and National Party politician in Australia.
Such political opposition to students having a voice about their own future will only strengthen this generation’s view that the current political class are active agents against them, with little interest in anything except their own piece of cake.
IMAGEThe placards were unequivocal in their overt contempt for the current Federal Government —
‘Governments are supposed to help. So where the bloody hell are you?’; ‘It’s time to change politics like we change PMs’; ‘Fossils should be in the ground not parliament’; ‘I can’t believe I’m marching for facts’; ‘I bet the dinosaurs thought they had time, too’; ‘School taught me that dinosaurs were extinct’; ‘If climate was a bank it would have been saved’; ‘The water is rising. Get your budgie smugglers ready’.Young Australians articulating a clear understanding that the Federal Government is essentially ignorant and contemptible is somewhat different to anything we’ve seen before.
One student, 17-year-old Manjot Kaur of Sydney said:
“The action of striking is so important. Students are so afraid, so upset, so worried about their future that they’re literally sacrificing their education to show how serious this problem is. Because right now we aren’t treating it as a crisis. The act of striking is us saying this needs to be treated as an emergency.”In Melbourne on 15 March, it was obvious that many schools fully supported the strike and encouraged students to wear their school uniforms with pride. On the other hand, some school principals threatened that those who participated could jeopardise their assessment results.
IMAGESchools which threaten sanctions and punitive action in this way are contradicting one of their essential and fundamental educational purposes to develop democratic values, participation in public life and critical thinking in students.
Such schools are contributing to the development of a mindset which encourages silence, passivity and acquiescence in the face of overwhelming evidence that climate change is here with us now and that Australia is already being severely impacted.
Schools not actively promoting discussion of climate change are breaching their responsibilities as educational institutions, undermining educational standards, inhibiting access to vital knowledge and are engaged in the wilful promotion of ignorance.
The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has recently stated that government inaction “is rapidly moving beyond a purely partisan or moral issue — indeed, the threat is distinctly financial in nature”. The regulator predicts “economic and environmental disaster” to Australia under the current leadership vacuum.
As Greg Jericho wrote in The Guardian, the RBA is no longer equivocating about the threat to the economy, either, saying that:
“...the physical impact of climate change and the transition are likely to have first-order economic effects”.IMAGE According to Jericho:
‘This week really should mark the end of the line for anyone within politics or the media being able to spout climate-change denialism without being met with scorn and jeers. It also should mark the time when boldness and verve becomes the norm for any climate-change policy’. Former corporate coal boss Ian Dunlop has come out swinging against proposals for new fossil fuel projects in Australia, labelling them as ‘crimes against humanity’ which must stop immediately:
‘To halt our suicidal rush to oblivion, the community must ensure no leader is elected or appointed in this country unless they are committed to emergency action.’The three main goals of the student campaign are to stop the Adani coal mine, no new gas or coal projects and 100 per cent renewables by 2030. The majority of informed Australians, including students, are well ahead of the main political parties. Energy Minister Angus Taylor inanely claims that Labor’s 45 per cent emissions reduction target is ‘aggressively high’, when, in fact, it is too low. We are at the end of an era. Australia is at a crossroad it hasn’t faced since late 1941.
The students are right. Ian Dunlop is right. This is a crisis. People like Taylor belong in a museum. If the incoming Shorten administration displays the same flat-Earth blind stupidity, it will follow the current Morrison Government into irrelevance. We simply can’t afford any more gutless and ignorant Federal administrations. Time is too short.
By now you will have seen the sea of students protesting today against climate change in almost every corner of Australia.
This is how the day went down through the eyes of one of those protesters, Aisheeya. #ClimateStrike #TheProjectTV pic.twitter.com/PVGENCzD2c— The Project (@theprojecttv) March 15, 2019Links
- Climate Strike: Greta Thunberg Calls For ‘System Change Not Climate Change’ – Here’s What That Could Look Like
- Students Worldwide Skip School To Demand Tough Action On Climate Change
- Climate Change Strikes Across Australia See Student Protesters Defy Calls To Stay In School
- Teenage Climate Activist Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize
- Students Are Striking For Action On Climate Change — A Truancy Everyone Should Applaud
- Striking Schoolkids Should Wear Storm Of Criticism As A Badge Of Honour
- Amsterdam's First National Climate Change March Draws 40,000 People
- Climate Change And The Power Of One
- Striking For The Future: From Australia To Japan To India, Youths Will Skip School On March 15 To Protest Against Climate Change
Categories: External websites
Why Fear And Anger Are Rational Responses To Climate Change
The Conversation - Quan Nguyen
Cyclone Idai wreaks havoc in Mozambique. EPA-EFE/JOSH ESTEYNot everyone cheered for the school children striking against climate change. In the US, democratic senator Dianne Feinstein accused them of “my way or the highway” thinking. German Liberal Democrats leader Christian Lindner said that the protesters don’t yet understand “what’s technically and economically possible”, and should leave that to experts instead. The UK’s prime minister, Theresa May, criticised the strikers for “wasting lesson time”.
These criticisms share a common accusation – that the striking children, while well-intentioned, are behaving counter-productively. Instead of having a rational response towards climate change, they let emotions like fear and anger cloud their judgement. In short, emotional responses to climate change are irrational and need to be tamed with reason.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – his moral philosophy had a lasting influence on how we view emotions and rationality. Johann Gottlieb Becker/WikipediaThe view that emotions are intrusive and obscure rational thinking dates back to Aristotle and the Stoics – ancient Greek philosophers who believed that emotions stand in the way of finding happiness through virtue. Immanuel Kant – an 18th-century German philosopher – saw acting from emotions as not really agency at all.
Today, much of political debate is moderated with the understanding that emotions must be tamed for the sake of rational discourse. While this view stands in a long tradition of Western philosophy, it invites Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro to insist that “facts, reason and logic” can dismiss an emotional response to anything in debates.
However, the view that emotions aren’t part of rationality is false. There’s no clear way of separating emotions from rationality, and emotions can be rationally assessed just like beliefs and motivations.
Emotions can be rational
Imagine you’re walking in the woods, and a huge bear approaches you. Would it be rational for you to feel fear?
Emotions can be rational in the sense of being an appropriate response to a situation. It can be the correct kind of response to your environment to feel an emotion, an emotion might just fit a situation. Fear from a bear coming towards you is a rational response in this sense: you recognise the bear and the potential danger it represents to you, and you react with an appropriate emotional response. It could be said to be irrational not to feel fear as the bear walks towards you, as this wouldn’t be a correct emotional response to a dangerous situation.
Imagine you find out that a meteor will kill millions of people across the world, displace hundreds of millions more, and make life for the remainder of humanity much worse. The world’s governments neither put a defence system in place, nor do they evacuate the people threatened. Fear from the meteor, and anger at the inaction of governments, would be a rational response as they are an appropriate reaction to danger. And if you don’t feel fear and anger, you’re not appropriately responding to a dangerous situation.
As you’ve probably guessed, the meteor is climate change. The world’s governments aren’t addressing the causes of climate change or preparing to mitigate its impact. For the people of Mozambique, who are reeling from the devastation of Cyclone Idai, anger is entirely appropriate. Climate change is largely a product of economic development in richer countries, while the world’s poorest are bearing the brunt of its effects.
A woman and child take shelter in Beira City, Mozambique, after the passage of Cyclone Idai.
EPA-EFE/TIAGO PETINGAAre emotions counter productive?
Regardless of how fitting an emotional response is, it may sometimes be unhelpful for what a person wants to achieve. Theresa May makes this point about the school strike: understandable, but young people missing valuable lessons makes it harder for them to solve climate change. As others have already pointed out, climate change demands rapid action – waiting until some vague point in the future when the children are old enough to do something is relinquishing responsibility instead of meaningful action.
It is, however, hard to deny that fear and anger sometimes lead people to choices they regret. However, dismissing emotional responses on this basis is too quick. There are many examples where fear and anger have triggered the correct response and created a motivational push for change. As Amia Srinivasan, an Oxford philosopher working on the role of anger in politics, puts it,
Anger can be a motivating force for organisation and resistance; the fear of collective wrath, in both democratic and authoritarian societies, can also motivate those in power to change their ways.Young people take part in a climate strike in Edinburgh, Scotland. Lauren McGlynn, Author provided (No reuse) A lot of social change has happened because of anger against injustice, empowering the weak and oppressed, while causing those in power to fear they may be ousted leads to reforms and change. We do need scientific understanding of the climate crisis to solve it, but banning emotions from the debate and dismissing rational fear and anger about climate change may encourage people to do nothing.
So, not only are children, who are angry and scared about climate change, rational, they might be more so than the adults criticising them. Emotions play a bigger part in life beyond rationality – they mark values and indicate what people care about. Fear of the future and anger at inaction are ways young people can express their values. Their emotions are, in the words of feminist writer Audra Lorde, an invitation to the rest of society to speak.
Dismissing the emotions of school children not only invalidates their rational responses to a grave situation – it implicitly states that their values aren’t taken seriously, and that adults don’t want to reach out to them.
Links
Cyclone Idai wreaks havoc in Mozambique. EPA-EFE/JOSH ESTEYNot everyone cheered for the school children striking against climate change. In the US, democratic senator Dianne Feinstein accused them of “my way or the highway” thinking. German Liberal Democrats leader Christian Lindner said that the protesters don’t yet understand “what’s technically and economically possible”, and should leave that to experts instead. The UK’s prime minister, Theresa May, criticised the strikers for “wasting lesson time”.
These criticisms share a common accusation – that the striking children, while well-intentioned, are behaving counter-productively. Instead of having a rational response towards climate change, they let emotions like fear and anger cloud their judgement. In short, emotional responses to climate change are irrational and need to be tamed with reason.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – his moral philosophy had a lasting influence on how we view emotions and rationality. Johann Gottlieb Becker/WikipediaThe view that emotions are intrusive and obscure rational thinking dates back to Aristotle and the Stoics – ancient Greek philosophers who believed that emotions stand in the way of finding happiness through virtue. Immanuel Kant – an 18th-century German philosopher – saw acting from emotions as not really agency at all.
Today, much of political debate is moderated with the understanding that emotions must be tamed for the sake of rational discourse. While this view stands in a long tradition of Western philosophy, it invites Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro to insist that “facts, reason and logic” can dismiss an emotional response to anything in debates.
However, the view that emotions aren’t part of rationality is false. There’s no clear way of separating emotions from rationality, and emotions can be rationally assessed just like beliefs and motivations.
Emotions can be rational
Imagine you’re walking in the woods, and a huge bear approaches you. Would it be rational for you to feel fear?
Emotions can be rational in the sense of being an appropriate response to a situation. It can be the correct kind of response to your environment to feel an emotion, an emotion might just fit a situation. Fear from a bear coming towards you is a rational response in this sense: you recognise the bear and the potential danger it represents to you, and you react with an appropriate emotional response. It could be said to be irrational not to feel fear as the bear walks towards you, as this wouldn’t be a correct emotional response to a dangerous situation.
Imagine you find out that a meteor will kill millions of people across the world, displace hundreds of millions more, and make life for the remainder of humanity much worse. The world’s governments neither put a defence system in place, nor do they evacuate the people threatened. Fear from the meteor, and anger at the inaction of governments, would be a rational response as they are an appropriate reaction to danger. And if you don’t feel fear and anger, you’re not appropriately responding to a dangerous situation.
As you’ve probably guessed, the meteor is climate change. The world’s governments aren’t addressing the causes of climate change or preparing to mitigate its impact. For the people of Mozambique, who are reeling from the devastation of Cyclone Idai, anger is entirely appropriate. Climate change is largely a product of economic development in richer countries, while the world’s poorest are bearing the brunt of its effects.
A woman and child take shelter in Beira City, Mozambique, after the passage of Cyclone Idai.
EPA-EFE/TIAGO PETINGAAre emotions counter productive?
Regardless of how fitting an emotional response is, it may sometimes be unhelpful for what a person wants to achieve. Theresa May makes this point about the school strike: understandable, but young people missing valuable lessons makes it harder for them to solve climate change. As others have already pointed out, climate change demands rapid action – waiting until some vague point in the future when the children are old enough to do something is relinquishing responsibility instead of meaningful action.
It is, however, hard to deny that fear and anger sometimes lead people to choices they regret. However, dismissing emotional responses on this basis is too quick. There are many examples where fear and anger have triggered the correct response and created a motivational push for change. As Amia Srinivasan, an Oxford philosopher working on the role of anger in politics, puts it,
Anger can be a motivating force for organisation and resistance; the fear of collective wrath, in both democratic and authoritarian societies, can also motivate those in power to change their ways.Young people take part in a climate strike in Edinburgh, Scotland. Lauren McGlynn, Author provided (No reuse) A lot of social change has happened because of anger against injustice, empowering the weak and oppressed, while causing those in power to fear they may be ousted leads to reforms and change. We do need scientific understanding of the climate crisis to solve it, but banning emotions from the debate and dismissing rational fear and anger about climate change may encourage people to do nothing.
So, not only are children, who are angry and scared about climate change, rational, they might be more so than the adults criticising them. Emotions play a bigger part in life beyond rationality – they mark values and indicate what people care about. Fear of the future and anger at inaction are ways young people can express their values. Their emotions are, in the words of feminist writer Audra Lorde, an invitation to the rest of society to speak.
Dismissing the emotions of school children not only invalidates their rational responses to a grave situation – it implicitly states that their values aren’t taken seriously, and that adults don’t want to reach out to them.
Links
- School climate strikes: why adults no longer have the right to object to their children taking radical action
- Climate Strike: Greta Thunberg Calls For ‘System Change Not Climate Change’ – Here’s What That Could Look Like
- Students Worldwide Skip School To Demand Tough Action On Climate Change
- Climate Change Strikes Across Australia See Student Protesters Defy Calls To Stay In School
- Teenage Climate Activist Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize
- Students Are Striking For Action On Climate Change — A Truancy Everyone Should Applaud
- Striking Schoolkids Should Wear Storm Of Criticism As A Badge Of Honour
- Amsterdam's First National Climate Change March Draws 40,000 People
- Climate Change And The Power Of One
- Striking For The Future: From Australia To Japan To India, Youths Will Skip School On March 15 To Protest Against Climate Change
- Extinction Rebellion: I’m an academic embracing direct action to stop climate change
- Rosa Luxemburg: revolutionary warned of environmental destruction and resurgent far right
- How a moral philosopher justifies his carbon footprint
Categories: External websites
These 8 Cities Are Taking Bold Steps To Get Rid Of Cars
Fast Company - Adele Peters
Cities around the world are starting to see that they’ll be cleaner, healthier, and just better overall if people–not cars–are the priority.
In downtown Cairo, it’s not uncommon to see streets clogged with cars. But in a proposed redesign for a central thoroughfare, they’re hard to spot. Instead, in the concept illustration for what looks like the Egyptian version of Amsterdam, a two-way bike lane, a sidewalk, and a plaza filled with palm trees replace the sea of street parking.
Similar changes are now happening in every part of the world. Some cities are going further, transforming larger swaths of space that were previously dedicated to cars and restricting when and where the most polluting vehicles can drive. For most cities, the primary reason for the change is air pollution, which now kills more people than smoking. It’s also a way for cities to tackle their climate change goals–and to deal with the fact that there just isn’t enough room on city streets for everyone to sit in a car of their own, especially as populations grow. Here are a few of the cities transforming fastest.
OsloCyclists on Oslo City Bikes. Photo: Åsmund Holien Mo/Urban SharingIn the city center of Oslo, former parking spaces on the street have been transformed into bike lanes, benches, and tiny parks. By the beginning of this year, the city had finished a process of removing 700 parking spaces as a way to incentivize people not to drive in the area, while adding some charging stations for electric cars and more parking for drivers who are disabled. At the same time, Oslo is improving public transit and making it easier to bike. The goal: to reduce pollution while making better use of limited public space. “Cities, like Oslo, have been built for cars for several decades, and it’s about time we change it,” Hanne Marcussen, Oslo’s vice mayor of urban development, says in an email. “I think it is important that we all think about what kind of cities we want to live in. I am certain that when people imagine their ideal city, it would not be a dream of polluted air, cars jammed in endless traffic, or streets filled up with parked cars.”
Buenos Aires
Photo: ITDP/Fabrico Di DioOn a massive boulevard in Buenos Aires that used to have 20 lanes of traffic, the center of the road is now dedicated to buses. When the city made the change a few years ago, commuting times shrank dramatically. Buses also no longer needed to use crowded side streets, which freed up around 100 blocks to become fully pedestrianized, or pedestrian-priority zones where cars are restricted and limited to six miles per hour. Since then, the city has continued to add new pedestrian zones in other areas, and is trying to keep people safe on all its streets. At busy intersections, paint and planters help reshape the street to make it safer for pedestrians, using the same kind of tactical urbanism that has also been used in cities like Boston to quickly test new changes. “It’s pretty inexpensive and it can be deployed quickly, so the public can judge if it actually improves the streets,” says Luc Nadal, technical director for urban development at the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy, which worked with the city as it made its initial changes. “Usually, people adopt it fully. Local businesses find that foot traffic increases and that their business improves, and eventually permanent facilities can be implemented.”
London
Photo: Luke Stackpoole/UnsplashAs London grows over the next couple of decades, an extra 100,000-plus people will need to commute to the “Square Mile” in the heart of the city, and the area will also add an extra 3,000 residents. If all of those people drove, traffic wouldn’t move. To deal with the growth–and the air pollution problem it already has–the city is proposing a new plan that would eventually make half of the streets either completely car-free or “pedestrian priority,” meaning that cars (and bikes) would have to yield to people on foot. The city also wants to build protected bike lanes on most major streets. Where cars are allowed, the plan proposes a 15-mile-per-hour speed limit. It’s the latest in a long series of steps to reduce traffic. In 2003, the city pioneered a congestion charge, a fee that drivers pay if they enter central London during peak driving hours. In 2010, the city started opening its first “cycle superhighways” on busy routes. Since 1999, the volume of cars has dropped by about a quarter. The city will finalize its new transport strategy this spring.
Seoul
Photo: Flickr user BryanIn the first year after the city of Seoul finished converting a highway overpass into a High Line-like pedestrian pathway in 2017, 10 million people used the path and business improved in the area, with sales increasing 42%. Now, the city plans to add new pedestrian zones. Some traffic lanes on major streets will be converted to bike lanes and dedicated bus lanes. The city is also starting to roll out new electric buses, and plans to have 3,000 by 2025, while it also improves bus routes to encourage more people to choose the bus over a car. A rating system for cars is designed to keep the most polluting vehicles out of the city center, and by 2020, only electric cars will be allowed.
Madrid
Photo: Flickr user Nicolas VigierUnless you happen to live in central Madrid, there’s a good chance you can’t drive there anymore. In November 2018, the city started rolling out sweeping restrictions across the city center to try to address its air pollution and traffic problems. Older, polluting vehicles are banned, but electric cars can still use the streets. There are exceptions: Residents of the neighborhood and disabled people can still drive more polluting cars, and emergency vehicles can still access the area. Taxis that run on gas or diesel can still drive in the area if they’re relatively new. But when the laws started taking effect, traffic quickly dropped 32%. The low-emissions zone is designed to be “a lung for the city in the heart of Madrid,” the city explains on its website. Inspired by the success, in late 2018 the Spanish government proposed banning any cars that aren’t zero-emissions vehicles from large city centers throughout the entire country.
BeijingPhoto: zhang kaiyv/UnsplashTo fight traffic congestion and cut pollution, Beijing has closed 23 major streets to non-resident cars, says Nelson Peng, an associate and director of the China practice at the urban planning firm Calthorpe Associates. Where drivers are allowed, they’re restricted based on license plates: If their license plate ends in a particular number, they won’t be allowed to drive on a particular day each week. The city also offers small financial incentives for people who choose not to drive an additional day. And because there is a lottery to get license plates in the first place, most people who want cars can’t get them. Other Chinese cities also have restrictions on when and where people can drive. In a new district in Xiong’An, planners have considered banning private cars and only using self-driving cars that run on clean energy. Visitors to the area’s civic center currently leave their cars in a parking lot and take a bus to the center, where companies are testing new autonomous cars. “If China can successfully switch the [auto] industry to autonomous, clean vehicles, I can imagine permanent restrictions of old-style cars in large areas in the near future,” Peng says.
ParisPhoto: rabbit75_ist/iStockIn 2017, a busy highway next to the Seine River became a car-free pedestrian pathway and park. It’s one piece of the city’s ongoing work to cut pollution by reducing traffic. The city also restricts older, more polluting cars from entering the city on weekdays. By 2024, no diesel cars will be allowed, and by 2030, gas cars will be forbidden. Intersections are being redesigned to give people priority over cars, and bike lanes and public transit options are growing. “I was just there a few weeks ago, and it’s pretty impressive what they’re doing,” says Timothy Papandreou, founder of Emerging Transport Advisors, a consulting firm that works with cities. “You look at the hordes of people that are walking or riding a bicycle or taking a scooter down these riverbanks, and you quickly count the number of people–there’s no way you could move this number of people if they were all in their individual cars.”
Chennai
A bike share in Chennai. Photo: Flickr user ilugc inUntil recently, shopping on busy Thyagaraya Road in Chennai, India, meant navigating through throngs of cars and auto rickshaws. But the street is now transforming to a pedestrian plaza, which will be completed in the next few months. Before building the new plaza, the city ran two trials to block off traffic and give people the experience of a car-free pedestrian mall–something that is common in other parts of the world, but a new idea in Chennai. Nearby, the city also recently launched a new bike-sharing system. Chennai, like other cities in India, struggles with air pollution, in part from transportation. In 2017, the Indian government said that it wanted all new cars to be electric by 2030. Though it later scaled back that goal, it recently committed $1.4 billion in new incentives to help kick-start sales of electric and hybrid cars.
Links
Cities around the world are starting to see that they’ll be cleaner, healthier, and just better overall if people–not cars–are the priority.
In downtown Cairo, it’s not uncommon to see streets clogged with cars. But in a proposed redesign for a central thoroughfare, they’re hard to spot. Instead, in the concept illustration for what looks like the Egyptian version of Amsterdam, a two-way bike lane, a sidewalk, and a plaza filled with palm trees replace the sea of street parking.
Similar changes are now happening in every part of the world. Some cities are going further, transforming larger swaths of space that were previously dedicated to cars and restricting when and where the most polluting vehicles can drive. For most cities, the primary reason for the change is air pollution, which now kills more people than smoking. It’s also a way for cities to tackle their climate change goals–and to deal with the fact that there just isn’t enough room on city streets for everyone to sit in a car of their own, especially as populations grow. Here are a few of the cities transforming fastest.
OsloCyclists on Oslo City Bikes. Photo: Åsmund Holien Mo/Urban SharingIn the city center of Oslo, former parking spaces on the street have been transformed into bike lanes, benches, and tiny parks. By the beginning of this year, the city had finished a process of removing 700 parking spaces as a way to incentivize people not to drive in the area, while adding some charging stations for electric cars and more parking for drivers who are disabled. At the same time, Oslo is improving public transit and making it easier to bike. The goal: to reduce pollution while making better use of limited public space. “Cities, like Oslo, have been built for cars for several decades, and it’s about time we change it,” Hanne Marcussen, Oslo’s vice mayor of urban development, says in an email. “I think it is important that we all think about what kind of cities we want to live in. I am certain that when people imagine their ideal city, it would not be a dream of polluted air, cars jammed in endless traffic, or streets filled up with parked cars.”
Buenos Aires
Photo: ITDP/Fabrico Di DioOn a massive boulevard in Buenos Aires that used to have 20 lanes of traffic, the center of the road is now dedicated to buses. When the city made the change a few years ago, commuting times shrank dramatically. Buses also no longer needed to use crowded side streets, which freed up around 100 blocks to become fully pedestrianized, or pedestrian-priority zones where cars are restricted and limited to six miles per hour. Since then, the city has continued to add new pedestrian zones in other areas, and is trying to keep people safe on all its streets. At busy intersections, paint and planters help reshape the street to make it safer for pedestrians, using the same kind of tactical urbanism that has also been used in cities like Boston to quickly test new changes. “It’s pretty inexpensive and it can be deployed quickly, so the public can judge if it actually improves the streets,” says Luc Nadal, technical director for urban development at the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy, which worked with the city as it made its initial changes. “Usually, people adopt it fully. Local businesses find that foot traffic increases and that their business improves, and eventually permanent facilities can be implemented.”
London
Photo: Luke Stackpoole/UnsplashAs London grows over the next couple of decades, an extra 100,000-plus people will need to commute to the “Square Mile” in the heart of the city, and the area will also add an extra 3,000 residents. If all of those people drove, traffic wouldn’t move. To deal with the growth–and the air pollution problem it already has–the city is proposing a new plan that would eventually make half of the streets either completely car-free or “pedestrian priority,” meaning that cars (and bikes) would have to yield to people on foot. The city also wants to build protected bike lanes on most major streets. Where cars are allowed, the plan proposes a 15-mile-per-hour speed limit. It’s the latest in a long series of steps to reduce traffic. In 2003, the city pioneered a congestion charge, a fee that drivers pay if they enter central London during peak driving hours. In 2010, the city started opening its first “cycle superhighways” on busy routes. Since 1999, the volume of cars has dropped by about a quarter. The city will finalize its new transport strategy this spring.
Seoul
Photo: Flickr user BryanIn the first year after the city of Seoul finished converting a highway overpass into a High Line-like pedestrian pathway in 2017, 10 million people used the path and business improved in the area, with sales increasing 42%. Now, the city plans to add new pedestrian zones. Some traffic lanes on major streets will be converted to bike lanes and dedicated bus lanes. The city is also starting to roll out new electric buses, and plans to have 3,000 by 2025, while it also improves bus routes to encourage more people to choose the bus over a car. A rating system for cars is designed to keep the most polluting vehicles out of the city center, and by 2020, only electric cars will be allowed.
Madrid
Photo: Flickr user Nicolas VigierUnless you happen to live in central Madrid, there’s a good chance you can’t drive there anymore. In November 2018, the city started rolling out sweeping restrictions across the city center to try to address its air pollution and traffic problems. Older, polluting vehicles are banned, but electric cars can still use the streets. There are exceptions: Residents of the neighborhood and disabled people can still drive more polluting cars, and emergency vehicles can still access the area. Taxis that run on gas or diesel can still drive in the area if they’re relatively new. But when the laws started taking effect, traffic quickly dropped 32%. The low-emissions zone is designed to be “a lung for the city in the heart of Madrid,” the city explains on its website. Inspired by the success, in late 2018 the Spanish government proposed banning any cars that aren’t zero-emissions vehicles from large city centers throughout the entire country.
BeijingPhoto: zhang kaiyv/UnsplashTo fight traffic congestion and cut pollution, Beijing has closed 23 major streets to non-resident cars, says Nelson Peng, an associate and director of the China practice at the urban planning firm Calthorpe Associates. Where drivers are allowed, they’re restricted based on license plates: If their license plate ends in a particular number, they won’t be allowed to drive on a particular day each week. The city also offers small financial incentives for people who choose not to drive an additional day. And because there is a lottery to get license plates in the first place, most people who want cars can’t get them. Other Chinese cities also have restrictions on when and where people can drive. In a new district in Xiong’An, planners have considered banning private cars and only using self-driving cars that run on clean energy. Visitors to the area’s civic center currently leave their cars in a parking lot and take a bus to the center, where companies are testing new autonomous cars. “If China can successfully switch the [auto] industry to autonomous, clean vehicles, I can imagine permanent restrictions of old-style cars in large areas in the near future,” Peng says.
ParisPhoto: rabbit75_ist/iStockIn 2017, a busy highway next to the Seine River became a car-free pedestrian pathway and park. It’s one piece of the city’s ongoing work to cut pollution by reducing traffic. The city also restricts older, more polluting cars from entering the city on weekdays. By 2024, no diesel cars will be allowed, and by 2030, gas cars will be forbidden. Intersections are being redesigned to give people priority over cars, and bike lanes and public transit options are growing. “I was just there a few weeks ago, and it’s pretty impressive what they’re doing,” says Timothy Papandreou, founder of Emerging Transport Advisors, a consulting firm that works with cities. “You look at the hordes of people that are walking or riding a bicycle or taking a scooter down these riverbanks, and you quickly count the number of people–there’s no way you could move this number of people if they were all in their individual cars.”
Chennai
A bike share in Chennai. Photo: Flickr user ilugc inUntil recently, shopping on busy Thyagaraya Road in Chennai, India, meant navigating through throngs of cars and auto rickshaws. But the street is now transforming to a pedestrian plaza, which will be completed in the next few months. Before building the new plaza, the city ran two trials to block off traffic and give people the experience of a car-free pedestrian mall–something that is common in other parts of the world, but a new idea in Chennai. Nearby, the city also recently launched a new bike-sharing system. Chennai, like other cities in India, struggles with air pollution, in part from transportation. In 2017, the Indian government said that it wanted all new cars to be electric by 2030. Though it later scaled back that goal, it recently committed $1.4 billion in new incentives to help kick-start sales of electric and hybrid cars.
Links
- Four Ways Our Cities Can Cut Transport Emissions In A Hurry: Avoid, Shift, Share And Improve
- More Than 100 Cities Now Mostly Powered By Renewable Energy, Data Shows
- This Is How Climate Change Will Shift The World’s Cities
- How To Fix Climate Change: Put Cities, Not Countries, In Charge
- These Six Utopian Cities Of The Future Will Help You Re-Imagine Life On Earth
Categories: External websites
'Out Of Line': Top Australian Companies Accused Of Undermining Paris Deal
The Guardian - Ben Smee
Action group Market Forces urges shareholders to divest holdings in 22 ‘uninvestables’
The companies reported to be ignoring the Paris climate deal are worth a combined $121bn and represent 7% of the ASX300 index. Photograph: Tim Wimborne/Reuters New analysis shows 22 of Australia’s largest companies are actively working to undermine the Paris agreement targets, betting shareholders’ money on strategies that assume global climate change action fails.
Investor action group Market Forces says those companies – worth a combined $121bn and representing 7% of the ASX300 – are “out of line and out of time” and has called on shareholders to divest their holdings.
Paris-alignment of ASX 300 companies by weight
The group’s legal analyst, Will van de Pol, said it was the first time Market Forces had “named names” and called out companies whose business strategies relied on the world failing to meet the Paris targets to restrict the global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
“A handful of Australian companies are undermining efforts to limit global warming by pursuing new fossil fuel projects, or basing their business plans on energy projection scenarios that would doom the Paris agreement to failure,” the report says.
“These companies have now been given more than three years to align their business with the Paris goals, but have dismissed the notion.”
The list of “uninvestables” includes mainly resource and energy companies, but also diversified investment vehicles including WH Soul Pattinson and Seven Group Holdings.
The Market Forces study found that 199 ASX300 companies, representing 64% of total market capitalisation, faced heightened transitional climate risk but had not yet demonstrated business strategies consistent with the Paris agreement.
There were 143 companies with policies “not overtly inconsistent with Paris”, and just eight had aligned their strategy with the agreement.
Three companies – AGL, Origin and BHP – earned a reprieve from the list of the worst offenders, despite acting in a similar manner, because Market Forces said they had shown some progress towards aligning their goals with Paris.
In recent years, the boardroom has become an increasingly important front for climate activism.
This month, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, announced it would divest from firms that explored for oil and gas. Last month, Glencore said it would no longer back new coalmines in response to investor calls for the company to act on climate change.
Pressure is also increasing on Australian companies, though many still refuse to even consider the financial risk posed to their businesses by climate change.
In September, a report from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission said “the law requires” relevant companies to “include a discussion of climate risk” in their annual report.
In February, the Asic corporate governance council released new recommendations that directors and companies should make climate risk disclosures.
The Market Forces report singled out “coal cowboys” Whitehaven and New Hope, which it said had plans to establish new coalmines, or expand existing ones, based on forecasts that assume the failure of Paris.
Oil and gas companies Woodside, Santos and Oil Search had each “faced increased investor engagement over climate change in recent years, but this has done nothing to dissuade their plans to increase fossil fuel production”, the report said.
“Investors determined to play their part in the fight against runaway climate change must immediately reallocate capital away from these companies.”
Links
Action group Market Forces urges shareholders to divest holdings in 22 ‘uninvestables’
The companies reported to be ignoring the Paris climate deal are worth a combined $121bn and represent 7% of the ASX300 index. Photograph: Tim Wimborne/Reuters New analysis shows 22 of Australia’s largest companies are actively working to undermine the Paris agreement targets, betting shareholders’ money on strategies that assume global climate change action fails.
Investor action group Market Forces says those companies – worth a combined $121bn and representing 7% of the ASX300 – are “out of line and out of time” and has called on shareholders to divest their holdings.
Paris-alignment of ASX 300 companies by weight
The group’s legal analyst, Will van de Pol, said it was the first time Market Forces had “named names” and called out companies whose business strategies relied on the world failing to meet the Paris targets to restrict the global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
“A handful of Australian companies are undermining efforts to limit global warming by pursuing new fossil fuel projects, or basing their business plans on energy projection scenarios that would doom the Paris agreement to failure,” the report says.
“These companies have now been given more than three years to align their business with the Paris goals, but have dismissed the notion.”
The list of “uninvestables” includes mainly resource and energy companies, but also diversified investment vehicles including WH Soul Pattinson and Seven Group Holdings.
The Market Forces study found that 199 ASX300 companies, representing 64% of total market capitalisation, faced heightened transitional climate risk but had not yet demonstrated business strategies consistent with the Paris agreement.
There were 143 companies with policies “not overtly inconsistent with Paris”, and just eight had aligned their strategy with the agreement.
Three companies – AGL, Origin and BHP – earned a reprieve from the list of the worst offenders, despite acting in a similar manner, because Market Forces said they had shown some progress towards aligning their goals with Paris.
In recent years, the boardroom has become an increasingly important front for climate activism.
This month, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, announced it would divest from firms that explored for oil and gas. Last month, Glencore said it would no longer back new coalmines in response to investor calls for the company to act on climate change.
Pressure is also increasing on Australian companies, though many still refuse to even consider the financial risk posed to their businesses by climate change.
In September, a report from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission said “the law requires” relevant companies to “include a discussion of climate risk” in their annual report.
In February, the Asic corporate governance council released new recommendations that directors and companies should make climate risk disclosures.
The Market Forces report singled out “coal cowboys” Whitehaven and New Hope, which it said had plans to establish new coalmines, or expand existing ones, based on forecasts that assume the failure of Paris.
Oil and gas companies Woodside, Santos and Oil Search had each “faced increased investor engagement over climate change in recent years, but this has done nothing to dissuade their plans to increase fossil fuel production”, the report said.
“Investors determined to play their part in the fight against runaway climate change must immediately reallocate capital away from these companies.”
Links
- Out of line, out of time (pdf)
- Australian companies still failing to properly disclose climate risk
- Australian mining giants 'may be breaking law' by ignoring climate change risks
- Australia's coal bonanza at risk as Chinese import 'ban' spreads
- Authorities can do nothing about pro-coal ads linked to Glencore campaign
- Coalition considers letting power companies buy offsets to cut emissions
- Queensland accused of breaking ‘no public funds for Adani’ promise
- Coal-fired plant shifted $1bn offshore while pocketing $117m from Australian taxpayers
- Coal in decline: Adani in question and Australia out of step
- Big Australian banks invest $7bn more in fossil fuels than renewables, says report
Categories: External websites
Australian Faces Free Trade Agreement Pressure To Cut Emissions
AFR - Ben Potter
Australia is set to come under increased pressure on climate change this year after French officials insisted the Morrison government's carbon emissions targets are not ambitious enough to fully comply with the Paris agreement.
The French officials' comments come at a sensitive time because Australia is currently negotiating a free trade agreement with the European Union, which EU negotiator Helena Konig and French President Emanuel Macron have said must include a clause requiring full implementation of the Paris agreement.
In a briefing in Paris the officials lavished praise on the role of Pacific Islands nations and New Zealand in climate change negotiations while slighting Australia's efforts with faint praise, and held out the hope of a stiffening of Australia's ambitions after the federal election.Coal is expected to be Australia's largest export this year. Caria Gottgens"New Zealand is playing a very constructive role in the fight against climate change. Australia is, well, it's slightly more complicated," an official said.
"Australia is as constructive as it can [be] in the climate change negotiations but frankly not ambitious enough in terms of its NDCs and ambitions. Hopefully it can become more ambitious over time."
NDCs – nationally determined contributions – are the commitments made by individual nations at the Paris talks.
In an apparent reference to the federal election expected to be held by May 18, for which Labor is campaigning on more ambitious carbon targets and leading in opinion polling, a second official said, "We know that things may happen in Australia this year, and we hope of course that the ambition of Australia will increase over time".
Europe's frustration
The remarks underline Europe's frustration with backsliding by countries such as the United States, which wants to pull out of the Paris agreement, Brazil, which is toying with pulling out, and Australia and other nations that claim the energy intensive nature of their economies entitles them to deliver smaller emissions cuts.
The Morrison government has stuck with the carbon targets agreed to at the Paris talks in 2015, which require Australia to reduce its carbon emissions by 26-28 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. The target would be reduced to about 15 per cent if the government insisted on being able to carry forward the "overachievement" against past "Kyoto" targets, a tactic comparable nations have ruled out.
Public pressure is also increasing for more decisive action on climate change: The School Strike for action against Climate Change. Justin McManusAustralia's climate change negotiators must also return to the United Nations in New York in September to finalise the "rule book" for international carbon markets, which couldn't be agreed at the COPS24 talks in Katowice, Poland, last December despite pressure building for signatories to pursue policies that would limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures.
Cut more carbon
Australia is expected to come up with new, improved emissions targets by 2020 under the Paris agreement, which contains an overriding agreement – beyond the individual nations' targets – to limit temperature increases to "well below" 2 degrees.
The French officials agreed with scientists who say existing commitments would mean global temperature increases of more than 3 degrees. But they were not ready to embrace a new target of 55 per cent emissions cuts recommended by an EU committee two weeks ago, which several European nations have pushed back against.
Scientists say temperature increases of 3 degrees and more would be more dangerous, with increased extreme weather events that insurers say could make insurance unaffordable.
Last September the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a scientific report that concluded coal power would have to be virtually eliminated and agriculture changed dramatically to achieve the 1.5 degree target and avoid more frequent dangerous heatwaves, droughts, floods and tropical cyclones as well as irreversible damage to coral reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef.
Coal is expected to be Australia's largest export this year, with sales of $67 billion across thermal and steel-making coal.
The French officials laid out a series of priorities for climate negotiations including getting the Paris agreement "fully implemented", raising national ambitions for carbon cuts and getting more ambitious commitments from the signatories by 2020.
No coal, no 'double counting'
They said the Group of 20 leading economies – which includes Australia, the US, Japan and Britain as well as France, German, other leading European nations and emerging giants India and China – must take the lead in cutting emissions because they are responsible for four-fifths of global emissions.
France has banned its development aid agencies from financing coal power, and the officials said they wanted the equivalent agencies of China and Japan - the largest funders of global coal power projects - to follow suit and support renewable energy instead, because of the benefits in terms of reduced carbon emissions and improved health outcomes that would likely result.
They noted that Australian officials played a constructive role in technical aspects of climate talks – such as rules for carbon markets and actions to mitigate damage to coral reefs.
But they said they were counting on a strong rule book on carbon markets to emerge from the UN talks in September to prevent any "double counting" – such as the tactic of carrying forward past overachievement – and maintain the integrity of the Paris agreement.
"That's what we mean by environmental integrity – real reductions in emissions, no double counting," an official said.
Links
Australia is set to come under increased pressure on climate change this year after French officials insisted the Morrison government's carbon emissions targets are not ambitious enough to fully comply with the Paris agreement.
The French officials' comments come at a sensitive time because Australia is currently negotiating a free trade agreement with the European Union, which EU negotiator Helena Konig and French President Emanuel Macron have said must include a clause requiring full implementation of the Paris agreement.
In a briefing in Paris the officials lavished praise on the role of Pacific Islands nations and New Zealand in climate change negotiations while slighting Australia's efforts with faint praise, and held out the hope of a stiffening of Australia's ambitions after the federal election.Coal is expected to be Australia's largest export this year. Caria Gottgens"New Zealand is playing a very constructive role in the fight against climate change. Australia is, well, it's slightly more complicated," an official said.
"Australia is as constructive as it can [be] in the climate change negotiations but frankly not ambitious enough in terms of its NDCs and ambitions. Hopefully it can become more ambitious over time."
NDCs – nationally determined contributions – are the commitments made by individual nations at the Paris talks.
In an apparent reference to the federal election expected to be held by May 18, for which Labor is campaigning on more ambitious carbon targets and leading in opinion polling, a second official said, "We know that things may happen in Australia this year, and we hope of course that the ambition of Australia will increase over time".
Europe's frustration
The remarks underline Europe's frustration with backsliding by countries such as the United States, which wants to pull out of the Paris agreement, Brazil, which is toying with pulling out, and Australia and other nations that claim the energy intensive nature of their economies entitles them to deliver smaller emissions cuts.
The Morrison government has stuck with the carbon targets agreed to at the Paris talks in 2015, which require Australia to reduce its carbon emissions by 26-28 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. The target would be reduced to about 15 per cent if the government insisted on being able to carry forward the "overachievement" against past "Kyoto" targets, a tactic comparable nations have ruled out.
Public pressure is also increasing for more decisive action on climate change: The School Strike for action against Climate Change. Justin McManusAustralia's climate change negotiators must also return to the United Nations in New York in September to finalise the "rule book" for international carbon markets, which couldn't be agreed at the COPS24 talks in Katowice, Poland, last December despite pressure building for signatories to pursue policies that would limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures.
Cut more carbon
Australia is expected to come up with new, improved emissions targets by 2020 under the Paris agreement, which contains an overriding agreement – beyond the individual nations' targets – to limit temperature increases to "well below" 2 degrees.
The French officials agreed with scientists who say existing commitments would mean global temperature increases of more than 3 degrees. But they were not ready to embrace a new target of 55 per cent emissions cuts recommended by an EU committee two weeks ago, which several European nations have pushed back against.
Scientists say temperature increases of 3 degrees and more would be more dangerous, with increased extreme weather events that insurers say could make insurance unaffordable.
Last September the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a scientific report that concluded coal power would have to be virtually eliminated and agriculture changed dramatically to achieve the 1.5 degree target and avoid more frequent dangerous heatwaves, droughts, floods and tropical cyclones as well as irreversible damage to coral reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef.
Coal is expected to be Australia's largest export this year, with sales of $67 billion across thermal and steel-making coal.
The French officials laid out a series of priorities for climate negotiations including getting the Paris agreement "fully implemented", raising national ambitions for carbon cuts and getting more ambitious commitments from the signatories by 2020.
No coal, no 'double counting'
They said the Group of 20 leading economies – which includes Australia, the US, Japan and Britain as well as France, German, other leading European nations and emerging giants India and China – must take the lead in cutting emissions because they are responsible for four-fifths of global emissions.
France has banned its development aid agencies from financing coal power, and the officials said they wanted the equivalent agencies of China and Japan - the largest funders of global coal power projects - to follow suit and support renewable energy instead, because of the benefits in terms of reduced carbon emissions and improved health outcomes that would likely result.
They noted that Australian officials played a constructive role in technical aspects of climate talks – such as rules for carbon markets and actions to mitigate damage to coral reefs.
But they said they were counting on a strong rule book on carbon markets to emerge from the UN talks in September to prevent any "double counting" – such as the tactic of carrying forward past overachievement – and maintain the integrity of the Paris agreement.
"That's what we mean by environmental integrity – real reductions in emissions, no double counting," an official said.
Links
- Coal power finished by 2050 if temperature increase kept to 1.5 degrees: IPCC
- Even In Its Dying Days, The Government Denies The Need For Climate Action
- Enough Scandalous Time-Wasting On Climate Change. Let's Get Back To The Facts
- Scientists Slap Down Australia Government Over Fake Climate Claims
- The Coal, Hard Facts: Australia Could Follow Germany's Phase-Out Model
- Angus Taylor Again Falsely Claims Australia's Greenhouse Emissions Are Falling
- Climate Change In Court
Categories: External websites
Why Climate Change Risks Are 'Material' For Big Finance
Fairfax - Clancy Yeates
After a prod from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, the financial regulator this month reminded superannuation funds that their job was to stay out of political causes, and stick to their knitting: looking after members' interests.
Then, the day after this warning was revealed, the very same regulator, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), upped the pressure on our biggest financial institutions to take more action to deal with climate change risks.
Do those two directions from APRA sound like they might be in conflict? They shouldn't.Financial businesses are under greater pressure to consider their exposure to climate change risks, which could include fossil fuel assets. Credit: Peter BraigThe pressure put on companies over climate action by many large superannuation funds has attracted plenty of attention lately, with some criticising super funds' role in pushing resources giant Glencore's to cap its coal output.
How the funds managing $2.7 trillion in retirement savings deal with social or environment issues is a debate that is worth having, as the clout of super funds will only grow in years to come. When it comes to climate change, however, the message coming from those who regulate our financial system could hardly be clearer.They view climate change as a real and present business risk that financiers need to be putting high on the agenda – irrespective of the failure of our political system to really deal with the issue. The sooner more companies start viewing it this way, the better.
In the Reserve Bank’s first meaty comments on the topic, deputy governor Guy Debelle this month warned climate change could cause financial shocks, if companies didn't take these risks seriously in their planning.Then, last week, APRA released its first survey of how 38 large banks, insurance companies, and superannuation funds are looking at climate risks.
It showed a third of these businesses viewed climate changes as a "material" risk to their businesses right now. More than half thought it would be a material risk at some point in the future.The most common types of financial risks identified were damage to reputation, flood, regulatory action, cyclone, energy risks, and bushfires.
In a finding that's raised some eyebrows among observers, only about half of the general insurers — who are exposed to flood, bushfire, and cyclones — thought climate change was "material" for them at the moment.
More than 40 per cent of banks and superannuation funds also thought climate risks were material right now, and the vast majority thought they would be material risks in the future.It's a safe bet those proportions will only rise in years to come, as regulators and investors raise the pressure on financial businesses to put more emphasis on climate change risks.
Emma Herd, who represents institutional investors with about $2 trillion as chief executive of the Investor Group on Climate Change, says the consistent message from regulators is that climate change risks are "material, foreseeable, and actionable."“The key message for the businesses is don’t get distracted by the political debate. Look at what your regulators are telling you," she says.
Why are the regulators so concerned to see action on climate change?
No doubt part of it is a sense of trying to do their part to help us avoid catastrophic environmental costs for future generations, but their more immediate worries concern financial stability.APRA board member Geoff Summerhayes, speaking in his capacity as chair of the Sustainable Insurance Forum, last month said climate change was quickly moving from a "purely partisan or moral issue" to one that is "distinctly financial in nature."
Insurance companies are the most immediately affected by more frequent and severe natural disasters. Global insured losses in 2018 were only half of those of 2017, Sumerhayes said, but he added that "2018 was still the fourth most costly year on record".Banks and financial markets would also be exposed to dramatic changes in the values of trillions in fossil fuel assets. There is a risk many of these assets could become "stranded" as a result of policies to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions, or from advances in renewable energy technology. That risk is especially relevant to big fossil fuel producers like Australia, and it's a reason why banks have been getting more wary about coal financing in recent years.
Longer term, banks' massive mortgage books could also be exposed to risks because of hazards made worse from climate change, such as floods or cyclones.
For several years, regulators have been pushing big financial institutions to collect and publish more data on such climate risks, and run scenarios on how they would fare under various "transition" scenarios.Now, APRA says it wants to see a move from "awareness to action." It wants banks, insurers and wealth managers to look at climate risks just like any other part of their risk management framework — not as a social responsibility issue.
Bank of England governor Mark Carney, a global leader in this area, last week gave us a taste of where APRA and other local regulators will probably go. Carney said he expected climate risks to be given consideration at board level, and that the United Kingdom regulators would start conducting climate "stress tests" on insurers and banks.Carney acknowledged these sorts of changes - which are likely coming here as well - won't be enough on their own to move the world to a low-carbon economy. That will be up to governments, and business.
But however dysfunctional our domestic debate is on climate change, it's abundantly clear the financial sector needs to give this issue growing attention.
Links
After a prod from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, the financial regulator this month reminded superannuation funds that their job was to stay out of political causes, and stick to their knitting: looking after members' interests.
Then, the day after this warning was revealed, the very same regulator, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), upped the pressure on our biggest financial institutions to take more action to deal with climate change risks.
Do those two directions from APRA sound like they might be in conflict? They shouldn't.Financial businesses are under greater pressure to consider their exposure to climate change risks, which could include fossil fuel assets. Credit: Peter BraigThe pressure put on companies over climate action by many large superannuation funds has attracted plenty of attention lately, with some criticising super funds' role in pushing resources giant Glencore's to cap its coal output.
How the funds managing $2.7 trillion in retirement savings deal with social or environment issues is a debate that is worth having, as the clout of super funds will only grow in years to come. When it comes to climate change, however, the message coming from those who regulate our financial system could hardly be clearer.They view climate change as a real and present business risk that financiers need to be putting high on the agenda – irrespective of the failure of our political system to really deal with the issue. The sooner more companies start viewing it this way, the better.
In the Reserve Bank’s first meaty comments on the topic, deputy governor Guy Debelle this month warned climate change could cause financial shocks, if companies didn't take these risks seriously in their planning.Then, last week, APRA released its first survey of how 38 large banks, insurance companies, and superannuation funds are looking at climate risks.
It showed a third of these businesses viewed climate changes as a "material" risk to their businesses right now. More than half thought it would be a material risk at some point in the future.The most common types of financial risks identified were damage to reputation, flood, regulatory action, cyclone, energy risks, and bushfires.
In a finding that's raised some eyebrows among observers, only about half of the general insurers — who are exposed to flood, bushfire, and cyclones — thought climate change was "material" for them at the moment.
More than 40 per cent of banks and superannuation funds also thought climate risks were material right now, and the vast majority thought they would be material risks in the future.It's a safe bet those proportions will only rise in years to come, as regulators and investors raise the pressure on financial businesses to put more emphasis on climate change risks.
Emma Herd, who represents institutional investors with about $2 trillion as chief executive of the Investor Group on Climate Change, says the consistent message from regulators is that climate change risks are "material, foreseeable, and actionable."“The key message for the businesses is don’t get distracted by the political debate. Look at what your regulators are telling you," she says.
Why are the regulators so concerned to see action on climate change?
No doubt part of it is a sense of trying to do their part to help us avoid catastrophic environmental costs for future generations, but their more immediate worries concern financial stability.APRA board member Geoff Summerhayes, speaking in his capacity as chair of the Sustainable Insurance Forum, last month said climate change was quickly moving from a "purely partisan or moral issue" to one that is "distinctly financial in nature."
Insurance companies are the most immediately affected by more frequent and severe natural disasters. Global insured losses in 2018 were only half of those of 2017, Sumerhayes said, but he added that "2018 was still the fourth most costly year on record".Banks and financial markets would also be exposed to dramatic changes in the values of trillions in fossil fuel assets. There is a risk many of these assets could become "stranded" as a result of policies to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions, or from advances in renewable energy technology. That risk is especially relevant to big fossil fuel producers like Australia, and it's a reason why banks have been getting more wary about coal financing in recent years.
Longer term, banks' massive mortgage books could also be exposed to risks because of hazards made worse from climate change, such as floods or cyclones.
For several years, regulators have been pushing big financial institutions to collect and publish more data on such climate risks, and run scenarios on how they would fare under various "transition" scenarios.Now, APRA says it wants to see a move from "awareness to action." It wants banks, insurers and wealth managers to look at climate risks just like any other part of their risk management framework — not as a social responsibility issue.
Bank of England governor Mark Carney, a global leader in this area, last week gave us a taste of where APRA and other local regulators will probably go. Carney said he expected climate risks to be given consideration at board level, and that the United Kingdom regulators would start conducting climate "stress tests" on insurers and banks.Carney acknowledged these sorts of changes - which are likely coming here as well - won't be enough on their own to move the world to a low-carbon economy. That will be up to governments, and business.
But however dysfunctional our domestic debate is on climate change, it's abundantly clear the financial sector needs to give this issue growing attention.
Links
- Banks need to mitigate climate risk: APRA
- APRA to banks, insurers: Act on climate risk
- Fin services needs to walk the walk on climate risk
- 'Change Now Or Pay Later': RBA's Stark Warning On Climate Change
- Climate Change Poses Financial Stability Risk – RBA
- Climate change-related litigation was once seen as a joke, but it could soon become business reality
Categories: External websites
Banks Funneled $1.9 Trillion Into Fossil Fuels Since Paris Agreement
CleanTechnica - Joshua S Hill
A new report published this week shows that 33 global banks provided $1.9 trillion to fossil fuel companies since the adoption of the Paris Climate Agreement at the end of 2015 and that the amount of fossil fuel financing has increased in each of the past two years.
The new report, Banking on Climate Change 2019, is the tenth annual fossil fuel report card and the first-ever analysis of funding from the world’s major private banks for the fossil fuel sector as a whole. The report was released Wednesday by Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, Oil Change International, Sierra Club, and Honor the Earth, and endorsed by over 160 organizations around the world.
In addition to finding that 33 of the world’s top banks are supplied $1.9 trillion to fossil fuel companies since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the report also found that of that $1.9 trillion, $600 billion went to 100 companies that are most aggressively expanding fossil fuels, highlighting business-as-usual practices that fly in the face of the latest scientific warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which warned that “Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”
That same report not only outlined the dangers ahead if we remain committed to business-as-usual practices but also highlighted the fact that we need $2.4 trillion worth of clean energy investments each year up to 2035 to stave off the worst of the effects of climate change. That so much money is still being funneled towards the fossil fuel energy sector speaks volumes about how banks and energy companies are responding to the need for renewable energy.
“Alarming is an understatement. This report is a red alert,” said Alison Kirsch, Climate and Energy Lead Researcher at Rainforest Action Network. “The massive scale at which global banks continue to pump billions of dollars into fossil fuels is flatly incompatible with a livable future. It’s an insult to logic, to science and to humanity that since the groundbreaking Paris Climate Agreement, financing for fossil fuels continues to rise. If banks don’t rapidly phase out their support for dirty energy, planetary collapse from man-made climate change is not just probable — it is imminent.”
Tellingly, the report also found that the four biggest global bankers of the fossil fuel energy sector are all US banks — JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America. This is not to say that banks in the rest of the world aren’t also making nuisances of themselves, with Barclays of England, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) of Japan, and RBC of Canada all continuing to heavily finance the industry. But, as highlighted by the authors of the report, “The massive economic weight of the US oil and gas industry can be easily seen in the fact that the top four bankers of climate change are all headquartered in the United States” and, further, two more US banks — Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs — serve to fill out the top 12, meaning that “all six of the US banking giants are in the top dirty dozen fossil banks” and “account for an astonishing 37% of global fossil fuel financing since the Paris Agreement was adopted.”
US banking giant JPMorgan Chase is also highlighted in the report as “very clearly the world’s worst banker of climate change,” having funneled $196 billion into the fossil fuel industry between 2016 and 2018 “is nearly a third higher than the second-worst bank, Wells Fargo” — another US bank.
Total Fossil Fuel Financing by YearLARGE IMAGE“We’re faced with ever-worsening climate change impacts worldwide, and the latest IPCC report provides a stark 2030 deadline for the deep cuts in global CO2 emissions needed to avoid full climate breakdown,” said Johan Frijns, Director of BankTrack. “Yet banks continue to throw their billions at the fossil fuel industry while announcing minor policy tweaks here and endorsements of the latest toothless ‘responsible finance’ initiative there. One wonders what on earth it will take for banks to finally change course and fully abandon the fossil fuel sector. Campaigners will be demanding exactly this at this year’s upcoming bank AGMs, armed with this report’s shocking new findings.”
RBC of Canada was ranked fifth and is the world’s top banker of tar sands and funneled a total of $101 billion into the fossil fuel industry. England’s Barclays is the top European banker of fracking and coal and is the worst European bank for climate change, having poured $85 billion into fossil fuels and $24 billion into expansion. Japan’s worst fossil fuel bank was MUFG, which funneled $80 billion into fossil fuels overall and $25 billion into fossil fuel expansion specifically, while China’s top banker of coal power was Bank of China, qualifying it as the country’s worst banker of fossil fuels with $17 billion poured into expansion.
“At a time when science tells us we need to rapidly transition to clean energy, major American banks are placing themselves on the wrong side of history by continuing to offer a blank check to the fossil fuel industry,” concluded Ben Cushing, Sierra Club Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign Representative. “The global outcry for financial institutions to stop financing climate destruction will only grow louder and more powerful until these banks get the message and pull their support for dirty fossil fuels once and for all.”
Links
A new report published this week shows that 33 global banks provided $1.9 trillion to fossil fuel companies since the adoption of the Paris Climate Agreement at the end of 2015 and that the amount of fossil fuel financing has increased in each of the past two years.
The new report, Banking on Climate Change 2019, is the tenth annual fossil fuel report card and the first-ever analysis of funding from the world’s major private banks for the fossil fuel sector as a whole. The report was released Wednesday by Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, Oil Change International, Sierra Club, and Honor the Earth, and endorsed by over 160 organizations around the world.
In addition to finding that 33 of the world’s top banks are supplied $1.9 trillion to fossil fuel companies since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the report also found that of that $1.9 trillion, $600 billion went to 100 companies that are most aggressively expanding fossil fuels, highlighting business-as-usual practices that fly in the face of the latest scientific warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which warned that “Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”
That same report not only outlined the dangers ahead if we remain committed to business-as-usual practices but also highlighted the fact that we need $2.4 trillion worth of clean energy investments each year up to 2035 to stave off the worst of the effects of climate change. That so much money is still being funneled towards the fossil fuel energy sector speaks volumes about how banks and energy companies are responding to the need for renewable energy.
“Alarming is an understatement. This report is a red alert,” said Alison Kirsch, Climate and Energy Lead Researcher at Rainforest Action Network. “The massive scale at which global banks continue to pump billions of dollars into fossil fuels is flatly incompatible with a livable future. It’s an insult to logic, to science and to humanity that since the groundbreaking Paris Climate Agreement, financing for fossil fuels continues to rise. If banks don’t rapidly phase out their support for dirty energy, planetary collapse from man-made climate change is not just probable — it is imminent.”
Tellingly, the report also found that the four biggest global bankers of the fossil fuel energy sector are all US banks — JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America. This is not to say that banks in the rest of the world aren’t also making nuisances of themselves, with Barclays of England, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) of Japan, and RBC of Canada all continuing to heavily finance the industry. But, as highlighted by the authors of the report, “The massive economic weight of the US oil and gas industry can be easily seen in the fact that the top four bankers of climate change are all headquartered in the United States” and, further, two more US banks — Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs — serve to fill out the top 12, meaning that “all six of the US banking giants are in the top dirty dozen fossil banks” and “account for an astonishing 37% of global fossil fuel financing since the Paris Agreement was adopted.”
US banking giant JPMorgan Chase is also highlighted in the report as “very clearly the world’s worst banker of climate change,” having funneled $196 billion into the fossil fuel industry between 2016 and 2018 “is nearly a third higher than the second-worst bank, Wells Fargo” — another US bank.
Total Fossil Fuel Financing by YearLARGE IMAGE“We’re faced with ever-worsening climate change impacts worldwide, and the latest IPCC report provides a stark 2030 deadline for the deep cuts in global CO2 emissions needed to avoid full climate breakdown,” said Johan Frijns, Director of BankTrack. “Yet banks continue to throw their billions at the fossil fuel industry while announcing minor policy tweaks here and endorsements of the latest toothless ‘responsible finance’ initiative there. One wonders what on earth it will take for banks to finally change course and fully abandon the fossil fuel sector. Campaigners will be demanding exactly this at this year’s upcoming bank AGMs, armed with this report’s shocking new findings.”
RBC of Canada was ranked fifth and is the world’s top banker of tar sands and funneled a total of $101 billion into the fossil fuel industry. England’s Barclays is the top European banker of fracking and coal and is the worst European bank for climate change, having poured $85 billion into fossil fuels and $24 billion into expansion. Japan’s worst fossil fuel bank was MUFG, which funneled $80 billion into fossil fuels overall and $25 billion into fossil fuel expansion specifically, while China’s top banker of coal power was Bank of China, qualifying it as the country’s worst banker of fossil fuels with $17 billion poured into expansion.
“At a time when science tells us we need to rapidly transition to clean energy, major American banks are placing themselves on the wrong side of history by continuing to offer a blank check to the fossil fuel industry,” concluded Ben Cushing, Sierra Club Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign Representative. “The global outcry for financial institutions to stop financing climate destruction will only grow louder and more powerful until these banks get the message and pull their support for dirty fossil fuels once and for all.”
Links
- Banking on Climate Change 2019 - Rainforest Action Network (pdf)
- Banks increasing exposure to fossil fuels despite promises to fight climate change: report
- Bank on climate action after financial warning
- Position on Climate Change | Australian Banking Association
- Banks need to mitigate climate risk: ARPA
- APRA to banks, insurers: Act on climate risk
- Fin services needs to walk the walk on climate risk
- 'Change Now Or Pay Later': RBA's Stark Warning On Climate Change
- Climate Change Poses Financial Stability Risk – RBA
- Climate change-related litigation was once seen as a joke, but it could soon become business reality
- Global Banks, Led by JPMorgan Chase, Invested $1.9 Trillion in Fossil Fuels Since Paris Climate Pact
Categories: External websites
Water Is A Growing Source Of Global Conflict. Here’s What We Need To Do
World Economic Forum - Kitty Van Der Heijden | Callie Stinson
In 2017, water was a major factor in conflicts spanning 45 countries - including SyriaImage: REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh Kitty Van Der HeijdenKitty Van Der Heijden is Africa and Europe Director, World Resources Institute
Callie StinsonCallie Stinson is Project Lead, Water Initiative, World Economic Forum The most intensive drought ever recorded in Syria lasted from 2006 to 2011. Water scarcity hit households, businesses and infrastructure, while in the countryside crops failed, livestock died, and entire families moved to the country’s cities. The subsequent eruption of civil war in 2011 led to as many as half a million deaths, as well as massive migration flows to neighbouring countries and beyond, and untold misery. Syria’s war has been a tragic illustration of the central, driving role that water insecurity can play in instability and conflict.
This is no surprise. In 2017 alone, water was a major factor in conflict in at least 45 countries, including Syria. Its importance as a resource means that water-related insecurity can easily exacerbate tensions and friction within and between countries. It can be weaponized; nefarious actors can gain control of, destroy, or redirect access to water to meet their objectives by targeting infrastructure and supplies. Advancements in cyber attacks on critical infrastructure raise further concerns as to the security of water systems.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report (GRR) has listed water crises among the top-five risks in terms of impact for eight consecutive years. In the most recent version of the report, it remains nested among a cluster of other risks that are rated as having both a very high likelihood and a very high impact. These include extreme weather events, natural disasters, the failure of climate change adaptation and mitigation, man-made environmental disasters, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, interstate conflict and large scale-involuntary migration.
These risks are increasingly interconnected. Failure to mitigate climate change could lead to more extreme weather events, ecosystem collapse and a greater likelihood of man-made environmental disasters. All of these can exacerbate food and water insecurity, which in turn can lead to human deprivation, and could make these and other risks like migration and conflict more likely in a negative feedback loop. Around two thirds of the world’s population, or 4 billion people, currently live without sufficient access to fresh water for at least one month of the year.
Further complicating the picture is the reality that securing water for food and economic activity will only become more difficult over time. As economies develop, their water consumption patterns shift and overall demand rises dramatically to meet the needs of food production, thirsty manufacturing and other industries, thermal power plants and households. However, water supplies are often damaged by poor management, pollution and over-consumption, in addition to supply-side reductions due to climate change impacts and the ecosystem degradation mentioned above.
Many of these drivers of insecurity can be seen in the Inner Niger Delta area of Mali, a marshy wetlands along a stretch of the Niger river. Disruptions to the Delta’s waters, for instance through the construction of two upstream dams, risk destroying fragile ecosystems and further destabilizing the entire region. Altering downstream flows can jeopardize traditional economic activities that underpin the viability of Delta fishing villages, destroying livelihoods and exacerbating social tensions such as intergenerational friction.
Combined with reductions in available farmland associated with rising temperatures and desertification, such environmental degradation risks further fuelling mass migration to the Malian capital Bamako and Europe. The journey is not a safe one, with criminalised trafficking routes that pass nearby between the West African coast and the Sahara. The history of radicalization in the region by extremist groups that have established themselves in northern Mali further illustrates the vulnerabilities facing the displaced and disenfranchised. People whose access to water is limited risk becoming increasingly marginalized, and a target for recruitment by radical groups. Water is critical to the region’s security.
The Inner Niger Delta illustrates the critical role that water insecurity can play in exacerbating other risks, and the necessity of holistic policy approaches. Unfortunately, water insecurity is not yet taken seriously enough by all actors, despite its central role in our economies and in human lives and livelihoods. In most scenarios, the true security threat caused by water insecurity is not a ‘water war’, but rather in its secondary impact on associated human security, that which can then exacerbate local, regional and international security threats.
It can impede or reverse economic development, and prevent countries from playing their art in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. It can also affect the private sector, for instance by affecting critical parts of complex supply chains. Robust solutions to the water security challenge are critical for everybody from public policymakers and businesses to the wider public and the international community. A new generation of public-private partnerships can be part of the solution to such complex and interrelated risks, responding with urgency and innovation to manage the ‘less for more’ challenge of reduced supply and increased demand.
Advances in technology can play an important role in this new era of collaboration. Real-time data is already being used to generate insights about the interplay of risk factors, allowing the development of sophisticated early-warning tools. The Water, Peace and Security Partnership partnership, for instance, crunches vast amounts of data, using machine-learning and other technologies to identify patterns that indicate the high risk of a conflict situation developing. It does not simply flash a warning light, but points to the factors that need to be addressed through capacity-building and stakeholder engagement to mitigate any potential conflict.
The tool, presented to the UN’s Security Council in 2018, aims to build cohesion for collective action among diplomats, defence analysts, development and humanitarian experts and environmental scientists. Another partnership, Digital Earth Africa, is developing an open-access platform of analysis-ready geospatial data for public use that will enable African nations to track environmental changes across the continent in unprecedented detail, including flooding, droughts, soil and coastal erosion, agriculture, forest and land-use change, water availability and quality, and changes to human settlements.
Such insights can help governments, businesses and communities better understand and address the interconnected web of environmental risks, in particular the impacts of climate change. From variations in rainfall patterns to extended periods of extreme weather events, building resilience across agricultural, industrial and domestic water supplies is a key priority for increasing water security.
The complex challenges and impacts of water crises will certainly make it difficult to shift from the top of future global risk lists. But real progress can be made, especially through cross-sectoral partnerships and platforms that can engage with such complexity. The 2030 Water Resources Group, which works across a network of more than 600 partners to tackle the water supply-demand gap in 14 different geographies, is a promising blueprint for effective public-private cooperation.
Access to better data can bolster such collaborations and lead to more effective solutions, for instance through mapping water risk, and generating greater understanding of how physical water shortages affect societal tensions, political disruptions and cross-border migration. These are just a few examples of how the world is already developing the types of ‘next generation’ insights, tools and partnerships needed to tackle water insecurity. But what the Global Risk Report makes clear is that any solution needs to be underpinned by an increased awareness of the scale and interconnectedness of the water security challenge before us.
Links
In 2017, water was a major factor in conflicts spanning 45 countries - including SyriaImage: REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh Kitty Van Der HeijdenKitty Van Der Heijden is Africa and Europe Director, World Resources Institute
Callie StinsonCallie Stinson is Project Lead, Water Initiative, World Economic Forum The most intensive drought ever recorded in Syria lasted from 2006 to 2011. Water scarcity hit households, businesses and infrastructure, while in the countryside crops failed, livestock died, and entire families moved to the country’s cities. The subsequent eruption of civil war in 2011 led to as many as half a million deaths, as well as massive migration flows to neighbouring countries and beyond, and untold misery. Syria’s war has been a tragic illustration of the central, driving role that water insecurity can play in instability and conflict.
This is no surprise. In 2017 alone, water was a major factor in conflict in at least 45 countries, including Syria. Its importance as a resource means that water-related insecurity can easily exacerbate tensions and friction within and between countries. It can be weaponized; nefarious actors can gain control of, destroy, or redirect access to water to meet their objectives by targeting infrastructure and supplies. Advancements in cyber attacks on critical infrastructure raise further concerns as to the security of water systems.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report (GRR) has listed water crises among the top-five risks in terms of impact for eight consecutive years. In the most recent version of the report, it remains nested among a cluster of other risks that are rated as having both a very high likelihood and a very high impact. These include extreme weather events, natural disasters, the failure of climate change adaptation and mitigation, man-made environmental disasters, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, interstate conflict and large scale-involuntary migration.
These risks are increasingly interconnected. Failure to mitigate climate change could lead to more extreme weather events, ecosystem collapse and a greater likelihood of man-made environmental disasters. All of these can exacerbate food and water insecurity, which in turn can lead to human deprivation, and could make these and other risks like migration and conflict more likely in a negative feedback loop. Around two thirds of the world’s population, or 4 billion people, currently live without sufficient access to fresh water for at least one month of the year.
Further complicating the picture is the reality that securing water for food and economic activity will only become more difficult over time. As economies develop, their water consumption patterns shift and overall demand rises dramatically to meet the needs of food production, thirsty manufacturing and other industries, thermal power plants and households. However, water supplies are often damaged by poor management, pollution and over-consumption, in addition to supply-side reductions due to climate change impacts and the ecosystem degradation mentioned above.
Many of these drivers of insecurity can be seen in the Inner Niger Delta area of Mali, a marshy wetlands along a stretch of the Niger river. Disruptions to the Delta’s waters, for instance through the construction of two upstream dams, risk destroying fragile ecosystems and further destabilizing the entire region. Altering downstream flows can jeopardize traditional economic activities that underpin the viability of Delta fishing villages, destroying livelihoods and exacerbating social tensions such as intergenerational friction.
Combined with reductions in available farmland associated with rising temperatures and desertification, such environmental degradation risks further fuelling mass migration to the Malian capital Bamako and Europe. The journey is not a safe one, with criminalised trafficking routes that pass nearby between the West African coast and the Sahara. The history of radicalization in the region by extremist groups that have established themselves in northern Mali further illustrates the vulnerabilities facing the displaced and disenfranchised. People whose access to water is limited risk becoming increasingly marginalized, and a target for recruitment by radical groups. Water is critical to the region’s security.
The Inner Niger Delta illustrates the critical role that water insecurity can play in exacerbating other risks, and the necessity of holistic policy approaches. Unfortunately, water insecurity is not yet taken seriously enough by all actors, despite its central role in our economies and in human lives and livelihoods. In most scenarios, the true security threat caused by water insecurity is not a ‘water war’, but rather in its secondary impact on associated human security, that which can then exacerbate local, regional and international security threats.
It can impede or reverse economic development, and prevent countries from playing their art in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. It can also affect the private sector, for instance by affecting critical parts of complex supply chains. Robust solutions to the water security challenge are critical for everybody from public policymakers and businesses to the wider public and the international community. A new generation of public-private partnerships can be part of the solution to such complex and interrelated risks, responding with urgency and innovation to manage the ‘less for more’ challenge of reduced supply and increased demand.
Advances in technology can play an important role in this new era of collaboration. Real-time data is already being used to generate insights about the interplay of risk factors, allowing the development of sophisticated early-warning tools. The Water, Peace and Security Partnership partnership, for instance, crunches vast amounts of data, using machine-learning and other technologies to identify patterns that indicate the high risk of a conflict situation developing. It does not simply flash a warning light, but points to the factors that need to be addressed through capacity-building and stakeholder engagement to mitigate any potential conflict.
The tool, presented to the UN’s Security Council in 2018, aims to build cohesion for collective action among diplomats, defence analysts, development and humanitarian experts and environmental scientists. Another partnership, Digital Earth Africa, is developing an open-access platform of analysis-ready geospatial data for public use that will enable African nations to track environmental changes across the continent in unprecedented detail, including flooding, droughts, soil and coastal erosion, agriculture, forest and land-use change, water availability and quality, and changes to human settlements.
Such insights can help governments, businesses and communities better understand and address the interconnected web of environmental risks, in particular the impacts of climate change. From variations in rainfall patterns to extended periods of extreme weather events, building resilience across agricultural, industrial and domestic water supplies is a key priority for increasing water security.
The complex challenges and impacts of water crises will certainly make it difficult to shift from the top of future global risk lists. But real progress can be made, especially through cross-sectoral partnerships and platforms that can engage with such complexity. The 2030 Water Resources Group, which works across a network of more than 600 partners to tackle the water supply-demand gap in 14 different geographies, is a promising blueprint for effective public-private cooperation.
Access to better data can bolster such collaborations and lead to more effective solutions, for instance through mapping water risk, and generating greater understanding of how physical water shortages affect societal tensions, political disruptions and cross-border migration. These are just a few examples of how the world is already developing the types of ‘next generation’ insights, tools and partnerships needed to tackle water insecurity. But what the Global Risk Report makes clear is that any solution needs to be underpinned by an increased awareness of the scale and interconnectedness of the water security challenge before us.
Links
- World Humanitarian Data And Trends 2018 (pdf)
- US faces fresh water shortages due to climate change, research says
- A lack of water can lead to war. Just look at Syria
- Unsafe air, the coming water shortages in the US and other top stories of the week
- Climate Change Is Exacerbating World Conflicts, Says Red Cross President
- We Need To Do More To Understand How Climate Change And Conflict Are Linked. Here's Why
- Geologists Are Feuding About The Collapse Of Civilization
- UN Security Council Considers ‘Cycle Of Conflict And Climate Disaster’
- How Climate Change And Scarce Resources Are Pushing Muslim Cattle Herders And Christian Farmers To The Edge Of Civil War In Nigeria
- Conflict, Climate Change Choke Efforts To Cure Poverty, Inequality: U.N.
- Climate Change Is Not A Key Cause Of Conflict, Finds New Study
- Millions More Hungry In 2017 Amid Famine, Conflict, And Numbers Rising-Report
- Climate Change: A Catalyst For Conflict
- Shaping Conflict In The 21st Century—The Future Of Food And Water Security
Categories: External websites
Book Reviews: The End Of The World Is Coming, And You Are Responsible
Tablet - Sean Cooper
New climate-change narratives ordain humans with godly powers to undo and repair the planet. Is it science, or a new religion?
Flames close in on cars parked along a country road at the Blue Cut Fire, Wrightwood, California, in August 2016.
Photo: David McNew/Getty ImagesLet us now gather round the steel drum of fire and remember the moments of our lives before the climate apocalypse. It is perhaps 2045 or 2075, predicting the future is never an exact science, and you and I are among the lucky half billion, or not so lucky, to have survived the collapse of civilization. We avoid wolf packs, ration freeze-dried meals, and reminisce about mundane comforts, like long hot showers and take-out Vietnamese food.
It’s almost difficult to recall the high-volume chatter that had once streamed through our mind’s eye, the news websites and social platforms that had begun to monetize the uptick in climate disaster media, the bundled up packages of commissioned and crowdsourced videos and images of towns made uninhabitable, evacuations captured in real-time courtesy of omnipresent drones. We hashtagged our outrage and dismay. Some of us took out our Amazon credit cards to donate to the most worthy cause or charity, but we had otherwise internalized the agony and drama of global suffering as content, clicking off when bored.
This certainly could have all been avoided. If only the political class of the Western world hadn’t become the plaything of fossil fuel corporations! We are conversant with the basic factual one-two-three on climate change because we feel dutifully obligated to know, and we keep our fingers crossed that we won’t wind up dead in biblical floods or worse as survivors of whatever comes after. We know that our use of fossil fuels emits too much carbon into the atmosphere; it’s heating the world and pushing us ever closer to mass calamity, casualties, pain; the only way to stop it is an enforceable global treaty getting us off of fossil fuels, onto renewables.
In the narrative of our great slide over the cliff’s edge the present moment is notable in that it offers glimmers of quiet hope in the potential of a Green New Deal, with the United States finally leading the way. Concurrent to any social and political movement there’s a rash of topical books hitting the shelves. Every month brings us a new slate of titles informing us in great detail of how exactly civilization will end, or not end, thanks to the ingenious and industrious effort of other people. But let us not forget the truism, born out as always by recent memory, that we should be cynical and suspicious in our current affairs, if only to temper the disappointment that never seems to go away.
The two most prominent titles of this year—The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells, and Losing Earth, by Nathaniel Rich—began as blockbuster magazine articles. A deputy editor at New York Magazine, Wallace-Wells wrote for that publication in 2017 a graphic account of the scope of suffering that unmitigated climate change will soon bring, which per Wallace-Wells is now the most-read story of all time on the magazine’s website. For Rich, a novelist, his article on the missed opportunity in the 1970s and ’80s, when U.S. politicians failed to midwife a global treaty at a key climate change summit, appeared last year in The New York Times Magazine, which gave over an entire issue for the effort. Perhaps with the acute awareness of our imminent demise the authors turned them into books with unusual haste.
Penguin Random HouseIn the padding of the original articles with fresh statistics and extended commentaries, both books carry with them a brooding quality, a heavy guilt not so much the authors’ as one that’s projected upon an audience already quite aware of climate change. Indeed, these books are not written to convince those in denial or uncertain of the science. These are for the well-initiated, and in their pairing we have something of a unified view of how we’ve gotten to where we are and where we’re going. Or, if not that, then at least an idea of how our past and future will be successfully packaged and sold to us, the knowing general audience.
In an unusual gambit Rich concedes at the outset to the redundant futility of a detailed narrative on a world altered by climate change. “Nearly every conversation that we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979,” he writes. “We are well-enough acquainted by now with the political story of climate change, the technological story, the economic story, the industry story. They have been told expertly, exhaustively, by journalists and scholars.” To compensate for the climate-soaked reader’s inevitable fatigue Rich deploys a twinkling cinematic plot, a three-act hero tale with an unusual ending.
The hero, in this case, is Jim Hansen, the folksy son of an Iowa waitress and bartender who after a studious youth montage of classroom and graduation scenes found himself in the 1970s at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, running computer simulations of our warming planet. According to Hansen’s models, we were on track for a 3-degree-Celsius warming by around 2035, which was a critical threshold for untold global destruction. Although scientists knew man’s fossil fuel habits were dangerously warming the planet as early as the 1930s, for the sake of dramatic tension Rich sets Hansen’s discovery of the approaching 3-degree rise as revelatory. For Hansen, “a guileless atmosphere physicist,” the challenge is to try to “warn humanity of what was coming.”
AmazonHansen is aided in his quest to defeat ignorance by a group of top scientists and science agency officials, a boy’s club called The Jasons. “The Jasons were like one of those teams of superheroes with complementary powers that joins forces in times of galactic crisis,” Rich writes, addressing himself to the audience for Marvel Comics superhero movies. Together, The Jasons and Hansen seek to convince Washington that we are doomed. Through a series of conference room meetings with slide projectors, meetings in backroom offices, and meetings before congressional subcommittees, Rich shows Hansen and his squad of scientists quibbling over report language and how best to communicate the stakes of their findings to a political body that would only take “decisive action … during a crisis.”
Rich keeps reminding the reader of his story template, writing that while “Hansen could occupy the role of hero,” there were worthy foes to oppose him. “A villain was emerging too: Fred Koomanoff, Reagan’s new director of the Energy Department’s carbon dioxide program, a wolf asked to oversee the henhouse.” Koomanoff and other administration figures hostile to the factual claims of the science community do what they can to undercut Hansen, chopping at his NASA funding and spinning his congressional testimony. But Hansen’s warnings, widely covered in the media, garner support from the public as well as both sides of Congress. Then-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush seizes on the groundswell of publicity around climate change during his campaign, and vows to enact regulations on carbon emission once in office.
Once elected, however, Bush is at best uninterested in environmental policy, and his chief of staff, John Sununu, takes up the job of super villain, doing whatever he can to blunt Hansen and his widening coalition seeking a global agreement on carbon regulation. The climatic showdown between Hansen and Bush’s administration takes place at a 1989 diplomatic summit in the Netherlands, where representatives of 65 countries have come together to sign a binding treaty to reduce carbon emissions by 20 percent before 2005. In the end, Hansen and the others lose out to the White House, which had roused Russia, other Soviet republics, and Great Britain to join them in endorsing a toothless treaty with no enforceable limits.
The point Rich wishes to make with the book is that in 1989 there was never a better time for political action on climate change. The public was in favor of emissions regulation. Politicians from both sides knew it was prudent. And even fossil fuel corporations had resigned themselves to the inevitable fate of regulation. So what happened? Despite their public statements of support, the political establishment didn’t think the long-term stability gained by curbing emissions was worth the painful cost of short-term changes to a society built on fossil fuels.
Since then, there have been similar diplomatic summits, the Paris Accord included, but the agreements have been weak at best, while carbon emissions continue to climb. As Rich notes, since the 1989 gathering in the Netherlands, “more carbon has been released into the atmosphere … than in the entire history of civilization preceding it.” Like Bush on the presidential campaign trail in the ’80s, nations have recently taken up the mantle as world leaders in climate change action, Canada, Denmark, and Australia included, but they continually fail “to honor their commitments.” Because, even when there are agreements made, Rich points out, they’re inherently flawed by the lack of enforcement. ‘There is no global police force, and no appetite for economic sanctions or military action triggered by a failure to meet emissions.”
A strong wind blows embers around a resident hosing his burning property during the Creek Fire on Dec. 5, 2017, in Sunland, California. Photo: David McNew/Getty ImagessRich’s ultimate solution to the broken political system is a peculiar one. As “we face the prospect of civilizational death,” he writes, “it brings into relief a dimension of the crisis that to this point has been largely absent: the moral dimension, which is to say, the heart of the matter.” But for Rich the moral responsibility doesn’t fall squarely upon the political class elected to serve and protect its constituents. Rather, the moral failure is found among us, the constituents. ‘“Nobody who lives on the electrical grid can be let entirely off the hook; certainly not any American,” Rich says. From the “moderator of a presidential debate” who doesn’t ask candidates hard enough climate change questions to the magazine “editor who fails to assign” enough climate change articles—everyone is complicit. Even the destitute among us are villains, as “a homeless person in the U.S. today consumes twice as much energy as the average global citizen.”
Elevating the issue of climate change above simple party politics or fossil fuel greed and into the rarefied moral strata follows Rich’s fetishization of the hero storybook model. “We can call the villains villains, the heroes heroes, the victims victims, and ourselves complicit,” he writes, endeavoring to pen a suprahero narrative whereby you and I, the morally bankrupt citizens, can rise above our own inherent flaws and help create a society that is more morally pure.
“A human problem requires a human solution,” Rich says with chilling, ominous undertones. “One of the most effective weapons is mortal shame. Shame may have no influence on the handyman of industry, but an appeal to higher decency can work on the human beings who vote in elections.”
Once society no longer tolerates those weak enough to still desire fossil fuels, then the political and industrial class will have to follow. Otherwise, pragmatic appeals to those who control the power and money will be meaningless.
Like Rich, David Wallace-Wells wants to cut through the deadlock on climate change with a direct appeal to the human condition. However, rather than run the risk of promoting an elite moral class that bestows upon itself the privilege of shaming others, Wallace-Wells seeks to rouse us into action by making us afraid. Very afraid. Because as he opens the book: “It is worse. Much worse than you think.”
“The mass extinction we are now living through has only just begun; so much more dying is coming,” Wallace-Wells writes of our shared future, for we are “a civilization enclosing itself in a gaseous suicide, a running car in a sealed garage.” Over 12 snappy sections Wallace-Wells documents in horrendous, suffocating detail the biblical events of death and decay that await us right around the corner. We’re stepping onto an entirely new planet, one ravaged by fires, floods, tsunamis, droughts, famines, and temperatures so hot that “humans at the equator and in the tropics would not be able to move around outside without dying.”
Perhaps because Wallace-Wells is the bearer of such bad news, he connects with us as a complicit bad actor. “I toss out tons of wasted food and hardly ever recycle,” he confesses. “I leave my air-conditioning on.” For those fastidious eco-lads and green ladies of the Western world, Wallace-Wells points out that all their effort to save the Earth one person at a time doesn’t really matter. In the grand scheme of carbon emissions, “the climate calculus is such that individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much.”
It doesn’t matter how we change our day-to-day bad habits, Wallace-Wells assures us. We are all together hurtling toward a world of “suffering beyond anything that humans have ever experienced through many millennia.” The ominous tone and details of our pain is his operating principal. “If this strikes you as tragic, which it should, consider that we have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all,” Wallace-Wells writes, noting that currently available technology combined with proper emissions regulation and a shift to greener production of food and energy can save civilization from collapse.
Similar to Rich’s shaming of the commonwealth, Wallace-Wells hopes that a critical mass can be terrified into mass action, engendering “a renewed egalitarian energy” that uses “technology to chase every last glimmer of hope for averting disastrous climate change.” In this way, Wallace-Wells mimics Rich’s suprahuman hero tale; he just sees fear to be more effective than shame to rouse the citizenry, in order to achieve a more elevated state of being. “We have an idiomatic name for those who hold the fate of the world in their hands, as we do: gods.”
The temptation to confront the realities of climate change by venerating those engaged with the confrontation is one that has been indulged by climate change observers for quite some time, going back to Bill McKibben, a former New Yorker staff writer, whose 1989 The End of Nature is an obvious touchstone for both Rich and Wallace-Wells. In his book, McKibben evokes the post-nature capacities of modern man as an all-powerful being that must no longer use its powers for evil. “We are in charge now, like it or not. As a species we are as gods—our reach global,” he writes.
With a nod to McKibben’s idolization of the progressives who posit themselves capable of correcting an ill society, Wallace-Walls concludes that if “humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it.” But the path Wallace-Wells sees to successful implementation of the proper technologies and regulations is a familiar one: “voting and organizing and political activity deployed at every level.”
Yet, if we are already fully capable of fixing the problem with the tools at hand, and our political system is in fact equipped to enact the changes once they’re demanded by the majority of the voting public, one might fairly question whether shame and fear are the best or even the only methods to catalyze us into action. To put it another way, perhaps the hero tales are themselves nothing more than distractions, useless provocations of a readership that already knows what’s at stake—a knowledge that will be slower to convert into meaningful action if it is driven by fear of what might come and shame of what we are already. Tormented by author-induced fear and shame, it wouldn’t be surprising if guilty readers chose to have another hamburger.
Links
New climate-change narratives ordain humans with godly powers to undo and repair the planet. Is it science, or a new religion?
Flames close in on cars parked along a country road at the Blue Cut Fire, Wrightwood, California, in August 2016.
Photo: David McNew/Getty ImagesLet us now gather round the steel drum of fire and remember the moments of our lives before the climate apocalypse. It is perhaps 2045 or 2075, predicting the future is never an exact science, and you and I are among the lucky half billion, or not so lucky, to have survived the collapse of civilization. We avoid wolf packs, ration freeze-dried meals, and reminisce about mundane comforts, like long hot showers and take-out Vietnamese food.
It’s almost difficult to recall the high-volume chatter that had once streamed through our mind’s eye, the news websites and social platforms that had begun to monetize the uptick in climate disaster media, the bundled up packages of commissioned and crowdsourced videos and images of towns made uninhabitable, evacuations captured in real-time courtesy of omnipresent drones. We hashtagged our outrage and dismay. Some of us took out our Amazon credit cards to donate to the most worthy cause or charity, but we had otherwise internalized the agony and drama of global suffering as content, clicking off when bored.
This certainly could have all been avoided. If only the political class of the Western world hadn’t become the plaything of fossil fuel corporations! We are conversant with the basic factual one-two-three on climate change because we feel dutifully obligated to know, and we keep our fingers crossed that we won’t wind up dead in biblical floods or worse as survivors of whatever comes after. We know that our use of fossil fuels emits too much carbon into the atmosphere; it’s heating the world and pushing us ever closer to mass calamity, casualties, pain; the only way to stop it is an enforceable global treaty getting us off of fossil fuels, onto renewables.
In the narrative of our great slide over the cliff’s edge the present moment is notable in that it offers glimmers of quiet hope in the potential of a Green New Deal, with the United States finally leading the way. Concurrent to any social and political movement there’s a rash of topical books hitting the shelves. Every month brings us a new slate of titles informing us in great detail of how exactly civilization will end, or not end, thanks to the ingenious and industrious effort of other people. But let us not forget the truism, born out as always by recent memory, that we should be cynical and suspicious in our current affairs, if only to temper the disappointment that never seems to go away.
The two most prominent titles of this year—The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells, and Losing Earth, by Nathaniel Rich—began as blockbuster magazine articles. A deputy editor at New York Magazine, Wallace-Wells wrote for that publication in 2017 a graphic account of the scope of suffering that unmitigated climate change will soon bring, which per Wallace-Wells is now the most-read story of all time on the magazine’s website. For Rich, a novelist, his article on the missed opportunity in the 1970s and ’80s, when U.S. politicians failed to midwife a global treaty at a key climate change summit, appeared last year in The New York Times Magazine, which gave over an entire issue for the effort. Perhaps with the acute awareness of our imminent demise the authors turned them into books with unusual haste.
Penguin Random HouseIn the padding of the original articles with fresh statistics and extended commentaries, both books carry with them a brooding quality, a heavy guilt not so much the authors’ as one that’s projected upon an audience already quite aware of climate change. Indeed, these books are not written to convince those in denial or uncertain of the science. These are for the well-initiated, and in their pairing we have something of a unified view of how we’ve gotten to where we are and where we’re going. Or, if not that, then at least an idea of how our past and future will be successfully packaged and sold to us, the knowing general audience.
In an unusual gambit Rich concedes at the outset to the redundant futility of a detailed narrative on a world altered by climate change. “Nearly every conversation that we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979,” he writes. “We are well-enough acquainted by now with the political story of climate change, the technological story, the economic story, the industry story. They have been told expertly, exhaustively, by journalists and scholars.” To compensate for the climate-soaked reader’s inevitable fatigue Rich deploys a twinkling cinematic plot, a three-act hero tale with an unusual ending.
The hero, in this case, is Jim Hansen, the folksy son of an Iowa waitress and bartender who after a studious youth montage of classroom and graduation scenes found himself in the 1970s at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, running computer simulations of our warming planet. According to Hansen’s models, we were on track for a 3-degree-Celsius warming by around 2035, which was a critical threshold for untold global destruction. Although scientists knew man’s fossil fuel habits were dangerously warming the planet as early as the 1930s, for the sake of dramatic tension Rich sets Hansen’s discovery of the approaching 3-degree rise as revelatory. For Hansen, “a guileless atmosphere physicist,” the challenge is to try to “warn humanity of what was coming.”
AmazonHansen is aided in his quest to defeat ignorance by a group of top scientists and science agency officials, a boy’s club called The Jasons. “The Jasons were like one of those teams of superheroes with complementary powers that joins forces in times of galactic crisis,” Rich writes, addressing himself to the audience for Marvel Comics superhero movies. Together, The Jasons and Hansen seek to convince Washington that we are doomed. Through a series of conference room meetings with slide projectors, meetings in backroom offices, and meetings before congressional subcommittees, Rich shows Hansen and his squad of scientists quibbling over report language and how best to communicate the stakes of their findings to a political body that would only take “decisive action … during a crisis.”
Rich keeps reminding the reader of his story template, writing that while “Hansen could occupy the role of hero,” there were worthy foes to oppose him. “A villain was emerging too: Fred Koomanoff, Reagan’s new director of the Energy Department’s carbon dioxide program, a wolf asked to oversee the henhouse.” Koomanoff and other administration figures hostile to the factual claims of the science community do what they can to undercut Hansen, chopping at his NASA funding and spinning his congressional testimony. But Hansen’s warnings, widely covered in the media, garner support from the public as well as both sides of Congress. Then-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush seizes on the groundswell of publicity around climate change during his campaign, and vows to enact regulations on carbon emission once in office.
Once elected, however, Bush is at best uninterested in environmental policy, and his chief of staff, John Sununu, takes up the job of super villain, doing whatever he can to blunt Hansen and his widening coalition seeking a global agreement on carbon regulation. The climatic showdown between Hansen and Bush’s administration takes place at a 1989 diplomatic summit in the Netherlands, where representatives of 65 countries have come together to sign a binding treaty to reduce carbon emissions by 20 percent before 2005. In the end, Hansen and the others lose out to the White House, which had roused Russia, other Soviet republics, and Great Britain to join them in endorsing a toothless treaty with no enforceable limits.
The point Rich wishes to make with the book is that in 1989 there was never a better time for political action on climate change. The public was in favor of emissions regulation. Politicians from both sides knew it was prudent. And even fossil fuel corporations had resigned themselves to the inevitable fate of regulation. So what happened? Despite their public statements of support, the political establishment didn’t think the long-term stability gained by curbing emissions was worth the painful cost of short-term changes to a society built on fossil fuels.
Since then, there have been similar diplomatic summits, the Paris Accord included, but the agreements have been weak at best, while carbon emissions continue to climb. As Rich notes, since the 1989 gathering in the Netherlands, “more carbon has been released into the atmosphere … than in the entire history of civilization preceding it.” Like Bush on the presidential campaign trail in the ’80s, nations have recently taken up the mantle as world leaders in climate change action, Canada, Denmark, and Australia included, but they continually fail “to honor their commitments.” Because, even when there are agreements made, Rich points out, they’re inherently flawed by the lack of enforcement. ‘There is no global police force, and no appetite for economic sanctions or military action triggered by a failure to meet emissions.”
A strong wind blows embers around a resident hosing his burning property during the Creek Fire on Dec. 5, 2017, in Sunland, California. Photo: David McNew/Getty ImagessRich’s ultimate solution to the broken political system is a peculiar one. As “we face the prospect of civilizational death,” he writes, “it brings into relief a dimension of the crisis that to this point has been largely absent: the moral dimension, which is to say, the heart of the matter.” But for Rich the moral responsibility doesn’t fall squarely upon the political class elected to serve and protect its constituents. Rather, the moral failure is found among us, the constituents. ‘“Nobody who lives on the electrical grid can be let entirely off the hook; certainly not any American,” Rich says. From the “moderator of a presidential debate” who doesn’t ask candidates hard enough climate change questions to the magazine “editor who fails to assign” enough climate change articles—everyone is complicit. Even the destitute among us are villains, as “a homeless person in the U.S. today consumes twice as much energy as the average global citizen.”
Elevating the issue of climate change above simple party politics or fossil fuel greed and into the rarefied moral strata follows Rich’s fetishization of the hero storybook model. “We can call the villains villains, the heroes heroes, the victims victims, and ourselves complicit,” he writes, endeavoring to pen a suprahero narrative whereby you and I, the morally bankrupt citizens, can rise above our own inherent flaws and help create a society that is more morally pure.
“A human problem requires a human solution,” Rich says with chilling, ominous undertones. “One of the most effective weapons is mortal shame. Shame may have no influence on the handyman of industry, but an appeal to higher decency can work on the human beings who vote in elections.”
Once society no longer tolerates those weak enough to still desire fossil fuels, then the political and industrial class will have to follow. Otherwise, pragmatic appeals to those who control the power and money will be meaningless.
Like Rich, David Wallace-Wells wants to cut through the deadlock on climate change with a direct appeal to the human condition. However, rather than run the risk of promoting an elite moral class that bestows upon itself the privilege of shaming others, Wallace-Wells seeks to rouse us into action by making us afraid. Very afraid. Because as he opens the book: “It is worse. Much worse than you think.”
“The mass extinction we are now living through has only just begun; so much more dying is coming,” Wallace-Wells writes of our shared future, for we are “a civilization enclosing itself in a gaseous suicide, a running car in a sealed garage.” Over 12 snappy sections Wallace-Wells documents in horrendous, suffocating detail the biblical events of death and decay that await us right around the corner. We’re stepping onto an entirely new planet, one ravaged by fires, floods, tsunamis, droughts, famines, and temperatures so hot that “humans at the equator and in the tropics would not be able to move around outside without dying.”
Perhaps because Wallace-Wells is the bearer of such bad news, he connects with us as a complicit bad actor. “I toss out tons of wasted food and hardly ever recycle,” he confesses. “I leave my air-conditioning on.” For those fastidious eco-lads and green ladies of the Western world, Wallace-Wells points out that all their effort to save the Earth one person at a time doesn’t really matter. In the grand scheme of carbon emissions, “the climate calculus is such that individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much.”
It doesn’t matter how we change our day-to-day bad habits, Wallace-Wells assures us. We are all together hurtling toward a world of “suffering beyond anything that humans have ever experienced through many millennia.” The ominous tone and details of our pain is his operating principal. “If this strikes you as tragic, which it should, consider that we have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all,” Wallace-Wells writes, noting that currently available technology combined with proper emissions regulation and a shift to greener production of food and energy can save civilization from collapse.
Similar to Rich’s shaming of the commonwealth, Wallace-Wells hopes that a critical mass can be terrified into mass action, engendering “a renewed egalitarian energy” that uses “technology to chase every last glimmer of hope for averting disastrous climate change.” In this way, Wallace-Wells mimics Rich’s suprahuman hero tale; he just sees fear to be more effective than shame to rouse the citizenry, in order to achieve a more elevated state of being. “We have an idiomatic name for those who hold the fate of the world in their hands, as we do: gods.”
The temptation to confront the realities of climate change by venerating those engaged with the confrontation is one that has been indulged by climate change observers for quite some time, going back to Bill McKibben, a former New Yorker staff writer, whose 1989 The End of Nature is an obvious touchstone for both Rich and Wallace-Wells. In his book, McKibben evokes the post-nature capacities of modern man as an all-powerful being that must no longer use its powers for evil. “We are in charge now, like it or not. As a species we are as gods—our reach global,” he writes.
With a nod to McKibben’s idolization of the progressives who posit themselves capable of correcting an ill society, Wallace-Walls concludes that if “humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it.” But the path Wallace-Wells sees to successful implementation of the proper technologies and regulations is a familiar one: “voting and organizing and political activity deployed at every level.”
Yet, if we are already fully capable of fixing the problem with the tools at hand, and our political system is in fact equipped to enact the changes once they’re demanded by the majority of the voting public, one might fairly question whether shame and fear are the best or even the only methods to catalyze us into action. To put it another way, perhaps the hero tales are themselves nothing more than distractions, useless provocations of a readership that already knows what’s at stake—a knowledge that will be slower to convert into meaningful action if it is driven by fear of what might come and shame of what we are already. Tormented by author-induced fear and shame, it wouldn’t be surprising if guilty readers chose to have another hamburger.
Links
- David Wallace-Wells On Climate: ‘People Should Be Scared – I'm Scared’
- The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story Of The Future by David Wallace-Wells
- ‘The Devastation Of Human Life Is In View’: What A Burning World Tells Us About Climate Change
- 8 Predictions for What the World Will Look Like in 20 Years
- Nathaniel Rich discusses his NYT piece “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change”The Problem With The New York Times’ Big Story on Climate Change
- "Losing Earth:" Nathaniel Rich on Why We Didn't Save the Planet 30 Years Ago
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Harvard Scientists Want To Limit How Much Sunlight Reaches Earth's Surface In Order To Curb Global Warming
Business Insider - Melina Seiler | Ruqayyah Moynihan
How we'll be able to curtail global warming and its devastating consequences is still very much a hot potato among politicians and scientists alike — and so far, the outcome of all these debates hasn't been particularly fruitful.
However, researchers at Harvard may have come up with a solution that sounds just a little too good to be true.
In conjunction with researchers from MIT and Princeton, the group has suggested slowing down global warming by diminishing the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth's surface.
Yes, you read that right. The technology is called solar geoengineering or solar geotechnics.
According to a study published in Nature Climate Change, the researchers are considering what might happen if they were to introduce sunlight-reflecting particles into Earth's atmosphere.
Researchers at Harvard have suggested dimming the sun as a partial solution to help slow down global warming. Shutterstock The most important thing to note is that the researchers aren't suggesting the method is a solution to rising global warming trends; it isn't designed to bring temperatures back to pre-industrial levels nor does it address the real crux of the problem — the amount of carbon dioxide we're producing.
In fact, too high a dose of "dimming" could even worsen the situation.
Postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Peter Irvine, was the lead author of the study.
As well as this measure, carbon dioxide emissions still need be reduced worldwide. J. David Ake/AP "The analogy is not perfect," he explained, "but solar geoengineering is a little like a drug which treats high blood pressure. An overdose would be harmful, but a well-chosen dose could reduce your risks. Of course, it's better to not have high blood pressure in the first place but once you have it, along with making healthier lifestyle choices, it's worth considering treatments that could lower your risks."
The study suggests that this technology could the rate at which temperatures are increasing in half, which could offer global benefits without exacerbating problems in other parts of the world.
Alongside this measure, however, carbon dioxide emissions would still need to be reduced across the globe.
More water and fewer hurricanes
The scientists found that halving global warming with solar technology not only cools the planet but would also compensate for over 85% of hurricane intensity. David Goldman/AP In order to better understand which regions might end up worse off if this geoengineering technology were combined with emission reductions, the researchers used a state-of-the-art, high-resolution model to simulate extreme rainfall and tropical hurricanes.
This is the first time a model of this sort has been used to look into the possible effects of solar geotechnics.
The researchers studied temperature and precipitation extremes, water availability, and also measured the intensity of tropical storms.
The researchers emphasised that our main response to climate change still ought to be to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions. Gian-Reto Tarnutzer/Unsplash They found that halving global warming via geoengineering would not only cool the planet but also moderate changes in water availability and extreme precipitation in many places.
While the science surrounding geoengineering technology is over half a century old, it's only recently — since our attention has been drawn Earth's climate change — that scientists have intensified their researched the field.
Researchers at Harvard University have stressed, however, that our main response to climate change should be to curb carbon dioxide emissions; geoengineering alone simply wouldn't be capable of fully remedying the root of the environmental problems.
Links
- Climate change and global warming are among the greatest challenges mankind has faced up until now.
- Researchers at Harvard have put forward a new solution — they want to reflect some of the sun's heat back out to space.
- The process is referred to as "solar geoengineering" or "solar geotechnics".
How we'll be able to curtail global warming and its devastating consequences is still very much a hot potato among politicians and scientists alike — and so far, the outcome of all these debates hasn't been particularly fruitful.
However, researchers at Harvard may have come up with a solution that sounds just a little too good to be true.
In conjunction with researchers from MIT and Princeton, the group has suggested slowing down global warming by diminishing the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth's surface.
Yes, you read that right. The technology is called solar geoengineering or solar geotechnics.
According to a study published in Nature Climate Change, the researchers are considering what might happen if they were to introduce sunlight-reflecting particles into Earth's atmosphere.
Researchers at Harvard have suggested dimming the sun as a partial solution to help slow down global warming. Shutterstock The most important thing to note is that the researchers aren't suggesting the method is a solution to rising global warming trends; it isn't designed to bring temperatures back to pre-industrial levels nor does it address the real crux of the problem — the amount of carbon dioxide we're producing.
In fact, too high a dose of "dimming" could even worsen the situation.
Postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Peter Irvine, was the lead author of the study.
As well as this measure, carbon dioxide emissions still need be reduced worldwide. J. David Ake/AP "The analogy is not perfect," he explained, "but solar geoengineering is a little like a drug which treats high blood pressure. An overdose would be harmful, but a well-chosen dose could reduce your risks. Of course, it's better to not have high blood pressure in the first place but once you have it, along with making healthier lifestyle choices, it's worth considering treatments that could lower your risks."
The study suggests that this technology could the rate at which temperatures are increasing in half, which could offer global benefits without exacerbating problems in other parts of the world.
Alongside this measure, however, carbon dioxide emissions would still need to be reduced across the globe.
More water and fewer hurricanes
The scientists found that halving global warming with solar technology not only cools the planet but would also compensate for over 85% of hurricane intensity. David Goldman/AP In order to better understand which regions might end up worse off if this geoengineering technology were combined with emission reductions, the researchers used a state-of-the-art, high-resolution model to simulate extreme rainfall and tropical hurricanes.
This is the first time a model of this sort has been used to look into the possible effects of solar geotechnics.
The researchers studied temperature and precipitation extremes, water availability, and also measured the intensity of tropical storms.
The researchers emphasised that our main response to climate change still ought to be to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions. Gian-Reto Tarnutzer/Unsplash They found that halving global warming via geoengineering would not only cool the planet but also moderate changes in water availability and extreme precipitation in many places.
While the science surrounding geoengineering technology is over half a century old, it's only recently — since our attention has been drawn Earth's climate change — that scientists have intensified their researched the field.
Researchers at Harvard University have stressed, however, that our main response to climate change should be to curb carbon dioxide emissions; geoengineering alone simply wouldn't be capable of fully remedying the root of the environmental problems.
Links
- Halving warming with idealized solar geoengineering moderates key climate hazards
- This Spanish company found a way to produce fuel without emitting CO2 — and it's made of sewage
- The UN has warned that we only have 12 years to curb climate change
- Global warming is making oceans so acidic, they may reach the pH they were 14 million years ago
- A UN Secretary-General adviser called Donald Trump a 'psychopath' for suggesting a return to coal power
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